Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) doesn’t just want to reform Pentagon acquisition during his first year as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee; he also wants to reform the way his committee does business, and he wants to reform the relationship between the committee and the Defense Department.
Among the most noticeable changes will be the fiscal year 2016 budget hearings. When the Pentagon releases its budget request on Feb. 2, HASC won’t follow the usual pattern of inviting the defense secretary and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in to kick off hearing season.
“Rather than have the president’s budget come out, and then we have the secretary of defense talk about it, and then we have the secretary of the Navy and the secretary of the Army and the secretary of the Air Force, and all the combatant commanders for two months talk about the president’s budget, we’re going to flip that on its head,” he told reporters Tuesday morning at a Defense Writers Group breakfast. “We’re going to spend approximately two months looking at, at the full committee level, looking at some of the bigger issues, threats, challenges that we face. And then we’re going to ask the secretary of defense to come in at the end of that time and explain to us how the president’s budget meets those threats and challenges that we’ve been hearing about over the past two months.
“I expected there would be pushback from the Department of Defense because they like to have the secretary talk first and then everybody else can talk–fortunately with the transition of the secretaries, it really works out pretty well for both of us,” he added
The budget request is expected to be released on Feb. 2, and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) has said he wants to hold a confirmation hearing for secretary-nominee Ashton Carter that same week. McCain told Defense Daily that current secretary Chuck Hagel would brief SASC on the budget request, since he was the secretary that oversaw the budget’s development, and that Carter’s confirmation would be considered a separate matter.
Thornberry said he also wants to foster more participation in the committee–the largest in Congress, with 63 members–and between HASC members and DoD personnel.
Regarding relationships within the committee, a first step was to host an informal roundtable for HASC members about global terrorism threats. Rather than asking questions by seniority as is done during hearings, anyone could question the military and intelligence experts at any time, fostering a good environment for new and eager committee members. Thornberry also said that for the first time ever he would appoint subcommittee vice chairs “to give more junior people greater leadership opportunities.”
As for the committee’s relationship with DoD–several members pointedly discussed a “trust deficit” during a hearing in December–Thornberry said it would take work, but he believes that with a new defense secretary and several new committee members they can find a way to rebuild the relationship.
“One of the things we’re planning is a committee retreat so that members of the committee can have more of an informal opportunity to interact with some key leaders at the department rather than just seeing them over a witness table,” Thornberry said. “So I do think we need to restore that balance. But a key part of restoring that balance is for us to be reassured that, especially from the military leaders, we’re getting their best professional military advice…I know there’s been a lot of pressure on a lot of leaders to toe the line with whatever the White House wants them to say, but part of that trust is we need their best advice. At the same time, you can’t expect them to buck the commander-in-chief, so they’ve got a tricky balance. I don’t meant to underestimate that. But back to my theme, we’re an independent branch of government, they have a responsibility to give us their best advice separately and apart from whatever the president wants them to say. So we’ve got work to do on that.”
Of presumed incoming secretary Carter, Thornberry said “I think he’s smart, he’s experienced, he knows the building very well, and he knows industry, and that gives us a very good–with [deputy defense secretary] Bob Work as well, by the way–that gives us a very good opportunity to make some of the [acquisition] reforms that need to be made. And so I’m pretty optimistic of the chances of doing that, because I think everybody–regardless of your position on different policy issues–everybody agrees that we cannot afford this sluggish cost-overrun sort of procurement system that not only costs money, not only delays technology getting to the field but also prevents us from keeping up with the latest technologies.”
Thornberry later elaborated on the need for acquisition reform, saying that he–along with Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall and other DoD leaders–needed to inject some agility into weapons procurement.
“One characteristic of the world we live in is that it is incredibly volatile and moves really fast,” he said. “That includes technology. And if it takes you 24 years to field a fighter aircraft, you are not keeping up. So the agility in our procurement system is something not just, again, for cost, but things are moving so fast, adversaries are looking for our vulnerabilities, and if we are not fast enough to respond to what they’re doing then we will be vulnerable. So the agility of the system is the key thing.”
Thornberry noted that part of acquisition reform would include taking a hard look at things congressmen do to slow procurement down, such as asking for too many reports from program managers and interjecting their ideas into the requirements-setting process–which can be a necessary part of congressional oversight but can at times be overkill.