Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has a solution for the military’s budget woes. Instead of looking to cut funding from the services, the Pentagon should turn an eye to its own bureaucracy and overhead, he said in a June 2 speech.
Twenty cents on every dollar spent on defense goes to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Defense Department undersecretaries and related agencies, which Mabus described as “pure overhead.”
“I think there are other places to look other than taking tools from the warfighter,” he said at the American Enterprise Institute. “Now they’re harder to find, they’re harder to get to, but they can return a lot of money and we can put more into tooth and less into tail.”
He pointed to the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), which manages pay for civilian and military employees. Despite the fact that the Navy paid DFAS $300 million for its services, the Navy’s 2014 audit may not be clean because “DFAS cannot tell us how they spent our money,” he said. “Nine out of 10 of their internal controls have been shown to be ineffective.”
He also took shots at the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which provides supplies to the services. In theory, the DLA should be able to buy products in bulk, thus garnering savings. But it doesn’t work out that way, because in many cases the services have to buy their own specialized products, Mabus said. An example is that the fuel the Navy uses to power its ships and aircraft is different than what the Army and Air Force use to power their own platforms.
“The theory behind DLA is great,” he said. But in practice, “it’s unclear if it saves us anything.”
The services should not be immune from scrutiny, he said. “We have a finance arm. We have an acquisition arm. We have a personnel arm, and there’s a lot of duplication going on here.”
However, he was resolute that reducing the Navy’s shipbuilding budget, or eliminating an amphibious ready group or carrier strike group, was a no-go.
When sequester and the government shutdown hit in 2013, the effects were not immediately visible, Mabus said. But because of the hiring freezes, furloughs and slowdowns that occurred as a result, Navy shipyards will deal with a backlog of ships until at least 2019. Aircraft depots are in the same situation.