Thornberry: Slow & Steady Saves The Pentagon

WASHINGTON: Mac Thornberry won’t save the world. The soft-spoken Texan faces high expectations as the new head of the House Armed Services Committee, but he spent his first DC speech as chairman lowering them on what’s become his signature issue, reforming how the Pentagon buys weapons. After more than a year working quietly on acquisition reform, the famously thoughtful Thornberry promised he won’t drop any blockbuster legislation. Instead, he’ll work with appropriators, the Senate, and the administration on a slow, steady, and consensus-seeking effort that can be sustained year after year.

“In the spring, I will probably put some proposals out there, ask for people’s feedback, and then the idea would be maybe they’d be incorporated into this year’s NDAA [national defense authorization act],” Thornberry said modestly this morning at the American Enterprise Institute. “There’s not going to be a 2,000-page bill that ‘solves’ acquisition. It does not exist. Nobody’s that smart. What we will do is, first, try to do no harm; secondly, try to make some things a little better; and then next year, try to make some more things better, and the next year try to make some more things better, and keep after it as long as I have this job.”

“We’re not going to just throw out an acquisition package and try to get it through the committee in a short timeframe,” he added later. “I want to hear feedback and… back and forth discussion, hopefully not just this year but in years to come.”

They were careful remarks from a careful man — a stark contrast to the take-no-prisoners ex-POW who’ll be Thornberry’s opposite number in the Senate. Despite the tremendous difference in temperaments, however, Thornberry said he was “very optimistic” about working with John McCain. “We have spoken about it several times and I think acquisition reform is going to be very high on his list of priorities, just as it is very high on my list,” Thornberry said.

Indeed, between McCain’s burning hatred of Pentagon waste, Under Secretary of Defense Frank Kendall‘s “Better Buying Power” program, prospective Secretary Ash Carter‘s acquisition expertise, and his own commitment to reform, Thornberry said, “we’re going to have a group of folks that really want to get things done, folks in both parties.”

So what might step one be? As acquisition experts inside the Pentagon and out have urged, it may well be repealing old laws before passing new ones. It may also be a joint venture between the GOP Congress and the Obama administration.

“Sec. Kendall has been working with us to identify duplicative overlapping regulations that either he can thin out or, working together, we can thin out,” Thornberry said. “That process is going well and is pretty far along.”

Beyond getting rid of regulations, though, “taking some additional steps will require us actually to change or repeal some laws,” Thornberry said. “I don’t know how far we can go until we see what the market can bear.”

Thornberry hardly sees Congress’s most important job as getting out of the way. Quite the opposite. He spent much of his time defending not just the legislature’s constitutional role but specific decisions often decried as parochial meddling: forbidding base closures, keeping the A-10 “Warthog” attack plane, adding funds to keep the nation’s sole tank plant running, or refusing to retire warships.

“We don’t know that we want to give up the A-10 or the ability to have tanks or the 25 years left on the George Washington. Is there a cost to preserving that option this year? Sure,” Thornberry said. “[But] with the volatility that we’ve seen in defense budgets…and with the volatility in the world situation, most of us want to be pretty careful about giving things away, because it’s really going to be hard to get them back.”

What can we afford to keep, though? That’s a question we can’t even answer unless we resolve the chronic uncertainty over the Budget Control Act caps popularly known as sequestration. Here Thornberry sounded even more guarded than usual. “Clearly there has to be some relief from … what is a real cut,” he said: Accounting for inflation, staying under BCA caps would drop the base defense budget from $521 billion to $515 in one year. But he refused to draw a “red line” behind the $541 billion figure set for ’16 in last year’s House GOP budget plan or any other number.

“I’m not going to say ‘not one dime less’ because one dime less would still be a whole lot better than a lot less,” Thornberry said. “Whatever can pass the House and pass the Senate and get signed into law by the president, I think I’m for.”