The Military-Congressional Complex
Courter, Jim & Fossedal, Gregory A.
Jim Courter and Gregory A. Fossedal THE MILITARY-CONGRESSIONAL COMPLEX Reforming military reform. Congress and the President are rushing to enact what proponents are pleased to describe as a...
...Today successful U.S...
...Now, between 50 and 60 per-cent of major contracts are awarded on a competitive basis...
...The DLA is but one example of a good idea turned sour...
...The Department of Defense now employs 225,000 full-time civilians to work on procurement...
...Meanwhile, talented minds are encouraged to avoid the defense industry altogether...
...Each time, the idea was to institute some practice that was perceived to be lacking: tougher testing, more competition, less bickering between the services, and on and on...
...In the Air Force Logistics Command alone—one branch of one service—there are more than 2,000 "competition advocates...
...The Department of Defense keeps no precise statistics, but in general, civilian employment is about half that of active duty personnel...
...Without such a reduction, by contrast, it becomes impossible to focus responsibility—either to punish failure or to reward success...
...So did the United States before the frenzy of ad hoc reforms that began in the 1960s...
...Thus, starting as a small, innovative idea within the services, central purchasing became a major agency...
...Who shall we blame for, say, the design of the MX missile or the Divad anti-tank weapon...
...And the Administration, led by Secretary Weinberger, has opposed elimination of the Defense Logistics Agency and other dinosaurs...
...Weinberger failed to note is that these prices were paid by the very Complex that later, by luck, discovered them...
...Non-service contracts include provisions directing that certain components must be of American manufacture, regardless of cost...
...Today, the DCAA employs 4,600 people...
...Last year, the U.S...
...McNamara set up (and his successors expanded) a new array of reporting requirements and internal audits, and hired the employees to carry them out...
...businesses are abandoning centralized control methods and instead offering incentives for performance to their employees...
...The solution is a drastic reduction in the Military-Congressional Complex...
...The 1985 figure for employment in defense-related industry is an estimate from the Congressional Research Service...
...As a remedy to such problems, Mr...
...Contrary to the rhetoric, however, these proposals are not, as many describe them, "sweeping...
...Most follow on the ad-vice of President Reagan's commission on procurement reform, headed by defense industrialist David Packard: reshuffle the Joint Chiefs of Staff, create a new procurement czar, and in-crease the amount of "planning" and "stability" at the Pentagon...
...DCAA auditors roam through industry offices at will and, like Internal Revenue agents, may actually impose penalties without due process...
...1) Number of central defense agencies (2) Number of employees working for (1) ('3) Congressional commit-tees and sub-committees with defense oversight (4) Number of employees working for (3) (5) Private sector employment in defense-related industry According to the former head of the MX missile program, almost half his staff was busy working not on the MX itself, but on responses to congressional and Pentagon inquiries, reports, and other red tape...
...The results...
...Simply put, there are too many cooks stirring the weapons broth...
...In 1966, the DCAA consisted of a staff of about 250 persons, who rapidly checked major systems for possible fraud or over-runs...
...The Navy officers who bought the $110 diodes, as the Wall Street Journal reported in a 1985 editorial, were simply following procedures, running their estimates by such bureaucracies as the DLA, the Small Business Office, the Office of Installation Services, the Defense Con-tract Administrative Services Regional Office, and the Cameron Station Administrative Support Center...
...Others are the imposition of a congressman's arms control or social agenda...
...So most others simply give in, while some learn to like regulation and the security it gives big businesses that can afford to pay for high-priced lobbyists and influence-peddlers...
...In 1970, Congress requested 36 reports from the Pentagon...
...The $600 toilet seat was bought directly by DLA agents empowered to make such purchases to prevent fraud and duplication by the services...
...They busily estimate the proper price for a centrally purchased diode, or scrutinize another bureaucrat's estimate, or report to still another bureaucrat on the activities of the first two...
...Six-hundred and fifty programs were changed in the appropriations process in 1970...
