In order to overtake the pace at which potential adversaries Russia and China are developing military technologies, the Defense Department needs to consolidate its innovation efforts under a single, very senior civilian official, former Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre told lawmakers Thursday.
Hamre, who now serves as chief executive of the Center of Strategic and International Studies, testified before the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) that the Defense Department’s innovation apparatus – once led by a director of defense engineering – has been “decapitated.” He favors a provision in the Senate markup of the National Defense Authorization Act that would establish anew the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering (USD R&E) as a senior administration official in charge of fielding new, innovative weapons and gear.
“The director of defense engineering and research…was the capstone of a system that put superior hardware into the hands of our soldiers,” Hamre said. “We lost that. And I will tell you right now we are losing the innovation agenda between us and the Chinese and the Russians. We are falling behind.”
The proposal – championed by Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) – would eliminate the position of chief weapons buyer Frank Kendall, formally known as the undersecretary of defense for AT&L, and divide duties among officials including the new USD(R&E). That person would focus exclusively on technological innovation.
Hamre agreed in part with the proposal, but suggested that Congress instead elevate the new undersecretary or establish a chief innovation officer as the number-three position under the secretary and deputy secretary. He also discouraged removing milestone decision authority from the new senior innovation official, which the Senate bill would do by eliminating the undersecretary of AT&L.
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter – who formerly held Kendall’s position – and the AT&L establishment have pushed back on McCain’s proposal.
“We need to lift up the director of defense research and engineering to make it the number-three position in the Building again,” Hamre said. “It once was. We need to put it back there again.”
The enormous acquisition, technology and logistics shop – it has between 1,500 and 2,500 personnel depending on how you count – currently led by Kendall “is a compliance organization, not an innovation organization,” Hamre said.
“We need to make changes now because we don’t have resources enough to support the needs that we have,” he said. “We have to find ways to make this organization more agile, more streamlined. The question is ‘Can that be the basis for a substantial reform agenda?’”
Dov Zakheim, a senior adviser at CSIS and senior fellow at the Center for Naval Analyses, “totally agrees” with Hamre’s call for a departmental focus on innovation. Inadequate education requirements for acquisition professionals and a behemoth bureaucracy that is deeply flawed and self-aware have all slowed the process by which the military buys equipment, he said.
“When you have a system that created its own rapid acquisition system to get around itself, which is what DoD did, something is fundamentally wrong,” Zakheim said. “The only question that arises if you want DoD to focus on innovation is how do you reach out to the commercial sector? The ways and means for doing that are not the ways and means we operate with right now.”
HASC Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) pointed out that his NDAA markup includes about a dozen reform measures to the acquisition systems and the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols law that established the current military and civilian Defense Department structure. The Senate’s version includes about 20 reform provisions. A symptom of the bureaucratic sprawl that needs correction is the length of the defense authorization bill, which Thornberry has tried and failed to trim during his tenure as HASC chair.
In the late 1980s, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s defense spending bill was 5 pages and the committee report was less than 100 pages, Hamre said. This year, the Senate version of the bill is 1,600 pages.
“The Congress – and this is collectively, this committee, everybody – is on the wrong path,” Hamre said. “You are not more powerful when you ask thousands of little questions. You are powerful when you focus on big issues. That used to be the historic role of the armed services committees: fundamentally shaping the direction of our country and national security. Instead the committees have become trapped in chasing after thousands and thousands of little issues.”
“I strongly urge you to pull back from all this mechanical stuff,” he added.