Responsibility for overseeing acquisition cannot be delegated to the deputy secretary, as has so often been the case in the past. This is not about micromanagement, it’s about accountability in leadership. Too many top executives in business and government think the details are beneath them, often with calamitous results. Frankly, I did not involve myself in acquisition issues in the Bush administration apart from urgent wartime needs, but I changed course early in the Obama presidency.
As we began to prepare the FY2012 budget in the spring of 2010, my sense of foreboding about Defense’s budgetary future turned to alarm as I listened to the debates in Congress, followed the media, and listened to Obama. I believed our budget would remain flat at best and probably decline. To afford the weapons programs and equipment that I strongly believed we had to buy, we would need to find the money internally. Defense’s base budget—not counting funding for the wars—had nearly doubled during the previous decade, and I believed the Pentagon had forgotten how to make tough decisions and to prioritize. We needed to begin to change a culture of spending into a culture of savings. This, then, required a new, even more aggressive examination of every part of the Defense Department. Thus began the “efficiencies” initiative of 2010.
I hoped to set the tone for what we would do in a speech on May 8 at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library. Eisenhower, one of my great heroes, had told the Pentagon he wanted it cut down to “a Spartan basis,” noting that “I say the patriot today is the fellow who can do the job with less money.” I said in my speech that I found it compelling that under Eisenhower real choices were made, priorities set, and limits enforced—even in the face of a superpower adversary like the Soviet Union. The post-9/11 “gusher of defense spending,” I warned, “has been turned off and will stay off for a good period of time.” Accordingly, the department had to take a hard look at every aspect of how it was organized, staffed, and operated—indeed, every aspect of how it did business. I concluded: “The goal is to cut our overhead costs and to transfer those savings to force structure [military capabilities] and modernization.… What is required is not more study. Nor do we need more legislation. It is not a great mystery what needs to change. What it takes is the political will and willingness, as Eisenhower possessed, to make hard choices.”
Three and a half years into the job, I had again declared war on the Pentagon—on the 40 percent of its spending that went to overhead, on layers of bureaucracy that put as many as thirty layers of staff between me and an action officer, on unnecessary programs, on too many generals and admirals for the size of our forces, on too many senior civilians in the department, and on too many contractors.
Most of my predecessors railed about the same problems. But most were trying to cut budgets, and some, including Robert McNamara, had come up with dramatic reform and restructuring initiatives that were imposed by fiat on the military services. These efforts, not surprisingly, met with significant resistance from the military. My strategy was different. I told the services that the money they saved through changing their way of doing business and cutting overhead I would return to them to invest in military capabilities. As with the program cuts and caps in 2009, the services would be deeply involved in the process. Critically important was getting agreement in advance from the president and the new director of OMB, Jack Lew, that we could keep all the savings from these efforts to reinvest in military capabilities. They were both supportive.
Between mid-May and mid-December, I chaired nearly sixty meetings ranging from half an hour to nearly eight hours on the efficiencies initiative. We delved into every aspect of the Pentagon. I was intending to bring about a cultural shift—“How do we make this place more efficient, make staffs more lean, flatten decision making, and pay more attention to cutting unnecessary costs.” I did not want to wait eighteen months until FY2012 to begin implementing these changes; I wanted to identify things we could begin to do right away.
I went public with the first changes on August 9, 2010. Among other decisions, I announced we would:
• reduce funding for service support contractors by 10 percent a year for three years;
• freeze the number of positions in the office of the secretary of defense, Defense agencies, and the combatant commands for three years (except for hiring additional acquisition professionals);
• freeze the number of senior civilian executive and general and flag officer positions while a task force came up with recommendations to reduce general officer and flag positions by at least 50 and civilian executive positions by 100;
• impose dramatic cuts in funding for myriad reports and studies, as well as for outside advisory boards and commissions;
• reduce funding for Defense intelligence contracts, freeze the number of senior executive positions in Defense intelligence organizations, and carry out a “zero-based” review of all Defense intelligence missions, organizations, relationships, and contracts;
• eliminate organizations that performed duplicative functions or had outlived their usefulness.
To underscore the importance I attached to making these changes, I said that I intended that all the initiatives lead to operational plans or measurable results within 90 to 120 days, and I appointed Robert Rangel and Hoss Cartwright to cochair the effort.
While collectively the measures amounted to an earthquake inside the department, only my recommendation to close the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, was controversial on the outside. Its role was to infuse, or occasionally compel, “jointness”—the military services working together—in everything the military did: train joint forces, create joint doctrine, and experiment with that doctrine. I said those goals remained important, but much progress had been made since the command was created, and it no longer required a four-star combatant command, 2,800 military and civilian positions, 2,000 contractors, and a billion-dollar budget to accomplish the mission. The Virginia congressional delegation went wild. A couple of the congressmen became my worst enemies on the Hill and would remain so throughout the rest of my tenure as secretary.
