ARTICLE

February 2004

Washington Pulse

by Geoff S. Fein

Lobbying Rules Strict Enough, Says Controller
Despite inspector general investigations and allegations of unethical behavior in the defense industry, it would be unwise for the Pentagon to change current conflict-of-interest policies, said Dov Zakheim, controller and undersecretary of defense.

The Pentagon is “pretty strict about this,” Zakheim said in an interview with defense reporters. Responding to questions about the Boeing-related investigations and whether they should lead to tighter scrutiny of the industry, Zakheim cautioned that people may be overreacting to recent events and neglecting to see the big picture.

Defense Department employees who are hired by defense contractors are barred from dealing with the Pentagon for a year, and they cannot do business with the department for two years in any area they specifically oversaw. Zakheim believes this policy is stringent enough.

If the policies were made tougher, they would have a chilling effect that may deter the most competent and ambitious people from serving in the government, he said. “One of the difficulties that increasing strictness raises is how you get good people.”

If the Pentagon hired people who have no knowledge of the defense business and put them in charge, the press would be writing stories about the “ignoramuses running the Defense Department,” Zakheim said. “You want to be taking people with expertise.

“Once you take people with expertise, you have to ask, do they have something to go back to? If they do not, then you are only going to get two kinds of people: fabulously wealthy people or people about to retire. You will not get people who are on the way up, because they will say, ‘if I go to the Defense Department, it will wreck my career.’”

As it is, he said, “we don’t exactly get the equivalent pay or benefits or lifestyle of people with similar type of responsibility” in the private sector. “To add restrictions because something went wrong with one individual, on top of the restrictions that already exist and that are seen as onerous by many people, is going in the wrong direction.”

Army Stresses ‘Joint Expeditionary Mindset’
The Army is wrapping up its first draft version of a family of joint operational concepts. The concepts range from homeland security to stability operations and strategic deterrence, said Brig. Gen. David A. Fastabend, director of capabilities development and experimentation at the Army Training and Doctrine Command’s Futures Center.

“We are working very intensely with Joint Forces Command to develop a family of joint concepts,” Fastabend said in an interview.

Last fall, the Army and JFCOM focused on “major combat operations joint operating concept,” said Fastabend. “Once that is completed, the Army can finalize its capstone concept for future force operations.”

These concepts will continue to evolve, at least in the foreseeable future, he said. “It’s still a work in progress.”

Fastabend oversees one of the 16 task forces set up by the Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, to focus on improving the Army. Fastabend’s task force addresses the need for a “joint expeditionary mindset.”

“The chief has asked us to look at what we need to do to adjust the mindset of the Army, so that it’s more closely reflects a joint expeditionary mindset,” he said. “We are looking at how we change the culture and the thinking, so it more closely resembles the fact that we are members of a joint team and members of a service second. … And also that we are more comfortable in an expeditionary environment. It means operating in places where you did not anticipate to be operating.”

In any institution as big as the Army, he said, “culture is a very complex set of assumptions and unstated beliefs.”

The Army, he said, “already does things that are expeditionary. So it’s a matter of refinement.”

Nevertheless, “I think the chief understands that you can’t tell people to change their culture. What you can do is look for behaviors that over time change the culture.”

One of the top goals is to adjust the size of the Army so it’s more flexible and deployable, he said. Another area of emphasis is joint training. “We are putting joint context into our major combat training centers and training events,” said Fastabend. “We’ll rewrite doctrine.”

He expects closer than ever collaboration with the Marine Corps. So far, both services’ one-star and two-star generals are scheduled to meet and discuss joint efforts. A four-star meeting of the Army chief of staff and the commandant is planned for May.

Defense Spending Fuels Aerospace Growth
Aerospace industry sales to the Defense Department increased by $1.1 billion to $59 billion in 2003 and are expected to grow next year to at least $61 billion, according to John W. Douglass, president and CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association. Missile sales also increased by 1.8 percent to $12.9 billion.

Defense-related research and development spending has grown faster than projected. AIA had lobbied for approximately $50 billion in federal spending over a five-year period. The Bush administration nearly doubled that amount in four years, providing more than $90 billion for research and development with most of that going to defense, said Douglass.

Additional investments are needed in the U.S. intelligence budget, he said. “For every bit of money that we invest there, it gives us warning, it will pay back many times over if we’re able to avoid future terrorist events.”

One piece of bad news last year was the industrial relationship between U.S. and allied nations. “Relationships are extremely tense right now because of the war, because of some of these World Trade Organization actions against the United States and so on. And we hope that whoever runs for the democratic side, and we hope the president as well, will commit to fixing these two items as we move into the next four years,” said Douglass.

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