Reinventing the Pentagon

As the Cold War winds to an end, cuts in the military budget are a certainty. This new fiscal reality presents a difficult, long-term, highly complex managerial challenge. It calls for solving serious problems of organization and control, managing relationships with suppliers, and choosing between alternative institutional designs. If defense spending is to be reduced without enfeebling the military, the Pentagon must make major changes in the way it does business - it must restructure, decentralize, and trim away the fat. Reinventing the Pentagon provides the solutions to many of the restructuring problems the Department of Defense now faces. Fred Thompson and L. R. Jones take the key concepts of the new public management - streamlining controls; implementing mission-driven, results-oriented budgets; creating more flexible and responsive hiring systems; and more - and tell how to organize the Pentagon to make these reforms work. Using specific applications of the new public management, the authors show how to align the Department of Defense's organizational strategy with its structure; redesign governance relationships between its mission centers and their suppliers; adjust individual and organizational self-interest to the objectives of national defense; implement responsibility budgets; replace rules and regulations with incentives; use competition and market mechanisms rather than administrative solutions, and more. Reinventing the Pentagon outlines the changes in the Pentagon's personnel, accounting, and financial management practices - as well as in the congressional appropriations, authorization, and oversight process - that are needed to make mission-driven, results-oriented budgeting a reality.