At his confirmation hearings in 2001, Rumsfeld unveiled ambitious plans to reform the military. He intended to reshape the notoriously bloated, bureaucratic Pentagon to become, in his words, "light on its feet." While there has been significant coverage of how Rumsfeld implemented this vision when it came to combat forces -- and its impact on the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan -- much less attention has been paid to his plans for revolutionizing military procurement (the mechanism through which the military buys any product). Over the years, military procurement has become notoriously bloated, wasteful, and inefficient. It takes too long to acquire and transport hardware and requires the labor of too many military employees (in what's known as a bad "tooth to tail" ratio, with the tail being too long for the tooth), and thus the military overpays for it. Rumsfeld came in pledging to reform what the military buys and how it buys it, as he put it in his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee back in 2001, "to meet the demands posed by an expansion of unconventional and asymmetrical threats in an era of rapid technological advances."
Unlike so many Bush administration initiatives, this was one that progressives could actually get behind. As John Deutch, who served as served as under secretary of defense for acquisitions and technology for President Clinton and now teaches at M.I.T., explained to the Prospect, "He came in with a sense of three things, what new technology could do to make the force more agile, and more effective, at lower cost for the missions performed -- more military effectiveness per dollar. His view of that was generally what I would call progressive."
But the president's latest budget proposal confirms that Rumsfeld's vision to streamline procurement procedures did not come to fruition. As Deutch told the Prospect, "On acquisition reform Rumsfeld had some good intentions. But of course it didn't happen."
Even before Rumsfeld's recent departure from the Pentagon, think tank experts were writing post-mortems on the death of Rumsfeld's procurement reform ambitions. In July, 2005, the Brookings Institution issued a report that concluded:
Rumsfeld may be one of history's most ambitious reformers, but his actual impact is far from assured. He still faces intense resistance from the armed services, especially the Army, which has the most to lose in the movement to a much lighter military. And many of his proposals are either still under consideration in Congress or only in the early stages of implementation in the department.Little progress has been made since then. The number of people working on military procurement has not decreased, troops in Iraq still struggle with their equipment arriving late or not at all, and reports of cost overruns abound.
The riddle, which the media has not spent much time trying to figure out, is why and how this happened. And the answer that emerges from interviews with experts on Pentagon procurement is that Rumsfeld undermined his own vision for procurement reform the same way he did his tenure generally: through a high-handed approach that alienated needed allies, a penchant for placing ideologues rather than competent managers in crucial leadership positions, and a destructively single-minded focus on the disastrous war in Iraq.
"The tremendous pressure of the Iraq operation and the pressure that put on the budget and the attention Iraq took from top leadership of the Pentagon," are what Deutch points to by way of explanation. Moreover, he says, "I don't think his communication with his military commanders has been adequate in order to have this really move into the system, to be adopted by the system."
"He basically was trying to put the Pentagon on a more 'business like' footing," says Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress, who served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. "He felt that transforming the military to buy the right thing, that's more important than the process by which you buy it."
The results were not pretty. "The procurement thing just got out of hand," Korb says. "The cost increases and the delays were just worse than they had ever been. Body armor would be a good example ... It was really a management thing. Everyone knew you needed it as soon as you could get it but no one seemed to know how to make it happen." Indeed, the Pentagon's inability to deliver body armor to the troops in Iraq in a timely manner is the one related issue that has actually gained the public's attention. The military contracted with only one company, Point Blank Body Armor, and failed to give many troops their body armor before they deployed. Reservists, for instance, were not slated to receive body armor even though they were deployed to a war zone. Consequently, soldiers and their families had to buy armor from other companies, like Bulletproofme.com, that, unlike Point Blank, sell directly to the public.
"To make things happen in government, you need to get the support of the people who have to carry out the plan," says Korb. "If I don't consult with defense industry or services or congressmen who are affected by cutting a weapons system, they will push back. Rumsfeld didn't seem to care." Indeed, Rumsfeld's trademark arrogance and go-it-alone attitude seemed to have damned him to ineffectiveness on this issue just as they did on Iraq.
Jacques Gansler, who teaches at the University of Maryland and previously served as under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics during Clinton's second term, thinks the former secretary of defense had sound commitments on this issue initially and attributes Rumsfeld's loss of focus to to 9/11 as well as Iraq. "There was a war. That changed focus of DoD from transformation to war fighting, which caused a dramatic increase in the budget. If you were really going to do the transformation it would have to be at the expense of resources in other areas. But in the rich man's world that followed for the next four years there was not a constraint ... And so there wasn't a real focus internally anymore on the transformation."
Armoring humvees stands as another example of a crucial procurement process that required major streamlining. The military failed at Rumsfeld's stated goal of making better acquisitions in the first place -- they did not foresee a long insurgency, and thus did not order enough armored vehicles. Then, when the insurgency heated up, the Pentagon ordered armor that could be added to them, but for reasons that remain unclear, production was slow and soldiers had to wait months for the armor to arrive. There were myriad similar problems with other equipment. As early as October 2004, 60 Minutes was reporting shortages of radios, bullets, and replacement parts "for critical equipment like Abrams tanks, Bradley personnel carriers, and Black Hawk helicopters."
Ultimately, Gansler concurs that Rumsfeld's high-handedness and poor personnel choices undermined his own goals. "Institutions always have huge resistance to change. And so it was hard to make change. You have to gain the leadership group behind you, not just do it alone. If I were trying to do what he was trying to do, I would have picked the military leaders first, because Congress and industry will listen to them ... And I certainly would have made a bigger effort to get the industry leaders onboard." Gansler also acknowledges that then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was a poor choice for the task. "Wolfowitz was clearly a policy person, not an acquisitions person by far. So you didn't have, like you would with David Packard, and as you now have with Gordon England, someone who is deeply interested in acquisitions."
With Rumsfeld's tenure thankfully finished, one might hope that a new opportunity for much needed reform at the Pentagon would open up. But Robert Gates has pledged to focus on Iraq primarily. As Gansler suggests, the next big opportunity will come when troops are withdrawn from Iraq and the budget can get tightened. That's when the imperative to make hard cuts is felt. Let's just hope that the next president appoints a defense secretary with the humility and leadership skills to transform the military into a more efficient and effective force, one that is better equipped to meet the needs of the new century. That is to say, let's hope the next president appoints someone who can do the job that Donald Rumsfeld was supposed to.
