How to Transform the World's Biggest Bureaucracy: The Pentagon

The massive defense bureaucracy poses a great risk to our national security and must be transformed for the modern era.

The DoD is the world’s largest employer with over two million employees deployed around the globe, conducting a vast array of war and peacetime operations. The DoD includes the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Joint Staff, three Military Departments, six Services, 11 Combatant Commands, and 17 major defense agencies. The Pentagon, the world’s (now second) largest office building, is a small city of over 26,000 military and civilian leaders to oversee this complex enterprise.

Congress is also actively involved in Pentagon operations. There are four defense focused committees and the GAO that provide detailed oversight of budgets, policies, programs, and operations. The annual NDAA is thousands of pages of Congressional direction on organizing, managing, and executing the vast bureaucracy. This includes hundreds of reports and briefings sent to Congress annually. The $850B+ budget is broken into thousands of budget line items that are meticulously scrubbed, adjusted, with increasing direction and constrained on how to execute the funding.

The DoD is now 75 years old and showing its age.

• During WWII, the DoD could develop and produce at scale major weapon systems in a year or two. Now, our major weapon systems take 10-15 years.

• A key reason President Truman established the DoD was to unify the military departments. Yet today we still struggle to manage and fight as a Joint Force.

• Buying less with more. The DoD budget is over $850B yet continues to lose buying power as the bureaucracy tail consumes more than the warfighting tooth.

• A majority of our major weapon systems were fielded in the last century. We cannot expect to win against near peer adversaries with 30+ year old systems.

• With a growing array of threats and technologies operating at a greater speed and scale than ever before, the bureaucracy impedes speed, agility, and innovation.

In asking Chat GPT: “How to Transform Bureaucracy” it provided a valuable set of eight main points. It was so good that I decided to use that as a structure for this piece and use it as a writing prompt. The focus of this piece is on defense acquisition and related elements of the massive bureaucracy.

1. Clearly define your vision

ChatGPT: Start by articulating a clear vision of what you want the transformed bureaucracy to look like. Identify the key objectives, outcomes, and values that will guide the transformation effort.

The DoD’s mantra should be: To deter or win wars.

It achieves this by developing, training, and equipping a joint force to be lethal. By rapidly exploiting leading technologies and adapting their ways of fighting. One that is responsive to change in a dynamic operational environment. One that dominates all domains: air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace. One that fights as a coalition with many allies and partners.

Key objectives include:

• Speed of Delivery: Regularly deliver and iterate on warfighting capabilities. DoD can no longer afford to take 10-15+ years to plan, design, develop, test, and produce major weapon systems with the vision of operating and sustaining them for 30-50+ years. It must aggressively shrink the time from idea to IOC. Buy before build is the law - buying commercial solutions is the default approach.

• Capability Portfolios: Pivot structures, investments, and processes to deliver integrated suites of capabilities. DoD can no longer manage requirements, budgets, and acquisitions for over 1,000 stovepiped systems. It must involve many industry vendors early, competing to develop and produce novel solutions for the key mission sets and capability gaps. DoD is piloting new portfolio management practices with its PEOs.

• MVPs, Prototypes, and Experiments: Technologists and operators must work closely together to explore capabilities that maximize mission impact. Rapidly develop initial products for operators to experiment with to accelerate learning and feedback then scale what works and pivot when necessary.

2. Foster a culture of innovation and accountability

ChatGPT: Bureaucracies often suffer from a lack of innovation and accountability. Encourage a culture that values creativity, experimentation, and risk-taking. Reward and recognize employees who come up with innovative ideas and implement them successfully. Hold individuals and teams accountable for their performance and ensure transparency in decision-making processes.

DoD has made many attempts to foster an innovation culture. It has a Defense Innovation Unit, a Defense Innovation Board, a Defense Innovation Steering Group, and a Defense Innovation Ecosystem. DEPSECDEF gave a keynote address on the Urgency to Innovate. While there are pockets of innovators across the department having novelty with impact (H/T Dan Ward), the bureaucracy of the Pentagon and Congress crush the innovative spirit. When new pilot programs or pathways are established, bureaucrats see it as a threat to their authorities and focus on burning the saplings of innovation.

