He raised good questions about personnel costs, too, like healthcare fees and pay raises. Like how many civilians and military the department really needs. And how many officers, and what about all those folks who are doing commercial, not military work? If any secretary wants to take this on, he does so gingerly, and at the edges, the way Secretary Gates did, but a full assault is needed to make any real progress.
Above all, Hagel addressed what he once called "bloat" at the Pentagon -- too many headquarters, too big a Joint Staff, a plethora of offices. The back office needs to be the cutting edge of budget discipline; it is too often ignored in debates about whether weapons or uniforms will pay the price.
Like all good speeches, and all puddings, the proof will lie in the eating. So far, the signs aren't good. The terms of reference for the Strategic Choices and Management Review (known as "scammer" in the Pentagon -- an unfortunate acronym) Hagel ordered did not make it clear that program options were needed at much lower budget levels. And the secretary may have made a strategic error in saying that the entire building, including the service chiefs, "are going to come out of this together." The big, hard choices are the ones the chiefs do not like to make: cutting billets, offices, infrastructure. The operating budgets have historically been cut the least in a defense drawdown. They are the pet rocks, the bulwark of service turf. And to cut them down to size, the secretary is going to have to discipline the services, not bear hug them. It will not be easy. He will need to lay down the law and take the money.
In fact, the whole task is going to be unbelievably difficult. Because if Hagel means business, he is taking on the Iron Triangle, all three parts at once. He is going after the services' cherished possessions. He is going after the programs and basing infrastructure Congress loves to protect. And he is telling industry and the communities that house bases and offices that some of them will not survive.
Few secretaries have done this and gotten away with it. Eisenhower, whom Hagel quoted twice, could do it because, well, he had five stars and the highest-ranking officers had only four. Nixon could do it because the war was ending and his defense secretary, Melvin Laird, was one of the best pickpockets the Pentagon has ever seen. And Dick Cheney and Colin Powell could do it because they were Cheney and Powell.
Every drawdown is tough. This one should, in theory, be less tough because the budget is historically high. But the problems are historically tough, too. So we should wait a while, spoon in hand, for the pudding tasting, to see if the rhetoric this week is followed by the discipline it will take to bring the Iron Triangle to heel.
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