So how does hard stuff get done in Washington? It gets done by single-minded obduracy in the senior leadership. And resource scarcity can compel that. If DoD is really, really worried about its top line, breaking the acquisition system with a hammer and building a better one could squeeze probably $20 billion a year out of the defense budget.
But let me cast a different scenario for you, which is the service chiefs filing up to Capitol Hill and saying: “You are not helping soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines by not allowing us to adjust compensation. You are in fact putting the 19-year-olds at greater risk, because we don’t have money for their readiness. They can’t train unless we have the capacity to reduce, in a minor way over a long period of time, the compensation packages.”
Could the same be true for personnel costs? You and Adm. Roughead write that personnel costs have increased by 90 percent since 2001, while the size of the active-duty workforce has increased by only 3 percent.
A big driver of that, of course, is the increase in benefits, which comprise more than half of military compensation. Secretary [Robert M.] Gates pointed out that health care costs rose from $19 billion to $52 billion a year in his time as secretary.
First Sgt. Jeffrey Chambers, Troop D, 5th Cavalry Regiment, 170th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, attached to 5th Squadron, 1st Cavalry. Regiment, addresses his soldiers during a brief at Forward Operating Base Frontenac, Aug. 3. Troop D deployed out of Baumholder, Germany, to support operational requirements in the Afghanistan theater. Personnel pay and benefits, as well as actual numbers in each service, have become vital if contentious issues. DoD photo by Sgt. Seth Barham
You also point out that the current compensation structure was designed to increase recruitment of the active-duty, all-volunteer force by 100,000 during wartime.
Gary and I are not saying that it wasn’t a sensible approach. But we’re saying that now, when the president has already ended the war in Iraq and is drawing down the war in Afghanistan and we are talking about reducing the Army to at least 490,000 soldiers … we should consider a more flexible approach to providing benefits.
But again, the Pentagon has tried to shift some of those cost increases back to personnel, in the form of TRICARE enrollment fees and higher co-payments …
Right, and Congress won’t let them. And that’s a huge impediment, but it’s not the law of gravity. Secretary Gates included it in his budget, and he went up to Capitol Hill and testified that it was important, and Congress said, “No.”
Ok, fair enough. But let me cast a different scenario for you, which is the service chiefs filing up to Capitol Hill and saying: “You are not helping soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines by not allowing us to adjust compensation. You are in fact putting the 19-year-olds at greater risk, because we don’t have money for their readiness. They can’t train unless we have the capacity to reduce, in a minor way over a long period of time, the compensation packages.” That makes for a very different political constellation. And the service chiefs are so far not willing to do that. But I think they will be, because they’re very anxious about the fact that the only thing they’re having latitude to cut is readiness.
You seem to think sequestration and the current defense budget climate will actually make their case easier to argue, rather than more difficult.
Gary and I feel, overall, that we should take this time of resource scarcity to fix the drivers of the high cost of our defense, because they need fixing whether or not the budget goes down. And given that the budget is going down, we ought actually to learn to be efficient again – because we’re not efficient in our defense policy now.
This interview was first published in Defense: Spring 2013 edition.