Even as we were devising and implementing these efficiencies that summer and fall, we were negotiating with OMB over the size of the FY2012 budget. My proposal was exactly the same set of numbers that former OMB director Orszag and I had agreed to—and the president had blessed—in November 2009. Under a new director, Jack Lew, OMB walked away from that agreement and proposed instead a $20 billion reduction from our request and wanted to cut the five-year defense program by $148 billion in projected spending. It quickly got ugly.
On November 24, I gave the president a long memo summarizing our progress on the efficiencies initiative since my August announcement, reporting that the military services had indeed come up with $100 billion in overhead savings over five years, to be applied to increasing our capabilities. I also said we had identified a further $20 billion in department-wide savings over the same time period, which we intended also to plow back into “tooth.” I briefed him in more detail on November 30, with Mullen, Lew, and Donilon present. With regard to the dispute with OMB over the current and future budget numbers, Obama told me to “work out” the number with OMB. I met with Lew for an hour on December 3, and while the meeting was friendly, we didn’t make much progress.
On December 14, Obama met with me, Cartwright, Lew, and Donilon for the budget endgame. I offered to cut our FY2012 request to $555 billion and make further cuts of $63 billion over the following five years—a considerable concession, I thought, given our agreement of the previous year. The president said we had to do better. He talked about the budget crisis and the deficit and cuts he was making to domestic programs. He said he couldn’t slash domestic spending and leave Defense with real growth. I reminded him that he had agreed we could keep all the savings we identified for reinvestment. I said I recognized the challenges facing the country, but that Defense should get credit for the cuts we had already made.
At that point, I intemperately told Obama that I could br
eak the Defense Department, put hundreds of thousands of people out of work, and wreck programs, but that wasn’t in the country’s interest. He then asked Lew and me to continue talking.
The next morning I called Lew and told him we could cut another $1 billion (to $554 billion) for FY2012 and a total of $78 billion over the five years—“and that’s it.” The president called me after lunch and was somewhat apologetic, saying with respect to our meeting the day before, “At least you didn’t yell at me.”
That same afternoon, the fifteenth, I was waiting alone in Donilon’s office for my regular weekly meeting with him and Hillary (they were both in with Obama) when the door opened and the president walked in carrying a gift-wrapped package. He gave it to me, and I unwrapped an expensive bottle of vodka. Enclosed was a handwritten note: “Dear Bob, Sorry I drive you to drink. Barack Obama.” It was a very thoughtful peace offering.
In truth, I was extremely angry with President Obama on the afternoon of the fourteenth. I felt he had breached faith with me both on the budget numbers for FY2012–16 that Orszag, Emanuel, and I had agreed on—with Obama’s approval—in the fall of 2009, and on the promise that Defense could keep all the efficiencies savings for reinvestment in military capabilities. I felt like all the work we had done in the efficiencies effort had been unrewarded and, further, that I had been forced to break my word to the military services. As in the spring with “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” I felt that agreements with the Obama White House were good for only as long as they were politically convenient.
In the end, we got about the same amount of money—roughly $530 billion—in FY2011 as in FY2010. Budgetary pressure on Defense would only increase for the rest of the time I was secretary and well beyond.
Nonetheless, we continued our efficiencies endeavor. On January 6, 2011, I gave a status report to the Pentagon press corps detailing the savings each of the services had made to reach the $100 billion mark. I outlined an additional $78 billion in savings that came from department-wide reductions, mainly in information technology, contracting, workforce size, general officer and flag officer positions, civilian executive positions, and intelligence organizations. I announced the cancellation of a number of additional procurement programs, the most controversial of which was the Marine Corps decision to cancel the expeditionary fighting vehicle, an amphibious assault vehicle that had proven far more costly than anticipated and that would have excessively high operating costs.
I then elaborated the areas in which the services would invest their overhead savings: a new long-range bomber for the Air Force; modernizing the Army’s battle fleet of armored vehicles; and additional ships, F/A-18s, and unmanned strike and surveillance aircraft for the Navy. I said we would make more investments in long-range and regional missile defense. As it turned out, I was able to return virtually all of the $100 billion in savings to the services for “must pay” bills such as fuel price increases, and for reinvestment. The $78 billion in departmental savings was applied to the reduced budget levels in the future. The effort to reallocate funds through the efficiencies initiative had been successful, but actually realizing those savings would require very tight discipline and top-down managerial toughness for the entire projected five-year period. That would be a high hurdle indeed.
I have long believed that the way to change bureaucratic culture and performance is not through reorganization but by affecting day-to-day operations and ways of doing things. You need to get at the essence of what people are doing and encourage, incentivize, or force them to alter behavior. The crux of what I was trying to accomplish through the efficiencies effort was to pry open all the components of the defense budget that cost hundreds of billions of dollars but didn’t get close scrutiny either within the Pentagon or by Congress. We needed to get at that daily “river of money” running through the building, as my Bush-era deputy Gordon England had so eloquently put it. We made a beginning, but only that.
