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The bureaucracy must be untangled, for the nation's sake
Sunday, December 31, 2000
There were many demons pursuing James Vincent Forrestal, America's first secretary of defense, when, on May 22, 1949, he leapt to his death from a window on the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital. But one of them must have been the frustrations he experienced in a job he'd designed not to work.
We might have had both a separate air force and a rational structure for the Department of Defense if the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) hadn't gotten greedy. Granted a temporary separation at the start of World War II, the USAAF wanted a permanent divorce from the Army, which the Army was willing to grant, and about which the Navy didn't care. But in addition to its own aircraft, the USAAF wanted control of those of the Navy and Marine Corps. This set off the most vicious of the interservice wars.
The Army and the Air Force wanted a unified department of defense. The Navy wanted a DoD that was unified in name only. The Navy - thanks in large part to the political skills of its then secretary, James V. Forrestal - won. The National Security Act of 1947 created one Department of Defense, but it consisted of three distinct feudal baronies. The titular monarch was all hat and no cattle. When Forrestal took the job of secretary of defense, his entire staff consisted of one assistant, and a secretary.
Times sure have changed. There are now more than 3,700 people in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and supporting agencies such as the Defense Logistics Agency, Defense Nuclear Agency and Defense Mapping Agency.
Various "reforms" have added layers of bureaucracy, but little clarity. The Pentagon has five sides, but nine different chains of command: One to the secretary of defense; another to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff; one to each of the four service chiefs, and one to each of the three service secretaries. Round and round the paper flows; where it stops, nobody knows.
There have been a lot of changes in the more than 50 years that have elapsed since passage of the National Security Act of 1947. The Soviet Union has collapsed. International terrorists and criminal gangs now may pose more of a threat to our security than hostile nation-states do. There has been a revolution in military technologies which may pall into insignificance the changes wrought by the musket, machine gun, tank and airplane. A patch here and a patch there won't do. We need to rethink, carefully, how we should organize to defend our country. And the form the defense department takes should have more to do with military utility, and less to do with politics, civilian or military.
Gen. Henry Shelton, whose penchant for politics at the expense of the troops has done much to bring it about, acknowledged in a postelection speech at the National Press Club that a defense "train wreck" is coming. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff admitted the defense budgets he'd championed for the last three years were inadequate.
"We thought [the Clinton defense budget] would be adequate to maintain an acceptable level of modernization," Shelton said. "Reality has dictated otherwise."
Other generals whose noses have not been quite so close to President Clinton's posterior are more blunt:
"We have lived off the technology of the 1960s and 1970s that was developed and fielded in the 1970s and 1980s," said retired Army Lt. Gen. Lawrence Skibbie, president of the National Defense Industrial Association. "We are in a death spiral of [military] equipment."
We're spending a hair over 3 percent of the Gross Domestic Product on defense, less than half the 6.5 percent we spent in 1985. Gen. James Jones, commandant of the Marine Corps, thinks defense spending should be increased to 4 or 4.5 percent of GDP.
We need to spend more for defense. But we need to make sure we are buying weapons to guard against the threats we face today and are likely to face tomorrow, not to protect us from the threats we faced 20 years ago. And though we need more people in the fighting formations, and we should treat them better, we don't need any more military bureaucrats, horseholders and dog robbers. More spending for defense must be accompanied by military reform.
A good place to start would be by paring down the size and complexity of the Pentagon bureaucracy. The Office of the Secretary of Defense needs also to shift its focus from preparing the annual budget to making critical decisions about force structure, and streamlining a baroque procurement process.
Few institutions are as resistant to change as are the armed forces. But rarely in history has dramatic change more urgently been required. Don Rumsfeld has a big job ahead of him. Maybe the new SecDef should stay away from the windows.
Jack Kelly is national affairs writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com).