Call for Pentagon and Congressional leaders to address “growing imbalances within the defense budget"

38 signatories from 15 think tanks and universities, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies have signed an open letter calling for Pentagon and Congressional leaders to address “growing imbalances within the defense budget that threaten the health and viability of America’s military power.”

Citing "strong bipartisan consensus", excerpts from the letter assert:

Too much of the defense budget is currently consumed by institutional inefficiencies, some of which are mandated by law. This is leaving a smaller share of the budget to pay for the manning, training, and equipping of our armed forces that make the US military without peer. Now is the time to begin the hard but necessary work to close excess bases, right-size the civilian workforce, and give future service members more value in a modern pay and benefits package.

As the US military shrinks, it must reduce its inventory of physical infrastructure. Smaller budgets can no longer support paying for the operation of unnecessary facilities. Estimates remain constant that the Pentagon retains over 20 percent excess capacity here in the US. Meanwhile, the military services have arguably drawn down too far in overseas basing. Members of Congress in both parties should partner with the Pentagon to identify the true scale of excess capacity and better match the Department's vast network of facilities to its smaller, more forward-engaged force.

The size and structure of the federal defense civilian workforce is another area in need of urgent examination and restructuring that policymakers in both branches have been reluctant to tackle. From 2001 to 2014, the active duty military shrank by nearly 3 percent. Yet over the same timeframe the number of civilian defense employees grew by 10 percent to 756,000. This workforce rose another 3 percent in just the past year. While these professionals support essential missions of the Defense Department, their growth since 2001 has created a workforce that is now out of proportion to need.

At the same time, the Department of Defense has grown a civilian contractor workforce of nearly the same size, an estimated 700,000.

The Government Accountability Office, for instance, has consistently criticized the Pentagon for failing to collect the necessary data to optimize its workforce-including assessing the most efficient balance between contractors, civilians, and military personnel. Collecting this information is essential in order to bring the defense civilian and contractor workforces into balance with the size of our uniformed military. But the Department should not stop there. In order to right-size the defense workforce, DoD should undertake a systematic effort to de-layer headquarters organizations across the Department, reducing needless bureaucracy and optimizing spans of control to enable better performance at lower cost.

Finally, it is time for a comprehensive modernization of the military compensation system. The nation's approach to military compensation and benefits has changed little since the 1970s, even as the demographics of our force have shifted to a greater proportion of married, college-educated service members with dependents and even as new approaches in areas like health care have created the possibility of delivering better outcomes at lower cost.

In recent years, Pentagon leaders have proposed many incremental changes to military compensation to reduce the rate of growth, but Congress has yet to act in a holistic manner. Congress should, at a minimum, commit to bringing the commission's thoughtful recommendations to a vote in both chambers this year. It should also examine and implement the best proposals for reforming the DoD health care system to deliver better outcomes for service members, retirees, and their families at less cost to the American taxpayer.

Those of us who have joined together in support of these efforts may differ on many issues, but we are unified in our agreement on the need to pursue long-overdue defense and institutional reforms. Excess facilities, an oversized civilian workforce, and outdated military compensation and benefits models all jeopardize the combat power these investments are intended to support.

Again, the letter is available at this link: http://www.cnas.org/sites/default/files/Defense_letter_april29.pdf


Hattip to CNAS for bringing this to our attention.