Reforming Defense Decision-Making

Anthony Cordesman of CSIS must be feeling as irritated as I am by the low level of discourse on defense acquisition decisions. He sent out an email that was a transcript of a recent speech at NDU.

The truth is, however, that the problems we face are part of a defense culture that has been building for a long, long time. No one administration or party is responsible, nor is any one group of leaders-civilian or military. It is partly the legacy of cutting too rapidly in reaction to the end of the Cold War; and it is partly the result of a culture of accommodation, process, and consensus that buries decisions and issues in endless studies and reviews.

Let me suggest that we do not need more reviewers, task forces, contractors, processes, or paperwork. What we do need is to create a level of accountability that forces the civilian and military leaders of the Department to take personal responsibility, and that this should be based a return to three key principles:

• The first is that there are no good intentions, only successful actions.
• The second is that no improvement in process can compensate for decisive and timely leadership.
• The third is that any meaningful strategy must be based on detailed force plans, procurement plans, program budgets, and measures of effectiveness.

We can't afford to go on the way we have been operating. We can't afford to waste the world's best military on the world's most mediocre leadership and try to keep solving our problems by throwing money at them.

I heartily agree with the man. A part of his speech identifying key points of the three principles is below the fold.

The simplest of these principles is that there are no good intentions, only successful actions.

Let me put this simply. It does not matter a damn what Secretary Gates or Admiral Mullen try to do. It does not matter how difficult the circumstances were, are, and will be. The same is true of every civilian from director and deputy assistant secretary up, and -- devalued as military rank is becoming -- of every officer with the rank of major general and above. There is only one test: what did you do that served the broader national interest of the U.S. successfully during your tour of duty. Not your party, not your ideology, not your service, and not your program.
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This brings me to the second principle: no improvement in process can compensate for decisive and timely leadership.

There was-and is-a school of thought that believed we could solve these problems through technology: through the most extreme versions of the "revolution in military affairs." There was another school who saw the solution in terms of greater efficiency through better processes; a school whose thesis seems to be that with the right process you can do more and more with less and less until you can do everything with nothing. What there was not, however, was hard, timely decisionmaking and honest efforts at cost projection and cost containment.
 
Year after year, our top civilian and military decisionmakers came and went letting the underbudgeting of procurement, force plans, and manpower grow. We then found ourselves fighting "long" wars that we took years to fully deploy and budget for, each year asking for supplementals that tacitly assumed we would win in the next year. We were slow to react in Iraq, and took until FY2007 to seriously budget for Afghanistan. In fact, we used the totally predictable inability to precisely predict the cost of war to create a nightmare of unrealistic annual baseline budgets, half thought-out supplementals, and pointless Future Year Defense Plans (FYDPs).
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This brings me to the last of my three principles: Any meaningful strategy must be based on detailed force plans, procurement plans, program budgets, and measure of effectiveness.

Is $533.7 billion in FY2010 and 4.2% of the GNP enough? Enough for what? Our most recent QDR is a morass of half thought-out ideas-many calling for further study or otherwise deferring tangible action. We don't have a force plan. We don't have a clearly defined, defenser-wide procurement plan. We don't tie the QDR to end strength goals that are clearly defined and costed. We haven't provided meaningful budget figures because the QDR is not tied to the FYDP. We haven't set clear goals to be achieved. We have no metrics.

Worse, there is no clear alternative. When a series of panels were set up to actually review key issues in the last QDR, they seemed to produce nothing. We could write a FYDP with less than 20 people in systems analysis in the early 1960s. Now we still have a FYDP that is little more than a crude input budget that is not tied to any key mission area that is not directly relevant to our strategy documents to truly challenging trade-off analysis by PA&E or OSD comptroller. We are fighting two demanding wars-which we call "long wars." None are in the FYDP, whose details remain classified for reasons that simply do not exist except to cover up its lack of meaning and content.