Brose knows whereof he speaks. He is a veteran of John McCain’s unceasing efforts to reform both the military and the Pentagon while working with like-minded allies such as former House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry. Brose has few kind words for the Pentagon Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process, better known as PPBE. (The “E” is a rather late add-on, which I initiated in 2002 while I was serving as DoD Comptroller). He rightly notes that the process, built around what is termed the “Program of Record,” that is, those programs initiated and funded that have been incorporated into the Department’s “Future Years Defense Program,” or FYDP (pronounced “fidip”), has enabled the bureaucracy to stifle innovation.

The stultifying effects of the Program of Record have a long pedigree. I recall that when first joining the Pentagon in 1981, I proposed to a meeting of programmers that several older efforts be replaced by newer systems. My suggestion was met with a cynical response by an Army two-star general: “Weinberger may try to change what he wants. But he won’t get anywhere. The program is locked in.”

Decades later, as I was about to take office as Comptroller, Robert McNamara asked me if the DoD still operated on the basis of the ppb system that he had introduced four decades earlier. When I replied in the affirmative, his amazed reply was “they’re still using it?” Equally amazed was Donald Rumsfeld, who, upon resuming the Pentagon’s helm after a twenty-five-year hiatus, expressed his astonishment that nothing had changed. Indeed, when early in 2001 Rumsfeld called a meeting to discuss repurposing 10 percent of the Pentagon budget, he was flatly told by a senior military officer that “you can’t do it.” Rumsfeld got so frustrated that he stormed out of his own meeting.

As if the ossification of the program were not enough, Brose points out that there are no incentives for change. Indeed, there are disincentives, since program managers simply wish to avoid mistakes so that, after two or three years in their current positions, they could move on to other jobs without any record of failure that would blemish their efficiency reports. As he puts it, “the issue is not a lack of authority to go faster or take more risk, but that those who must exercise those authorities, bear those risks, and be accountable for the outcomes rarely use the authorities they have.”

Brose could have added that where an officer was permitted to remain in the same position for more than a few years, and was willing to risk failed experiments, the program ultimately proved to be a major success. That was the case with Hyman Rickover, who directed the naval nuclear program for decades, whose last several promotions were mandated by the Congress in the face of Navy recalcitrance, and whose successors serve for eight-year terms. Similarly, Wayne Meyer, whom Brose does not mention in his book, became manager of the Navy’s Aegis radar air defense program as a captain, and successfully led its upgrades and modifications even as he rose to the rank of two-star admiral.

One way to address Brose’s concern about the lack of risk taking in the Pentagon would be to change the rating system for both officers and civilian managers. The latter generally serve as deputy program managers and provide management continuity when their military bosses are assigned to other positions. Risk taking should be a criterion for promotion, rather than a drawback. Experimentation should be rewarded, and failure tolerated. That was the case when General Schriever and his colleagues launched the ballistic missile program, or when the Marines first sought to adapt the British vertical/short landing and take-off aircraft for their own amphibious missions.

In addition, the DoD should put greater emphasis on ensuring that the leaders of its acquisition programs remain fully abreast of the latest technological developments, and are open to acquiring them regardless of source, whether from the commercial sector or the long-standing defense industrial base. Military officers benefit from ongoing professional military education, though too few of them are exposed to the workings of industry, or the latest breakthroughs in university laboratories. Civilian managers have even less exposure to technological breakthroughs; indeed, the DoD has only begun to take the first halting steps toward providing continuing education for the civilian acquisition corps. Such exposure should be a prerequisite for promotion to general or flag rank, or to the senior executive service. Only acquisition managers who fully appreciate the significance of potential technological breakthroughs can be expected to seek them wherever they might be found, whether in the commercial sector, or even among America’s allies, whose advances over the years have all too often been dismissed as unimportant and/or insignificant because of the bureaucracy’s log-standing, and deleterious “not invented here” syndrome.

In addition to undertaking the training of civilians, the DoD has begun to reach out, albeit very haltingly, to the developers of commercial high-tech. Ash Carter, Barack Obama’s fourth and final secretary of defense, was especially sensitive to the need to exploit commercial breakthroughs for military purposes. Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of defense for Acquisition and Sustainment in the Trump administration, has built upon Carter’s outreach to Silicon Valley. The difficulty is that the career bureaucracy is not nearly as forward looking as many of the Pentagon’s leaders.

In 2015, Carter prompted the establishment of the Defense Innovation Unit (at the time called Experimental, or DIU-X). Possessing an office in Silicon Valley, the unit has a mandate to reach out to the commercial sector in order to help the U.S. military make faster use of emerging commercial technologies. The following year Carter had the unit report directly to him and staffed it with both civilians and reservists with experience in high-tech industry. By the time he departed his office in early 2017, the DIU had additional offices in other high-tech regions of the country—Boston, Austin, as well as the Pentagon.

DIU has a worthy mission, to be sure, and has indeed identified some start-up programs that the military services have incorporated into their own research and development budgets. In particular, during Lord’s tenure, DIU scored an important success when in late May 2020 it awarded Google—evidently no longer suffering from qualms about working with DoD—a contract to detect and protect against cyber threats. DIU will use Anthos, Google’s cloud service, to build, as the company put it, a “multi-cloud solution… allowing DIU to run web services and applications across Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure — while being centrally managed from the Google Cloud Console.” Thus, even as Microsoft and Amazon continue to tangle over JEDI, DIU, with a contract worth a fraction of the JEDI deal, has introduced DoD to another cloud-based approach.

The DIU award does not guarantee that the whole of DoD will actually adopt the Google cloud service, however. Indeed, the number of systems that the military has adapted from DIU’s pilot projects remains quite small. Moreover, the challenge of avoiding having these new systems weighed down by voluminous and bureaucratically-driven military specifications (termed mil-spec) has yet to be overcome.

What DIU really needs it cannot obtain from Congress: a fund that would enable it to move resources from less promising developments to new emerging ones without having to go through the entire PPBE process. As Brose notes, Congress worries about slush funds, and has tended to prefer micromanagement either on its own or on the part of the Office of the Secretary of Defense rather than grant the military, who are the actual consumers of technology, any degree of autonomy or flexibility in program development. This sentiment does not just affect DIU—it is one that constrains all DoD research, development, and procurement.

It is not merely an aversion to so-called “slush funds” that colors Congressional attitudes to defense budgeting. As Brose points out, and as I recall from exceedingly frustrating personal experience, Congress limits the Department’s ability to move funds among its accounts. Brose notes that the ceiling on what is called “re-programming” totals less than of one percent of the budget; the ceilings on individual accounts are considerably lower. These limits make it exceedingly difficult to support innovations as they emerge in the commercial sector.

It does not help that, as Brose notes, Congress’ inability to “correct the failings and oversights of the Department of Defense and the defense industrial base ... [while] too often us[ing] its awesome powers for things that do not matter much to the future effectiveness of our military,” is due in no small part “to the significant reduction in the number of members of Congress with military experience, which is roughly half of what it was thirty years ago.” In addition, he points out “less than 1 percent of members have studied computer science, and few have meaningful experience working in the technology industry.” While he acknowledges that neither form of experience is a prerequisite for prioritizing new technology for the military, he rightly concludes that “more leaders who understand these technically complex subjects can only help” and the same can be said regarding military experience.