The Political Forests and Technocratic Trees of Acquisition Reform

Much has been made in the press about differences in style between hard-charging Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), and the cautious approach of his counterpart in the House of Representatives, Congressman Mac Thornberry. Drawing sharp contrasts between McCain and Thornberry, however, runs the unfortunate risk of obscuring a remarkable commonality: their shared tendency to treat defense acquisition dysfunction as a managerial issue, rather than the product of distributional politics. By ignoring the political aspect of acquisition activities, this technocratic view fails to target the root cause of acquisition dysfunction.

It is undoubtedly true that the current responsibilities of USD(AT&L) are too much for any one person. However, there are two glaring, interrelated flaws in Senator McCain’s proposal that will likely offset any potential benefits from a re-distributed workload. First, it ignores the likelihood that the two new bureaucracies will grow over time. Second, it does nothing to address the political roots of acquisition dysfunction at the Pentagon, which led to the increased number of subordinates at AT&L in the first place.

Following the initial announcement of Senator McCain’s proposal to split USD(AT&L) in two, a SASC staffer told Breaking Defense that the reform would actually be an exercise in bureaucratic streamlining. Instead of the current seven subordinate positions—four assistant secretaries (ASDs) and three deputy assistant secretaries (DASDs)—the new USD(R&E) will have only a single assistant secretary.

It is unlikely, however, that the new undersecretaries’ staffs will remain so small. If the former job of USD(AT&L) was too big for one person and seven subordinates, then it beggars belief that the same responsibility will be handled by two people and one subordinate. Even if savings are possible from the elimination of the ASDs and DASDs, the need for increased numbers of lower level personnel to coordinate the work of the formerly joined offices will likely cancel them out.

There is precedent for this type of bureaucratic growth in the Pentagon’s acquisition process, specifically in USD(AT&L) itself. The target of Senator McCain’s reform effort came to being in 1986 as the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, or USD(A). Due to ongoing acquisition problems,  T (technology) and L (logistics) were added to USD(A) to highlight their importance to the department and provide central control over all acquisition activities. The seven subordinates the SASC proposal seeks to eliminate were also not part of the original USD-A proposal. They were added later, as were the special offices for technology and logistics, as acquisition dysfunction expanded.

Because the proposed managerial changes fail to address the political causes of acquisition problems, the new undersecretaries would likely suffer a similar fate.  As with Congressman Thornberry’s Acquisition Agility Act before it, the technocratic approach Senator McCain takes to acquisition ignores how bureaucratic politics drive acquisition outcomes. Specifically, the SASC proposal disregards how military service politics cause problems at the beginning of the acquisition process that are only felt later as programs progress.

These problems start in the requirements process. The military services, particularly the Air Force and Navy,  love to push the technological envelope five and ten years out. As the Government Accountability Office found in 2005, this preference for immature technology is a leading cause of acquisition cost growth. However, because the services control the determination of program requirements, there is no incentive for any service to veto the plans of another, and no mechanism by which they could do it—even if the plans are infeasible.

In theory, the new USD(R&E) should be able to exert authority over the services. However, as J. Ronald Fox of Harvard Business School noted in his history of defense acquisition reform from 1960-2009, because the U.S. government is made up of independent fiefdoms, it is therefore “easier to block the policy initiatives of others than to translate one’s own initiatives into action.” Working in this environment, the new undersecretary will have finite political capital.

Meanwhile, the military services will have numerous opportunities for bureaucratic logrolling that can stymie oversight. In other words, USD(R&E) may find that a program is technologically precarious, but if one of the military services desires a particular capability, the others services are likely to work to ensure the undersecretary does not modify the program. Instead, a tacit non-intervention pact will persist because each service might find itself in a similar position in the future, and therefore in need of similar support from its service brethren. Or more programs may be “born joint” to get around the penalties for cost overruns on service-specific programs Senator McCain included in last year’s NDAA, leading to even more problems.

Once a program begins, a number of powerful actors have skin in the game, so program cancellations are rare even in light of serial flaws and ballooning costs. Absent bureaucratic power to overrule the services’ decisions at the beginning of the acquisition process—rather than simply the authority to manage programs as they progress—USD(R&E) will have only limited influence on acquisition outcomes. As dysfunction sets in, expect Congress to again add support staff—as it did previously with USD(AT&L). Such a move might provide bureaucratic muscle to USD(R&E) for the political fights it will inevitably face, but it will come at the expense of the streamlining the new position was supposed to provide.

Senator McCain and the Senate Armed Services Committee staff are clearly sincere and passionate about reforming the way the Pentagon operates. However, the technocratic focus of the acquisition reform effort ignores the politics driving poor acquisition outcomes. Senator McCain has said repeatedly that the effort to reform Pentagon operations will take several years. But given the chances the Republicans lose the Senate, and thus SASC chairmanship (as well Senator McCain’s own shaky reelection prospects), there is a greater need now than ever to shift the focus away from technocratic fixes. Unless the balance of political power between the military services and their civilian overseers is addressed, then the next generation of defense reformers will find themselves trying to fix the same problems that have plagued the Pentagon for decades.

Matthew Fay is a defense policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a PhD student in political science at George Mason University’s School for Policy, Government, and International Affairs, and a fellow with the school’s Center for Security Policy Studies. Alexander Kirss is a defense consultant in Washington, DC. He holds an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago.