On Monday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced a common-sense plan to cut Pentagon fat to preserve battlefield muscle.
He’ll be damned for it.
Gates is breathtakingly willing to take on poisonous political interests, unscrupulous contractors and bloated institutions. He may be the only senior official in our lifetimes who genuinely cares about both the troops and the taxpayers.
In his take-no-prisoners statement, the SecDef noted: “Our headquarters and support bureaucracies . . . have swelled to cumbersome and top-heavy proportions, grown over-reliant on contractors, and grown accustomed to operating with little consideration to cost.”
Now the money’s drying up. Our military’s bare-bones “grunts and gear” needs demand budget increases of 2 percent to 3 percent a year — but real increases won’t exceed 1 percent. The old money-for-nothing ways of doing business aren’t sustainable — unless we cut troops to protect defense-industry profits.
Somebody has to feel the pain. Gates already had directed the services to identify $100 billion in internal cuts to free up funds for baseline needs. On Monday, he made another assault on the status quo.
Amid his wave of initiatives, five stand out:
The free ride for contractors is over: The SecDef revealed that, in 2009, private contractors made up 39 percent of the Defense Department workforce. And that’s not counting contractors in Iraq or Afghanistan.
For years, we’ve heard the politics-driven nonsense that “private industry can do things more cheaply and efficiently than government.” Iraq proved that to be history’s biggest lie not told by a half-naked teenager. Contractors can do a few things, such as run chow halls, better than the military — but few save us any money.
Instead, we’ve seen the worst war-profiteering orgy in history by “patriotic” corporations packed with hireling retired generals and admirals and gushing campaign contributions. Gates is calling them out.
Certainly, there are conscientious defense contractors — but they tend to be the smaller outfits. The big boys, with their informal cartel, pay more attention to lobbying, advertising and suing the government that pays them than to the mission.
Generals, admirals and senior civilians will be axed: Since 2001, flag-officer positions have increased by over 100, while Senior Executive Service slots grew by 300. As Gates noted, this “brass creep” is often “fueled by the desire to increase the bureaucratic clout or prestige of a particular service, function or region, rather than reflecting the scope and duties of the job itself.”
Fifty generals and admirals will get their walking papers, while 150 top civilians will go. That’s only halfway back to semi-sanity, but by DC standards, it’s a massacre.
The challenge lies in forcing the services to cut their dead-wood good ol’ boys, not their up-and-coming innovators. Today, the Army’s senior generals are more inbred than a hillbilly family snowed in for a generation. And the Air Force is worse.
Goodbye, Joint Forces Command: Created to foster joint force compatibility, this newish headquarters in Norfolk, Va., never found its footing. Even Gen. Jim Mattis, an incredible Marine, couldn’t make much of it.
JFCOM simply hasn’t been worth its cost. With more contractors than government employees, it’s become little more than a jobs program.
And therein lies the problem: Immediately upon Gates’ announcement, every politician in Virginia — including Sen. Jim Webb, who knows better — howled that, without JFCOM’s thousands of local jobs, a vast alliance of Islamists, Communists and cannibals would conquer the heartland.
President Obama doesn’t need congressional approval to shut down JFCOM, though. Will he do the right thing just once?
Redundant information-technology offices get a mercy killing: The Pentagon’s IT offices and organizations have spread faster than bedbugs. The duplication of missions and bureaucratic turf wars mired serious efforts to get things done. So Gates is chopping his own DoD bureaucracy and wiping out the Joint Staff’s J6 division to set the example.
No more expensive studies for everything: This may sound like small-change stuff — if you’re a BP executive. Thousands of DoD personnel, countless hours, innumerable contractors and hundreds of millions of bucks go into producing a deluge of studies, mandated or self-imposed. A few have value; most are self-licking ice-cream cones.
The test of whether Gates has a chance of doing the right thing by those in uniform and you, the taxpayer? JFCOM. If the Virginia delegation in Washington can save a bloated headquarters that does nothing much, we’ll know who won.