Cutting Waste Isn't Enough to Curb Pentagon Spending

Benjamin H. Friedman

Security,

Treating the Defense Department like a profit-making company is a serious mistake.

The Pentagon killed a 2015 report showing wasteful administrative spending, according to a Washington Post exposé by Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward. The report, authored by McKinsey consultants for the Defense Business Board, a DoD advisory body consisting mostly of corporate executives, estimated that the Pentagon could save $75–150 billion over five years by becoming more efficient and using the savings to pay for combat forces. According to the Post, Pentagon officials feared that the report, ambitiously titled “Transforming DoD’s Business Processes for Revolutionary Change,” would offer ammunition to those demanding military budget cuts, so they prevented its publication. Of course it leaked.

It’s unfortunate that Pentagon officials killed the report. But their quoted complaints about its shallowness and lack of content are fair. The report claims to map a “clear path” to savings, a line the Post approvingly repeats. What it actually delivers—in seventy-seven PowerPoint slides of vacuous consultant-speak—is some good information about the Pentagon’s administrative workforce and vague reform ideas, which fail to identify “waste” and seem unlikely to save money.