So why do you think the Pentagon continues to propose the same kinds of cuts year after year – things like reduced pay raises and benefits, and base closures – and the House and Senate deny them, and nobody has any hope of success? What’s the point?

I think part of it is the Pentagon knows their proposals are politically unpopular; they know they’re unlikely to succeed, so why put a lot of effort into it – and why try something different, when you’re convinced you’re not going to be able to do it? DoD is kind of throwing up their hands at Congress and saying, “Look, you want us to manage our resources better, but you won’t let us. We told you. You need to cut TRICARE and you need to close bases.” And they seem almost content to just keep doing that, because that’s what they’re used to doing.

I think if they really want to make serious progress on this, they have to rethink their approach. I don’t think that the department views its approach as being flawed – I think they view Congress as the problem. And what they really need to do is step back and realize maybe their approach is the problem, that Congress is playing the role the people want it to play: resisting things that are unpopular.

It’s remarkable that you get such a bipartisan consensus among think tanks about three controversial areas of reform that we all believe are important. Yet when you look at what the House and the Senate are doing, they’re almost ignoring the consensus that really exists out there, that these things are necessary.

DoD can’t simply continue to offer the same or very similar proposals – cuts in different forms of military compensation – and expect the outcome to be different. I think they’ve got to take a different tactic. And what I’ve recommended in my research is that the tactic should be: Let’s rebalance military compensation, and let’s do it based on evidence. Let’s go out and survey the troops and figure out how they value different forms of compensation, and let’s cut forms of compensation that they don’t value. Let’s improve forms of compensation that they do value and come back with a balanced package that has some cuts for sure. You’ve got to save money, but you can also make some improvements and actually make service members happier, make them value their total compensation package more.

I did see a little progress along that front. There’s an amendment that passed and is attached to the House version of the NDAA that is going to require DoD to do that kind of study – just do the study; that’s all they have to do. But that’s progress.

 

Can you think of a tactic that might help break the logjam and trim O&M cost increases as well? Another round of base realignment and closure [BRAC] also seems like a nonstarter with legislators.

Maybe with the BRAC, you’ve got to think of it as an organized political campaign – you know, you’ve got 535 people in Congress to convince, but you don’t have to convince all of them. You just need enough in each chamber, right? So if you throw a big sweeping proposal out there to close bases, then everyone in Congress who has any kind of military facility in their district is going to go in a defensive crouch, and say: “I don’t want this touching my district.” Instead of putting everyone on the defensive, maybe the Pentagon could say, “Okay, we need a targeted BRAC. And we think we’ve got excess facilities that would make sense to close in these particular locations.” And narrow it down a bit, maybe intentionally concentrate your closures in certain areas. You’re guaranteed to lose the votes of the members of Congress whose districts those fall in, but then you can actually get the support of everyone else. By supporting that kind of BRAC, they’d be protecting their own district.

 

I guess it’s true that Congress is rejecting unpopular things – but you couldn’t really say they’re doing much that’s popular.

No. In June, we issued a joint think tank letter [Open Letter: Defense reform Consensus], in which we united 25 different scholars from all over the political spectrum, from 10 different think tanks, calling on the Pentagon and Congress to initiate reforms in military compensation, civilian personnel, and base closures. It’s remarkable that you get such a bipartisan consensus among think tanks about three controversial areas of reform that we all believe are important. Yet when you look at what the House and the Senate are doing, they’re almost ignoring the consensus that really exists out there, that these things are necessary.

 

So how long can this go on – this weird alternate universe, where the Pentagon and Congress propose and enact spending measures that look nothing like what ends up funding the military – before something changes?

If these budget caps remain in effect at the current level, then all of this is just going to get thrown aside. It really boils down to what they do with the budget caps, and that question actually has very little to do with defense. It has to do with revenues. It has to do with entitlement spending, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Defense is a secondary issue in deficit reduction. So a lot of this is going to be up in the air for the foreseeable future.

Right now, we have the prospect, once again, of starting the new fiscal year without passing a continuing resolution or appropriations bill – and if that happens, you could have a government shutdown. Around the same time, we should be close to hitting the debt ceiling, so we could have a default on our obligations. And then if we’re still exceeding the budget caps for 2014, sequestration will be triggered 15 days after Congress adjourns for the session. So we’ve still got this triple threat looming in the fall, and into the winter.

It may be that we’re simply in a period where we’re just going to stumble along, as I wrote in my piece recently, through a fog bank of uncertainty, and we’re not going to have any visibility more than a few months in advance. It may be like that for years.

This interview was first published in Defense: Fall 2013 Edition.