Pentagon Head Vows War on Defense Waste

With its maddening organizational charts and overpriced commodes, the Pentagon always has been the ultimate target for the efficiency-minded in Washington.

Skilled managers from Defense Secretaries Robert S. McNamara to Caspar W. Weinberger have mobilized campaigns that promised savings of billions--and usually fell far short of their goals.

But on Monday, an undeterred Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he planned to renew the crusade, describing the effort to wring savings from the $300-billion-plus defense budget as the moral equivalent of war.

“It could be said that it’s a matter of life and death--every American’s,” Rumsfeld said in an appearance at the Pentagon. “Today, we declare war on bureaucracy.”

Rumsfeld said he plans to root out duplicative organization, cut a civilian work force of roughly 600,000 and, following a requirement of federal law, trim headquarters staffs by 15% this year.

Veterans of past Pentagon reform efforts hailed Rumsfeld’s goal--and predicted the new secretary would have as much trouble as his predecessors. They warned against expecting savings big enough to really move the department toward its goal of replacing aging weaponry.

“Their intentions are great, but the likelihood that they’ll make a dent in the system is almost nil,” said Daniel Goure, an analyst with the Virginia-based Lexington Institute, a conservative think thank, and a former official in the administration of former President George Bush.

Rumsfeld declined to say how many cuts he expected in the civilian work force, which already has shrunk from about 1.1 million in 1990 as part of the post-Cold War drawdown. But he said he has “never seen an organization” that couldn’t cut its expenses by at least 5%. At the Pentagon, that would save $15 billion to $18 billion a year, he said.

He pointed out what he said are some examples of inefficiencies at the department. He noted that each military branch has a separate general counsel’s office, as does the Defense secretary’s bureaucracy.

He noted that the civilian service secretaries and uniformed chiefs of staff have separate support staffs and that the services have separate public relations and lobbying organizations.

“Maybe we need many of them,” said Rumsfeld, who returned to the Pentagon in January after 25 years as a successful business executive. “But I have a feeling we need fewer than we have.”

Experts said major cost savings are tough to achieve at the Pentagon, in part because the organization must carry out complex and sometimes contradictory congressional requirements.

Comparing the Defense Department to a corporation is misleading, said Thomas Donnelly, a former Republican congressional aide now with the Project for the New American Century, a conservative think tank. “We’re a democracy, and we do things by consensus” and thus not always in the most efficient manner, he said.

Although the services can conduct some functions jointly, they have different missions and needs.

McNamara, a former Ford chief executive, sought to save money in the 1960s by centralizing intelligence gathering under the Defense Intelligence Agency. Yet the effort was undermined by the service chiefs’ insistence that only their own intelligence bureaucracies could do the job adequately.

Analysts noted that it is difficult to pin down how much savings have been gained by such crusades.

The “defense management review” effort of Vice President Dick Cheney, when he was Defense secretary for the first President Bush, projected savings of up to $70 billion. But that was never documented. Neither were the savings of up to $30 billion that aides to Secretary William J. Perry contended they could achieve for the Clinton administration.

Lawrence Korb, who was an assistant secretary of Defense under President Reagan, said he once calculated that if all the savings claimed in efficiency campaigns had been realized, the defense budget “would be less than zero.”

Some analysts contended that the new campaign has a political goal as well as a financial one.

With the department asking for an 11% budget increase at a time of a slowing economy, Rumsfeld “has got to show that he’s trying to be as efficient as he can,” Goure said.

Other analysts said the campaign is an effort to win political points by a Pentagon leadership that so far has disappointed advocates of military reform and conservatives who have pushed for a far bigger defense budget hike.

“This is so obviously a cover for the fact that they just haven’t delivered the budget increase that’s needed,” Donnelly said.