When it comes to bigness, the U.S. military has few rivals. The Defense Department is the nation’s largest employer, with over 1.3 million men and women on active duty. The department’s back-office business operations employ over a million people. The $580 billion U.S. military budget amounts to over half of each year’s discretionary federal spending. Making the Pentagon more efficient has frustrated many of those chosen to lead it.
Robert Work, as deputy defense secretary the Pentagon’s No. 2 official, set out to try again after taking office in 2014. He ordered the Defense Business Board to conduct an efficiency study, and boasted that corporate executives would be recruited.
Chaired by Robert Stein, a private-equity investor from Florida, the board drilled deep into the data of Pentagon back-office operations, looking at personnel, supply chains, acquisition, health care, financial flows and real estate management, and came up with an estimate that, with new ways of doing business, the military could save $125 billion over five years.
The board’s conclusions were made public Jan. 22, 2015. But once the study was completed, according to Washington Post reporters Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward, Work’s view changed. He dismissed the findings as “unrealistic,” and the report was essentially deep-sixed by the Pentagon leadership. Stein was replaced.
The study harvested a wealth of unreleased data on how the Pentagon functions. The $125 billion savings figure is an estimate, not a concrete list of wasteful spending to be trimmed. Work criticized the panel for failing to identify specific systems or processes to be changed in order to realize such big savings.
Work was right to embark on the project but wrong to bury it so hastily. The U.S. military has vital missions around the globe and is already facing severe budget pressures. To justify the money that it really needs, Pentagon leaders must confront openly the burden of bloat and wasteful overhead.
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