The Big Three:
Our Greatest Security Risks and How to Address Them
4. Sustaining Domestic Support
In the first years of the 21st century, DOD requirements are likely to increase as the large stockpile of planes, ships, tanks, and weapons bought in the 1980s reaches the end of its useful life. Costs will be further increased if peacekeeping operations, with resultant wear and tear on people and equipment, continue at their recent pace.
At the same time, three problems may combine to erode the support DOD needs to perform its mission:
To counter the first problem, we must heighten understanding that our national security depends in the long term on dissuading other nations from competing with us militarily. We are in a rare position of such exceptional strength that others do not now compete on our level, but substantial effort and continued investment are required to sustain that position.
This support is endangered if we do not make DOD more evidently efficient. DOD has tried to avoid waste and in innumerable ways pursues efficiencies, but to truly confront the second problem, it must come to grips with the fact that fundamental efficiencies within the department cannot be pursued only incrementally. Perhaps this point can be put most strongly by recognizing that, in the wake of perestroika in the Soviet Union, and privatization in China, the DOD has succeeded to the dubious honor of being one of the world's last bailiwicks of central planning. Indeed, in some respects, the DOD is a Communist system. The department does not normally provide decisionmakers with accurate price information and incentives to minimize costs, but instead supplies them with directives, quotas, and punishments. It does not reward success but instead cuts the budgets of those who are efficient and adds funds to those who show a "requirement." Thus, it takes from each manager "according to his abilities and gives to each according to his needs." In sum, the same methods of doing business that disabled the Soviet Union are evident in DOD. Perestroika is no less warranted in the second case than in the first.
Some effort has been made in that direction under the more American rubric of "reengineering." The intuition behind reengineering is sound—it is a philosophy of delegation rather than direction—but the analogy to the Russian State is again suggestive. It is not enough to tear down the old system; chaos and declines in productivity will ensue unless the recipients of the previously centralized authority are given the proper incentives and information to act on those incentives.
A description of techniques to achieve this is beyond the scope of this essay. Efforts along these lines underway in the Department of the Navy include permitting the private sector to bid to perform basic services (base support, accounting, maintenance, housing, etc.) so as to induce competition and force recognition of true costs; placing budgets in the hands of customers (for example, fleet commanders) rather than suppliers and then having suppliers compete to perform services; budgeting for the true costs of military manpower rather than treating (as is common) it as though it were almost a free good (a legacy of conscription); and using metrics that measure the value and efficiency of services rather than merely the size of bureaucrat workloads.
All components of DOD must come to grips with this challenge, because restructuring is fundamental not merely to efficiency, but also to credibility and therefore to viability. In the future, if DOD cannot extract benefit more efficiently from what it is given, it will (unlike in the past) be given less.
At its deepest level, the issue of public support runs beyond efficiency. While maintaining a professional and merit-based military, responsible decisionmakers also need to address the need to bring the DOD and American society closer together. Practical steps to achieve this include stepping up recruitment of minority officers, expanding the roles of women, and seizing opportunities to immerse officers in civilian society. Because officer recruitment often occurs at the beginning of college, some 4 years before officers enter the force, and because it takes officers more than 25 years to become flag officers, today's recruitment patterns shape the leadership of the military three decades from now. In 2028, America will be some 40 percent Black, Hispanic, and Asian, but our officer corps today is only 15 percent minority. Further, minorities comprise less than 20 percent of current officer recruits.
The problem this will cause should be apparent, quite apart from any issues of social policy. Our military cannot live apart from our society. That risk is low for our diverse and fluctuating enlisted ranks, but it is high for our much smaller and less representative corps of career officers. With the rise of Jacksonian democracy, the Army and Navy had to transform their officer corps from being a "gentleman's service" to one open to all classes. All services must similarly now transform their officer corps from being predominantly a white man's milieu to being truly representative of America. At the same time, attention needs to be focused on how to better recruit from elite educational institutions, at many of which ROTC units and a tradition of service have lapsed.
For the same reason, all four services must move further and faster in their assimilation of women. Mistreatment or unwarranted narrowing of opportunities for women in the military is morally condemnable, it erodes the respect of service members for one another, and it is an unconscionable waste of talent. But, for those who think these moral arguments reflect only a penchant for political correctness and that the practical benefits are not worth the effort, the risk identified here suggests another reason. As society at large accords women more equality of power and professional acceptance, the military must do the same. The predominantly white male leaders of today's services should press to recruit minorities and women into their officer corps not as an act of social engineering, but because the military itself is at risk if it is perceived as alien to those who share power in the larger society.
In another dimension, more attention needs to be paid to opportunities to expose members of the military and civilian populations to one another. Programs that support the transition of servicemen and women into the civilian sector as schoolteachers should be supported. Greater attention should be paid to the impact of advertising not only on the recruits at whom it is targeted, but also on society at large. Portraying a service, as some recent advertisements did, as an opportunity to "drive something hot" may draw recruits, but it misleads the public into thinking about the military as an institution characterized by an ethic of indulgence rather than responsibility.
Although special needs warrant separate establishments for military education and military medicine—our military personnel are professionals who need to maintain unique skills and a warfighting ethic, and military doctors face deployment and mobilization demands often incompatible with civilian practice—opportunities should still be sought for intertwining military and civilian systems of education and medical care. Similarly, present debates over housing for military service members should recognize that it would serve a larger end to bring service members into the civilian housing market rather than to isolate them on bases that breed a cantonment mentality. Military members are most often model citizens, and all will benefit from increasing interaction of military and civilian sectors.
Initiatives to move away from military-only systems are often warranted on grounds of economy; this perspective suggests a more overarching purpose. To allow the military services to drift away from the society that must nurture them is to put great institutions in great jeopardy.
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