...One industry employee, who asked that his name be withheld, put it this way: "Today . . . government contractors are told the color and gender of employees to be hired, how much they are to be paid, and how long they can work...
...Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger crowed that the horror stories had been discovered "by Department of Defense auditors...
...France has nothing comparable to our unwieldy Complex...
...Despite stories of individual abuse, contractor profits may be too low, as Pentagon reports in 1970 and 1985 showed...
...But just to make sure, Congress mandated the hiring of "competition advocates...
...by 1984, the number jumped to 458 reports...
...If we assume that the support and feeding of those 400,000 shoppers costs an average of $40,000 per year—in salary, benefits, office and operating expenses, and so on—then we must add at least another $15 billion to the price tag of the Military-Congressional Complex...
...Packard was an official in the Pentagon, and at least four more during the Reagan years: the Carlucci initiatives of 1981, the Grace Commission reforms of 1984, and the congressional measures of 1984 and 1985...
...decided that there was too much "duplication" in buying common items used by all the services: paper clips, pencils, and so on...
...Secretary McNamara decided, however, that progress had not been quick enough...
...fell behind France in Third World weapons sales...
...Do the savings produced by the Complex match its costs...
...Programs could then be the responsibility of a single, lean staff of officers who would not need to be harassed by dozens of committees and agencies: they would know that the rewards for success, and the penalties for failure, would be focused on them...
...In addition to the 225,000 civilian employees working on procurement, there is probably an equal number of military officers con-ducting procurement for the Pentagon as well, for a total of more than 400,000 shoppers.' Many of these are spread from program to program...
...Thus, in 1984, Congress decided it needed "more competition" in defense contracting...
...THE GROWING MILITARYCONGRESSIONAL COMPLEX 1961 1972 1985 2 8 11 3,341 61.000 86,000 4 8 34 840 N/A 3,000 2.1 2.6 2.6 million million million Source: Annual posture statements by the Secretary of Defense, and Annual Guide to the Congress...
...Yet the cost of the central defense agencies and the Office of the Secretary of Defense alone will be $16 billion in 1986...
...Congress man-dates, for example, the use of Defense Department aircraft for transporting burros and horses from military installations—but rules out using dogs and cats to study the effects of various kinds of ammunition...
...Most of this congressional management is well intentioned, but much is not...
...And so on...
...she builds weapons with a central staff of a few hundred people...
...Civilians, however, are more concentrated in support and procurement functions...
...Several different officers headed each program, issuing dozens of reports to several different defense secretaries...
...Today, every weapons program has at least one, just as each major program has its own equal opportunity employment officer, its own small business office, and its own public affairs and legislative liaison specialists...
...In the fall of 1983, the Pentagon bought a toilet seat for $618...
...Despite rapid growth in the defense budget, employment in defense-related industries has barely risen since 1961...
...Congress and the President are rushing to enact what proponents are pleased to describe as a series of major reforms in the way the Pentagon builds weapons...
...its employees take 60 to 100 days or more to complete checks and double-checks of the most obscure contract provisions, including what sort of vacation and insurance benefits companies offer their employees...
...And all of these officials were working with several private contractors and sub-contractors...
...One office that generates such reports is the Defense Contract Audit Agency, charged with scrutinizing con-tractor claims on contracts: "Did the company really spend this much on that kind of steel...
...But their vindication is little . noted...
...Some, like General Electric, fight back, and prove that charges of fraud against them are false...
...But they point, at least, in the right direction—something that the military reform debate, both for and against, has failed to do for some time...
...Such costs, delays, and diffusions of responsibility are not inevitable...
...Unfortunately, more ambitious proposals were voted down...
...And that is because all these reforms, some good and some bad, fail to confront the single greatest problem in weapons procurement: the growth of a slow, unresponsive bureaucracy that builds weapons, the Military-Congressional Complex...
...Each time, however, the unintended result was identical: more staffers, in the Pentagon and Congress...
...In 1985, for example, Congress added $5 billion in spending not re-quested by the Defense Department, by one estimate, and perhaps $10 billion, according to Weinberger aide Lawrence Korb...
