Here are some excerpts from MG Arnold Punaro’s recent book, The Ever Shrinking Fighting Force. It is packed with data on how costs have increased and force structure has decreased — perhaps no surprise to anyone reading this blog. But here are a couple quotes that jumped out at me:
By any measure, the Defense Department is a leviathan of nearly inconceivable proportions. It is routinely recognized as the largest centrally directed and managed activity on Earth.
In the last 20 years, the average fully burdened cost for a mid-career individual on active duty has gone from $80,000 per year to $160,000 at the end of the Bush administration, to the current estimates of close to $400,000 today… the $400,000 fully burdened cost can be misleading, as DoD uses a composite rate strictly for budgeting purposes.
It is interesting, by the way, that the fully burdened cost of a government official is in often higher than is accepted for contractors. Eric Fanning recently mentioned this fact on the Defense & Aerospace report. A couple years ago GSA tried to arbitrarily cut contractor labor rates by as much as 40 percent. Of course, it is very hard to compare. The $400,000 figure is for budgeting, and isn’t on an apples-to-apples basis with a contractor, but that $400,000 for a mid-career comes out to roughly $220/hour at 1,800 hours a year.
OK, here’s more:
Congress fundamentally does the same thing three times a year — budget, authorize, and appropriate. It should consider reducing the separate processes to two steps by combining the authorization and appropriation steps.
Of course, there was no “authorizing” committee in the 1950s and before. Program authorization in DoD really started around the same time as PPBE, which realigned budgeting to a program structure (makes sense). The NDAA was:
- One page in FY 1962
- 10 pages by FY 1970
- 169 pages in FY 1985
- 519 pages in FY 1996
- broke a thousand in FY 2020
- over 2,000 pages in FY 2022
Section 800 acquisition provisions first broke 100 pages in FY 2022, coming in at a whopping 150 pages. Will the exponential growth be curtailed?
And some comments on accountability in acquisition:
… the department often starts copious major weapons projects they ultimately cancel, such as the Comanche helicopter, Crusader artillery, and the Expeditionary fighting vehicle. The disaster initiatives and enterprises, like the Future Combat System and DIMHRS, which, after 12 years and over $3 billion trying to put the military under a single payroll and personnel records system, came to nothing, and no one was held accountable. [emphasis added]
Throughout this process, OSD must be intentionally cautious not falling victim to Flournoy’s “tyranny of consensus,” and instead champion dialogue, debate, and even disagreement to produce the most effective solutions. OSD cannot afford to simply remain in line with the bureaucratic norms if it truly desires to successfully adjust its focus and governance structures toward great power competition.
I think these two issues are related. The tyranny of consensus protects officials from accountability because no one could actually say “yes” and everybody was involved. That consensus actually creates suboptimal requirements and leads to the disasters cited above.
Have a good day!
Eric, the other thing that protects officials from accountability is time. By the time poor acquisition decisions are revealed to be poor, the officials responsible for them are no longer part of the defense acquisition enterprise. Short of actual crimes, there is no available (or possible) mechanism to reward or punish them. That wouldn’t change, even if individuals had significant acquisition authority to say “yes”.
Good point David! But I can’t help but think that timelines are so long because of the consensus and paper documentation. So delegating execution would speed up feedback times and therefore accountability…. to some degree. Still, lots of challenges in the career incentives.