Brass Creep!
Perhaps it’s a foolish thought: Is this an issue on which dotCommonwealers of all persuasions and none might agree– apart from the story’s amusing aspects?
““General Motors did not set out to become a benefits agency that occasionally built a car,” said Arnold L. Punaro, a retired Marine Corps major general and head of an independent board appointed by Mr. Gates to examine Pentagon spending. “We don’t want the Department of Defense to become a benefits agency that occasionally kills a terrorist.”…“When you have a head dog, you also have a deputy dog, then a deputy deputy dog, and a deputy deputy deputy dog,” said General Punaro. “The layers are suffocating the bureaucracy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us/27generals.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
If you mean, do we all agree with Gates, no, I don’t. I think officers’ salaries are rather high, considering their incredible benefit packages, retirement, and the low pay of enlisted personnel. But I think we need a professional elite in our military and they need staffers.
I don’t think Mr. Gates disagrees about a professional elite. What the story says is that he thinks there are too many of them.
I thought the main point was that their staffs were too big. I think when a general shines his own shoes, an action which is positively spun in the article (“servant leadership”), we’ve probably lost some of the benefits of specialization. I don’t think an academic should do the wiring for her “smart classroom” or get too involved with the catering for a conference. She has other things to do. Part of being an elite is having time to use one’s specialized skills, and that means other people need to be around to do everything else.
Sounds like Parkinson’s Law: officials want to multiply subordinates, not rivals.
I urge one and all to read the whole story!
For a minute I thought this was about the number of bishops in Ireland or Archbishops in the Vatican.
Something is wrong when the Navy has more Admirals than ships. This reform needs to take place, but the Generals and Admirals certainly know how to push back and won’t hesitate to do so.
If the reform is done with the goal of making the military more effective, e.g. able to react more quickly to security problems, then it seems like a good thing.
Whatever savings come out of it, of course, are dwarfed bhy the massive scale of the Pentagon’s budget. I don’t doubt that some senior officers’ staffs are swollen, but saving a million dollars in military spending by laying off a general and his staff iwould be the equivalent of our household using a 40-cents-off coupon for Rice-a-Roni. My guess is that $1 million covers the cost of a bucket seat in one of the Navy’s fighter planes.
$180,000 a year is a lot of money to most of us, but in terms of salaries for senior executives in the corporate world, it’s not particularly competitive. I’d love to see the list of Ford execs (much less Goldman Sachs employees) who made more money last year – I’d wager it’s a very long list. (General Motors is a special case because the federal government controls it for now, and I believe they’ve capped salaries and bonuses for execs). It’s no wonder that a lot of generals and admirals become lobbyists after retirement from the military – it’s their opportunity to earn money at a level with their brethren in the corporate world who had far less demanding and, frequently, far less dangerous careers.
If I get Gates right, it’s not the money so much as the layers of bureaucracy that have been created by enlarging the upper ranks. Iraq and Afghanistan notwithstanding there are fewer soldiers than in 1985: “Meanwhile, the overall number of active duty personnel has declined to some 1.5 million from 2.2 million in 1985, even though the Army and Marine Corps have grown since the Sept. 11 attacks, to carry out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
And this, “Mr. Gates said he wanted to flatten a bureaucracy that had experienced significant “brass creep,” swelling to “cumbersome and top-heavy proportions.” He complained, for example, that a request to send a dog-handling team to Afghanistan goes through no fewer than five four-star headquarters.”
The problem with Gates is that he focuses on the outward symbol or symptoms of the problem and not the cause. This move will save a pittance by DoD standards.
He’s right that there are too many layers of bureacracy – and he and the other political appointees are the ones that have been causing them to be formed, not the generals. The organization is responding to them. In the name of cost savings and accountability they have been loading layer upon layer of reviews and approvals on decisions and actions that ought and used to be made at lower levels. The problem is that he will cut the number of flag officers without addressing the processes that he and others have created that made them necessary on the first place. So, big deal, such-and-such office is now headed by a Colonel or a civilian, but there are still 50 people doing the staff work created by foolish policies.
SH: “In the name of cost savings and accountability they have been loading layer upon layer of reviews and approvals on decisions and actions that ought and used to be made at lower levels.” What is the alternative to reviews and approvals if you want accountability and transperancy? I can’t help thinking of Mylo Minderbinder!
