Mackenzie Eaglen offers ideas for reforming American defense spending.
When targeting wasteful spending within the federal government, the sheer size, scope, and reach of the Pentagon make it a tempting target for constant reform. While many in Washington rightly call for acquisition and other changes, little has been done in recent years to make serious modification to bureaucratic processes, holding employees accountable, cutting bureaucratic fat and redundancy, and eliminating non-core missions and expenses.
There have been plenty of recent attempts in recent years to bring about reform, to mixed success. While well-intentioned, a common theme was that these were short-term, budget-bogey exercises that yielded few new dollars for reinvestment into higher priorities. This is due in part to defense reform being over-focused on the acquisition of expensive military hardware. Despite the fact that the majority of what the military purchases is no longer weapons systems but rather services and technology, zealous reformers continue to over-focus on weapons buys when hardware is increasingly the commodity.
Mackenzie’s five rules of defense reform follow:
1. Serious defense reform is often the patient work of many years.
2. To effect meaningful change within entrenched defense priorities, coalitions must be built and sustained.
3. Almost without fail, there is an upfront cost to change before any meaningful savings can be reaped years later.
4. The more money there is to be harvested for other purposes in the defense budget, the harder that change typically is to achieve politically.
5. Not undertaking hard but overdue reforms in the military bureaucracy does not help the troops.
While it would be nice if there was an “Easy button” or a line item to rescind for “fraud, waste, and abuse,” more needed reform is far more difficult. Inefficiency is marbled within the budget and across programs, accounts, services and agencies, as well as time wasted by staff on non- critical tasks.
