Sack Weinberger, bankrupt General Dynamics, and other procurement reforms.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg
• Position: Caspar Weinberger, Packard Commission investigation

SACK WEINBERGER, BANKRUPT GENERAL DYNAMICS, AND OTHER PROCUREMENT REFORMS

Was that really former DefenseUndersecretary David Packard standing in the Rose Garden last July, handing Ronald Reagan a blue-ribbon report blasting the way the Pentagon procures weapons? Was that really Reagan grinning away as he accepted?

It was. With White House pomp RonaldReagan consecrated defense reform views his own administration was decrying as misinformed and irresponsible a few years ago. Given the ritual of presidential commission reports--their purpose usually to appear hard hitting but in fact celebrate the status quo, a Kabuki adhered to exquisitely by the recent Rogers Commission--people may have been tempted to write Packard off. But in this instance there may actually be significance to a presidential commission report.

First, Packard's work presents specific recommendationsrather than the standard windy exortations for "a new national debate,' and so on. Most of those recommendations were right on the beam. It also comes at a time when the number of books, reports, congressional studies, and of course real-life examples concerning military ineptitude is building to a critical mass. Even bureaucracies as vast as the Pentagon do eventually respond to the sheer weight of paper heaped on them, especially when a report like this, embossed with the seal of a president, is thrown on top of the pile.

The Packard report, and the grudging acceptanceof military reform ideas currently taking place, creates an ideal political opportunity to make crucial, fundamental changes in the American defense establishment--the kind of reform which, someday, will redound much to the credit of the party which backs it. If Reagan isn't willing to reach for history in his final two years and do for the Pentagon what he did for the tax code, then perhaps the Democrats, now holding the Senate again, will embrace defense reform as a party-wide goal. With that in mind it becomes useful to take a close look at just what Packard recommended--and what new avenues of reform thinking, unmentioned by Packard, should be considered.

Extra-strength spending

Packard proposed many perceptive reforms,some straight out of the cheap hawk's handbook, reorganizing the Joint Chiefs of Staff being one of them.

Previously, the JCS chairman has been strictlya figurehead. The JCS reorganization, enacted recently by Congress, gives the chairman, Admiral William Crowe, a degree of true authority over the military as a whole, creates a vice-chief who supposedly will concentrate on interservice harmony, and also grants some autonomy to U.S. regional commanders.

A key Packard Report recommendation is thatthe Pentagon buy more parts and supplies from commercial outfits instead of designing custom "mil-spec' hardware. This would save billions while speeding procurement. It is also expected to be resisted by the supplycrats with the full splendor of their collective inertial mass.

Time and again the military spends millionsdeveloping supplies only marginally different from commercial products which are already available and cheaper to boot. After the $7,600 coffee pot percolated into the news, General Lawrence Skantze, head of the Air Force Systems Command, issued a paper defending its selection over similar, cheaper systems sold commercially. The Air Force amphora, Skantze declared, was no mere Mr. Coffee, but an amazing, technologically advanced super-urn capable of withstanding 40 times the force of gravity. The Russians have nothing on this coffee pot! If the $7,600 pot ever endures 40 g's it will be useful mainly for brewing crash investigators a hot cup of java as they scrape the remains of the rest of the airplane off the ground.

Supposedly, the high cost of mil-spec hardwareis justified by added performance, but usually this is about as smart a buy as the "extra strength' painkllers which contain a 50 percent higher dose at twice the price. As is shown by the frequency with which small entrepreneurial companies beat global conglomerates to the market with new products, money is not the prime mover in product development. Competitive tensions-- and the knowledge that results will directly affect one's job security and earnings--can be worth more than money. Anyone who has compared a mil-spec flashlight to a Magna-Lite, the leading commercial heavy-duty flashlight, knows this.

Sam Nunn, the likely new Senate Armed ServicesCommittee Chairman, is thought to favor another Packard recommendation: enactment of two-year budget cycles. Under the present system, procurement strategy vacillates on an almost daily basis, as multiple subcommittees get several shots per year at fussing with the numbers. Two-year cycles will permit more efficient industrial planning while reducing the temptation for Congress to tinker with decisions it has "made.' Chronic procurement mood swings not only tie up the House and Senate with redundant debate, they embolden military leaders into thinking legislators can be taken lightly because Congress never means what it says anyway.