...So the services set up eight offices to coordinate block purchases of many such items, and did in fact achieve some success...
...The development, design, and testing of each was spread out over ten to twenty-five years...
...The tragedy here is that all these actors—Congress, contractors, and the Pentagon—have generally good intentions...
...Alexander Flax, head of a 1975 panel on reform, put it well: "Acquisition management problems .. . arise from well-motivated but inappropriate and largely ineffectual at-tempts to compensate . . . for failings in the military departments and pro-gram offices in the detailed execution of weapon systems acquisition pro-grams...
...And for each such readily identifiable, centralized bureaucrat, the increased reporting demanded by OSD and the Congress has necessitated the hiring of thousands of others...
...Its catalogue of items for joint purchase, and hundreds of concomitant regulations for their procurement, run to thousands of pages...
...for example, according to the former head of the MX missile program, almost half his staff was busy working not on the MX itself, but on responses to congressional and Pentagon inquiries, reports, and other red tape...
...almost 1,900 were so changed in 1985...
...Today the Defense Logistics Agency employs more than 50,000 people...
...In the 1950s, for example, it was Jim Courter is a Republican congressman from New Jersey and a member of the House Armed Services Committee...
...Many of these additions reflected simple pork-barreling, the protecting of bases or programs located in a congressman's district...
...In 1984 congressional offices wrote 85,000 letters and made 590,000 phone calls to the enormous and growing staffs of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Service Liaison offices...
...Does it cost that much to ship the load from Cleveland to Detroit...
...Each waste-and-fraud checker workTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 17 ing for a congressman or central agency is able to generate hundreds of hours of work with a mere phone call...
...As with the oil industry in the 1970s, defense contractors are a demoralized lot...
...this may cheer some, but it hardly speaks well for our weapons industry...
...Later that year, Navy personnel purchased a pair of diodes, which go for about 25 cents at your local Radio Shack, for $110 apiece...
...Gregory A. Fossedal is a media fellow at the Hoover Institution and a contributing editor of Harper's...
...And all this leaves out the impact on private weapons makers...
...Ironically, this edifice was erected in an attempt to crack down on waste...
...In 1961 he ordered the creation of a Defense Supply Agency, later the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), to pull together the disparate effort...
...From 1967 to 1980, the number of aerospace companies actually declined, to 3,000 from 6,000...
...Former Weinberger aide Paul Thayer estimates that out of every dollar private industry spends on weapons, 40 cents is spent complying with paperwork requirements and other regulations not related to performance...
...In 1962, a Haryard panel on procurement reform said that many weapons programs were plagued by "gold-plating" with unneeded technology, while a 1970 panel set up under Defense Secretary Melvin Laird cited "cost overruns" as a major cause and effect...
...Half are under investigation for some sort of fraud—an indication not that the industry suddenly has been overrun with cheaters, but that it is under a burdensome assault from the Complex...
...What Mr...
...Congress is thus a driving force behind the growth in Pentagon staff...
...This may be the greatest cost of all imposed by the Military-Congressional Complex: a brow-beaten weapons industry, blasted by charges of fraud and written off as guilty until proven innocent...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986...
...In one hopeful sign, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted this spring to reduce by 16,000 the number of employees in various central defense agencies, and enact cuts of a similar scale, about 20 percent, in the number of congressional hearings, reports, and oversight committees...
...Congress took dozens of votes and intervened every time to mandate specific changes in the pro-gram or the weapon itself...
...Secretary Weinberger claims that his expanded waste-and-fraud army will save the Pentagon more than $10 billion this year, or about 10 cents for every procurement dollar...
...The Navy is not allowed to use certain kinds of paint until approved by the Environmental Protection Agency...
...Its growth began in the 1950s, accelerated rapidly in the 1960s under Robert McNamara, and has continued ever since through more than a dozen "sweeping" reforms—including two while Mr...
...The committee's measures are well short of the significant change that is needed...
Vol. 19 • June 1986 • No. 6