There have been hundreds of reports criticizing the failures of those in program offices and related organizations for not diligently following their textbook policies. With each failure comes new compliance regulations and oversight. Rarely do the oversight organizations face criticism or scrutiny on the delays and risks imposed nor held to impact measures themselves.

DoD and Congressional leaders must first come to the realization that the current environment doesn’t work. If they want to foster innovation, they must loosen their death grip on the enterprise. Provide strategic direction and delegate decisions to the lowest practicable level. Headquarters organizations adopt more of a servant leadership mindset and pivot from oversight to enablement. They must ask themselves what they can do to reduce or eliminate the barriers for those on the front lines and give them the resources needed to succeed. There will be failures. Celebrate them as learning opportunities to do it better next time. Scale the successes by identifying the sources and replicate them.

Most importantly, there are those in key positions across the department that are unwilling or unable to change. There are toxic leaders that drive good people away. There are bureaucrats who actively sabotage the enterprise. Your people know who they are. You must take aggressive steps to remove them from these key roles and if they cannot change, remove them from the organization.

3. Streamline processes and eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy

ChatGPT: Identify and streamline bureaucratic processes that impede efficiency and productivity. Simplify procedures, reduce paperwork, and eliminate unnecessary approvals. Implement technology solutions that automate routine tasks and enable self-service options for employees and citizens.

DoD and Congressional leaders must take aggressive steps here as there are decades of bureaucratic debt built up across the department. There are thousands of bureaucrats that offer little value yet will fiercely resist reform efforts that seek to remove their approval authorities. DoD leaders should be bold with issuing policy memos that remove mandates for low value processes and reviews. Earned Value Management, Clinger Cohen Act compliance, and cost accounting systems are prime examples of streamlining opportunities. Don’t spend a year updating a policy to enable a waiver by an oversight board. Eliminate the low/non-value items quickly. Continue to streamline and modernize processes leveraging data and tools to balance speed with rigor. This includes the PPBE budget and JCIDS requirements processes.

Oversight is a crushing force across the DoD. While it validates strategies, tracks progress, and manages risks, it also imposes additional costs, schedules, and risks to programs and operations. While Congress drove the delegation of decision authorities, many Pentagon organizations continue to impose themselves to review and certify many program strategies and compliance with their vast array of policies. Massive reviews, documents, and metrics once reserved for DoD’s largest billion-dollar programs, now extends to programs in the tens of millions of dollars. Good people don’t want to operate in an environment with dozens of oversight organizations requiring hundreds of pages of reports and regular reviews which only add complexity and risk. Some Congressional staff seek to impose crushing oversight on programs, processes, and policies which sabotages speed and agility.

4. Empower employees and encourage collaboration

ChatGPT: Create a work environment that empowers employees to make decisions and take ownership of their work. Encourage collaboration and cross-functional teams to break down silos and promote information sharing. Provide training and development opportunities to enhance skills and knowledge.

This requires leadership attention to help shape the culture to foster more collaboration. Marking far too many things CUI or classified greatly discourages people from sharing across organizational silos and involve industry partners. Sharing strategies, technologies, threats, processes, and other insights enables professionals to do their jobs with greater speed and impact. Encourage more short videos, blog posts, or other mediums for employees to easily share best practices and lessons learned.

5. Embrace digital transformation.

ChatGPT: Leverage technology to transform bureaucratic processes. Implement digital tools and platforms for data management, communication, and collaboration. Explore emerging technologies like AI and machine learning to automate routine tasks and enhance decision-making.