As the Defense Department continues to face deep budget cuts, the effort to cut overhead costs must be intensified; as we learned from the “efficiencies” exercise, such efforts can succeed only if enforced from the top with regular reporting and strict accountability.
RESPITE
My last full year as secretary, 2010, was my toughest because of the multiple fronts on which I was fighting. The only thing that kept me going was getting out of the Pentagon and being around the troops. There is not much about being secretary of defense in wartime that is fun, but there are moments.
In May, I helicoptered into an open area at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida as a couple of hundred exhausted, hungry men training to be Army Rangers emerged from the deep woods to assemble for a few words from me. One of my key staff people, Ryan McCarthy, had been a Ranger captain, and he alerted me that these guys had not eaten or slept in days and were filthy and barely conscious. He told me that ordinarily they would not remember me or my visit. But, he said, if you bring them frozen Snickers candy bars, they will never forget you. He added that I should make the soldiers eat while I was talking because if they didn’t, their instructors would take the candy away from them after I left. I’ll never forget the look on those soldiers’ faces as we hauled coolers full of Snickers bars out of the helicopter to pass out to them. Months later I was still hearing from parents and friends of those soldiers who had heard about my visit.
In August, I visited the Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, watched new recruits in training, and spoke to several hundred brand-new enlisted Marines at their graduation ceremony. I was amazed how many of their parents were present. I then visited the Naval Special Warfare Center in San Diego, where sailors undergo the toughest training imaginable in the hope of becoming Navy SEALs. Only 67 out of the previous entering class of 180 graduated. The fifth week of training—“Hell Week”—is the toughest. I arrived at the end of that week and had the pleasure of telling the sailors that it was over and they had survived to continue their training. These aspiring SEALs were a mess: having gone days without food or sleep, they were hollow-eyed, freezing, and barely able to stand. Formed up on the beach, they were covered head to toe in sand, unshaven, a little drool here and there, snot running out of their noses. I was proud to shake every filthy hand. These young men, like the Ranger trainees and so many others in uniform, are the best our country can produce. Being able to thank them personally was, for me, one of the greatest honors of being secretary of defense.
In the spring of 2010 I began a speaking campaign to impart to young people in uniform my views on how they should think about their military careers and what kind of officers they should become. I wanted to talk with them about the military challenges I thought they would face, the same challenges I was trying to get their four-star leaders and Congress to address. I began in April with visits to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and West Point. At each academy, I spent nearly an hour in each of two classrooms, taking questions from the cadets and midshipmen and talking about the future.
My main messages were delivered in lectures to the entire student body of cadets and middies. At each academy, I talked about the great officers of the past in their branch of service who had the “vision and insight to see that the world and technology had changed,” understood the implications of that change, and then pressed ahead at the risk of their careers in the face of “incredible fierce institutional resistance.” I spoke about how each of these officers had put his career on the line “to speak truth to power,” and I said they must be willing to do so as well. I also warned them: “In most of these cases, integrity and courage were ultimately rewarded professionally. In a perfect world, that should always happen. But sadly, in the real world it does not, and I will not pretend there is no risk. You will, at some point or another, work for a jackass. We all have. That is why speaking up often requires courage. But that does not make taking a stand any less necessary for the sake of our country.”
I told the aspiring young officer
s at the academies that the complexity of the twenty-first-century battlefield would require leaders of great flexibility, agility, resourcefulness, and imagination, leaders willing to think and act creatively and decisively in different kinds of conflict than we had prepared for during the previous six decades—precisely the qualities I had found in Petraeus, Odierno, McChrystal, Dempsey, Austin, Rodriguez, Chiarelli, and others. I urged them to reject service parochialism, convention, and careerism and instead “to be principled, creative, and reform-minded” on and off the battlefield.
I believe the ever-changing complexity of the world in the years ahead and the agility and adaptability of our adversaries make the willingness of our officer corps to challenge orthodoxy and conventional thinking essential to our success, and that is the message I wanted to convey to the cadets and midshipmen. I would tell both cadets and generals that we must not stifle the young officers and NCOs coming back from the wars. They had been forced to be innovative, adaptable, independent, and entrepreneurial and to take responsibility. Our future depended on keeping them in the services and sustaining those same characteristics at home that we had so valued on the battlefield. All these were messages I would continue to preach until I left office, and I would damn sure make certain the officers I recommended to the president to lead the military in the years to come understood and shared those same views.
At the end of my remarks, I always thanked the young officers-to-be for their service. And then, my voice breaking each time, I said, “I consider myself personally responsible for each and every one of you as though you were my own sons and daughters. And when I send you in harm’s way, as I will, I will do everything in my power to see that you have what you need to accomplish your mission—and come home safely.”
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Page 60