Comeback America Read online

  It’s time to start taking our wars seriously again—including how we pay for them. Too many people have had a free ride for too long while others have sacrificed. When we fight a war, Congress should declare it, and that declaration should be coupled with a surtax to pay for the war. If we followed this course of action, I can assure you that we would think much more seriously before committing our human and financial resources to armed conflicts.

  There aren’t many politicians who will advocate cutting back the defense budget during these challenging times—but I’ll advocate it. The truth is, just because the money relates to defense, homeland security, or another laudable or critical area does not mean that the cost is justified. Given current and projected deficits, we must justify all of our budgets, including the defense budget. That’s the only way to keep costs under control.

  THE ELEMENTS OF REFORM

  The stewards of taxpayer money have to develop more courage and thicker skin when they take on the Pentagon budget. When that wish list of weapons systems and personnel benefits arrives, each item has to be considered against our actual threat-based needs for today and tomorrow. Each proposal needs to be considered in light of what is affordable and sustainable over time.

  Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Obama administration have taken some initial steps to question the Pentagon’s appetite for major weapons systems and are challenging several marginal programs. The Congress also enacted a defense acquisition reform bill that was passed unanimously by both the House and the Senate and signed by the president. This bill was influenced significantly by the GAO’s work and, when effectively implemented, will save the taxpayers billions of dollars a year. It addresses some but not all of the “fundamental fifteen” issues noted earlier. It’s a positive step, but much, much more remains to be done.

  The first thing to ask—and keep asking—about a weapons system is, do we need it? The second is, how many do we need? You have heard stories of the military spending billions on outmoded weapons, but I will tell you a story with a relatively happy ending. In 1994, the Army began developing the Crusader, a rapid-fire howitzer designed to perform twice as well as the old Paladin weapon it was to replace. The Crusader might have been a valuable tool in a European ground war against the Soviet Union and its allies—but nobody seemed to notice that the Cold War had been over for nearly half a decade before we started work on the Crusader. Only in 2002, after 9/11 had shown us that no howitzer was going to help us win the war on terror, did Defense Secretary Rumsfeld order an end to the $11 billion Crusader program. By that time, we had already spent over $2 billion. At least we saved the balance!

  The predictable opponents sprang up to oppose Rumsfeld’s move. Representatives from Oklahoma, where the Crusader was to be manufactured, fought to save their cash cow. Army lobbyists warned that canceling the weapon would cost American lives. But in the end, Congress went along and terminated the Crusader—backed by the obvious and overwhelming evidence that we just didn’t need the thing.

  Sometimes we do need a new weapon proposed by one of the service branches. Then the question becomes, how many of them do we need? You have to keep asking that. Air Force planners conceived the F-22 Raptor fighter in the 1980s as a plane designed to maintain air superiority over the Soviets. In recent years, with the Soviet air force long out of the picture, the Pentagon expanded the mission of the Raptor to include ground attack and intelligence capabilities in an effort to keep it relevant, but the Raptor was not a very economical way to deploy these new capabilities.

  Production of more than six hundred advanced fighters originally was supposed to begin in 1994, but that schedule slipped by almost a decade. All along, Congress and the Pentagon chipped away at the program without killing it. As of this writing, supporters of the Raptor program seek to increase the number of aircraft beyond the 187 already procured through 2009, further adding to the estimated $60 billion in total program cost to date. The Air Force has already taken delivery of more than a hundred of the fighters but has yet to actually deploy them in combat.

  We have cut back production and plan to shut down the assembly line in 2011, but you still have to ask: Exactly how are we going to use that many planes? Why do we need more? They cost roughly $260 million each, and we could do a lot of other things with that money. After all, money spent on items that represent wants rather than true needs is money robbed from systems that actually are needed. To his credit, President Obama has proposed to cease acquiring additional F-22s. We have enough already, and we need the money that will be saved to modernize our aging tactical fighter wings with larger numbers of aircraft that cost much less per copy. One such fighter is the Joint Strike Fighter, which is being built for several military services as well as several of our allies.

  In fairness, the Air Force is not the only service with mismatches between its wants and our needs. Similar questions can be raised about the Army’s Future Combat Systems, the Navy’s DD(X) destroyer, and the Marine Corps’ V-22 helicopter, among others. Fortunately, the Obama Administration is starting to take a hard look at weapons systems in order to separate the true needs from wants.

  Bloated weapons programs make up only a portion of the challenge for anyone trying to control Pentagon costs. Think of the expense of supporting a professional army, especially when it’s in the field during a time of war. We have to recruit those soldiers with good salaries; generous health, pension, and other benefits; tax preferences; educational opportunities; and the promise of retirement after only twenty years of service.

