Can the Pentagon be liberated from bureaucratic stranglehold?

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: DEFENSEWATCH

A four-star general selected to run a newly created Pentagon agency wanted the organization to have a catchy name that everyone would remember.

Instead, he got JIEDDO.

"We tried to create a simpler title, but the bureaucracy wouldn't let us do it," says retired Army Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, former director of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization.

Any other name for the agency was "impermissible because of the way the staff is set up," he says. "So we got stuck with that monster."

Such is life at the Department of Defense. Even four-star generals are relatively powerless when they go up against the fearsome bureaucracy.

Just about every secretary of defense who ever attempted to shake things up--reform the weapons acquisition system, overhaul outdated accounting processes, or even consolidate staffs that seemed to be doing duplicative work--has had to face this inscrutable enemy.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously declared war on institutional inertia on Sept. 10, 2001. He blamed the Pentagon's bureaucracy for fomenting waste and thwarting progress.

To the chagrin of his successor, Robert Gates, not much has changed, nearly a decade later.

In terms more polite than Rumsfeld's, Gates chided the bureaucrats on several occasions for failing to mobilize for war while military forces were engaged in two major conflicts. "For too many in the Pentagon it has been business as usual, as opposed to a wartime footing and a wartime mentality," Gates says in a 2008 speech.

Just last month, the secretary once again implored recalcitrant functionaries to get with the program as he introduced an ambitious plan to shake up the export-control apparatus. Securing support from Congress on these major reforms will be a cakewalk compared to overcoming a far more formidable hurdle of an entrenched bureaucracy that consistently resists new and better ways of doing things. "Our building has not overflowed in the past with enthusiasts for this kind of change," says Gates. "I would say that is also true for some other buildings in town."

Even the Pentagon's dysfunctional accounting and finance reporting system can't be fixed as quickly as Congress wants because of institutional inaction. The Defense Department a few years ago established a "business transformation agency" to overhaul an antiquated and disjointed maze of Pentagon financial databases and transform them into a state-of-the-art integrated system similar to what is...