This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, April 22, 2011 - WASHINGTON - When U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill chaired a recent Senate hearing on Pentagon efficiency initiatives, the committee room was packed with so many uniformed personnel that she asked Defense Department employees to raise their hands.
"That's a lot!" McCaskill, D-Mo., said as she looked around the room. "I'm trying to figure out what all these people do and why they need to be here."
Figuring out the military's "entourage culture," as the senator described it, is not a simple task. The Pentagon's maze-like corridors are an apt symbol of the complex, at times duplicative bureaucracy. If a typical civilian Cabinet member brings along five or six staffers to a congressional hearing, an Armed Services session might fill an entire hearing room with an entourage of advisers and the lobbyists who follow the issues.
As Congress and President Barack Obama's administration confront difficult decisions this spring about slashing federal spending -- and Americans face possible cuts to popular programs such as Medicare and Social Security -- a growing number of lawmakers is focusing on potential savings in the Pentagon budget.
At $550 billion, that Defense Department budget is now about 50 percent higher than it was a decade ago. (That sum doesn't count the additional $118 billion requested this year to pay for the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.) In 1998, defense expenditures amounted to about $1,500 per American; now it is $2,700 a person. That's more than 50 cents for every dollar of discretionary federal spending. The nation now spends about as much on the U.S. military as do the world's other 194 countries combined, according to Time magazine.
In his speech this month outlining his deficit-reduction plans, Obama said he wanted to cut an additional $400 billion from the Pentagon over the next dozen years, but he wasn't specific about where the cuts would come. On Thursday, Obama told a town hall forum that he would target "wasteful spending that does little to protect our troops or our nation -- like old weapons systems that the Pentagon doesn't want but still make it into the budget thanks to well-connected special interests."
Should such savings on "wasteful spending" be plowed back into the Pentagon? Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced a "reinvestment through efficiencies" program -- under which the Pentagon would identify $150 billion in potential savings over five years, most of which would be re-invested in priority military programs.
McCaskill, a former Missouri state auditor, called Gates' plans "more modest than draconian," and suggested that any savings go to deficit reduction. "I question whether, in this time of economic and fiscal duress, we can afford to allow the military departments to 'reinvest' the $10 billion that they plan to save this year through cuts to excessive bureaucracy and underachieving programs," she said.
Inefficiencies and Waste in Pentagon Contracts
While other lawmakers tend to focus on weapons programs for the biggest Pentagon budget cuts, McCaskill has been targeting the growth in the Defense Department's outside contracting, the quality of the auditing of those contracts, as well as on questionable military construction projects.
As the chair of the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on readiness and management, the Missouri senator vowed at a recent hearing to expose "gold-plated" military construction projects. Her initial targets: a proposed $50 million gym in San Diego, a $5 million "working dog" center, and a $1.2 billion military hospital in Germany.
"At a time when our nation is facing a fiscal crisis, I have trouble seeing how we can justify spending $50 million on a single fitness center," McCaskill lectured a Navy budget expert at the hearding. That expert, Jackalune Pfannenstiel, defended the planned center as an important recreational facility for thousands of Navy and Marine personnel in San Diego.
McCaskill told the top Pentagon military construction officials that she plans "to be very aggressive in my oversight to make sure these large, costly force posture actions are accompanied by careful, rigorous analysis." She was especially critical of the timing of budget requests related to the plan to move 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam by 2014 -- complaining that no master plan detailed the costs and the schedule for the huge endeavor, which will involve more than $10 billion in projects on Guam and the construction of a new airfield in Okinawa to handle the move.
"There needs to be a master plan, and we need to make sure the plan makes sense" before the move is funded, said McCaskill, who is worried that Japan's expenses in recovering from the March earthquake and tsunami could delay its contribution to the Guam move. Pfannensteil pledged to develop a master plan, explaining that the Navy had not yet done so because the project has "a lot of moving parts."
At her panel's March 29 hearing on the Pentagon's efficiency initiatives, McCaskill questioned whether the military was serious about its commitments to reduce the number of contractors.
