Making Defense Reform Work

The Project on Monitoring Defense Reorganization was initiated in 1987 to bring the collective experience of individuals who have served at the highest levels of the Department of Defense, both military and civilian, in defense industries and scientific establishment, and on relevant committees of the U.S. Congress, to bear on the complicated issues of defense management. The mandate was narrow: to assess the degree to which the requirement of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Defense Commission were being implemented, to evaluate the consequences of the steps that had been taken to date, and to determine if further measures to implement these two reform effortsóor additional kinds of reformsówere desirable. The general conclusion is the Department of Defense, in many areas, has made considerable progress toward implementing these changes. In force planning, programming and budgeting, and in the planning and conduct of military operation, there has been cautious movement toward effective implementation of the Goldwater-Nichols legislation and the recommendations of the Packard Commission. Reform of the weapon acquisition process has come much more slowly. In one key areaóthe participation of Congress in defense management and decision makingóthere has been very little change. This project was a joint effort of the Foreign Policy Institute of The Johns Hopkins University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Pentagon spending has been the target of decades of criticism and reform efforts. Billions of dollars are spent on weapons programs that are later abandoned. State-of-the-art data centers are underutilized and overstaffed. New business systems are built at great expense but fail to meet the needs of their users. Every Secretary of Defense for the last five Administrations has made it a priority to address perceived bloat and inefficiency by making management reform a major priority. The congressional defense committees have been just as active, enacting hundreds of legislative provisions. Yet few of these initiatives produce significant results, and the Pentagon appears to go on, as wasteful as ever. In this book, Peter Levine addresses why, despite a long history of attempted reform, the Pentagon continues to struggle to reduce waste and inefficiency. The heart of Defense Management Reform is three case studies covering civilian personnel, acquisitions, and financial management. Narrated with the insight of an insider, the result is a clear understanding of what went wrong in the past and a set of concrete guidelines to plot a better future.

Chris Van Aller demonstrates that a better understanding of the complicated civil-military relationship in the United States is prerequisite to reforming the expensive and often inefficient military establishment maintained since World War II. Arguing that reduced defense expenditures and adequate national security are both possible, this book illustrates how American political culture remains deeply ambivalent about national security. Though significant budget cuts have been implemented over the past five years, Van Aller takes a closer look at the fact that no true reorganization or reconceptualization has taken place. For policy makers, historians of American military history and anyone who cares about this complex topic, The Culture of Defense will be indispensable reading.