Obama's Serious About Taking an Axe to Corruption and Waste at the Pentagon

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet. Posted March 17, 2009.

Others think the wings of the Pentagon’s imagination are more dangerous than the lack of contracting oversight. These critics hold that timetables and cost limits will always be broken and revised once high-tech production pipes are opened. The most important thing, they say, is to stop shooting for the military moon. “The problem is not the way we contract, it’s what we contract,” says Benjamin Friedman, Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security Studies at the Cato Institute. “The trouble is we want several technological miracles in each new platform. It’s not sustainable.”

“We can't fix [the Pentagon system] because we want crazy things,” writes Harvey Sapolsky, professor of Public Policy and Organization Emeritus at MIT, in a February essay in Defense News. Sapolosky argues that until weapons programs become more realistic, the charade of yet another round of acquisition reform should be skipped altogether. “Changing the rules every time we change administrations or secretaries is a colossal waste of effort, forcing everyone involved to learn a new manual, another set of acronyms and a revised timetable for required approvals.”

This growing debate over how best to scale back the most expensive next-generation programs (a debate that will increase with the return of deficit awareness) has not surprisingly led the defense industry to mount a counterattack. Industry’s response to the threat to its most expensive programs is to paint defense spending as a crucial economic stimulant during a recession, providing jobs and keeping money pumping through the system via vast nationwide webs of contractors and subcontractors. Whereas these defense firms once posed as patriotic defenders of the American people, they now pose as patriotic employers of the American people. Lockheed Martin recently launched an economics-based national campaign in support of its threatened F-22 Raptor program, on which the Air Force has already spent more than $62 billion for less than 200 planes. The planes do not even appear in the ads.

While such arguments may be tempting for members of Congress with defense industries in their districts and states, the idea that defense dollars equal effective job creation is open to debate, at best. A 2007 study conducted by researchers at the University of Massachusetts concluded that $1 billion of education spending generates as many as twice the number of jobs as military spending. Spending on health care, mass transit, and infrastructure, meanwhile, creates jobs at a lower average salary than military spending, but creates substantially more of them.

But even a dramatic scaling back of the Pentagon’s favorite next-generation programs won’t free up much money for other kinds of more socially productive economic stimulus programs. Nor will it reduce military budgets on the horizon below the current mindboggling $500 billion-plus ($700b if you include the war supplementals). Defense budgets will remain high due to rising personnel costs, two wars, and the maintenance of bases around the world. Still, getting the defense contracting process under control is worth doing for a raft of other moral, economic, and national security reasons. It would also be deeply satisfying to see the Pentagon do like the bumper-sticker says and finally hold that bake sale.

On this front, can the Obama administration succeed where so many others have failed?

“Efforts to fix this flawed, complex system go back four decades with very little success,” reminds Watts, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment. “I wouldn’t get too excited.”

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Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist.

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