Should Michèle Flournoy Be Secretary of Defense? POGO – Project on Government Oversight BY WINSLOW WHEELER & PIERRE SPREY NOVEMBER 20, 2020 President-elect Joe Biden faces monumental challenges, left to him by an exceptionally dysfunctional administration now heading for the exits—despite temper tantrums en route. Among those challenges, one hardly mentioned during the campaign is stemming the runaway appetite in the Pentagon, the defense industry, and Congress for never-ending increases in the military budget.The president-elect’s apparent pick for secretary of defense, Michèle Flournoy, would not squelch that appetite. Her stated prescriptions for defense are to bring in people ill-suited to curb Pentagon spending, kill off badly needed oversight, and worsen long-standing pathologies that make our armed forces smaller, older, and weaker.
Keep in mind Flournoy‘s extensive defense industry ties. In 2002 she went from positions in the Pentagon and the National Defense University to the mainstream but hawkish Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is largely funded by industry and Pentagon contributions. Five years later, she co-founded the second-most heavily contractor-funded think tank in Washington, the highly influential Center for a New American Security (CNAS). That became a stepping stone to her role as under secretary of defense for policy in the Obama administration. From there she rotated to the Boston Consulting Group, after which the firm’s military contracts expanded from $1.6 million to $32 million in three years. She also joined the board of Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting firm laden with defense contracts. In 2017 she co-founded WestExec Advisors, helping defense corporations market their products to the Pentagon and other agencies.
Though WestExec Advisors does not reveal its clients, Flournoy has stated, “Building bridges between Silicon Valley and the U.S. government is really, really important,” even a “labor of love.” WestExec is also careful not to designate Flournoy as a lobbyist, which could run afoul of Biden’s likely prohibitions against appointing “lobbyists” to senior positions. But a WestExec source did tell an interviewer, “We’ll tell you who to go talk to” and what to tell them. This simply circumvents the legalities; it is lobbying by remote control.
In a CNAS article this July, Flournoy laid out a plan embraced by candidate Biden and other Democrats, “Sharpening the U.S. Military’s Edge: Critical Steps for the Next Administration.” The piece reveals Flournoy’s corporate outlook and outlines how the next secretary of defense should manage the Pentagon.
The nature of any Pentagon administration stems from the quality of the people selected to run it. Addressing this central question, Flournoy states:
It will be imperative for the next secretary to appoint a team of senior officials who meet the following criteria: deep expertise and competence in their areas of responsibility; proven leadership in empowering teams, listening to diverse views, making tough decisions, and delivering results; mission-driven and able to work well in a team of strong peers … and diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that will ultimately contribute to better decision making and organizational performance.
Nowhere does she list ethics, character, objectivity, or independence from contractor, service, or political biases, all qualities stunningly missing from Trump’s Pentagon as well as earlier ones…………..
Pork, unmentioned by name, also rears its head in the Flournoy article. She advocates various funds, organizations, and a “center of excellence” to monetize technology. Again, history counts. In 2010 the House initiated a Rapid Innovation Fund to support technology development, just as Flournoy proposes. In actuality, it turned out to be an earmarking slush fund so members of Congress could satisfy local interests and circumvent new rules in Congress to pretend to end earmarks. Flournoy would likely expand this contractor self-funding process inside the Defense Department. Once it shows up in a Pentagon spending bill, the congressional add-ons will proliferate, given how voraciously today’s Congress stuffs earmarks into defense bills.
Another word that does not appear in the Flournoy article is “audit.” The Defense Department is the only major federal agency that has never passed an audit, despite statutory and constitutional mandates. Some feeble progress has been made in recent years, but without far stronger action, it will be many years before the department delivers to Congress and the public clean audits of contractor spending and profits, much less routine audits of agency and contractor fraud. Under an uninterested Flournoy, it would be an even longer time……………
None of the Biden/Flournoy/Clinton thinking is new. Recall slogans from the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations like “transformation” and “revolution in military affairs” that promised modernized forces for affordable costs. In reality, the outcome of those promises has been shrinking combat forces, more program failures, weapon fleets growing steadily older, and troops training less—all at ever-growing cost.
To explain, we need to examine some Pentagon budget history.
Defense spending is now at an all-time post-World War II high no matter how you adjust for inflation—barring three years, 2010 to 2012, of even higher spending under President Barack Obama. Looking at yearly appropriations since the Korean War (unadjusted for inflation in order to avoid the Pentagon’s doctored inflation indices), the figure below reveals that the Pentagon budget has never fallen below a steady 5% growth curve, except for a brief departure in the late Obama and early Trump years.
This 65 years’ worth of inexorable spending growth has been unaffected by dramatic changes in America’s actual national security needs, revisions of U.S. national strategies, the rise or collapse of perceived enemies, or—for the most part—who is president or whether we are at war or peace.
Second, throughout this perpetual budget expansion, the Army, Air Force, and Navy have been shrinking—with the shrinkage accelerating during the period of highest spending growth: the period since 9/11. Moreover, the added money and smaller forces have not resulted in overall modernization. Our smaller inventories of armored vehicles, ships and aircraft are all today dramatically older, on average, than at any time in modern history. Nor are these forces better trained, nor their equipment better maintained. Indeed, all of these measures have been declining significantly, especially now.
How can so much more money lead to smaller, older, less effective forces?
………….. Beyond hardware and technology, we need to do a far more intelligent job of understanding the never-ending evolution of tactics and forms of warfare……….. Mercenary parties have no part in that process. We need to listen to military leaders who have experienced both defeat and victory on the battlefield while remaining free of industry influence and careerism; engineers and scientists who have developed proven, useful technologies; and industry leaders who have delivered successful, affordable products and eschewed self- and corporate-interest.
The Flournoy plan proposes no such rigorous evaluation or evaluators of new ideas and new weapons.
Under her plan, the students wouldn’t just grade their own exams; they would write them and then demand we reward them handsomely for doing so.
Instead of this toxic plan, we need to select, nominate, and confirm a new generation of defense leaders who have demonstrated the ethics, competence, independence, and spine to produce a stronger national defense and a more honest system for delivering it.
The president-elect should be asking who those people are. https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2020/11/should-michele-flournoy-be-secretary-of-defense/
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