before its completion. But it is reasonable to weigh what can be expected from the track records of the Pentagon officials running this particular QDR iteration.  One of the key players is the Deputy Secretary of Defense, aside from Gates the most powerful person in the Pentagon bureaucracy.  William J. Lynn III has a well established track record.  During the Clinton Administration he rose to be the Pentagon’s comptroller, its CFO.  There, his major contribution was to confound financial integrity, not advance it. He strenuously argued, with success, for exempting the Pentagon from major provisions of the Chief Financial Officers' Act of 1990 seeking to force all federal departments to comply with accepted financial integrity standards.  He also advocated the notorious bill paying system, known as "pay and chase," under which the Pentagon hands the contractor a quick payout and later tries to figure out what it was for. The mess that continues today's, the lack of Pentagon accountability, stems in large part from his handiwork.

Now promoted to Deputy Secretary of Defense after an intervening hiatus as Raytheon's chief lobbyist, Lynn's predilection for quashing reform remains strong--notably in the fine-tuning of the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act that President Obama so proudly signed into law in May.  Lynn's contribution was to take a weak, cosmetic measure and make it worse.

The bill creates a new Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, a cost czar to replace the existing in-house cost shop and to put an end to the phony, understated price tags used to sell weapon programs in their early stages.  As crafted by its primary authors, Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ), the bill made sure to not require the Pentagon to actually use the cost czar’s estimates in making decisions or in putting together budgets. Even so, the new cost czar remained too much of a threat to Mr. Lynn's hand on the purse strings.  He sought to eliminate the new position altogether.  Though unsuccessful, he did argue successfully to kill the House wording that actually entitled the cost czar to determine the costs used in Pentagon budgets. The result: Pentagon decision makers remain free to ignore the new czar -- just as they have been ignoring previous independent cost estimates for decades.

Similarly, the bill seems to require the Pentagon to buy competing prototypes of each new weapon--that is, "competitive fly before buy," a practice which has consistently resulted in better weapons at lower cost, on the few occasions when it has been tried. However, Levin and McCain's tepid wording permitted the Pentagon to quickly waive this requirement simply by invoking "critical national security objectives," undefined. Dissatisfied with this gaping loophole, Lynn toiled to widen it.  To more thoroughly undo the onerous quasi-requirement to competitively prototype whole weapons, he made sure that competing just one token subsystem would suffice. In case even that was too painful, he added another waiver: now a simple declaration that any competitive subsystems might increase costs allows Pentagon bureaucrats to ignore the requirement altogether.

As originally written in the Senate, the bill's language actually ended the practice, now rife, of permitting contractors to conduct the Pentagon’s reviews of their own programs.  Apparently finding such contractor self-review indispensable, Lynn objected. At his request, the Senate Armed Services Committee changed the bill to permit corporate subsidiaries to perform reviews of their parent companies' programs. The final wording discarded this embarrassingly obvious charade.  As signed, the Reform Act instructs the Pentagon to write any contractor self-review regulation it pleases, subject only to the vaguest legislative guidance.   In essence, through waivers and loopholes, the Act's entire reform program has been reduced to a polite request for the Department of Defense to fix itself.  The lesson from this sad legislative history is twofold:  first, the Pentagon’s leadership is as hostile to real reform as ever; second, Congress, rather than carrying out its constitutional duty to actively oversee the nation's defenses and correct abuses, is in fact the Pentagon's ally in killing change and reform.

Larding the Gates Budget

Though he's no crusader for reform, Secretary of Defense Gates deserves credit for a number of the decisions he announced on April 6; two of them were right on the money.

He very properly said "it was not a close call" to end production of Lockheed's F-22 fighter.  Horribly overpriced at over $65 billion just for the 187 authorized and a gigantic performance disappointment, the F-22 was the embodiment of the Pentagon's shrinking-and-aging-at-higher-cost problems.  The fact that it was irrelevant to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it has no mission, was just icing on the cake.

The Air Force's C-17 transport, made by Boeing, is very much the same story.  At $327 million per copy (counting all procurement and development costs), it delivers far too little cargo at too much cost.  A more fuel-efficient Boeing 747-8 freighter costs 10 percent less and hauls 85 percent more cargo for 85 percent longer range. The Air Force claims that the C-17 was designed to be able to land on unprepared runways.  That ability proved to be only a demo stunt, unfortunately one that imposed major payload and cost penalties on the design. Even for demos, it takes weeks to prepare the "unprepared" landing strip. In the current wars, the rare C-17 landings on such strips are mainly publicity events ballyhooed by Air Force press flacks.  Unlike the F-22, the Air Force has funding in hand for more C-17s than the 190 it says it needs. In past years Congress had already ladled out funds for 15 over and above the Air Force's "requirement." Gates was entirely correct, even overdue, to stop this cramming of unneeded C-17s into the budget.

Of course, for both the F-22 and the C-17, the performance features that attract the Congress are unrelated to war: Lockheed and Boeing each trumpet that 40-plus states have been cut in for a piece of the production.  The deliberate piecemealing of production, coordinated with a corresponding distribution of campaign donations, quite literally buys votes in Congress -- funded by the taxpayer, of course. That same inefficient distribution of non-competitive contracts, loads up the planes with serious quality control problems at lots of extra cost. Result: the military gets less aircraft that cost more to fix and fly less often.

Congress shredded Gates' decision to cancel the C-17, and did so without a murmur from the secretary.  On May 12, the House Appropriations Committee added $2.2 billion for eight more C-17s to an "emergency" war supplemental to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The next day, the White House issued an official response to the bill in its OMB Statement of Administration Policy (SAP).  Traditionally the vehicle for veto threats to remove unwanted provisions, the SAP was notably silent on the C-17s. 

A few days later, when asked, the Pentagon spokesman  offered no objection to the extra planes, observing that at least the C-17 was "in the fight" in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It was all down hill from there.  The bill was signed into law by Obama with $2.2 billion in C-17 gravy for 40-plus states.  It was never really in doubt. The Congressional porkers rolled over Gates, hardly feeling a bump.  This trampling sent an abundantly clear signal: if Gates can be rolled on the C-17, why not go for more?  The House Armed Services Committee quickly did so. Meeting to mark up the 2010 Pentagon...