One of the really wonderful lessons of the last 10 years of extended warfare is just how amazingly well America’s National Guard and reserves have fought. And we think, given the strategic environment, and how terrific the performance of Reserve and Guard units has been in the regular rotation, that we would accept risk in changing the current force structure by moving a larger number of soldiers into the reserves.
The Pentagon has proposed end strength cuts to the ground forces – but in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress specifically limits the amount by which the department can reduce the Army and Marine Corps annually.
I think there is general congressional agreement with the plan for reducing end strength by 2016 – but I think there is a lot more congressional concern about the pacing of these cuts, and the terms on which they’re being performed. But that means that the Secretary of Defense and the service chiefs haven’t won the policy argument – and they haven’t actually engaged in it very effectively, either. They didn’t propose any personnel cuts with sequestration looming, so it’s not surprising that they haven’t persuaded the Congress that their plan is executable, and superior to what Congress would pull out of its hat.
Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. Jonathan Greenert shares a laugh with his predecessor, the 29th CNO, retired Adm. Gary Roughead at the end of a retirement ceremony for Chief of Naval Operations Deputy of Warfare Systems Vice Adm. Bill Burke at the Washington Navy Yard. Former CNO Roughead co-authored “National Defense in a Time of Change.” U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Peter D. Lawlor/Released)
You mention sequestration. Your and Adm. Roughead’s recommendations are sequestration-neutral – and that’s in keeping with the idea, I suppose, that the top line isn’t really the number we need to be looking at if we’re going to fix the military budget. And yet that’s the number that DoD leadership has been focusing on since the Budget Control Act was passed.
I think the DoD made two mistakes in the run up to sequestration. One is that in the 18 months preceding it, they didn’t undertake any planning about how to make the cuts in a way that minimizes damage. For example, are you really going to furlough every single civilian employee, or are you going to figure out which ones have jobs for which you can tolerate a backlog in their workload, and which ones you can’t? Because they didn’t do that kind of planning, it exacerbated the near-term effects.
Second, the political choice that the leadership of the department – Secretary Panetta and the chiefs – made was to emphasize how damaging the cuts would be. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has made such strident statements to the effect that if you cut even $1 from the current defense budget, then the strategy becomes unexecutable. And in doing so, the Pentagon has really turned up the volume – but it doesn’t look as if they changed a single congressional vote. So what I very much hope Secretary [of Defense Chuck] Hagel is doing is talking the military back a little bit from their very exposed position – and the secretary himself, as the civilian secretary, should be shouldering more of the responsibility for managing the politics and the legislative side of this.
The Government Accountability Office recently estimated that $74 billion was wasted last year because of problems with the procurement system. You and the admiral propose several new acquisition practices.
I have a missionary zeal at how badly this system serves the youngsters in harm’s way and the taxpayers. One of my very favorite examples was given by Bill Lynn when he was deputy secretary of defense. He compares the time line for the Pentagon to purchase IT products by identifying what they need, setting specifications, and going to industry to make them – a process that averages 81 months from start to finish – to the 24-month developmental time line for the iPhone®.