Expanding Private Production Of Defense Services

Among other topics, the Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces considered whether the Department of Defense (DoD) should contract out--outsource--support services that DoD now produces in-house and, if so, (1) which services DoD should outsource and (2) what DoD can do to make outsourcing more cost-effective. This report reviews a set of issues relevant to these questions. The report first reviews barriers and objections to outsourcing that have been raised by earlier studies and government commissions that have addressed outsourcing. It then reviews insights from commercial-sector experience with outsourcing that DoD could use to guide its own actions on outsourcing. Finally, it offers suggestions about how to structure an implementation plan for large-scale outsourcing of support services. In particular, it identifies the attributes of support activities that DoD should consider outsourcing first and how DoD could facilitate an outsourcing program.

Recent years have seen a growing role for private military contractors in national and international security. To understand the reasons for this, Elke Krahmann examines changing models of the state, the citizen and the soldier in the UK, the US and Germany. She focuses on both the national differences with regard to the outsourcing of military services to private companies and their specific consequences for the democratic control over the legitimate use of armed force. Tracing developments and debates from the late eighteenth century to the present, she explains the transition from the centralized warfare state of the Cold War era to the privatized and fragmented security governance, and the different national attitudes to the privatization of force.

Examines how spending on military operation and maintenance grew in the 1980s and fell in the 1990s. The study highlights changes that could be made to achieve lower levels of spending by 2002. Topics addressed include: the need to reduce operation and maintenance spending levels in the future, why defensewide spending on operation and maintenance has grown, readiness and operation and maintenance spending by the services, and strategies for reducing spending. Charts and tables.

This analysis, prepared by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for the Defense Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, examines how O & M spending grew in the 1980s and fell in the 1990s. The study highlights changes that could be made to achieve lower levels of spending by 2002. In keeping with the CBO's mandate to provide objective analysis, the study makes no recommendations--Preface.