May 13, 2025
Dear Friends and Family,
Because I didn’t know much about the Department of Defense, I decided to buy a book to obtain some understanding and to share that understanding with you via excerpts. The book is titled Assignment Pentagon and was written by Major General Perry M. Smith, USAF (ret.) and Colonel Daniel M. Gerstein US Army (ret.) [written in 2020 – fifth edition].
The excerpts first provide statistics on its size, budget, personnel, and operational range (some stats. are a bit outdated given it was written in 2020). Then they move on to identifying the key players in the Pentagon and their responsibilities. This is followed by a view of the Pentagon’s key constituents. At the heart of the Pentagon’s business activities, is their strategic planning system coupled with the PPBES (Planning, Programing, Budgeting, and Execution System) process. Of importance is their approach to research, development and innovation for weapons of war which have shifted in approach as defined in the latter excerpts of the segment.
Next: The next segment focuses on the U.S. Military, a very key component of the Department of Defense. The excerpts of this segment will all come from Pete Hegseth’s book The War on Warriors published shortly before he became the Secretary of Defense.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Because I didn’t know much about the Department of Defense, I decided to buy a book to obtain some understanding and to share that understanding with you via excerpts. The book is titled Assignment Pentagon and was written by Major General Perry M. Smith, USAF (ret.) and Colonel Daniel M. Gerstein US Army (ret.) [written in 2020 – fifth edition].
The excerpts first provide statistics on its size, budget, personnel, and operational range (some stats. are a bit outdated given it was written in 2020). Then they move on to identifying the key players in the Pentagon and their responsibilities. This is followed by a view of the Pentagon’s key constituents. At the heart of the Pentagon’s business activities, is their strategic planning system coupled with the PPBES (Planning, Programing, Budgeting, and Execution System) process. Of importance is their approach to research, development and innovation for weapons of war which have shifted in approach as defined in the latter excerpts of the segment.
Next: The next segment focuses on the U.S. Military, a very key component of the Department of Defense. The excerpts of this segment will all come from Pete Hegseth’s book The War on Warriors published shortly before he became the Secretary of Defense.
Happy Learning,
Harley
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH – SEGMENT 9
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: THE PENTAGON – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: The Department of Defense (DOD) is an international corporation with an annual outlay of almost $750 billion and more than 3 million military and civilian personnel stationed in nearly every country in the world. This figure includes more than 1.4 million men and women on active duty and 718,000 civilian personnel, as well as another 1.1 million that serve in the National Guard and Reserve forces. The department’s capabilities allow it to conduct operations ranging from humanitarian assistance to peacekeeping to full-scale combat with conventional and nonconventional weapons. In addition, the department has a full range of services, from transportation to communications to medical support. It can employ these capabilities in virtually every corner of the globe on timelines that no other nation or corporation can begin to match in either speed or scope. The Pentagon is DOD’s headquarters, and the 25,000 people who work in the Pentagon serve within the corporate headquarters of this cabinet-level department. The Pentagon also has the distinction of being one of the largest bureaucracies in the world.
The bureaucratic politics model seems to work best for explaining the workings of the Pentagon. Entrenched bureaucracies, fighting hard to enhance (or at least maintain) their policies and budgetary positions, are the norm. The major bureaucratic players are each of the military services chiefs, the Joint Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), and the major defense agencies are:
THE KEY PLAYERS: The Armed Services: To secure the most effective equipment for the field requires the Services to understand the operational scheme of maneuver and the threat that the theater commanders face. In fact, their staffs must thoroughly understand the tactics, techniques, and procedures of both the coalition and threat forces. Another important aspect of the Service’s role is to provide the ready personnel. This process is sometimes called the “sourcing of forces for the combatant commander.” The Services must staff (including recruit), train, and equip the forces and then “chop” them (meaning send them on) to the combatant commanders (COCOMs) for deployment.
In coordination with the other players in the Pentagon, the Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD) develops the Strategic Planning Guidance (SPG), which serves as a strategic direction for the Services to use when developing their programs. This step is important, as later in the Planning, Programing, Budgeting, and Execution System (PPBES) the Service programs are “graded” to ensure they have met the SPG’s specific direction. In addition, the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff (CJCS) will have the opportunity to comment.
