As the defense budget inevitably shrinks, attention is concentrated on appropriate choices of hardware and on savings attainable by closing and consolidating bases. At this point, there must be some question as to how much more can be saved in this way. In particular, as a superpower in a very unstable world, the United States often finds itself involved in unpredictable conflicts. Thus, operating expenses are likely to rise. They may even swamp other parts of the defense budget; for a time, it appeared that the cost of Bosnian operations would be borne by freezing all other defense spending for the last quarter of fiscal year 1996.
As the fiscal year 1998 budget approaches, several options are being discussed. One is to recapitalize, cutting current assets to begin work on new ones—the massive fleet cuts of the past few years exemplify this approach. Proponents maintain that the newer ones may well cost much less to maintain and, later, to modernize. Reports of the fiscal year 1998 Air Force budget mention decisions not to upgrade existing aircraft, or to stretch out the upgrades. There is a widespread suspicion in all three services that the projected budget cannot support planned programs.
Budget policy is further complicated, particularly in an election year, by calculations of the impact of choices on jobs (read California, a pivotal state). The Defense Department actually wanted more munitions, but they are far less glamorous.
Some have argued instead that the current force structure is far too large, that the United States could do with something like $175 billion rather than the current roughly $240 billion. Cuts on this scale are pushed because the overall federal budget is being squeezed so badly between entitlements and the demand for budget balance within the next decade. Although it seems unlikely that near-term demands for drastic cuts in defense will be met, the potential remains. Some argue that since about half the Cold War defense budget was spent on forces defending Europe, surely these forces are not needed. The counterargument, that forces are never single-purpose, and that forces in Europe proved useful in the Gulf War, seems not to be making much headway. Because the Navy is preeminently flexible in this era of violent peace, it seems essential to avoid any accounting that assigns particular elements of the fleet to particular Cold War geographical problems.
Even so, the issue remains: how to use fewer resources better. Critics long have claimed that about 25% of the federal budget is simply wasted. Inefficient procurement policy is one reason. In the past, procurement reform generally has meant more carefully managed competition, based on the theory that competition always drives down prices. In fact, the situation is more complex. Running the competition can be quite expensive. Companies find themselves paying heavily simply to develop proposals, and they pass on those costs to the government. Many smaller companies abandon government work entirely, because they find the formalities and paperwork overwhelming.
Of course, the paperwork and attendant oversight is there to protect the government against fraud. Unfortunately, there is evidence that the protection costs far more than the problem—all of which prompts a subversive proposal: destroy all procurement regulations written since, say, 1955 and then drastically limit any restoration. The 1955 Defense Department, which ran considerably larger forces than the current one, made do with many fewer—and lower-ranking—procurement officers.
Part of the problem may be that the programming/budgeting process introduced under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (admittedly to head off gross overruns such as those encountered in the 1950s) did not include among program parameters the time it would take to bring any new system into service. It is difficult to avoid the view that time did not matter to McNamara because he believed that nuclear deterrence made the details of programs almost irrelevant; his job was to maintain a reasonably credible force at an affordable price. Now that nuclear deterrence seems nearly irrelevant in the Third World, perhaps this reasoning deserves a revisit.
Procurement policy seems largely unrelated to performance requirements, although excessively complex Mil-Specs are themselves quite costly. Some experimental programs, including the arsenal ship, have been exempted from the usual procurement practices. It may be inexpensive not because it is a particularly good idea, but because it is an Advanced Research Projects Agency prototype, hence largely exempt from red tape. Advocates of “skunk works” programs generally make the same point. If they are right, then the appropriate conclusion is surely that the procurement machine itself should largely be scrapped.
One subject has received little public attention: personnel. The assumption is that any savings in personnel costs will entail pay cuts, pay freezes, and reductions in living conditions. Considerable economies might accrue from improved personnel policies; better, forces might become more effective.
Current policy reflects two biases. One might be considered the military side of U.S. youth culture, the belief that only the young can master the accelerating rate of change in military technology and tactics. In the Navy, the youth culture is reflected in the rule that officers retire after 20 years unless they make commander, and after 30 years unless they make flag rank; and that admirals themselves must retire after 10 years.
The other bias is more subtle. It might be considered the military equivalent of the civilian Master in Business Administration idea that management skill is more important than any particular skill. Officers are rotated frequently, on the theory that they are primarily leaders, with skills easily transferrable.
Short careers and short tours were introduced after World War II. As reported in this magazine, the inspiration for short military careers came from the Air Force, which saw itself as the incarnation of youth, and which sponsored particularly revolutionary technology. There may also have been a subtler need to maintain morale in an officer corps whose junior ranks had swollen during World War II (the “hump”), and remained to man the Korean War and Cold War fleet.
