Some battles are eternal.
In the eight-decade history of the Pentagon, there has not been a single defense secretary who has not vowed to vanquish the inefficiencies of a hidebound procurement bureaucracy that has consistently delivered weapons that are too often too late, over-budget, and underperforming boondoggles.
The current Pentagon chief is the latest to brandish a rhetorical sword in a valiant effort to cut through the War Department’s notorious thicket of red tape, vowing to speed weapons to our brave warfighters.
In a Nov. 7 speech before an audience of about 200 acquisition wonks, including industry executives, congressional staffers, and senior military officers, at the National War College in Washington, War Secretary Pete Hegseth struck a dire tone.
“I’d like to talk to you about an adversary that poses a threat, a very serious threat to the United States of America,” he began. “This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. Perhaps this sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy is long gone. The foe I’m talking about is more subtle and implacable.”
“The adversary I’m talking about is much closer to home,” Hegseth continued. “It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the process, not the civilians, but the system, not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action that is too often imposed on them.”
At this point, I hit pause on the C-SPAN video I was watching.
I had heard this message before, I thought. Not just the general message but the exact words seemed eerily familiar.
I called up a transcript of a report I delivered on the evening news back in my TV days, around the turn of the century:
DONALD RUMSFELD, U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: So today we declare war on bureaucracy, not people but processes.
JAMIE McINTYRE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In an unusually blunt speech aimed directly at the Pentagon’s bureaucrats and military brass, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld launched a frontal assault on the Pentagon.
RUMSFELD: In this building, despite the era of scarce resources, attacks by mounting threats, money disappears into duplicate duties, bloated bureaucracy, not because of greed but gridlock.
McINTYRE: He compared the Pentagon bureaucracy with its five-year plans to the old Soviet Union.
RUMSFELD: With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas.
McINTYRE: And he said reform was no less than a matter of life and death.
RUMSFELD: I have no desire to attack the Pentagon. I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself.
Did Hegseth plagiarize Rumsfeld’s speech from 24 years ago? No, he did not.
“This speech so far is not my own,” Hegseth confessed about four minutes in. “Those words are practically verbatim from a speech given by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Sept. 10, 2001, … Now, the world changed the day after he gave that speech on 9/11, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began. As a result, Secretary Rumsfeld never quite had the full opportunity to implement many of his reforms.”
Hegseth, the least experienced leader of the Pentagon in U.S. history, invoked the ghost of the most experienced defense secretary to lend more gravitas to his call to shake the Pentagon out of its comfort zone.
“Today, the need for Pentagon transformation — not just reform — is even more urgent than it was when Secretary Rumsfeld spoke those words nearly a quarter century ago, and his words are just as true now as they were then,” Hegseth said.
“Our objective is to build, rebuild the arsenal of freedom,” he continued. “American industry and its innovative spirit are begging to be unleashed to solve our most complex and dangerous war-fighting problems. We’re not building for peacetime. We are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing — building for victory should our adversaries FAFO.” (FAFO loosely translates to fool around and find out).
In my 2001 report, I noted that Rumsfeld’s 30-minute speech was “heavy on rhetoric, but light on specifics.”
By contrast, Hegseth’s 70-minute stemwinder was heavy on both, although the many specifics, outlined in four separate memos, also lacked specifics stating broad goals or were so arcane that only experts in defense procurement could grasp them.
“If folks are watching this on Fox, their eyes are rolling over, but everyone in this room understands exactly what I’m talking about,” Hegseth noted at one point.
If Hegseth had one central theme, it was that speed is the priority and that a bloated bureaucracy is the enemy of speed.
“We are prioritizing speed, flexibility, competition, and calculated risk-taking,” he said. “By taking greater calculated risk in how we build, buy, and maintain our systems, we will gain speed to more quickly provide capabilities to the battlefield.”
Too much testing is the enemy of speed.
“An 85% solution in the hands of our armed forces today is infinitely better than an unachievable 100% solution endlessly undergoing testing or awaiting additional technological development,” Hegseth said.
Too many regulations and specifications are the enemies of speed.
“[It] often took over 300 days. Yes, 300 days close to one whole year, just to approve a single document,” he continued, referring to the Pentagon’s process for determining weapons specifications. “The process was so complicated that there is a 400-page manual, instruction manual, just to understand it.”
Perhaps Hegseth’s most pointed message was aimed at the defense contractors in the room, who make hundreds of billions of dollars selling weapons to the Pentagon.
“The Department of War will only do business with industry partners that share our priority of speed and volume above all else,” he said.
Innovate or go home was essentially Hegseth’s message — and don’t expect taxpayers to insulate multibillion-dollar companies from risk.
“Industry also needs to be willing to invest their own dollars,” he said. “We appreciate your need to make a good margin and a profit as capitalists, but you must invest in yourselves rather than saddling taxpayers with every cost.”
Hegseth is well aware that all who came before him failed, and that it will take far more than a speech full of mission statements and bumper stickers to transform an entrenched bureaucracy that might be more inclined to wait him out.
“This is not a speech, this is not a fire and forget, this is the beginning of an unrelenting onslaught to change the way we do business and to change the way the bureaucracy responds,” Hegseth vowed. “This transformation is a war of bureaucratic attrition, and it is one that we intend to win.”
Over at the Project on Government Oversight, Mark Thompson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who has been covering the Pentagon for more than 45 years, views the whole exercise with a jaundiced eye.
In his newsletter, The Bunker, Thompson noted that, over the years, there have been more than 150 commissions, reviews, task forces, and initiatives — all of which have failed to eliminate, or even mitigate, cost overruns, schedule delays, and performance shortfalls.
HEGSETH ANNOUNCES WEAPONS ACQUISITIONS OVERHAUL ‘TO OPERATE ON A WARTIME FOOTING’
“The forlorn fact is that the Pentagon buys weapons the same way it wages wars,” Thompson wrote. “Both kinds of endeavors too often begin with a bang and end with a whimper.”
“That doesn’t mean Hegseth shouldn’t try,” he added. “It simply means that the rest of us should keep our expectations in check.”