To give you some idea of how time-consuming the Process is for the Services, consider how the Army’s program is developed. Beginning in the late summer or early fall, the Army begins work on a four-volume set of documents that provide strategic guidance, requirements, priorities, and the campaign plan, respectively. The Process ends with the program’s submission in the summer, meaning the entire process takes roughly ten months.
The Services, in coordination with OSD and with acquisition executives in the lead, drive the acquisition system through a formal chain of command. The Process begins when a Service identifies and unfulfilled requirement. For instance, senior leaders or doctrine developers might identify a needed capability or a current capability that should be upgraded.
The second type of acquisition process, which became more prevalent for supporting the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, involves the operational need statements (ONS). With this system, the field identifies an operational capability shortfall and the Services work to satisfy the critical requirement. One example of this type of procurement is the fielding of remotely piloted vehicles, such as robots armed with cameras for searching the caves of Afghanistan, or of unmanned aerial vehicles across the battle space in Iraq or Afghanistan. An important goal has been to find methods for accelerating the fielding of operational capabilities to the warfighter. Entire courses are devoted to acquisition, as it is laden with rules, regulations, and laws that must be followed.
The Joint Staff: The Joint Staff is composed of approximately 1,500 people. Important decisions are made by a small number of key staff members from the Joint Staff rather than involving large numbers of staff members from the Joint Staff and the Service staffs. Since all chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have retained most of the power, a small group of people – close advisers either to the chairman or the secretary of defense – now have a pivotal role in the decisions made in the Pentagon. The rest of the Pentagon staffs coordinate and implement policy but do not make policy on the more important issues. The great advantages of this approach to decision-making include less infighting and fewer delays. Although the individual military Services remain separate, the powerful Service fiefdoms that have dominated American military history since the late 1800s are no more.
Because the Joint Chiefs of Staff are responsible for providing strategic direction and planning guidance to the combatant commands, the Joint Staff is a big player in this arena as well. The Joint Staff emphasize missions rather than functions. (The Services are more involved in the latter). The Joint Staff must focus on effectively integrating forces, interoperability and readiness. The Joint Chiefs of Staff is in a strategic position between the highest civilian authorities (executive and legislative) and the combatant military forces. This situation requires the Joint Staff to work with the civilian staffs supporting cabinet-level officers and Congress, which continually call upon the JCS to explain military requirements, capabilities, and limitations.
The chairman and his staff are also responsible for developing the National Military Strategy (NMS), which is published in response to the White House’s National Security Strategy of the United States (NSS). The NMS is a critical document that lays out how the military intends to support and accomplish the military tasks implied in the NSS. Finally, the Joint Staff works with similar military organizations in other governments, primarily those of our allies.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD): The OSD has many differences in approach, attitude, and administrative procedures than the Service staffs. Because the OSD Staff is smaller than that of the Service chiefs and because many other staffs in the Pentagon consider the OSD Staff as an enemy of sorts, it can at times take on the feel of an embattled small town whose people have banded together to deal with all the outside forces. This situation can be especially true when the secretary of defense has not established and maintained a close, warm relationship with the key leaders in the military departments and the Joint Staff.
Most of the OSD staff are civilian government officials and political appointees, with a small number of uniformed personnel also on the staff. In addition, action officers in OSD tend to be younger than their Joint Staff or Service counterparts. There is also a higher percentage of political appointees in OSD than can be found in the military departments. Depending on the ideological proclivities of the president these ideologues feel their mission is to push the Department of Defense in certain directions. Submitting political appointees in the Pentagon to ideological litmus checks can be problematic, as those who pass and are appointed are often guilty of groupthink and don’t examine all options.
In addition to the more traditional roles of fighting and winning the nation’s wars, DOD has a significant role in intelligence, border security, medical issues such as breast cancer research, and the development of democracies across the globe by promoting democratic values in allied militaries.
Most defense secretaries and deputy secretaries spend a great deal of time dealing with the media. Morning staff meetings often cover what the news has reported in the past day or two, what news conferences and important speeches are coming up, and what questions and issues to anticipate. Topical articles in the news can trigger much of the discussion. The secretary and deputy secretary learn a great deal about what transpires in the department from the press. In fact, the press presents more broad-based information than all the intelligence resources, the chain of command, and the inspector general system combined. This has become especially true with the proliferation of news sources and social media. Congress is one of the Pentagon’s greatest and most diverse critics.
