Pentagon officials seek to show they are reorienting to great power competition with China by shifting money under the flat defense topline. The goal is to spend a more defense dollars on high-end capabilities to match the National Defense Strategy instead of pleading for more, new money. The tradeoffs will become very real for members of Congress when the 2021 budget is released in February.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s defense-wide review is intended to identify programs and efforts that can be scaled back or canceled and reinvested into competition. The process is examining everything in the so-called Fourth Estate—from military health care to drones to data centers. According to one senior defense official, this is Esper’s way of showing Congress and the bureaucracy that even what would usually be considered a paltry $10 million by military budgeteers is not too small an amount if it can be moved into a higher priority area for the Pentagon. 

Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley.

Esper spearheaded a similar process while leading the Army, known as Night Court. The Army review process transferred $33 billion from legacy weapons to spend more on emerging technologies,” with roughly $15 billion of the total coming from equipment. The rest came mostly from business process reform, services contract reductions, and civilian headcount cuts. At its conclusion, the Army cut or canceled 186 programs—split equally between program kills and program delays. 

Major Army acquisition programs affected by the portfolio reorientation included CH-47 Chinook helicopter upgrades, tactical trucks and vehicles, armored vehicles, missiles, and air and missile defenses. The redirected savings were plowed into higher priority baskets, including the Army’s Big Six: Long-Range Precision Fires, Next-Generation Combat Vehicles, Future Vertical Lift, air and missile defense, soldier lethality, and battlefield networks.

However, Esper is not the first one to lead such an efficiencies effort. As he decides what should be sacrificed to align with the defense strategy, he should beware of the Gates’ trap. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates oversaw many efficiency drills on the job. The weapons and equipment cancelations he pushed through led to outcomes that still plague the Defense Department to this day. When his focus shifted from platforms to processes, he tried to reduce headquarters and headcount across the department. Again, his success was limited and those consequences continue to ripple through the Pentagon. 

One of Gates’ highest profile bureaucratic kills was to shutter Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) in the 2012 budget request. Following the closure of Joint Forces Command, many of its personnel were simply shifted to the Joint Staff. According to the Pentagon’s 2012 Manpower Report, the Joint Staff more than tripled from 1,286 in fiscal year 2010 to 4,244 in fiscal year 2012. This was largely a result of absorbing JFCOM staff.

But not its missions.

This shell game won Gates plaudits from across Washington for being tough on bureaucracy. Yet nearly a decade later, the Pentagon is scrambling to rebuild what was lost with the closure of Joint Forces Command. While most of the people working at JFCOM were able to find jobs elsewhere, the institutional memory and experience in developing joint concepts dissipated away. And the battle to create the unique command had been hard fought and years in the making.

The result is evident today. A recent article by Tom Greenwood and Pat Savage categorized today’s joint concept development process as hollow. They noted how it “relies too heavily on a bottom-up approach that begins independently within each service.” For example, the Army is refining its Multi-Domain Operations concept while DARPA is crafting what it calls Mosaic Warfare. The Air Force is focused on a Multi-Domain Command and Control concept while the Navy continues to think through “distributed maritime operations.” 

An ongoing tension between readiness priorities of the services versus the joint force has been created. No one office or agency is dedicated to creating a plan that would reconcile these sometimes competing priorities. Joint concepts need to be created through a process that integrates all the services’ efforts and then identifies the appropriate requirements. The concept must then be “rigorously validated through experimentation, exercises, and training, and subjected to the systematic analysis necessary to generate the associated time-phased force deployment data,” according to the National Defense Strategy Commission. 

JFCOM used to carry out this essential function. Pentagon leaders are now scrambling to stand up an office on the Joint Staff to essentially re-establish what was lost when it closed. 

Divesting deep knowledge, cutting-edge analytical capability, and centralized planning authority at the Pentagon was unwise and created a deficit that still haunts decision makers. In its report, the National Defense Strategy Commission noted that throughout its deliberations, Pentagon leaders failed in their basic duties of creating a logical chain that links objectives to operational concepts to capabilities to programs and resources. 

While the commission lamented this inability as “simply intolerable in an organization with responsibility for tasks as complex, expensive, and important as the Department of Defense,” they hit the mark with the risk involved. Lack of serious analytical capability “hampers the Secretary of Defense’s ability to design, assess, and implement the National Defense Strategy (NDS).” 

The result is that “many key concepts emphasized in the NDS are imprecise or unrealistic.” Secretary Esper should heed the lessons of the past and not cut necessary institutional memory and knowledge as he seeks to trim defense agencies. Otherwise, he might win the efficiencies hour and lose the concept development and implementation day that is necessary for successful implementation of the National Defense Strategy.