A blood-soaked money-wasting scandal.
President trump has appointed Jared Kushner to head the new White House Office of American innovation, which is charged with making the government more efficient. its biggest challenge, by far, will be dealing with the defense department’s monstrously sclerotic weapons-procurement system, which has unnecessarily cost the lives of countless thousands of our servicemen and -women and has literally wasted hundreds of billions of dollars. We can’t let this horror continue. Back in 2010 the Economist declared, “The chronic problem of exorbitantly expensive weapons is becoming acute.” Alas, such dire warnings have been uttered countless times before and since. President trump has the opportunity to do what every other Commander-in-chief and defense secretary has failed to do since Wwii: truly reform this festering disgrace.
Our military needs a buildup on a scale not seen since ronald reagan’s in the 1980s. Our services are undermanned. equipment is in dire need of repair and refurbishment. new equipment, software and weapons are needed for the u.s. to play its crucial role in keeping the world’s aggressors at bay and meeting the challenges of the cyberspace, unmanned systems and robotics era. The navy alone requires another 80 ships to meet our global obligations.
The trump military budget for fiscal year 2018 won’t even catch up on the maintenance of existing equipment and weapons and is 6% less than spending was in 2012.
Overhauling the process of developing new weapons, aircraft, ships and the like is no longer a discretionary matter. What needs to be done is simply unaffordable under current procedures. The magnitude of the task boggles the mind. The Pentagon’s total back-office personnel numbers over 1 million people.
every step in the development of a new weapon requires clearing major bureaucratic hurdles that add years of delay. These mindnumbing, molasses-laden obstacle courses are spelled out in the defense department’s “bible” entitled “Operation of the defense Acquisition system.” during these innumerable reviews, thousands of change orders are made to reflect new wants and new “improvements,” what critics dub “requirement creep.” Anyone who has been involved in remodeling a home knows how expensive and delay-inducing changes made during a project can be.
The F-35 fighter aircraft was originally estimated to cost $233 billion for 2,866 planes. The latest estimated cost: $391 billion for 14% fewer planes. The price produced a sharp rebuke from President trump. Lockheed, the F-35’s chief contractor, now claims that costs are under control. Which leads one to ask: How did expenses get so out of control in the first place? The delays and cost overruns of this airplane are relatively normal in Pentagonland.
so hidebound is the procurement process that past defense chiefs have occasionally had to yank a program out of the morass to meet an urgent battlefield need. That’s what defense secretary robert Gates did in 2007 to get blastresistant vehicles to our troops in iraq; bureaucratic lethargy had led to hundreds of avoidable marine casualties.
Our history is riddled with examples of the military’s bureaucratic blob sticking with weapons that don’t work or are manifestly inferior to available alternatives. during the Civil War, the Army resisted the repeating rifle, preferring the single-shot version. That terrible decision cost the lives of tens of thousands of union soldiers.
A deadly modern-day example of this is the original m16 assault rifle. Various people warned of its flaws. in the early years of the Vietnam War the m16 was notorious for jamming. Yet the Army ordnance officers and bureaucrats obstinately ignored the criticism, even going so far as to rig performance tests, thereby costing who knows how many soldiers’ lives. (shockingly,
non-pentagon experts today consider the m16 and its successor, the m4, to be inferior rifles for our infantry.)
Pentagon apologists claim their awful hurdle-after-hurdle process is necessary to prevent failure. Yet in the real world there have been numerous weapons programs that were timeand resource-wasting flops.
Once a program is under way, it’s almost impossible to stop, no matter how dysfunctional the weapon turns out to be. The reason: Careers are tied to every weapon, and those involved will fight tooth and nail to keep it going, regardless of the merits—the bureaucrats, the particular branch of the service, the contractors, the lobbyists and members of Congress, who too often see the defense budget as pork for their districts and states.
Cost-plus contracting gives providers no incentive to control expenses. The bigger the price tag, the bigger the profit. And, of course, there’s the dirty, not-so-secret year-end splurge—managers are gigged if they don’t spend every dime they have. savings could mean you’ll get less next year.
Gumming up the process further are additional regulations imposed by other government agencies, such as the EPA and OSHA.
The Pentagon procurement horror show is no secret, but it has bedeviled every effort to substantially change it. Just about every defense secretary has made at least a stab at reform. The results have been pitiful. Back in 2005 a rand Corp. study listed 63 reforms—and their total impact was negligible. in 2013 a Wall
Street Journal story found that there had been at least 27 major studies on defenseacquisition reform and more than 300 serious studies by nongovernment experts.
it’s the old government story: Appointed officials come and go, the bureaucracy stays.
Compounding the current problem are its origins. Legendary Wwii general and overseer of our armed forces George marshall concluded after the war that henceforth in peacetime the u.s. would have an officer corps far larger than seemingly necessary. That way our military would have a ready, experienced group of leaders to deal with any needed rapid military buildup. But what to do when there was no big war? Have officers work on weapons systems. Where one officer would do, use ten!
The most ambitious, thorough push for a major overhaul of the Pentagon development and procurement blob occurred in 2014–15. A riveting account of this effort, authored by Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward, appeared last december in the Washington Post. it was spearheaded by the defense Business Board, a federal advisory panel of corporate executives brought together to “provide trusted independent and objective advice . . . on proven and effective best business practices for consideration and potential application to the [defense] department.”
Assisted by a passel of knowledgeable mckinsey & Co. consultants, the board engaged in an unprecedented deep dive into all facets of the Pentagon, unearthing numerous agencies and data systems.
The waste and stupendous inefficiencies uncovered by the board stunned even the most jaded observers. Just dealing with administrative waste would save at least $125 billion over five years.
no surprise, the empire struck back. The Pentagon did everything it could to pretend the report never existed or to dismiss it as “naive” and “superficial.” When the exhaustive study was done, a 77-page summary was posted on a defense department website. it was quickly expunged.
There’s a battle being waged by an ethical contractor against the Pentagon that exemplifies this problem. Palantir, a software outfit, came up with a dataanalytics platform that would give troops in the field just about all the information they needed on a tablet, ranging from weather to the latest local intelligence. The cost: about $100 million a year. As recounted by steven Brill in an excellent Fortune article, the Army wanted nothing to do with it, choosing “instead to favor an updated version of a deeply flawed system created by a team of [traditional] defense contractors that . . . produced cascading cost overruns, and bills of nearly $6 billion.” Field troops despise the Army’s version and love Palantir’s (a number of local commanders used local, discretionary funds to get the Palantir platform). One marine colonel wrote: “marines are alive today because of the capability of this system.” Yet the defense department is waging a jihad against Palantir, playing every bureaucratic trick it can to keep it from bidding on the contract.
What should Kushner and his team do? tear into this bloodstained, massive mountain of bureaucratic muck on two fronts.
First, dig up that defense Business Board report. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. The findings there will give them all they need to mount a sustained, substantive attack that will yield the mother of all government reforms in u.s. history.
second, take to heart the lesson of the Gordian knot and put into practice an idea recommended by Christopher Lehman, a former national security official in the reagan administration, in the Philadelphia Inquirer in January: “a simple legislative provision that would grant to the defense secretary, or any of the services secretaries (Army, navy, and Air Force), the authority for five years to waive any and all Federal Acquisition regulations. instead, the legislation would allow that official to use standard commercial law to acquire goods or services with funds appropriated by Congress.
“in this way, thousands of pages of red tape and myriad bureaucratic obstacles could be eliminated and straightforward commercial contracting could be employed, saving months, years, or a decade or more, of delay and unneeded expenses.”