  When I was at the GAO, we calculated that as of 2005, the average annual cost of keeping an American serviceman or-woman in uniform was $114,000 a year. To put this in perspective, median household income at the time was less than $50,000 a year. When I told members of Congress these figures in briefings, they were shocked. Not even leaders of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees had any idea how costly our military compensation program was.

  Nonetheless, Congress continued to support the costly expansion of the military, including Guard and Reserve forces, and veterans benefit programs, even though these expenditures would not have been justified by any independent analysis. This is just another example of the government spending taxpayer money without any accountability.

  We must consider whether our personnel costs are sustainable. I don’t believe they are. We need to engage in a comprehensive review and reassessment of how to bring them down so we can meet our national security needs in a more affordable and sustainable manner.

  The cost of keeping our National Guard and Reserve troops at the ready is already high. When these weekend warriors signed up for duty, they anticipated attending drills close to home while picking up extra pay as well as attractive education, medical, and retirement benefits. In many cases, it hasn’t worked out that way. Because the regular branches have downsized over the years, many Guard and Reserve units have been called up for long periods of active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guardsmen and reservists have been pulled away from their families and sent into harm’s way again and again, in some cases with inferior equipment and training.

  We can talk about the human toll of that sacrifice, but my job here is to point out the financial cost of recruiting Guard and Reserve volunteers in these circumstances. Rather than modernizing the Guard and Reserve model, Washington has decided simply to throw more of our money at the problem. Among other benefits, those who have compiled ninety days of aggregate service after 9/11 qualify for an enhanced GI Bill that pays full in-state college tuition and fees, a monthly housing allowance, and an annual stipend for books and supplies. They are also eligible to be part of the military health system, with huge taxpayer subsidies. That’s a better deal than our returning veterans from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam got in their GI Bill.

  In short, our all-volunteer military may be more professional, but keeping the troops in uniform is also a lot more expensive. You won’t find anybody more promilitary than I am. We
couldn’t be prouder of our son Andy’s service and of the contribution he and his fellow warriors have made to our national security. But I still have to ask, as a patriot, whether we must do more to control the expanding personnel and other costs of our all-volunteer fighting forces. In my view, the answer is yes.

  Like all armies, ours is an organization of tooth and tail. That is, our military employs warriors who fight at the front, risking their lives every moment, and it employs people in the rear who support the warriors from positions out of the line of fire. Both of these roles are important; however, it’s wrong to give all of our service people equal pay and benefits just because they wear the same basic uniform. Should a combat sergeant at the front get the same basic level of pay and benefits as a supply sergeant in the homeland who is never put at any real risk? You tell me. In my view, the idea that everybody in the service deserves recruitment and retention bonuses and the same long list of benefits is bunk. Service members’ pay and benefits should be based on their skills and the risks they actually incur.

  By no means am I suggesting that we treat our men and women in uniform unfairly. They all have taken jobs of service to our country. But I am saying that in this time of genuine fiscal crisis, we can’t throw money at our defense programs blindly. We have to stop saluting the uniform so reflexively and start requiring the Pentagon to create commonsense spending plans.

  Among other things, the Pentagon must come to new terms with its contractors. My almost-ten-year tenure as comptroller general left me with the clear opinion that we have become overly reliant on contractors. In addition, we have used contractors in inappropriate roles and in some cases continue to do so. Such was clearly the case with intelligence, interrogation, and certain personnel protection services in Iraq. The time to engage in a comprehensive review of the “inherently governmental” concept has come.

  Common sense dictates that the services base their strategies on a carefully determined profile of our twenty-first-century defense needs. It tells us that the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps should integrate their budgets, putting together a common schedule of weapons and other needs along with funding priorities designed to address credible threats. The “requirements” they produce now, in other words, should be real requirements. Finally, we need somebody very high in the Pentagon hierarchy to spend every working day making sure that the Defense Department’s business transformation is on time, within budget, and achieves the intended results.

  This is especially true at a time when our defense system needs constant reevaluation and change. A 2008 report by the respected Project on National Security Reform notes that the United States’ status as a world leader is jeopardized by more than unpredictable new threats; we also must face the fact that our national security “is increasingly misaligned with a rapidly changing global security environment.” The report notes the need to move toward more simultaneous integration of military, diplomatic, intelligence, and other assets of American power.

  Such a fundamental realignment will take far more than business as usual at the Department of Defense. I have tried to show in this chapter that the Pentagon is one sacred cow we should stop worshipping. Of all government organizations, it is one of the most effective in achieving its mission, while at the same time wasting a huge amount of money, with inadequate transparency and little accountability. For these reasons, the Pentagon is a great example of how badly our government machinery needs fixing. Our defense establishment needs to be transformed rather than reformed. And despite assertions to the contrary, the first person to call for that within the Pentagon was not Bush 43’s first secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld; it was Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki.