Defense Contractors: The days when most of our weapons were produced in government-owned plants, shipyards, and municipal factories are long gone. The Department of Defense now must buy most of the items it needs from private industry. In addition, the only way the DOD can obtain all the analytical support it needs is to tap the intellectual resources of private and nonprofit research firms. Signing more than 50,000 contracts every day, the DOD is a major player in the American economy and in the economies of many other countries.
Philosophically, it is important to recall that our system of entrepreneurial capitalism has served this nation well for many years. The freedom to innovate, invest, take risks, and engage in competition for business is inherent in this system. Our capitalistic model has produced weapon systems that in general have been superior to those of our adversaries and our allies throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. Competition for the defense business has always been different from and somewhat more muted than private-sector competition. It is useful to remind ourselves of three points: America’s defense business is based on the need for competition among vendors, the profit margins in recent years have been quite small, and despite significant problems through the years, the level of integrity within the system has been quite admirable.
The challenges of the 21st century require conceptual innovation, technological creativity, efficient production lines, and close cooperation between business and government. How well we meet the future national security challenges will depend in large part on our ability to husband our resources. We will be even more dependent on defense contractors in the future than we were in the past. We will also expect and demand more from the defense industry. Keeping the important relationship between the Pentagon and the defense industry in proper perspective will be one of the great challenges of the future.
Pentagon Constituents: There are five key constituents for the Pentagon:
THE COMPLEX PATTERN OF RIVALRY AND COMPETITION: One price the United States has to pay for the luxury of having four large and competent military Services is the natural tendency for them to engage in strong inter-Service competition. Much of this competition is good, for it keeps each Service on its toes and working hard to maintain and demonstrate its capability to provide a major component of our military strength. Another advantage of competitive military Services is that no single element of the military is so strong and powerful that it poses a threat to the democratic principle of civilian control of the military. The negative side to these rivalries is the extremes the Services take at times to defend their essence – their core roles and missions. But much more than inter-Service competition is at work in the Building.
THE PENTAGON PROCESS: The heart of the Pentagon’s work is defined by the Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution System (PPBES). It seeks to align strategic imperatives with the necessary resources. It is noteworthy that the initial process was called (PPBS) and did not consider execution; this change was made to further align the strategy to resources, ensuring that expended resources were actually achieving the intended effects. With an entrance in 1961, the PPBS has dominated most Pentagon officials’ lives. Although various leaders have modified this system many times since, its basis structure and rationale remain intact. Conceptually, the system is quite sound and can best be described by outlining several sequential events:
The Joint Strategic Planning System: The Joint Strategic Planning Systems (JSPS) is part of a larger national planning system. Based on the three strategic documents above, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff issues the National Military Strategy (NMS). The NMS is the principal document by which the chairman provides strategic direction for the Armed Forces as they develop the overarching ends, ways, means, and risk tolerances to support the president’s National Security Strategy.
The Joint Strategic Planning System is also the primary formal means by which the Chairman carries out his duties. The Defense Planning Guidance provides the basis on which the Services and defense agencies begin to build their Program Objective Memorandums (POMS). The POM cycle generates the most work in the Pentagon. The military departments develop their Program Objective Memorandums in the winter months and submit them to the secretary of defense in the spring. The issue cycle takes place in the summer, and they work out the budget details in the fall. In the late fall the secretary submits the Defense Department’s budget to the president. Currently, the defense budget amount to less than 15% of the overall federal budget that the president presents to Congress.
RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT, and INNOVATION: The current Department of Energy laboratories trace their origins to the efforts to develop the science for atomic fission and proof of the operational concepts for the development of the first atomic weapons. These early labs remain today and have been joined by laboratories within other cabinet-level departments and agencies. The Department of Defense alone lists a total of 76 labs: 2 DOD, 36 Army, 24 Navy, and 14 Air Force facilities. In this broad scientific enterprise, the major sources of R&D are the government (including federally funded research and development centers such as the DOE labs), industry, and academia. Each category of R&D “performer” has levels of R&D they are most suited to perform.
