Inside the Five-Sided Box: Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon - Hardcover

Carter, Ash

 
9781524743918: Inside the Five-Sided Box: Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1524743917 ISBN 13: 9781524743918
Verlag: Dutton, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

The twenty-fifth Secretary of Defense takes readers behind the scenes to reveal the inner workings of the Pentagon, its vital mission, and what it takes to lead it.
 
The Pentagon is the headquarters of the single largest institution in America: the Department of Defense. The D.O.D. employs millions of Americans. It owns and operates more real estate, and spends more money, than any other entity. It manages the world’s largest and most complex information network and performs more R&D than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined. Most important, the policies it carries out, in war and peace, impact the security and freedom of billions of people around the globe.
 
Yet to most Americans, the dealings of the D.O.D. are a mystery, and the Pentagon nothing more than an opaque five-sided box that they regard with a mixture of awe and suspicion.
 
In this new book, former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter demystifies the Pentagon and sheds light on all that happens inside one of the nation’s most iconic, and most closely guarded, buildings. Drawn from Carter’s thirty-six years of leadership experience in the D.O.D., this is the essential book for understanding the challenge of defending America in a dangerous world—and imparting a trove of incisive lessons that can guide leaders in any complex organization.
 
In these times of great disruption and danger, the need for Ash Carter’s authoritative and pragmatic account is more urgent than ever.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

For over thirty-five years Ash Carter served in numerous jobs in the Department of Defense, mostly recently as the twenty-fifth Secretary of Defense under President Obama. He currently serves as the Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School. He also is an innovation fellow at MIT. A native of Philadelphia, he and his wife, Stephanie, have two grown children.

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Chapter 1: How Not to Waste $700 Billion

The Secretary of Defense is in charge of the largest and most complex organization in the entire world. He is responsible for preventing and waging war, for leading the largest workforce in the country, and for directing the nation's largest research and development enterprise. DOD also spends more money than any other entity in the American economy, on average a staggering $700 billion every single year. This is seven times the size of New York City's budget, twenty-five times the size of Apple's operating expenses, and a larger budget than that of all but eight countries. The $700 billion defense budget is equal to that of all the other federal government agencies combined. (Together, DOD and the other federal agencies make up about 30 percent of the total federal budget; the rest goes to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the social safety net, and interest on the federal debt.)

What kind of spending needs can possibly justify a budget of this size? What is all this money spent for? Is it spent well or wasted? How much is enough? How should we decide between spending to protect the country today versus investing in defense preeminence in the future? An essential job of the Secretary of Defense is to ensure that these questions are answered and that all this money is spent wisely and efficiently.

Among Secretaries of Defense, I had an almost unique vantage point on these matters: I had seen the Pentagon not only from "up on the bridge," where policy is made, but also from "down in the engine room," where all the gears turn and the money is spent. Beginning in 1980, I held a series of DDD jobs, including the number-three and number-two jobs, before becoming SecDef in 2015. The number two is deputy secretary, the chief operating officer of the Pentagon, who puts the budget together and runs the department. The number three is the undersecretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics, or the "acquisition czar," as the press likes to say. The undersecretary oversees the buying of the ships, airplanes, tanks, and satellites, as well as a dizzying array of other goods and services. His office is responsible for purchasing jet fuel and heads of lettuce, building combat outposts in war zones, mowing the lawns on parade fields, and researching concepts for top-secret weapons.

I understand why defense spending is a perennial and easy target for politicians, the news media, and interest groups from the political left, right, and center. For decades, the United States has spent far more on its military than any potential adversary. In recent years, its defense budget has exceeded that of the next seven largest military powers in the world combined. Taxpayers have a right to know why such enormous sums are necessary, particularly in a world where money for health care, education, research and development, civil infrastructure, social safety-net programs, and other vital purposes is often hard to come by. And the frequent requests for increased defense spending that citizens encounter during congressional hearings or budget debates only heighten the skepticism that many people feel.

What's more, whenever huge amounts of money are spent for any purpose, it's exceedingly difficult to ensure that every dollar is spent wisely. That's especially true when the activities being funded are as varied, complex, and specialized as those being managed by DOD. Throw in the intense political pressures surrounding every Pentagon spending program-starting with 535 members of Congress, each with an interest in promoting the maintenance of military bases and private contractors in his or her home district-and you have a scenario in which at least isolated instances of wasteful, excessive, and sometimes even corrupt spending are almost inevitable.

The result, over time, is a series of horror stories about profligate Pentagon spending that have lodged themselves in the national consciousness-$640 toilet seats, $435 hammers, and payoff scandals like the case of Randall "Duke" Cunningham. (A congressman from California and a member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Cunningham was accused of taking lavish gifts from contractors in exchange for help in landing lucrative Pentagon deals. In 2005, he pleaded guilty to numerous charges and spent seven years in federal prison.) Few citizens know the details behind these iconic cases, although they help sustain a vague yet almost universal impression that the Pentagon budget is hopelessly out of control and that a high percentage of the money spent is utterly wasted.

But how representative are these horror stories? And what can be done to prevent them from happening again?

Where Your $700 Billion Really Goes

It's important to put Pentagon spending in perspective, since numbers without context mean little. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the defense budget for 2016 represented about 3.1 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP)-a sizable sum, no doubt. But it's actually a modest amount compared with many previous defense budgets.

During the Reagan defense buildup of the 1980s, defense spending exceeded 6 percent of GDP, about double today's figure. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it fell dramatically. (You can win bets by challenging people to answer the trivia question "Which Secretary of Defense presided over the largest sustained drop in military spending?" The surprising answer: the well-known hawk Dick Cheney, who served as SecDef under the first President Bush. Dick just happened to be in office when the Berlin Wall fell and support for Cold War military spending plummeted.) Defense spending rose again in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. The most recent high point came in 2011, when the combined effects of the war in Afghanistan and a lingering recession boosted the share of GDP dedicated to defense spending to 4.5 percent.

Turn back the clock a bit further, and all these sums are dwarfed by historical spending on defense. At the height of the Cold War, the United States regularly spent close to 9 percent of GDP on defense. And the highest figure in history, unsurprisingly, came during the all-out effort of World War II, when the military gobbled up fully 41 percent of GDP.

These historical data offer some important lessons. First, it's false to assume-as many Americans do-that the military budget is an irrational juggernaut driven mainly by raw political factors, such as the power of Pentagon bureaucrats and greedy defense contractors. I sometimes hear cynics remark, "Everyone knows a government budget never shrinks-only grows!" The seesaw history of defense spending shows that this is a myth. Defense spending rises and falls in response to changing circumstances, as of course it should.

Second, while shifting political currents have an effect on military spending, it's a fallacy to assume that higher Pentagon budgets are driven by hawks (historically mostly Republicans), while cuts in those budgets are pushed by doves (mostly Democrats)-though, to be sure, those tendencies have generally characterized the two parties in recent decades. A complex array of factors beyond ideology is actually involved. I've already pointed out that the biggest drop in defense spending occurred under Republican leadership, during the era of the post-Soviet "peace dividend." Here's another counterintuitive fact you can use to win bar bets: Every federal budget proposed by the Obama administration but one called for higher levels of Pentagon spending than Republicans in Congress ultimately approved. Those Republican members were not so much defense doves as deficit hawks. Only later did the political charge emerge that the liberal Obama "decimated" our military by slashing budgets in the face of protests from conservatives. The real cause of military budget cuts...

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Verlag
Dutton
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1524743917
ISBN 13 
9781524743918
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Dutton
https://www.penguin.com/dutton-childrens-overview/

Im Mittelfeld 25
K?ln
Deutschland
51105
Deutschland

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