Ash Carter, Inside the Five‐Sided Box: Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon (New York: Dutton, 2019). 463 pp. $30.00 (Hardcover) ISBN: 978‐1524743918. Peter Levine, Defense Management Reform: How to Make the Pentagon Work Better and Cost Less (Stanford, CA. Stanford University Press, 2020). $35.00 (paperback), ISBN: 978‐1503611849

• Published date: 01 November 2021
• Author: Galia Cohen,Douglas A. Brook
• Date: 01 November 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13436

1206 Public Administration Review • November | D ecember 2 021

Douglas A. Brook is a visiting professor in

the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke

University. He has served in the Pentagon

as an Assistant Secretary of the Army

(Financial Management), Assistant Secretary

of the Navy (Financial Management &

Comptroller), and Acting Undersecretary of

Defense (Comptroller).

Email: doug.brook@duke.edu

Ash Carter, Inside the Five-Sided Box: Lessons from

a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon (New York: Dutton,

2019). 463 pp. $30.00 (Hardcover) ISBN: 978-1524743918.

Peter Levine, Defense Management Reform: How to Make the

Pentagon Work Better and Cost Less (Stanford, CA. Stanford

University Press, 2020). $35.00 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1503611849

The total budget authority of the United

States Department of Defense (DOD)

exceeds $740 billion. The DOD has more

than $2.9 trillion in assets, $2.8 trillion in liabilities

(DOD 2020), 2.1 million military and 700,000

civilian employees, and more than 4,600 defense sites

in 160 countries around the world (DOD, 2021).

It is no wonder that management of this massive

and complex organization is costly, difficult, and

attention-getting.

These two books are about defense management.

Being about management is not a bad thing. Hill

and Galvin (2016) assert there is a cultural bias for

leadership and against management in DOD but argue

that “Leaders and managers lead and manage both

people and things. Leaders and managers are concerned

with both effectiveness and efficiency. And large,

complex organizations only accomplish their missions

through good leadership and management.” The

Business Dictionary (2019) says management consists

of creating policy and organizing, planning, controlling,

and directing an organization’s resources in order to

achieve the objectives of that policy. These attributes of

management are on display in all three books.

Ash Carter and Peter Levine have decades of

collective experience working in the national defense

domain on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon and in

the defense industry. Both served in the Pentagon

during the Obama administration and have written

books that are both reflective and forward looking.

An initial takeaway from this collection is that

experience counts. The ability of each of the authors

to understand their organizations and the issues

they faced is clearly grounded in their substantial

career experiences. As Carter claims “My unusual

background makes me one of the few people

equipped to describe and interpret it all, because I’ve

seen it all […]” (xiii).

Describing and interpreting is what Ash Carter has

done in an exhaustive and extensively sourced memoir

of his time as secretary of defense from 2015 to 2017.

Carter’s memoir is in the tradition of his predecessors

but less personal that Panetta and Newton’s (2014)

memoir, and quite similar in topics and style to that

of Robert Gates (2015) though much less a wartime

memoir.

Organized topically, each chapter similarly addresses

a set of issues by explaining how something

works, providing one or more examples from

his recollection, and drawing out higher level

interpretations. For instance, Carter describes

defense budget management, presents an example

of cost management using the example of the F-35

Joint Strike Fighter, interprets some principles

for better contract management cost control, and

portrays his own Better Buying Power initiative.

Topics vary widely reflecting the massive scope of

the job of defense secretary. Major topics include

Pentagon spending, working with the White House

and Congress, the military chain of command and

Reviewed by: Douglas A. Brook

Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 81, Iss. 6, pp. 1206–1208. © 2021by

TheAmerican Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13436.