The proportion of R&D funded by the government has continued to decline since its high point in the 1960s. At one point the government sponsored 65% of U.S. R&D, industry funded approximately 30%, and other organizations (which include colleges and universities, state and local governments, and nonprofit organizations) funded approximately 5%. Today industry funds approximately 67%, government funds approximately 24%, and the other entities account for approximately 8%.
While the United States still spends more on R&D, the rest of the world is closing the gap. China has made R&D a priority for economic purposes, as well as for national security. The global R&D expenditures by region indicate that today North America accounts for approximately 28%, East/Southeast Asia accounts for 38%, and Europe accounts for 24% of global R&D spending.
The next war is just as likely to be won or lost in the laboratory as on the battlefield. In the growing competition with near-peer competitors Russia and China, new military technologies are being developed that could alter the global balance of power.
Source: Assignment PENTAGON: How to Excel in a Bureaucracy by Major General Perry M. Smith, USAF (Ret.) and Colonel Daniel M. Gerstein, USA (Ret.) (2020)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: THE PENTAGON – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: The Department of Defense (DOD) is an international corporation with an annual outlay of almost $750 billion and more than 3 million military and civilian personnel stationed in nearly every country in the world. This figure includes more than 1.4 million men and women on active duty and 718,000 civilian personnel, as well as another 1.1 million that serve in the National Guard and Reserve forces. The department’s capabilities allow it to conduct operations ranging from humanitarian assistance to peacekeeping to full-scale combat with conventional and nonconventional weapons. In addition, the department has a full range of services, from transportation to communications to medical support. It can employ these capabilities in virtually every corner of the globe on timelines that no other nation or corporation can begin to match in either speed or scope. The Pentagon is DOD’s headquarters, and the 25,000 people who work in the Pentagon serve within the corporate headquarters of this cabinet-level department. The Pentagon also has the distinction of being one of the largest bureaucracies in the world.
The bureaucratic politics model seems to work best for explaining the workings of the Pentagon. Entrenched bureaucracies, fighting hard to enhance (or at least maintain) their policies and budgetary positions, are the norm. The major bureaucratic players are each of the military services chiefs, the Joint Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), and the major defense agencies are:
- The Service Chiefs are four-star officers who serve for four consecutive years in the top military job in their respective services. Their role is to satisfy the responsibilities that specifically direct the organizing, training, and equipping their respective Services. Their role, however, is not to serve in the operational chain of command or to direct the movement of forces in the field.
- The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) has become the most important and influential military leader in the United States. The chairman’s primary role is to provide professional military advice to the president and the secretary of defense. The usual term is two years, but it is normal for a chairman to serve two terms.
- The Secretary of Defense has the luxury many other key players do not have: SECDEF’s strong and talented staff has a high percentage of civilians with long experience in the Building. However, the staff is not as large as the staffs of the Services. In addition, some of the staff are military personnel who also serve as conduits for insider information back to the Services. So, the secretary has a modest loyalty problem, one that is shared with the chairman.
- The defense agencies have many permanent civil servants who provide good continuity to policy and a fine institutional memory to these agencies. The heads of these defense agencies pay a price for this large professional long-term staff, however; they find it very difficult to move an agency in any major new direction during the two or three years they are in charge. Most of these agencies work in relative obscurity until some event occurs that brings them to the public’s attention.
- The Military Services occupy the preeminent position of power and influence among all the Pentagon bureaucracies, but their strong position is offset somewhat by the rivalries between and among themselves. Members of Congress have enjoyed the opportunity to play one Service against another in hearings and during the budgeting process. Strong inter-Service rivalries not only enhance the power of Congress, they also contribute to continued strong civilian control of the military.
THE KEY PLAYERS: The Armed Services: To secure the most effective equipment for the field requires the Services to understand the operational scheme of maneuver and the threat that the theater commanders face. In fact, their staffs must thoroughly understand the tactics, techniques, and procedures of both the coalition and threat forces. Another important aspect of the Service’s role is to provide the ready personnel. This process is sometimes called the “sourcing of forces for the combatant commander.” The Services must staff (including recruit), train, and equip the forces and then “chop” them (meaning send them on) to the combatant commanders (COCOMs) for deployment.