  Despite its considerable size, the Pentagon is only a 20 percent slice of our national government—and the whole government needs fixing. Stay with me for the next section of the book, where I will discuss other key challenges. I will show you how we can stage a second American Revolution and refashion our government into a better planned, more efficient, more effective, and more representative tool of the people.

  Ten

  TRANSFORMING

  GOVERNMENT

  At this point, you may very well be asking yourself where this parade of failings ends. Earlier, I led you through the developing disasters of our health and retirement programs, the inadequacies of our tax system, the waste in defense, the burdens of federal debt, and our nation’s increased dependency on foreign lenders. Now I’m telling you we’re also unprepared for a variety of other key twenty-first-century changes and challenges. Oh, and at the same time, we’re suffering through the effects of a monster of a recession. Yes, we are going through some tough times. But don’t despair. I didn’t call this book “Comeback America” for nothing. Together, we can climb the mountain.

  When I became comptroller general in 1998, it didn’t take more than a week to see how the agency’s culture, systems, processes, and performance metrics needed to be changed. The atmosphere of the place and the approaches taken by the very capable and dedicated GAO professionals were very telling. For example, I found out that I was the first comptroller general who did not regularly wear all white shirts and regularly take my coat off in a meeting. I was also the first one to lead a brainstorming session with a group of top GAO executives on core values and agency protocols. And I was the first one to insist on an agency-wide strategic plan with outcome-based performance metrics. Given these factors, I knew it was time to fasten seat belts and begin the transformation ride.

  It is critically important to keep in mind that at the root of our problems is the functioning of our government—not the people, but the systems, processes, and cultures. Process is very important in any enterprise, and in the case of our government we must analyze its processes and change them as needed. In fact, as I have found in my more than fifteen years of front-line experience in Washington, having the right process can make the critical difference between success and failure when tough policy reforms and transformations are involved. And we can improve the processes of government in many ways.

  It’s been done before. In the late 1940s, after World War II, President Truman inherited a mess of an executive branch. It was swollen with the bureaucracy cobbled up by the New Deal to combat the Depression—when FDR established an alphabet soup of agencies from the AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration) to the WPA (Works Progress Administration). It was weighed down by the huge government-military-industrial complex that was created from almost nothing to fight and defeat the Axis powers.

  With Germany, Japan, and much of the remainder of the industrialized world in ashes, the White House found itself virtually ruling the world. And yet America lacked the tools and mechanisms to lead in an efficient and effective manner.

  It was one of those moments in American history when everybody agreed that something had to be done. Congress passed a law creating the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, and Democrat Truman found himself working with an old rival, former Republican president Herbert Hoover, who was named to chair it. The Hoover Commission went on to propose a reorganization of the federal government that would make the office of the presidency the most powerful institution in the world—and Truman pushed more than 70 percent of those changes through Congress.

  Truman’s reforms, many supported by the Hoover Commission, included creating the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Council of Economic Advisors, among other institutions still in place today. The reforms got rid of old agencies and created new ones, all in an effort to create a more efficient and better coordinated national government. For example, it eliminated the WPA and the AAA. In addition, the General Services Administration (GSA), to give just one example, took over responsibility for housing, managing, and supplying government agencies. In doing so, the GSA consolidated the functions of the National Archives Establishment, the Federal Works Agency and its Public Buil
dings Administration, the Bureau of Federal Supply and the Office of Contract Settlement, and the War Assets Administration.

  There have been plenty of governmental reform efforts since then. Just about every new administration launches one. They typically concentrate on “cutting the fat out of government,” that is, trimming costs by reducing programs and personnel. Ronald Reagan’s Grace Commission issued its report in 1984 and recommended precisely 2,478 cost-cutting, revenue-enhancing measures that it said would save $424 billion in three years. Some were implemented but most were not. In the 1990s, Vice President Al Gore took on the job of “reinventing government” during the Clinton administration. Once again the focus was on trimming waste, fraud, and abuse, as well as cutting the number of bureaucrats and regulations. Bush 43 had the President’s Management Agenda, led by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. His approach was to rate each agency and measure its progress in achieving certain government-wide management goals—for example, linking resources to results, financial management, human capital strategies, and enhancing information technology and security. As with all self-evaluation systems, some ratings were inflated, especially toward the end of the administration.

  All of these reform efforts after Truman’s were ambitious in their way, but their goal, despite the names of some of these initiatives, was primarily to tune up the government machine, not to reengineer it. As you will see in this chapter, we need more than a tune-up. We need a major engine overhaul.

  To win in this faster-paced, interconnected, interdependent, and increasingly competitive world, we need a government that can plan more strategically, identify challenges and opportunities more quickly, respond to them more adeptly, and focus on achieving real results. Is our government equipped to perform in a complex and rapidly changing environment? Not by a long shot.