You thought my last overhaul of the Pentagon was radical? Wait 'til you see what I've got planned for next year.
That's the message Defense Secretary Robert Gates is sending to the armed services and to Capitol Hill. In a speech today at the Eisenhower Library in Abeliene, Kansas, Gates not only informed the military establishment that the post-9/11 "gusher of defense spending... has been turned off, and will stay off for a good period of time." He warned that he's putting everything from ships to jets to general's billets to troops' healthcare reimbursement rates under fresh scrutiny. "Given America’s difficult economic circumstances... military spending on things large and small can and should expect closer, harsher scrutiny," Gates added.
In 2008, before Gates rolled out the budget that offed the Air Force and Army's signature programs for superpower war, he paved the way with a series of speeches blasting the military-industrial complex for not focusing on today's conflicts. This talk -- along with one given Monday at the Navy League symposium -- signal a similar approach.
Cutting hardware will almost certainly be part of the equation, once again. Gates all-but-told the Navy earlier this week that the idea of having 11 carrier strike groups was overkill. But this next time, Gates is promising to do something much, much harder. First, he wants to rejigger the military's healthcare system.
"The premiums for TRICARE, the military health insurance program, have not risen since the program was founded more than a decade ago," Gates noted. "In recent years the Department has attempted modest increases in premiums and co-pays to help bring costs under control, but has been met with a furious response from the Congress and veterans groups. The proposals routinely die an ignominious death on Capitol Hill."
Then, he wants to convince the military's barnacled, byzantine bureaucracy to do the unthinkable: cut itself down.
"According to an estimate by the Defense Business Board, overhead, broadly defined, makes up roughly 40 percent of the Department’s budget," he said. "Almost a decade ago, Secretary Rumsfeld lamented that there were 17 levels of staff between him and a line officer. The Defense Business Board recently estimated that in some cases the gap between me and an action officer may be as high as 30 layers... A request for a dog-handling team in Afghanistan – or for any other unit – has to go through no fewer than five four-star headquarters in order to be processed, validated, and eventually dealt with."
Now, just about every military listener will answer this talk with a loud "amen." The question is how many generals and how many senior execs will really put their little fiefdoms on the chopping block. As Gates noted, his successors have waged war on the Pentagon's bureaucracy, too -- only to be forced to retreat. Gates even gave props in his talk to Donald Rumsfeld's (in)famous statement of September 10th 2001, that the military's PowerPoint-pushers were "a serious threat to the security of the United States of America."
But unlike Rumsfeld, Gates appears ready to order the bureaucratic cuts - not just bitch about the bloat.
I once called Gates the "most dangerous man in the military complex." But if he follows through on this speech, his most hazardous job may lie ahead.
[Photo: DoD]
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