"We've got to wean ourselves off of this incredible explosion of contractors," McCaskill told the Pentagon's chief comptroller, Robert F. Hale. She said the Defense Department had reduced its own civilian workforce by more than twice as much as it had cut its contracting workforce -- which has been criticized for inefficiencies and cost overruns.
When Hale replied that "the numbers are slippery" in assessing reductions in Pentagon contracting, McCaskill complained about numerous problems in such contracts -- including "way too many" cost-plus contracts, the expense of no-bid contracts, and "performance awards for non-performance" by contractors. "We have contractors who perform terribly but still get performance awards," she alleged.
At the same hearing, when Undersecretary of the Army Joseph Westphal outlined the "Army Business Transformation" initiative to streamline its business operations, McCaskill told him the description of the program "sounds like goobledygook."
Assured by Westphal that the initiative made sense, the Missouri senator demanded a plain-language analysis, saying: "I want to make sure that we're not investing a lot of money in having people do Power Point presentations."
McCaskill, who also chairs the Homeland Security panel's contracting oversight subcommittee, has been critical of the way many defense and other federal government contracts are audited.
Last fall, the senator focused much of her attention on what she regarded as weak government oversight of the $56 billion that this country has spent on Afghanistan reconstruction.
"You are not the right person for the job," McCaskill told the chief inspector, Arnold Fields, who headed the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which is charged with tracking waste and fraud in U.S. contracts in Afghanistan. In the wake of complaints from McCaskill and other senators, Fields resigned in early January.
McCaskill's contracting oversight panel also has been scrutinizing contracts let by the Pentagon and the State Department to train counter-narcotics police and other officials in countries such as Colombia. She contends that billions of dollars worth of such contracts have been signed, but with little oversight to see if they are working. Meanwhile, some of the same companies carrying out the training in Columbia have gotten lucrative contracts to conduct police and military training in Afghanistan.
"We are trying to get additional information on this contract spending, but it didn't appear ... that there was a good handle on performance measures, what was actually going on," McCaskill said.
Noting that the State Department and other federal agencies are involved along with the Pentagon in such counternarcotics activities, McCaskill said: "My sense is that there is money to be saved, there are efficiencies that can still be gained in terms of how we are mounting this effort, the overlap, and the lack of consistency as to who's in charge and why."
Akin Defends Pentagon Spending Levels
But some lawmakers say they oppose major cuts in the defense budget at a time when the nation is still involved in a war in Afghanistan, is trying to draw down its troop levels in Iraq, and is an integral part of NATO's air strikes in Libya.
The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, U.S. Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., has sought to limit Pentagon cutbacks, criticizing Obama last week for "picking a number out of his hat" in announcing that he wanted to reduce the Pentagon budget by about $400 billion over a dozen years.
"I am hoping that was just an opening shot in a presidential campaign," McKeon said, criticizing Obama for not finding out from the military what level of cuts it could withstand. "Maybe we should ask the military what their goals are," McKeon said.
Another strong backer of the Pentagon is Rep. Todd Akin, R-Town and Country, who chairs the House Armed Services subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces, which has oversight over Navy and Marine programs. As a member of the Budget Committee, Akin said he reluctantly agreed to moderate reductions in the House's military budget.
"The spending on defense has dropped rapidly and our preparedness, in terms of soldiers and in terms of ships and planes, is 50 percent of where we were 20 years ago -- and we are now involved in three different wars," Akin told the Beacon. "I don't think it's a good time for us, from a national security point of view, to be cutting defense. That's my opinion, and from somebody who's been on the Armed Services committee for 10 years."
Akin said the Pentagon's budget has to be assessed in historical terms and put into the perspective of the growth of the economy as a whole. "If you take a look at the gross numbers -- the number of planes, the number of ships and the number of soldiers -- and you look at where we are today versus where we were in 1990, we are at 50 percent of where we were in 1990," Akin said.
"We have the same number of ships today as we had in 1916. And if you take a look at the shrinking of the defense budget as a percent of GDP [gross domestic product], in 1965 we were about 9 percent of GDP, and now we're down to 3 or 4 percent."