Almost everybody, including Nunn, agreeswith Packard that Congress has to stop "micromanaging' the Pentagon; let's see how well Nunn can set an example by restraining his own committee. In recent years Congress has barraged the services with the kind of paperwork which only hardens their committee mindset. In 1970, Congress requested 36 formal reports from the Department of Defense; in 1986 the figure exceeded 600. Anyone who has worked in a big organization knowns that while the content of a formal report is usually mush--compromise language frapped by department after department until it says as little as possible-- composition can be an enormous drain on time, crowding out productive endeavors. Congress in turn seldom does anything with formal Pentagon responses except pile them on the scrap heap of history. Most are requested so that a subcommittee chairman can declare that he has taken bold, decisive action on an issue he is actually trying to dodge. A handful of serious investigations per year--accompanied by testimony under oath, where military officials would get into real trouble if they didn't provide answers--would be far healthier for the system than thousands of pages of pro-forma fluff.

The report called for abolishing DSARCs (thePentagon's Defense Systems Acquisition Review Councils). This showed an admirable willingness to face the music, since Packard himself created DSARCs in the early 1970s when he was undersecretary of defense. DSARCs were designed to nip bad procurement ideas in the bud. But after Packard left the Defense Department, DSARCs were nimbly taken over by the supplycrats and rigged in such a way that no program was ever too expensive or impractical to be funded. Even the Divad gun wafted through its DSARC like a concerto on a spring breeze.

DSARCs worked like this. Early in the life ofa weapons concept, a big meeting would be held. Service secretaries, high ranking political-appointees and other luminaries would crowd into a conference room to be shown dazzling animations in which an awesome manifestation of technology slices and dices through the entire Red Army. Let's call it the Goldfinch wheat-seeking missile, designed to destroy subsidized Russian grain. One or two token squids from the Pentagon's internal self-criticism shops such as Planning, Analysis, and Evaluation would be given the floor to raise objections to the idea. Then the DSARC would be asked to vote on whether basic research into the Goldfinch concept should go ahead. Since no one is opposed to research, the vote would always be aye.

Another DSARC would not meet untilGoldfinch was well along in development and had acquired a constituency. Those assembled would be shown more astounding animations, then told that although in its only actual firing Goldfinch had inadvertently attacked its own maintenance crew, computer simulations indicated the system could be made utterly flawless at an unspecified later date. This time the DSARC would be asked to vote on whether Goldfinch "program milestones' were being met. Usually the milestones were written by the hierarchy building the weapon, and consisted of items like whether certain tests had been held, as opposed to successful. The vote would again always be aye. At this stage the DSARC often would endorse initial purchases of long-lead production items-- tantamount to approving full production.

A final DSARC would not be conducted untilGoldfinch ribbon-cutting ceremonies had been scheduled and contractor lobbyists had finished working all the relevant congressional subcommittees. This panel would be informed that, ahem, the Goldfinch has turned out to cost 17 times more than estimated, and will explode spontaneously if the relative humidity exceeds 10 percent. But Goldfinch is the sole thing standing between us and a Soviet invasion. Gentlemen, the choice is yours.

The evident flaw in this process is that at nopoint did DSARCs weigh alternatives to the proposals before them, or consider what mix of forces is best given needs, threats, and budget realities. Each finding was reached in a vacuum: each moment of judgment scripted to occur when resistance to interest-group pressure was low. This decision-making cycle, which has dominated U.S. procurement for the last decade, inspired a saying among defense contractors--"Too soon to tell, too late to change.' The DSARC sequence also helped the Pentagon sell weapons to Congress as all-or-nothing choices, with votes portrayed "for' or "against' defense.

The Packard-designed replacement, called aJoint Requirements and Management Board, will in theory weight alternatives and take overall military performance ("joint requirements') into account. Two new officials, the procurement "czar' and the JCS vice-chief, are slated to be this board's primary members. Though there is potential for bureaucratic hocus-pocus in any...