It was through Defense Industry Daily a few weeks ago that I read of Harold Brown's editorial in the Washington Post last month arguing for the abolition of service secretaries in the US Department of Defense. Individual service secretaries for the Army, Navy, and Air Force Departments, he thinks, are mere "horse-holders," or at best, mouthpieces for the parochial wants of the organizations over which they are supposed to be in charge. All that are needed, he thinks, are the services' respective chiefs of staff. To boot, he notes, those secretaries come with big, expensive Pentagon bureaucracies, and money is short, or should be considered short, if the United States doesn't want to wind up like Greece.
To be fair, I once heard the same plea (though without the unpleasant analogies) from Perry Smith, the CNN general of the 1991 Gulf War. And I must admit that the concept of two tiers of civilian control is close to unique to the United States. But let me dwell for a moment on Harold Brown, for this was his argument. He does note that he's one of the few people ever to have been both a service secretary and a defense secretary, so he's the one in the know. If he knows, then isn't it a touch ironic that he was air secretary to Lyndon Johnson? Was he merely horse-holding when he presided over the disaster of the F-111 procurement?
It's a fair question, but now I've finished being mean. Honestly, I do find his record as defense secretary to Jimmy Carter much better. He let the big drives towards stealth and precision weapons get started. We know how that all turned out. He also had the intestinal fortitude to terminate the B-1A program. As a former Air Force client from contemporaneous vintage once argued to me, while the former's resurrection under Ronald Reagan and Caspar Weinberger may have been useful for scaring the Soviets, since 1990 the B-1B has mostly served as an expensive recapitalization for the missions that B-52s seem to perform quite adequately. But I digress.
Brown seems intent on continuing the consolidation of Pentagon power in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where presumably All and Only Good Decisions are made. So, allow me to suggest some contrary arguments to consider:
The United States and the United Kingdom somehow won the Second World War without a secretary or minister of defense.
Navy Secretary Benjamin Stoddert, way back in the day, somehow won the Quasi-War with France while serving effectively as his own 'chief of naval operations,' and without even a single officer with a permanent rank of anything higher than captain.
John Lehman, the man most likely to have been defense secretary had Mitt Romney won the recent election, was no horse-holder as secretary of the navy. Not even close. It's often forgotten now that not all the senior officers much liked him. He definitely got things done—just things that the government of the day wanted, regardless of what the admiralty thought best.
And if the huge bureaucracy of the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics (AT&L), the Pentagon's centralized buying group, was stood up to oversee the military's supply chain, and to prevent, through its oversight, some of the abject disasters that the individual services had allowed, has its record really been all that better? That's a difficult proposition to test, but unless one can conclude objectively that the answer is yes, could the cognoscenti please halt their fifty-year grinding push for more centralization? I certainly see no evidence that more jointness, at the margin, is working.
Indeed, as Robert Kozloski of the Navy Department recently argued in Naval War College Review, [1] it is instead high time for "critically examining the sacred purple cow of jointness." Consider his 'money shot,' as a friend recently put it to me:
As a recent study from the Institute for Defense Analysis notes, over the past decade JCIDS has not altered any solution originally proposed by a military service, nor does it appear that the process has added value to the front end of the acquisition process for the programs examined. [2] In the same period, the Department of Defense has spent over forty-six billion dollars on canceled defense programs. [3] While this amount cannot be directly attributed to failures of JCIDS, clearly twenty-five years of Goldwater-Nichols efforts to resolve this problem have had little success.
Rather than asking for more oversight and centralization to bolster failures of oversight and centralization, I'm intrigued by the idea put forth by the Tories in the UK last year, that the individual service chiefs need more authority to manage personnel and operations as they see fit, and that civilians should take more control of investment decisions. Spending big public monies, a program manager friend of mine once told me, is an inherently political act.
More recently in the US, and as I noted a few weeks ago, the Defense Business Board alternatively lamented the exclusion of the service chiefs from the acquisition process. If that's the case, then I'm wondering how programs like the Airborne Common Sensor, the Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter, the Future Combat System, the Littoral Combat Ship, and the Joint Strike Fighter have sagged under the overwhelming weight of stop-the-presses requirements insertions. I'm not saying that the chiefs shouldn't be involved; I'm saying that they should better involved, and with some direct involvement of political appointees who can keep some of their periodically unhelpful military tendencies under control.
So here's a counterproposal to Harold's: why not kill most of OSD instead? Why not just throw in the towel on that centralized buying group, AT&L? Why not devolve the ACAT 1D program back to the departments, and let their presumably crackerjack staffs take them from there? Why not let those each service secretary's staff buy its own stuff, and use the threat of differential resource allocation by the Secretary of All Defense pour encourager les autres? Manage by objectives at the top level, and not by direct control: if any one military department can't get it right, then one of the other two can get the nod, and the loser can regroup for the next round of innovation- and efficiency-inducing interservice competition.
And if the president still wants a secretary of defense—even if Churchill and FDR didn't need such a person—then let him handle the manageable task of managing the output of those three service secretaries, and of the directors of the common defense agencies (DLA, DIA, etc.). That would give him perhaps a dozen direct reports, and without the crazy overlapping authorities and matrixed responsibilities of the Pentagon today. For the overhead has gotten completely out of control, and cutting bureaucrats and their SETA contractors should be much more appealing than cutting actual trigger-pullers on the front line.
Now, I will acknowledge that this suggestion will be met with derision from some high places in the bureaucracy, but before dismissing it, I present this challenge:
Show me just what has been so wonderful.
Notes
1. Robert Kozloski, "Building the Purple Ford: an Affordable Approach to Jointness," Naval War College Review, Autumn 2012.
2. The Major Causes of Cost Growth in Defense Acquisition, Institute for Defense Analysis, 2009, p. ES-11.
3. Todd Harrison, Analysis of the FY 2012 Defense Budget, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2011, p. viii.
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