Beyond Monopsony: PENTAGON REFORM IN THE INFORMATION AGE

The United States Department of Defense purchases more goods, services, and software than all federal agencies combined and is often the target of scrutiny and reform. But the majority of what the military buys is no longer equipment or tangible items but rather labor and technology. Reformers have yet to keep up and continue to overfocus on weapons acquisition when hardware is increasingly the commodity. Despite near-constant attempts at reform, encompassing no less than 14 different efforts over the past eight sessions of Congress, change has not fully met the moment but typically served as short-term budget bogey exercises. Too often, changes are imposed on the Pentagon by Congress--a body that creates many of the problems reforms fail to fix. The Defense Department is a victim of the instability caused by continuing resolutions and lack of clarity, yet Congress further ties its hands regarding finances and sticks to rules from a bygone era when the defense budget was a tiny fraction of the size it is today. This report explains where past reform efforts focused and charts a new course for the Information Age when urgency, flexibility, transparency, and action are the watchwords. It reviews defense reform initiatives of the past decade and more and provides a series of policy recommendations borne out of the belief that to truly reform the Pentagon, change must not be additive. Defense reforms instead must roll back unnecessary strictures, byzantine regulations, and outdated bureaucracy and reduce time, tasks, and attention on unnecessary work. Pentagon reforms should also increase accountability for passing appropriations on time and help realize the true costs of running the US military. The end goal of these reforms is to reduce workload, mission, and the constant churn of forces that are burning out man and machine too quickly. As a result, implementing them will allow the United States to better deter, compete with, and, if necessary, defeat America's great-power adversaries.
Washington is rarely without ideas for how to next, and better, reform the Department of Defense. Indeed, there have been so many efficiencies drills over the past two decades that [...]