Reports of Saving the Pentagon $125 Billion Are Just Fake News

Harvey M. Sapolsky

Security, Americas

There's no way the Department of Defense can be run like a business.

The Balkan teenagers are at it again, this time in the guise of members of the Defense Business Board and consultants from McKinsey, with the claim that their report offering $125 billion in savings was being suppressed by the Department of Defense. What a devilishly clever way to gain new attention for the tired assertion that billions can be saved if DOD would just act like IBM or FedEx and become a great, efficient business machine. Now, ignoring the 836th repetition of a false idea is being called suppression. And the public once again is being told that America can have a big, globally deployed, frequently engaged and highly lethal military without the inefficiencies inherent in the task and imposed by our political system.

Yes, Defense is full of waste in part because being prepared to fight wars at any level, anywhere, under any climate condition and against all types of opponents, generates the requirements for lots of equipment, stocked and supported in lots of places around the world, most of which will not get used except in exercises. We haven’t executed a major airborne assault since the Second World War, but we have the aircraft and trained troops to do one. We haven’t carried out an opposed amphibious landing since the Korean War, but still support the capability. Our nuclear deterrent forces are always ready—and all of the infrastructure necessary for these and other rare activities is unavoidably intertwined with the supply chain and administrative systems that have been nearly continuously involved in supporting one counterinsurgency/humanitarian relief operation or another since the end of the Cold War. Even McKinsey will have to acknowledge that the price of possible failure is often so high that it has to temper the quest for efficiency in this riskiest of risky businesses.