The Twenty-Fourth Charles L. Decker Lecture in Administrative and Civil Law

• Author: Dr. David S.C. Chu
• Pages: 07

THE TWENTY-FOURTH CHARLES L. DECKER LECTURE IN ADMINISTRATIVE AND CIVIL LAW†

DR. DAVID S.C. CHU*

General Black, distinguished guests, it is truly a privilege to join you this morning and to speak to the issue of transformation in our Department of Defense, as it affects our people.

A first question that is often asked when the subject of transformation is raised focuses on the definition: What exactly is "transformation?" How would we know it if we saw it? Drawing on my economics training background, I think there is a story that economists like to tell about themselves that illustrates the essence of transformation.

In this tale, an alumnus of a major graduate program comes back to his alma mater some years after he graduated to visit his favorite professor. He arrives at examination time to find that she is engaged in proctoring the exam, so he waits patiently in the back of the classroom. While he is waiting, he opens the exam booklet to see what questions are being posed and discovers, to his astonishment, that the questions she's asking are the same questions that were asked twenty years earlier when

he was a student. When the students finish the exam, he goes up and greets her and asks immediately, "Isn't it a little strange to ask the same questions? If you don't change the questions, the students become too practiced in their answers. There is no real test of their underlying mastery of the material." She smiles at him and says, "Remember, in economics we don't change the questions, we just change the answers."

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That, I think, is the essence of what transformation is all about. It is about changing the answers to classic questions regarding how we organize, train, deploy, and utilize military forces on behalf of the United States and her security interests.

Of course, at the heart of any organization, be it military or civilian, stand the people of that enterprise. You see that today in the patience and fortitude of our Soldiers in confronting a very difficult insurgency halfway around the world. You saw that in 2003 in the march to Baghdad, executed with minimum force in an extraordinarily short period of time. You saw it fourteen years earlier in the performance of Americans in the first Persian Gulf War in ejecting Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait.

As that set of historical antecedents illustrates, people, as the central element of the organization, are important, not only because they

determine its performance, but because they also affect how society perceives that institution. The results of the first Persian Gulf War trumped the long national concern about its military forces that arose out of the Vietnam conflict. The military, post-Gulf War, became, as you are aware, the leading institution in terms of respect accorded by Americans in polls, when people are asked to rank institutions. Ever since that conflict and that extraordinarily fine performance, the American public has ranked the military number one, and that continues until the present day. Our reputation is a precious resource. Without that resource, it is very difficult to get quality young people like yourselves to decide to put on the nation's uniform and to serve her interests, often in very difficult circumstances.

What I would like to do today is speak to the changes that the Department seeks to make not only in how we recruit but, even more important, manage and employ the people of the Department. There are really, I would contend, four large personnel communities for which the Department of Defense is in some measure responsible. There are, first of all, privately employed personnel, contractors as they are often labeled, who support our operations. It is certainly true in Iraq today. There is a long set of issues attached to the use of contractor personnel- what is their role, should they carry weapons, what about the law of war and so on and so forth. I will not attempt to deal with those issues today because I want to concentrate on the other three communities to which we have a responsibility. Those are of course, the civilians, the federal employees in our ranks; the reserve forces of the United States, some of whose members are joining us in this audience; and the active military of the United States, who constitutes most of the attendance of this particular school.

In each of these areas, is a set of challenges the Department faces- challenges to which we have sought to respond by a series of proposals that we would argue are, in their essence, transformational in nature and that in many cases, indeed a majority of cases, require statutory action, changes in the law of the United States in order for the Department to proceed.

Now you might ask at the very start, "Why is so much in this regime, the personnel regime, imbedded in statute?" I remand that to the school and center here as an interesting subject of philosophical inquiry because I do think it is a good question. Why has the country decided over a period of many years to put so much detail about how we manage people

into permanent law? We don't do that for weapons systems. We buy a weapons system. When Congress authorizes a ship, it is up to the Department to decide what that ship will look like within some broad outlines and, absent contrary law, how we will go about buying it. But when it comes to people, we specify things down to the last dollar.

I raised this question with a long-time former staff director of the Armed Services Committee: "Why do you have to micromanage so much?" He said, "You think this is bad, let me show you the Appropriations Act for 1791." In that Act, Congress specified the pay of each Soldier by name, down to the individual. "So, okay, point taken. This is better than the alternatives." But I do think this question is one for the long term. It should be part of our strategic thinking. Does Congress have to specify as much as it does in the permanent authorities accorded to the Department?

Let me take each of the communities I mentioned in turn and very briefly summarize the challenges we face and then turn to what we are trying to do in the Department of Defense today to meet those challenges successfully.

First are the civilians, where we have two central problems. The first problem has to do with how we are perceived. We are not perceived well. That is not unique in the Department of Defense. As one installation manager put it, "The good young people in my state won't take my jobs." That's a devastating indictment. It is particularly devastating at the juncture in history at which the Department stands and at which other cabinets in the Department stand. Half our work force can retire in five years. Not all will retire in five years, but in ten years or so we will turn over much of the civil work force we have in this Department. We have to be able to recruit able, young Americans. When you look at poll results for how young Americans think about the government, you discover an astonishing fact. Young Americans, just like you, put public service as one of their preeminent career objectives. But when they are asked, "Where would you prefer that public service?" I regret to say that government is not the first choice on the list. That is a terrible indictment of how we are perceived in the civil community.

At the same time, we are not well-perceived by managers. You look at the behavior in the Department, when it comes to carrying out a mission task (and not just the Department of Defense, it is true of other cabinet departments as well). When it comes to carrying out a mission

task, the reaction of managers is not to ask, "How do I appoint additional federal civil servants?" The reaction is either to turn to military units or to turn to a contract organization. The reason, I think, is because managers do not see the civil service, as it has come through today, as a flexible, responsive, and effective instrument to meet our needs. That is not a criticism of the people who are civil servants; it is a criticism of the rules under which they are engaged and by which they are managed. I'll come back to this in discussing what we'd like to change.

Second is the reserve force of the United States. A generation ago, Secretary Melvin Laird announced it would be a total force. It was an...