AEIdeas
March 10, 2025
As DOGE chainsaws its way through Washington bureaucracy, good ideas that have been on the shelf awaiting action deserve a re-look. As my AEI colleague Todd Harrison and I said previously, the Pentagon needs to start closing entire offices and shifting any necessary statutory requirements to other organizations whenever possible.
Trimming headcount alone will not bring greater efficiency without also cutting workload that is no longer necessary due to technology improvements, threat adjustments, or leadership changes.
One office that needs to be shuttered is the Pentagon’s Under Secretariat of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, or P&R (a close second due for serious examination is the Under Secretariat for Intelligence and Security).
Most of the blame for the Pentagon’s outmoded human resources system—and the difficulties in understanding how ready military units are for the missions they are called upon to undertake—lies with the bureaucrats tasked with producing and implementing the military’s human resources and readiness policies.
Within P&R’s remit are activities that collectively consume some two-thirds of the defense budget—including compensation, housing, healthcare, education, training, and other readiness activities. The existence of other organizations that could manage these tasks means the Trump administration should divide up P&R’s responsibilities among the military services, the Joint Staff, the Pentagon’s Comptroller, the Deputy Chief Management Officer, and the Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation.
These essential tasks performed by P&R would need to be transferred to other organizations within the Department of Defense:
Providing Promotion Guidance for Flag Officers. The Secretary of Defense recommends officers to serve in senior flag and general officer billets, such as unified combatant commands. A subject matter expert must be on hand to advise the secretary when adjudicating between candidates, especially in regards to important prerequisites for these positions such as time-in-grade requirements. Furthermore, when a senior officer is guilty of misconduct, the secretary must determine the grade in which that officer retires. A seasoned hand helps apprise the secretary of the political sensitivities and bureaucratic nuances surrounding these invariably contentious decisions. This function could be handled by a dedicated senior advisor on the secretary’s staff.
Establishing Standards, Compensation, and Other Policies for Military and Civilian Personnel. Currently, P&R is notionally responsible for establishing department-wide policies for military and civilian personnel. In reality, each of the military services establish and manage many of these policies on their own. While some coordination is necessary, these responsibilities can be delegated to the services with coordination and oversight conducted by the deputy chief management officer in charge of coordinating the business operations of the Pentagon to better support forces in the field.
Recruiting, Marketing, and Analytics. P&R supervises defense-wide marketing activities, mostly visibly by conducting polling research of young people to determine their propensity to serve. In addition to collecting data vital for recruiters to attract the next generation of service members, P&R manages the Defense Manpower Data Center that tracks vital information regarding serving military personnel. All of these functions can be moved under the deputy chief management officer.
Supervising Military Healthcare. Members of Congress advocating for a more uniform military healthcare system are on the right track. To that end, a defense-wide manager for healthcare issues should be maintained. If P&R disappears, the Defense Health Agency and TRICARE would need to find new homes elsewhere in the sprawling front offices of the Office of the Secretary of Defense to keep the various services’ surgeons general in check.
Assessing Military Readiness. Beyond manpower concerns, the abolition of P&R would give Congress an opportunity to require the Pentagon to strengthen its readiness reporting system. With aircraft readiness at alarmingly low levels, Marine units canceling training exercises due to low readiness, and a “spike in afloat mishaps” last year, the current oversight arrangements are clearly ineffective.
The good news is that not all tasks currently undertaken by P&R need to be transferred. Much of the secretariat’s work involves supervising extraneous training deemed unnecessary by previous secretaries of defense or serving as a compliance overseer for the military services using whatever readiness data, complete or not, they voluntarily supply.
DOGE: Don’t overlook the importance of reducing workload alongside reducing headcount.
Learn more:Lower Cost, More Lethality: The US Defense Budget Is Getting a Trim | A Large Fleet Is the Foundation of Readiness | The U.S. Military Is Crumbling: A $137 Billion Crisis Unfolds | In Defense of the Military’s Unfunded Priority Lists