Have we reached peak “Chief …… Officer” in the DOD?

DoD leadership should focus on establishing business-reform objectives for each major DoD organization, and then holding leaders of these respective organizations accountable to the achievement of measurable business goals. This should be driven by the secretary and the deputy, and enabled by a much smaller CMO function. Secretary Mark Esper appears to be headed in that direction in his recent memo on 2020 DoD reform efforts, which focuses the CMO’s efforts on the fourth estate and makes the services directly responsible “to establish and execute aggressive reform plans.” That is the right approach.

That was from Jerry McGinn, Executive Director of the Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University, writing in Defense News on the subject, “Does the Pentagon need a chief management officer?” Here is the related Government Matters episode.

As Jerry correctly points out, the DepSecDef is the only point where responsibility for various parts of the acquisition system meet. CMO is outside of that review and approval process for programs except defense business systems. Jerry basically recommends reverting the structure to what it had been before the FY2017 NDAA, and then giving that Deputy CMO some added responsibility to hold the services accountable for business reforms.

If CMO loses its chiefdom, then it may signal the turn in the tide of expansion of “Chief” positions with ambiguous lines of authority, like the Chief Software Officer, Chief Data Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Learning Officer, and Chief Innovation Officer [which was put on hold].

By the way, in his memo Secretary Esper required “detailed ‘clean-sheet’ budget reviews” from the services, and marked out the Defense-Wide functions under CMO for savings, claiming $5 billion were found in FY 2021. I’m skeptical of the actual effectiveness of such zero-based budget reviews. Arbitrary cuts to Defense-Wide programs would have worked fine — though that strategy does not work for service programs.

Notice, however, that program plans are locked in already not just for FY 2020 (in execution), but FY 2021 (budget in prep for the hill). So the only place Esper can do to find funds for new innovations is FY 2022 (programming phase). The rest of the defense program is pre-ordained. A lot can happen in the next year and three-quarters before FY 2022 starts.