Barriers to Achieving Efficiencies
Resistance to change is part of the reason efficiencies are hard to achieve. But there are also more fundamental barriers.
- Nature of Military Mission: The department’s primary and overriding mission is to deter wars and if necessary, fight and win them. Neither profit nor efficiency appear in this statement of mission, in contrast to most private firms where profit represents a key goal. Not surprisingly, DoD commanders and managers focus on making planes fly and tanks run rather than on efficiency, a focus that will be heightened by the events of September 11. This is the most important barrier to achieving efficiencies in the Department of Defense.
- Pressure to Spend Budgets: Most commanders and managers believe that they must spend all their current budget or face cuts in future years, an attitude that does not promote efficiency. The author’s experience on a government aircraft, which slowed down in flight in order to use all its budgeted flying hours during the year’s final mission, highlights this problem in a tiny but telling way.
- Lack of Incentives: DoD’s field-level managers have little incentive to spend the time and make the hard choices necessary to achieve efficiencies because their units usually do not benefit from the effort. By contrast, in both the private sector and at least some foreign militaries (Australia for example), managers have stronger incentives to promote efficiency.
- Congress Factor: While it does many things well with regard to national security, Congress sometimes blocks or hampers DoD’s effort to improve efficiency. Pork-barrel spending and reluctance to permit changes, such as base closures, do not promote efficiency.