In coordination with the other players in the Pentagon, the Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD) develops the Strategic Planning Guidance (SPG), which serves as a strategic direction for the Services to use when developing their programs. This step is important, as later in the Planning, Programing, Budgeting, and Execution System (PPBES) the Service programs are “graded” to ensure they have met the SPG’s specific direction. In addition, the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff (CJCS) will have the opportunity to comment.
To give you some idea of how time-consuming the Process is for the Services, consider how the Army’s program is developed. Beginning in the late summer or early fall, the Army begins work on a four-volume set of documents that provide strategic guidance, requirements, priorities, and the campaign plan, respectively. The Process ends with the program’s submission in the summer, meaning the entire process takes roughly ten months.
The Services, in coordination with OSD and with acquisition executives in the lead, drive the acquisition system through a formal chain of command. The Process begins when a Service identifies and unfulfilled requirement. For instance, senior leaders or doctrine developers might identify a needed capability or a current capability that should be upgraded.
The second type of acquisition process, which became more prevalent for supporting the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, involves the operational need statements (ONS). With this system, the field identifies an operational capability shortfall and the Services work to satisfy the critical requirement. One example of this type of procurement is the fielding of remotely piloted vehicles, such as robots armed with cameras for searching the caves of Afghanistan, or of unmanned aerial vehicles across the battle space in Iraq or Afghanistan. An important goal has been to find methods for accelerating the fielding of operational capabilities to the warfighter. Entire courses are devoted to acquisition, as it is laden with rules, regulations, and laws that must be followed.
The Joint Staff: The Joint Staff is composed of approximately 1,500 people. Important decisions are made by a small number of key staff members from the Joint Staff rather than involving large numbers of staff members from the Joint Staff and the Service staffs. Since all chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have retained most of the power, a small group of people – close advisers either to the chairman or the secretary of defense – now have a pivotal role in the decisions made in the Pentagon. The rest of the Pentagon staffs coordinate and implement policy but do not make policy on the more important issues. The great advantages of this approach to decision-making include less infighting and fewer delays. Although the individual military Services remain separate, the powerful Service fiefdoms that have dominated American military history since the late 1800s are no more.
Because the Joint Chiefs of Staff are responsible for providing strategic direction and planning guidance to the combatant commands, the Joint Staff is a big player in this arena as well. The Joint Staff emphasize missions rather than functions. (The Services are more involved in the latter). The Joint Staff must focus on effectively integrating forces, interoperability and readiness. The Joint Chiefs of Staff is in a strategic position between the highest civilian authorities (executive and legislative) and the combatant military forces. This situation requires the Joint Staff to work with the civilian staffs supporting cabinet-level officers and Congress, which continually call upon the JCS to explain military requirements, capabilities, and limitations.
The chairman and his staff are also responsible for developing the National Military Strategy (NMS), which is published in response to the White House’s National Security Strategy of the United States (NSS). The NMS is a critical document that lays out how the military intends to support and accomplish the military tasks implied in the NSS. Finally, the Joint Staff works with similar military organizations in other governments, primarily those of our allies.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD): The OSD has many differences in approach, attitude, and administrative procedures than the Service staffs. Because the OSD Staff is smaller than that of the Service chiefs and because many other staffs in the Pentagon consider the OSD Staff as an enemy of sorts, it can at times take on the feel of an embattled small town whose people have banded together to deal with all the outside forces. This situation can be especially true when the secretary of defense has not established and maintained a close, warm relationship with the key leaders in the military departments and the Joint Staff.
Most of the OSD staff are civilian government officials and political appointees, with a small number of uniformed personnel also on the staff. In addition, action officers in OSD tend to be younger than their Joint Staff or Service counterparts. There is also a higher percentage of political appointees in OSD than can be found in the military departments. Depending on the ideological proclivities of the president these ideologues feel their mission is to push the Department of Defense in certain directions. Submitting political appointees in the Pentagon to ideological litmus checks can be problematic, as those who pass and are appointed are often guilty of groupthink and don’t examine all options.
