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Defense Watch
Can the Pentagon Be Liberated From Bureaucratic Stranglehold?
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By Sandra I. Erwin
A four-star general selected to run a newly created Pentagon agency wanted the organization to have a catchy name that everyone would remember.
Instead, he got JIEDDO.
“We tried to create a simpler title, but the bureaucracy wouldn’t let us do it,” says retired Army Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, former director of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization.
Any other name for the agency was “impermissible because of the way the staff is set up,” he says. “So we got stuck with that monster.”
Such is life at the Department of Defense. Even four-star generals are relatively powerless when they go up against the fearsome bureaucracy.
Just about every secretary of defense who ever attempted to shake things up — reform the weapons acquisition system, overhaul outdated accounting processes, or even consolidate staffs that seemed to be doing duplicative work — has had to face this inscrutable enemy.
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously declared war on institutional inertia on Sept. 10, 2001. He blamed the Pentagon’s bureaucracy for fomenting waste and thwarting progress.
To the chagrin of his successor, Robert Gates, not much has changed, nearly a decade later.
In terms more polite than Rumsfeld’s, Gates chided the bureaucrats on several occasions for failing to mobilize for war while military forces were engaged in two major conflicts. “For too many in the Pentagon it has been business as usual, as opposed to a wartime footing and a wartime mentality,” Gates says in a 2008 speech.
Just last month, the secretary once again implored recalcitrant functionaries to get with the program as he introduced an ambitious plan to shake up the export-control apparatus. Securing support from Congress on these major reforms will be a cakewalk compared to overcoming a far more formidable hurdle of an entrenched bureaucracy that consistently resists new and better ways of doing things. “Our building has not overflowed in the past with enthusiasts for this kind of change,” says Gates. “I would say that is also true for some other buildings in town.”
Even the Pentagon’s dysfunctional accounting and finance reporting system can’t be fixed as quickly as Congress wants because of institutional inaction. The Defense Department a few years ago established a “business transformation agency” to overhaul an antiquated and disjointed maze of Pentagon financial databases and transform them into a state-of-the-art integrated system similar to what is found in most Fortune 500 corporations. BTA Director David Fisher reports that the project is moving at an extremely slow pace because “there’s a lot of resistance” by the bureaucracy. The Pentagon so far has spent $9 billion on modern “enterprise resource planning” information systems, but only 10 percent of the Defense Department’s transactions are managed and tracked by the new ERP systems, Fisher grumbles.
“You can put a software system in any organization. It’s the people side that is by far the most difficult,” says retired Navy Vice Adm. Keith Lippert, a former director of the Defense Logistics Agency. He recalls that it took DLA years and “extensive management training” to transition to new information systems because of the “tremendous institutional resistance.”
To those who follow the ins and outs of government, this is nothing new. After all, bureaucracies are as old as civilization, and so is their inflexibility.
Good leaders can work around these obstacles, says David J. Berteau, a former Defense Department official and now director of the defense-industrial initiatives group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Let us not forget that these much-disdained bureaucracies are made up of people who, in most cases, defy change because they fear losing their jobs, or even their reason for being, Berteau says.
“All too often these reform ideas are seen by institutions as taking away their jobs and not giving anything in return,” he says. “That’s where the resistance comes in.”
It’s not that the individual bureaucrats are bad people. They’re well meaning, says Berteau. But their thinking is warped by the institutions. “If you moved the individuals to a different job they would have a different view,” he says.
In Washington, the smart leaders know that they have to be persistent over a long period — usually years — to accomplish any real change. Export controls are a case in point. The Bush administration launched a vigorous campaign to overhaul the system, but by the time agencies reached an agreement on what to do, it was already May 2008 and the leadership was on its way out, says Berteau. “The secret is to start early enough so you have time.”
To put it simply, change in Washington is tough, especially at the world’s largest five-sided building.
It is a strange paradox that the Pentagon draws up war plans to fight just about every conceivable potential foe — from nation states to shady terrorist groups, pirates, and even grapple with global warming.
But it hasn’t quite come up with a conclusive strategy for tearing down the brick walls of the bureaucracy. “I have no desire to attack the Pentagon,” says Rumsfeld. “I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself.”
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