The new National Defense Strategy calls for “urgent change at a significant scale” to reposition the U.S. military for global competitions with China and Russia, but the Defense Department lacks a sound strategic analysis process to drive the tough budget decisions likely required for major transformation, according to the Government Accountability Office and former Pentagon officials who spent years crafting national security policy.
The Pentagon's analytical shortcomings have also been noticed by Congress, which in the Fiscal Year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act called DOD's ability to conduct detailed joint force assessments “particularly moribund.”
The National Defense Strategy Commission has also been critical of DOD's analytic weaknesses, writing in a November report to Congress that the “deficit in analytical capability, expertise, and processes must be addressed.”
“Throughout our work, we found that DOD struggled to link objectives to operational concepts to capabilities to programs and resources,” the commission states. “This inability is simply intolerable in an organization with responsibility for tasks as complex, expensive, and important as the Department of Defense. It hampers the secretary’s ability to design, assess, and implement the NDS, and it makes it difficult for Congress to have faith that the administration’s budget request supports its strategy.”
GAO in a March report said the gap in joint analytical capability is “particularly problematic” in light of recent proposals by the services to greatly expand their force structure -- including the Navy’s plan to grow the fleet by as much as 25 percent and the Air Force’s plan to grow squadrons by 24 percent.
John Pendleton, director of force structure and readiness issues at GAO, said there is essentially a mismatch between the National Defense Strategy's call for prioritizing and making tough decisions and the ability of senior DOD leaders to credibly weigh such decisions.
“The national defense strategy has a sense of urgency so big changes need to happen fast,” he told Inside Defense. “Overcoming the status quo is hard. Without robust analysis senior leaders may face resistance among the services and insurmountable headwinds in Congress. Without such a process, I worry that the department will ultimately not be able to make hard decisions and the nation will end up with a force structure that is insufficient to the threat or unaffordable to the taxpayer, or both.”
In this case, “overcoming the status quo” could mean arming DOD civilian leaders with data to force steep cuts to some military capabilities, while dramatically increasing others.
Decisions related to military force structure can be politically challenging, as evidenced by debates related to scaling back spending on aircraft carriers, the future of the Marine Corps' amphibious assault mission and composition of Army brigade combat teams.
But GAO found the military services have been reluctant to conduct or share “boundary-pushing analyses” or innovative force structure options for fear they will “jeopardize their forces or limit their options,” according to the report.
“Unless directed to by senior leaders, service officials told us that they typically do not use their limited analytic resources to conduct sensitivity analysis or explore alternative approaches,” GAO states.
As such, the services only ever pursue “marginal” changes in their force structures or strategic scenarios, according to GAO.
A congressional staffer studying the issue said most budget decisions being made, especially on military force structure, have little to no analysis linking them to the new National Defense Strategy.
“Right now, the [program and budget review] is where decisions get made -- currently absent analysis to move service [programs of record] off of dead-center current trajectory,” the staffer said. “The end results are small decisions on the margins that are just shavings with no realistic way to fulfill the NDS mandate for ‘urgent change at significant scale.’ Instead it is ‘slow change at small scale.’”
The staffer said lawmakers may revisit the topic in the upcoming defense authorization bill.
The Pentagon says it is working to reinvigorate its joint analytical process, but has yet to institutionalize any changes.
Additionally, GAO worries the Pentagon's approach to revamp the process is “not fully developed” and says it is “unclear whether they will provide the analytic support needed,” according to the report.
'Winners and losers'
Former civilian analysts at the Office of the Secretary of Defense said tension between their offices and the Joint Staff -- while healthy -- often contributed to an atmosphere of analytical gridlock.
Mara Karlin, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development at DOD who is now nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, described the process as one of “constant frustration from every which way.”
“It's hideous -- best-case scenario,” she added.
But without that debate, she said, civilians at OSD risk becoming a “rubber stamp” for the Joint Staff and military services.
“If done well, the debate should touch resources -- that becomes hot-button and extremely radioactive,” she said. “The department's different communities have different desires. You need to prioritize. There have got to be winners and losers.”
For the past several years, however, Karlin said the “tri-chairs” from DOD's top analytic communities -- the under secretary of defense for policy, the cost assessment and program evaluation office and the Joint Staff -- have retreated to their own separate corners of the Pentagon.
“If you don't force people to have holistic discussions, everyone just does what they want,” she said. “Right now, everybody wins.”