The enterprise that more than 40 years ago helped invent the Internet for R&D collaboration must leverage the Web as a platform to network its workforce. DoD’s Advanced Research Projects Agency invented the internet in 1969, yet DoD struggles to effectively collaborate across the enterprise. While the pandemic forced the world to rapidly shift to online collaboration, DoD is still over a decade behind in providing basic file sharing and online collaboration tools to operate within and across organizations. Smartphones, tablets, and laptops are not authorized within most parts of the Pentagon. Enable your knowledge workers to collaborate effectively online instead of spending endless hours in unproductive meetings reviewing Power Points.

6. Engage stakeholders and citizens

ChatGPT: Involve stakeholders and citizens in the transformation process. Seek feedback, conduct surveys, and hold consultations to understand their needs and expectations. Engage them in co-creating solutions and ensure transparency and accountability in public service delivery.

DoD has many climate surveys that cover organizational culture or hot button issues. Yet leaders need to do more to involve those on the front lines of the bureaucratic processes with meaningful reforms to change or eliminate key elements. Leadership and staff should clearly define desired outcomes then ask what’s the most efficient and effective means to achieve them. What are the biggest impediments to achieving those results? The answers shouldn’t simply be adding more people or budgets. In many cases it’s simply reducing the number of people and constraints. Ask operational commands what acquisition pros could do better for mission impact.

A regular question leaders should ask is: What low/non-value activities should we stop doing? Removing the drag in an organization can have a huge effect on employee engagement and speed of delivery. Delegate decisions to the lowest practical level to execute against commander’s intent. Avoid using the phrase “we need to hold the programs accountable” as that focuses on adversarial oversight and punishment. Adopt the mindset of enabling people and having a shared responsibility for outcomes.

7. Establish performance metrics and monitor progress.

ChatGPT: Define clear performance metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure progress and outcomes. Regularly monitor and evaluate the transformation efforts against these metrics. Adjust strategies and tactics as necessary to stay on track.

DoD has countless reports and metrics. Those who work in this massive bureaucracy spend a significant amount of time reporting up their chain and across the enterprise. The data is scattered in thousands of Excel and PowerPoint files with database migrations well behind schedule. The annual NDAA includes hundreds of reports to Congress. Even with all this reporting, the most common theme of GAO reports is: “[Agency] needs to increase reporting on X.”

The DoD needs to focus more on Measuring What Matters. Clearly define your primary goals and ensure metrics align operations to achieve them. Eliminate many low value metrics that are rarely used to save time and energy. Within the acquisition enterprise the focus should be on delivering better capabilities faster.

8. Continuously learn and adapt

ChatGPT: Bureaucratic transformation is an ongoing process. Learn from successes and failures, and adapt your approach accordingly. Encourage a learning mindset across the organization and foster a culture of continuous improvement.

While many areas of the defense enterprise require bold changes and even clean sheet approaches, each organization should focus on continuous improvement. Leaders should have monthly, quarterly, and annual reflections on how the organization is doing to achieve its priority outcomes and what steps it can take to do better.

Leaders should regularly encourage employees to offer insights that others may not realize along with empowering them to act within certain guardrails to improve on outcomes. They must visibly act upon their employees’ suggestions to demonstrate a willingness to change, which will fuel greater engagement and impact.

Summary

Chat GPT: Remember that transforming bureaucracy requires strong leadership, effective change management, and sustained commitment. It is a long-term process, but with perseverance and dedication, significant improvements can be achieved.

The national security threats around the world require the department to operate with greater speed and agility. While some may adopt a wait-and-see mindset based on the elections in November, the threats dictate we must not let up. We must trim the fat in the bureaucracy and refocus limited resources on higher impact areas. We must reignite the innovative spirit the DoD had decades ago to build and achieve great things. The DoD needs to recruit and retain more tech experts and unleash them across the enterprise. The DoD requires a robust innovation ecosystem with many new technology companies competing to rapidly deliver novel solutions for greater mission impact.

There are success stories across the DoD and federal government to model and scale. I highly recommend Hack Your Bureaucracy by Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai who share their stories of remarkable success within the heart of the federal bureaucracy.

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