MIT-Key Issues In the Department of Defense for the Obama Administration

These five security specialists seem dubious about major Defense Department reforms as the Obama administration winds into action.

Cindy Williams first unloads these basics: the U.S. FY 2009 Department of Defense non-war budget is over half a trillion dollars – “about as much money as the rest of the world combined spends on their military endeavors;” another $200 billion is going to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. military is the nation’s and possibly the world’s largest employer, with 1.4 million active duty men and women and another million plus in the guard, reserves and civilian side. But in spite of this manpower and budget, says Williams, “the Secretary of Defense will face daunting constraints,” from the current economic meltdown, to the looming entitlement deficit posed by baby boomer retirement. Williams also notes a set of pressures driving costs skyward, not least of which include the likelihood of global conflicts springing up.

There’s a “popular parlor game in D.C.,” says Owen Coté, of tracking “elaborate, often baroque programs that are over budget, to figure out which will be canceled.” To Coté’s thinking, “dozens of programs fit into that category.” Complicating this “game” is a tug of war among the different services. The perception, says Coté, is of “a zero-sum fight for resources between the Army and Marine Corps, and the Navy and Air Force on the other hand.” Yet all our forces must prepare for both irregular warfare (military operations that don’t involve states), and traditional wars against nations with militaries. The simplest approach to Defense program allocations, Coté says, “is to decide what kinds of wars we think we’re going to fight, and what is the relevance of the program in one of these kinds of wars. If it doesn’t look relevant to either, I’ve got some candidates to help you save money.”

“I don’t think much new will happen in the new administration,” says Harvey Sapolsky. “It helps that Republicans started a big, messy war.” But Sapolsky is worried about “continuities,” including the U.S. “propensity to intervene internationally,” “exploitation of our gullibility about management systems,” and “wishful thinking about inter-organizational agency coordination.” We’re fortunately “out of troops” to do interventions he says, but he imagines we’ll still find ourselves “in the thick of it unnecessarily.” He wishes there could be a “moratorium on management fads in DOD,” the endless discussion of achieving reforms when “defense is inherently an inefficient enterprise.”

William Fallon sees a mountain of DOD “desirements,” stemming from an endless “to-do list of things people want done in the name of security.” Well-intended outsiders, from Congress to the general public, press for new weapons programs, and military interventions. We “have a phenomenal budget, filled with all kinds of things, that if you lay them out, you’re probably hard-pressed to find a connection between that line item and national security.” Nevertheless, “despite all the hand wringing, inefficiencies and angst, overall, security for the country stands in pretty darn good shape.”

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