In addition to the more traditional roles of fighting and winning the nation’s wars, DOD has a significant role in intelligence, border security, medical issues such as breast cancer research, and the development of democracies across the globe by promoting democratic values in allied militaries.
Most defense secretaries and deputy secretaries spend a great deal of time dealing with the media. Morning staff meetings often cover what the news has reported in the past day or two, what news conferences and important speeches are coming up, and what questions and issues to anticipate. Topical articles in the news can trigger much of the discussion. The secretary and deputy secretary learn a great deal about what transpires in the department from the press. In fact, the press presents more broad-based information than all the intelligence resources, the chain of command, and the inspector general system combined. This has become especially true with the proliferation of news sources and social media. Congress is one of the Pentagon’s greatest and most diverse critics.
Defense Contractors: The days when most of our weapons were produced in government-owned plants, shipyards, and municipal factories are long gone. The Department of Defense now must buy most of the items it needs from private industry. In addition, the only way the DOD can obtain all the analytical support it needs is to tap the intellectual resources of private and nonprofit research firms. Signing more than 50,000 contracts every day, the DOD is a major player in the American economy and in the economies of many other countries.
Philosophically, it is important to recall that our system of entrepreneurial capitalism has served this nation well for many years. The freedom to innovate, invest, take risks, and engage in competition for business is inherent in this system. Our capitalistic model has produced weapon systems that in general have been superior to those of our adversaries and our allies throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. Competition for the defense business has always been different from and somewhat more muted than private-sector competition. It is useful to remind ourselves of three points: America’s defense business is based on the need for competition among vendors, the profit margins in recent years have been quite small, and despite significant problems through the years, the level of integrity within the system has been quite admirable.
The challenges of the 21st century require conceptual innovation, technological creativity, efficient production lines, and close cooperation between business and government. How well we meet the future national security challenges will depend in large part on our ability to husband our resources. We will be even more dependent on defense contractors in the future than we were in the past. We will also expect and demand more from the defense industry. Keeping the important relationship between the Pentagon and the defense industry in proper perspective will be one of the great challenges of the future.
Pentagon Constituents: There are five key constituents for the Pentagon:
- Combatant Commanders (COCOM): The Pentagon’s mechanisms should be aligned to field the most well-equipped and best trained forces in the world. Given the COCOM’s reliance on the Services and OSD for forces and capability, they should have a say in what is actually fielded. Over the last several decades their influence within the Pentagon has steadily grown. But the COCOM’s tend to plan using short time horizons of one to three years, while the Services and OSD tend to look out at least through the Program Objective timeframe and even extended planning periods of fifteen years.
- Congress: Congress has the ultimate power of the purse and has levied significant reporting requirements on the executive branch while fulfilling this role. The number of oversight committees today and the significant growth over time of Congress’s professional staff clearly have their roots in Congress’s ability to make informed decisions about spending our nation’s resources.
- The Press: The press is going to cover the news, so you may as well help shape the stories and add context. Many are convinced that talking to the press is a bad thing. This approach is often self-defeating, because it means failing to help shape a story and thus often leads the press to run less accurate stories more through ignorance than design.
- The American People: The American people are the Pentagon’s most important constituent. Polls conducted over the course of the last twenty or so years show the military as the most respected institution in America.
- Allies and Partners: Coalition partners and allies are essential to our nation’s security and are prominently featured within the National Security Strategy of the United States. In fact, allies and partners are an integral part of our security. We cooperate in a variety of areas, from intelligence to weapon systems development to military-to-military contacts, that contribute to our national security.
THE COMPLEX PATTERN OF RIVALRY AND COMPETITION: One price the United States has to pay for the luxury of having four large and competent military Services is the natural tendency for them to engage in strong inter-Service competition. Much of this competition is good, for it keeps each Service on its toes and working hard to maintain and demonstrate its capability to provide a major component of our military strength. Another advantage of competitive military Services is that no single element of the military is so strong and powerful that it poses a threat to the democratic principle of civilian control of the military. The negative side to these rivalries is the extremes the Services take at times to defend their essence – their core roles and missions. But much more than inter-Service competition is at work in the Building.
