The quadrennial strategy spectacle
that occurs when a new administration comes to town had been operating as
expected until the invasion of Ukraine scrambled beliefs and assumptions. As
the final commas were to be placed on a revised National Security Strategy and National
Defense Strategy, the brazenness of global authoritarianism on the move appears
to now offer a watershed opportunity to outline a new vision of US leadership
for the century. The reality though is that whatever the outcome of this now
delayed exercise, it will likely not make much of a substantive difference as the
ability to achieve our ambitions has become increasingly unattainable.

While more money for defense
will obviously help, strategic execution has regrettably been challenged by a
decades-long undermining and deterioration of the administrative means and
capacities that enable any strategy or policy to be realized. Functional capabilities,
skills, assets, and resources (ships, aircraft, diplomacy, etc.) are the
building blocks of strategy, but the underlying management processes such as
budget, acquisition, and personnel vital to developing and maintaining these
means are seriously broken, divorced from time and urgency, and left to fester
in inefficiency. This administrative “plumbing of government” is massively
obstructed and gridlocked, and we have paid scant attention to its importance or
how to fix it.

Senior policymakers seem
unaware of the consequences of this failure in public administration and indeed
their unfocused, inconsistent, and ever-changing policy desires have often undermined
any semblance of good public management practice. As a result, the return on what
the US government is getting from each dollar invested in national security has
been rapidly diminishing. Our adversaries have no doubt taken notice of this trend.

The most direct manifestation
of this productivity decline can be measured in the time it takes to deliver
new capability and innovation to US forces. Innovation time is now measured in
decades rather than in the three to four years that was once achievable. This
is despite the commercial market, and China doing more with less and delivering
new information and defense systems on a timescale compatible with Moore’s law.

Unfortunately, public management
processes, when they have received what qualifies for passing attention from senior
leaders, are often in the context of a vague promise for “acquisition reform”
and “greater oversight.” Without leadership understanding of what this really means
or subsequent personal focus and follow-up, this often translates into the
wrong types of actions implemented by a risk-averse support staff and bureaucracy.
These agents have historically layered on new inefficiencies and costs, further
stretching out the time to deliver capability.

The budget system, industrial
policy, requirements process, personnel authorities, regulations, financial incentives,
security regimes, information management, and accounting have received even
less senior-level awareness than ill-advised passing comments about oversight and
contracting. Each of these management tools has ultimately been bureaucratized
and sub-optimized to achieve conflicting goals that have further undermined spending
productivity and made strategy implementation ever more elusive.

A greater focus on fixing the
plumbing of government would give the nation an opportunity to create an
effective strategy based on an expansion of capacity and competencies. This
foundation should be designed and built around deploying new capabilities in
timeframes that could actually influence the next four-year strategy cycle — not
in six presidential election cycles or the quarter of a century into the future
that it now takes to develop and deliver an F-35 equivalent or a new class of
warship.

Senior officials and the
modern-day Metternich and Kissinger acolytes who produce our strategy documents
need to be as equally proficient in the impact of the FAR, ITAR, JCIDS, PPBE,
OTAs, the 5000 series, HQEs, and a myriad of other administrative processes and
authorities on the future US ability to project power as they are about the
intentions of China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. Some serious thinking about
the relationship between management practices and strategy is required if we
are to ever implement the necessary set of actions to outlast our rivals.

No capability can be created, nor strategy implemented, without targeted, efficient, and streamlined management processes to effectively allocate resources; incentivize contracting with the most innovative parts of the industrial base; hire, train, and retain the best talent; collect and use the right information to guide decision making; and most importantly do all of this with a sense of urgency and time. Every inefficiency in managerial effectiveness not aligned with expanding capacity or delivering timely innovation is a tax on our military and foreign policy capabilities. As our potential adversaries multiply and grow stronger, we can no longer afford to pay such taxes. A focus on public management practices as enablers of our strategy is long past due as a national priority.

The post National strategy and public management: Ignoring the plumbing of government at our peril appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.