¼ of PENTAGON BUDGET PAYSFOR AN INTERNAL BUREAUCRACY

…The scene of the $580 billion Defense budget.

 

The Pentagon has over 1 million desk workers supporting over 1 million active duty military personnel.

 

Well, we continue to hear how we should be regarding our military personnel.  I agree that anyone that purposely puts themselves in a position to possible be fired upon while protecting this country should be treated with great respect.

 

 

But it’s probably time to take a closer look at the whole military organization.  Apparently, in a new report that was going to be released, but was squashed because it might have caused the US Congress to cut the next military budget.

 

 

The Pentagon has since buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations.

 

Of the $580 Billion defense budget, ¼ of it is for a bloated military bureaucracy.  Of the 1,300,000 active duty personnel, there are almost as many that are referred to as military “back-office personnel”.  Yes, there are 1,014,000 of these people supporting the active duty personnel.

 

That includes 298,000 military support personnel, 448,000 civilian personnel and 268,000 private contractors.

 

The Pentagon has almost as many personnel working desk jobs in its business operations as it does in active duty personnel.

 

Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help them make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.

 

The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.

 

The study was produced last year by the Defense Business Board, a federal advisory panel of corporate executives, and consultants from McKinsey and Company.

 

Based on reams of personnel and cost data, the report revealed for the first time that the Pentagon was spending almost a quarter of its $580 billion budget on overhead and core business operations such as accounting, human resources, logistics and property management.

 

That workforce supports 1.3 million troops on active duty, but that’s the fewest troops since before WWII.

 

The overall study and plan was killed. The Pentagon imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings. A 77-page summary report that had been made public, was later removed from a Pentagon website.

 

“They’re all complaining that they don’t have any money. We proposed a way to save a ton of money,” said Robert Stein, a private-equity investor from Jacksonville, Fla., who served as chairman of the Defense Business Board.

 

Stein, a campaign bundler for President Obama, said the study’s data were “indisputable” and that it was “a travesty” for the Pentagon to suppress the results.

 

 

“We’re going to be in peril because we’re spending dollars like it doesn’t matter,” he added.

 

The missed opportunity to streamline the military bureaucracy could soon have large ramifications. Under the 2011 Budget Control Act, the Pentagon will be forced to stomach $113 billion in automatic cuts over four years unless Congress and Trump can agree on a long-term spending deal by next October. Playing a key role in negotiations will probably be Trump’s choice for defense secretary, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis.

 

The Defense Business Board was ordered to conduct the study by Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work, the Pentagon’s second-highest-ranking official.

 

After the board finished its analysis, in an interview with The Post, Work did not dispute the board’s findings about the size or scope of the bureaucracy. But he dismissed the $125 billion savings proposal as “unrealistic” and said the business executives had failed to grasp basic obstacles to restructuring the public sector.

 

Navy Secretary - Ray Mabus

 

 

Last June, 2015, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus delivered a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. He complained that 20% of the defense budget went to the defense agencies that provide support to the armed forces — and called it “pure overhead.”

 

He singled out the Defense Finance and Accounting Service and the Defense Logistics Agency, which together employ about 40,000 people, these were his egregious examples.

 

When a reporter in the audience asked whether he thought the agencies should be abolished, Mabus resisted the temptation to say yes.  “Nice try on getting me into deep trouble,” he replied.

 

But trouble arrived in Mabus’s email the next day.

 

“Ray, before you publicly trash one of the agencies that reports through me I’d really appreciate a chance to discuss it with you,” wrote the Pentagon’s chief weapons-buyer, whose management portfolio included the Defense Logistics Agency.

 

The weapons buyer said that if Mabus had a complaint, he should raise it directly with their mutual bosses, Mr. Carter and Mr. Work, and copied the email to both.

 

In his interview with The Post, the buyer said he was “completely blindsided” by the Navy secretary’s criticism, “so I sent him what I thought under the circumstances was a pretty polite note.”

 

However, Secretary Mabus did not back down. In an emailed retort to the weapons buyer, he referred to the ill-fated Defense Business Board study.

 

“I did not say anything yesterday that I have not said both publicly . . . and privately inside this building,” he said. “There have been numerous studies, pointing out excessive overhead.”

 

That prompted a stern intervention from Secretary Work.  “Ray, please refrain from taking any more public pot shots,” Work said in an email. “I do not want this spilling over into further public discourse.”

 

Well, sorry Mr. Secretary, but the genie is out of the bottle and now the public will get to know all about it.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016