THE PENTAGON PROCESS: The heart of the Pentagon’s work is defined by the Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution System (PPBES). It seeks to align strategic imperatives with the necessary resources. It is noteworthy that the initial process was called (PPBS) and did not consider execution; this change was made to further align the strategy to resources, ensuring that expended resources were actually achieving the intended effects. With an entrance in 1961, the PPBS has dominated most Pentagon officials’ lives. Although various leaders have modified this system many times since, its basis structure and rationale remain intact. Conceptually, the system is quite sound and can best be described by outlining several sequential events:
- Develop a military strategy that is based on a comprehensive national strategy.
- Do some long and medium-range planning to support the strategy.
- Give the military departments fiscal guidance for the current two budget years and four additional years.
- Have each of these three departments build a six-year program that best meets the National Military Strategy and best serves the plan’s goals and priorities.
- Have military departments submit these six-year programs to the secretary of defense every other year.
- Conduct an honest debate about the merits and demerits of these programs, with the military departments, the Joint Staff, the OSD staff, the defense agencies, and the Office of Management and Budget properly represented in the discussions. Be sure to have strong input from the Commanders of the combatant commands in the field.
- Have the secretary of defense make the final decisions on the defense budget.
- Submit the DOD budget to the White House for inclusion in the president’s budget, which, in turn, is presented to Congress in January or February.
- Have Congress approve the budget with appropriate modifications, ideally before the new fiscal year begins in the fall of each year.
- Carry out the budget during the fiscal year that commences on the first of October.
- Submit proposals to Congress for supplemental funds when unexpected expenses arise during this fiscal year.
- Have Congress approve these requests for supplemental funds so that at the end of the fiscal year the books of the military department are reasonably well balanced.
The Joint Strategic Planning System: The Joint Strategic Planning Systems (JSPS) is part of a larger national planning system. Based on the three strategic documents above, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff issues the National Military Strategy (NMS). The NMS is the principal document by which the chairman provides strategic direction for the Armed Forces as they develop the overarching ends, ways, means, and risk tolerances to support the president’s National Security Strategy.
The Joint Strategic Planning System is also the primary formal means by which the Chairman carries out his duties. The Defense Planning Guidance provides the basis on which the Services and defense agencies begin to build their Program Objective Memorandums (POMS). The POM cycle generates the most work in the Pentagon. The military departments develop their Program Objective Memorandums in the winter months and submit them to the secretary of defense in the spring. The issue cycle takes place in the summer, and they work out the budget details in the fall. In the late fall the secretary submits the Defense Department’s budget to the president. Currently, the defense budget amount to less than 15% of the overall federal budget that the president presents to Congress.
RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT, and INNOVATION: The current Department of Energy laboratories trace their origins to the efforts to develop the science for atomic fission and proof of the operational concepts for the development of the first atomic weapons. These early labs remain today and have been joined by laboratories within other cabinet-level departments and agencies. The Department of Defense alone lists a total of 76 labs: 2 DOD, 36 Army, 24 Navy, and 14 Air Force facilities. In this broad scientific enterprise, the major sources of R&D are the government (including federally funded research and development centers such as the DOE labs), industry, and academia. Each category of R&D “performer” has levels of R&D they are most suited to perform.
The proportion of R&D funded by the government has continued to decline since its high point in the 1960s. At one point the government sponsored 65% of U.S. R&D, industry funded approximately 30%, and other organizations (which include colleges and universities, state and local governments, and nonprofit organizations) funded approximately 5%. Today industry funds approximately 67%, government funds approximately 24%, and the other entities account for approximately 8%.
While the United States still spends more on R&D, the rest of the world is closing the gap. China has made R&D a priority for economic purposes, as well as for national security. The global R&D expenditures by region indicate that today North America accounts for approximately 28%, East/Southeast Asia accounts for 38%, and Europe accounts for 24% of global R&D spending.
The next war is just as likely to be won or lost in the laboratory as on the battlefield. In the growing competition with near-peer competitors Russia and China, new military technologies are being developed that could alter the global balance of power.
Source: Assignment PENTAGON: How to Excel in a Bureaucracy by Major General Perry M. Smith, USAF (Ret.) and Colonel Daniel M. Gerstein, USA (Ret.) (2020)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| exec_9l_dod_-_the_pentagon_--_segment_9.pdf |