The problem is that an officer is much more than a general- purpose leader. Expertise, which takes time to perfect, really matters. It cannot be delegated completely to senior petty officers, who do serve long tours and who do gain specialized experience. Many allied navies keep officers in their jobs far longer than we do—claiming that their expertise, born of longer tours, often makes up for somewhat less sophisticated technology.
Rapid rotation also destroys corporate memory. Some long- serving civilian in a particular Navy office often can prevent a less-experienced officer from reinventing the wheel—while officers without access to such experience and expertise often find themselves wasting time on questions satisfactorily settled years—sometimes only months—before. Overlap between officers helps, but it does not solve the central problem, which is that the ideal career path does not leave an officer in any one job long enough to become completely expert.
Some years ago a congressional committee took the Navy to task for overemphasizing passive acoustics to the detriment of the active techniques needed to deal with quieter submarines. Its report went into some detail in suggesting which Navy office should be developing which equipment. Personnel practices were not mentioned—although most accounts of antisubmarine warfare performance indicate that a good ASW commander can improve the performance of his unit significantly compared to others of less experience with identical equipment. Few systems ever come close to their theoretical performance, and experience will sometimes trump investment in new systems; at the least, it will improve their performance.
The standard tour now is two years. Suppose it were doubled? Officers will reasonably complain that promotions, which may be attendant on changes in job, will suffer; the solution is probably to allow for promotions without changes in position. Perhaps we should look back to prewar personnel practice, in which some men served entire careers on board the same ships.
Specialization can go too far. The Royal Navy, for example, separates its executive branch from its engineering branch. Presumably this split reflects a split in British society between a technologically illiterate elite and the lower-class technologists. A senior British engineer admiral once complained in print that this split enabled the Royal Navy to ignore the crucial advances in steam plant engineering that allowed the U.S. Navy to operate so effectively in the Pacific during World War II. Similar ignorance apparently also led the British to adopt particularly ineffective antiaircraft fire-control systems.
Perhaps we ought to think of Cold War personnel policies as wartime policies, ripe for reexamination now that the war is over, and now that the fleet is likely to stabilize at a lower level. If, as seems likely, we will be engaging in low-level combat fairly frequently, experience will be much more, not less, valuable. We ought to cherish and preserve it. We probably ought to want longer, not shorter, officer careers.
Ah, but what about technological revolution? First, it is not entirely clear that the pace of change has been all that fast. True, the details are changing, but the basic facts of life remain remarkably constant. Our experience of World War II shows that experienced naval officers were able to deal with and exploit technology that had developed far more radically than ours. Admiral Ernest J. King, the wartime Chief of Naval Operations, began his career in a coal-fired Navy that had neither submarines nor aircraft. By 1941 his Navy had both, and it was developing radar and mechanized amphibious assault. King and his cohorts were able to manage.
Surely, the Air Force would say, the atomic bomb changed all that. What is striking in postwar internal naval analysis, conducted by officers with long prewar and wartime experience, is that they soon realized what the nuclear deadlock would mean, and what sort of operations and hardware would be needed. Experience does not mean mental paralysis. In 1955-57, the Navy’s long-range planners predicted that war would be possible only on the Eurasian periphery, and that the Navy needed a new all-weather attack airplane, the A-6, specifically for such warfare. Not bad for old fogies.
Long tours make it possible for officers to do more than merely learn the essentials of their jobs. In the late 1950s, for example, many surface ASW officers spent time during their tours on board submarines, mainly to learn how submariners thought. Littoral operations make exchanges attractive, though this time they may be far less practical.
The ideal exchange tour would be one on the small diesel submarines—operated by many of our allies—that more closely approximate the threats we are likely to face. Indeed, it might be useful for our submariners to spend some time on board such craft; small diesel submarines operate quite differently from large nuclear-powered boats. They are limited to ambush tactics and may spend considerable time waiting on the bottom (not a recommended posture for a nuclear submarine). Their commanders are obsessed with the state of battery charge.
The best tactics to use against such submarines are radically different from the best tactics to use against a nuclear submarine, but it is easy for an experienced submarine officer to mirror-image. Exercises against allied submarines clearly help, but time on board probably would be even better. That time can only be spared if the officer has a long enough tour in his primary job. The problem, of course, is that we may well prefer not to invite foreign naval officers for tours on board U.S. nuclear submarines. Nor, it would seem, would it make much sense to build a squadron of U.S. diesel-electric submarines mainly to give ourselves experience of our likely adversaries’ thinking- The cost would be grossly excessive. The submarines would be unable to make fast transits to overseas trouble spots: they really would be no more than trainers.
The biggest savings from lengthening careers would come from reduced training requirements. The annual intake of officers and sailors to sustain a given force level would drop. Incentives to keep capable personnel in the Navy, whether or not they advanced in rank, would increase our experience level and probably reduce our accident levels. Greater stability in the crews of ships and naval stations might increase the sense of community, and perhaps cause more sailors to remain in the Navy, where their greater experience would be valuable. These are not trivial considerations.