Smart Procurement Reform and Dumb Procurement Reform
John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy, has a nice op-ed in the Journal advocating for a range of reforms in the procurement process that would hopefully lead to fewer embarrassing and pointless cost overruns. And, as someone who thinks these overruns are bad, I support his ideas. But, it’s worth pointing out the temporary coalitions liberals, libertarians and reform-oriented hawks like John McCain can form around these issues are likely to be just that: temporary.
That’s because Lehman isn’t angry that the money spent on the F-22 is a waste and that, more generally, we spend too much money on weapons systems, but that the contracting process has made it so the military can’t get enough weapons. With the F-22, the problem is that “the Navy cannot buy sufficient numbers.” Apparently, only having 187 next generation Air Force jets at a cost of $350 million each is objectionable — he wishes we could get all of the original 648 at their original projected price. Not having them, he says, is “disarmament without a treaty.” Later in the piece he says “We are rapidly disarming ourselves, even as defense spending grows.” And no where does he call for cuts in overall defense spending.
This is an important distinction. Liberals and libertarians oppose the F-22 and other weapons programs because we think they’re pointless and are part and parcel of a budgeting and procurement process which has gotten entirely out of whack and lavishes way too much money on the Pentagon. So that’s why we support, in addition to procurement reform, less military spending.
This “dumb reform” of just spending less would probably do a whole lot to actually improve the procurement process in the way Lehman envisions, because the Pentagon and the services would have to become more efficient in their spending because they knew they didn’t have access to an unlimited supply of government largess. Any number of reforms which still leave the basic political set up intact — Pentagon asks for huge amounts of money, Congress gives it to them — are still likely to be gamed by defense contractors.