The alternative is to trust the people who you have placed in positions of authority.
The government as a whole and the Pentagon as well have a tendency to react – and over react – to events. They find out that someone committed a ten million dollar fraud, and they put a $50million bureacratic process in place to prevent it happening again. Look at 9/11 for a grand example. How does government react – a huge, expensive, and largely ineffective bureacracy.
People ask why I am distrust government, and this is one of the fundamental reasons. The most effect organizations (including the government) are those in which the members and leaders have the resources they need and the authority to use them, and if they suffer the consequences of using them ineffectively or corruptly. That, as a rule, is not how governemt works. Goverment is at a disadvantage when it comes to effective and efficient performance, so we ought to task it only with what it needs to do.
Most organizations have built in incentives to be efficient. Government doesn’t. The way government acheives “efficiency” is like this. Cut 50% of the Pentagon flag officers in the next year. Command that there will be an 18% efficiency in Medicare and acheive it by simply cutting the budget. That’s not how you or I or any rational being does things. If you or I take an 18% pay cut do we just assume that we can do everything we did before, just more efficiently?
Not that I agree with him, nor do I know, but Jim S, on another blog insists that only half of government emplyees work (he speaks, I assume, from his own agency’s experience). This means that if you cut only half of non-working staff, you might actually get a productivity increase because they are probably holding up the works.
TPM has some charts up that you might want to look at; here’s a sentence about one of them:
“What is so immediately striking is that the military budget has grown 289% in real dollars since 1980 and yet the actual fighting force has shrunk radically: Army divisions down by 47%, commissioned ships down by 45%, Air Force fighter attack jets down by 54%.”
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/27/the_bloated_pentagon/
When I worked for the U.S. Civil Service Commission and Office of Personnel Management from late 1974 to mid-1983, our local office had one supervisor (area manager) and anywhere from 8 to about 20 staff reporting to him (the lower number reflecting budgetary cuts and attrition over the years until eventual office closure). In the area manager’s absence, a senior/non-supervisory specialist took the reins with no temporary promotion involved.
When I worked at a VA medical center from early 1990 until late 1999, our HR office had a chief, asst chief, an employee relations & benefits supervisor, and a staffing & classification supervisor. The office had about 10 non-supervisory staff. The pay grade of the asst chief’s position was based on the pay grade of the chief’s position (one grade lower); he generally functioned as head of labor relations and directly supervised one person, to wit, a first-level supervisor who, in turn, supervised two staff and generally functioned as the employee relations specialist.
Go figure.
The competitive federal civil service is subject to the Classification Act of 1949, etc., and agencies with such employees must abide by classification standards published by the Office of Personnel Management. Individual agencies (including DoD and its military components) may also publish so-called classification guides that can supplement but not override OPM standards.
Relevant standards that can have a bearing on position management include:
+ General Schedule Supervisory Guide
http://www.opm.gov/fedclass/gssg.pdf
+ General Schedule Leader Guide
http://www.opm.gov/fedclass/gslead.pdf
+ Federal Wage System Supervisory Guide
http://www.opm.gov/fedclass/fwssupv.pdf
+ Federal Wage System Leader Guide
http://www.opm.gov/fedclass/fwsleadr.pdf
In addition, the Graduate School (spun off from U.S. Dept of Agriculture? and not to be confused with our understanding of the phrase “graduate school”) offers training in many occupational subject areas to federal agencies. One of its courses is “Federal Position Management” described at http://www.graduateschool.edu/course_details.php?cid=CLAS7012D.
DoD and/or military components also offer, if I recall, their own training in civilian position classification & management. The content must be compatible with OPM requirements but would also include agency-specific supplementary policy guidance.
Contrary to popular belief in some quarters of government, there is no official, i.e., governmentwide, correlation between civilian and military pay grades. Army may still have its own chart(s) showing correlations, but they — so far as I know — are not recognized by federal law (and OPM) as authoritative.
Whether DoD and/or individual military services have something comparable to position management directives/guidance, I don’t know. If they do, would they include information about supervisory-staffing ratios for both military and civilian personnel since it’s not unusual for a military officer to be supervising both categories of personnel?