In its March report, GAO says the Pentagon's former analysis process run by tri-chairs at USD-P, CAPE and the Joint Staff -- “support for strategic analysis” or SSA -- was slow and cumbersome, but suffered mortal blows when CAPE disengaged from it in 2012 and when the Joint Staff left in 2015.
“Everyone has taken their analytical ball and gone home,” said Chris Dougherty, an analyst with the Center for a New American Security who previously served as senior advisor to the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development at DOD.
In his time at DOD, Dougherty helped write major sections of the NDS and tried to reform the department's analytic enterprise.
“I never saw this process function,” he said. “It was on life support when I got there and I spent two and a half years trying to defibrillate it back to life.”
Dougherty said he saw plenty of analysis at DOD, but was surprised how little there was at the strategic-level.
“This is one of those things that should be a scandal, but isn't,” he said.
Dougherty said too much has been left up to the military services and the Joint Staff, which sometimes place excessive emphasis on lessons learned from recent Middle East conflicts and service “lore.”
“The services can pick and choose and there is no authoritative way to judge it,” he said. “Hard decisions are just left to the services to make.”
Jim Mitre, a former director for analysis, strategy and force development at DOD who now works as senior vice president for strategy and analysis at Govini, said the Pentagon's analysis process is a “public good,” but often devolves into a competition between military officials wielding experience and civilian officials wielding data.
“The services need to advance institutional interests and the Joint Staff has to handle the chairman's priorities,” he said. “They saw the [civilian] analysis community as a problem child when this is really a problem area. We need senior leaders to be able to better leverage data to inform decisions. You need to have a strategic analysis process and the current process isn't working.”
'Less about checking boxes'
Pentagon officials admit the SSA process is broken, but say there is work to bring USD-P, CAPE and the Joint Staff together in newer, more flexible ways to provide faster analysis that does not rely on bureaucratic consensus.
The Joint Staff, in a statement to Inside Defense, said the collaborative tri-chair structure has been reestablished to begin new “concept-driven planning approaches” to strategic analysis.
“The intent is to create an analytic and planning feedback loop that leverages concepts, wargaming, analytics, experimentation and exercises to create better warfighting options, deliver needed joint capabilities, demonstrate their merit, integrate them into the force and learn from this at each step along the way,” Joint Staff said. “The tri-chair is actively engaging senior leaders and driving the discussion to ensure products and outputs meet the department's NDS and [National Military Strategy] guidance.”
Adam Winkleman, director of CAPE's strategic analysis and warfighting division, told Inside Defense in an interview that the tri-chairs of the defunct SSA process are now using “many different venues to get after joint analysis” for senior leaders.
"In SSA you really had one [voice],” he said. “The point was to generate single-point solutions. The problem was the process took a couple years.”
Now, he said, DOD's analytic community wants to develop multiple concepts, “heavy emphasis on the plural,” and ideas have been moving much faster than they did under SSA.
“What we used to do in years we're now doing in one month,” he said. “We are not trying to find a single-point solution for a future that is unpredictable and unknown.”
Winkleman was critical of the GAO report's emphasis on the need for a new “process.”
“They want to pin the rose on one or two people or they want to pin the rose on a process,” he said. “It doesn't matter which GAO report I've ever read, GAO, based on their charter, they need a piece of paper that they can go to and validate and verify and check against something. And if you look at how -- I would argue -- society is moving today, it is much more fluid, much more dynamic. We're trying not to be process-centric, we're trying to be output-and-result-centric. It's less about checking boxes.”
Pendleton of GAO said he understands DOD's need for flexibility and speed, but cautioned that “the analytic process needs to be institutionalized so it survives changes in leadership at DOD.”
Winkleman also said the reunification of the tri-chairs is not yet being used to drive budgetary decisions.
“In order to get all of the players being transparent, it's hard to do that if you're holding the budget over [them],” he said. “We're trying to create this community, we're trying to create a cultural shift. It won't be justification or the sole source of any fiscal decision.”
The congressional staffer studying the matter said “having a bunch of smart people talking about force planning issues is not bad in and of itself, but it needs to come to something,” especially concerning military budgets.
“I guess I’d say if it doesn’t come together in a product that recommends or analyzes courses of action on force structure, I have a hard time seeing how it moves the needle,” the staffer said. “Not sure the way forward as currently playing gets them to a place of actionable analysis at the speed of relevance. Eventually, force structure decisions are budget decisions . . . where the rubber and the rhetoric meets the road.”