Defense management reform : how to make the Pentagon work better and cost less / Peter Levine.

ISBN:

9781503611856

Title:

Author:

Levine, Peter, 1957- author.

Personal Author:

Levine, Peter, 1957- author.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Contents:

Introduction: The Problem of Defense Management -- Finding a Targeted Solution to the Right Set of Problems -- Getting the Initiative Approved -- Getting the Initiative Implemented on a Lasting Basis -- The Case Studies -- Chapter 1 Civilian Personnel Reform at the Department of Defense -- The Civil Service Demonstration Projects -- The Enactment of NSPS Legislation -- The Implementation of NSPS -- The NSPS Pay-for-Performance System -- Labor Relations and the Collapse of the NSPS -- The Road Forward -- Chapter 2 Lessons from the Never-Ending Search for Acquisition Reform -- The Need for Acquisition Reform -- 1982: The Carlucci Initiatives -- 1985: The Era of Waste, Fraud, and Abuse -- FM S7612-Levine Page 5 of -- 1992: The Packard Commission -- 2004: Reinventing Government -- 2014: The WSARA Era -- Assessment -- The Road Forward -- Chapter 3 Auditing the Pentagon -- The Road to the CFO Act and the Goal of a Clean Audit -- The 1990s: The Bush I and Clinton Administrations -- The 2000s: The Bush II and Obama Administrations -- Assessment.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Corporate Subject:

United States. Department of Defense -- Management.

United States. Department of Defense -- Accounting.

Pentagon (Va.)

Pentagon (Virg.)

United States. Department of Defense

Subject Term:

Waste in government spending -- United States.

Dilapidation des fonds publics -- États-Unis.

POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Public Affairs & Administration.

Accounting

Management

Military policy -- Decision making

Waste in government spending

Geographic Term:

United States -- Military policy -- Decision making.

United States

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

http://ezproxy.angliss.edu.au/login?url=http://ezproxy.angliss.edu.au/login?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&AN=2389765

Publication Date:

2020

Publication Information:

Stanford, California :

Stanford University Press,

[2020]

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
355.68570973 23	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Pentagon spending has been the target of decades of criticism and reform efforts. Billions of dollars are spent on weapons programs that are later abandoned. State-of-the-art data centers are underutilized and overstaffed. New business systems are built at great expense but fail to meet the needs of their users. Every Secretary of Defense for the last five Administrations has made it a priority to address perceived bloat and inefficiency by making management reform a major priority. The congressional defense committees have been just as active, enacting hundreds of legislative provisions. Yet few of these initiatives produce significant results, and the Pentagon appears to go on, as wasteful as ever.

In this book, Peter Levine addresses why, despite a long history of attempted reform, the Pentagon continues to struggle to reduce waste and inefficiency. The heart of Defense Management Reform is three case studies covering civilian personnel, acquisitions, and financial management. Narrated with the insight of an insider, the result is a clear understanding of what went wrong in the past and a set of concrete guidelines to plot a better future.

Author Notes

Peter Levine is a senior fellow at the Institute for Defense Analyses and a former Senate staffer. He has served as the Deputy Chief Management Officer of the Department of Defense--the senior Pentagon official responsible for defense management reform.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

Levine (senior fellow, Institute for Defense Analysis), a former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director and, subsequently, a senior Defense Department official, draws on his own practical experience to address why efforts aimed at improving efficiency and accountability in the Pentagon have been a struggle over the past 40 years. The author focuses on three main issues: civilian personnel reform, acquisition reform, and attempts to execute a financial audit of the department. Employing descriptive analysis rather than formal hypothesis testing, Levine distills lessons learned from these three cases into substantive political categories. He emphasizes prioritization, incrementalism, consultation with all interested parties, and sustained interest of senior leadership as common characteristics of more successful endeavors. Conversely broad efforts, demanded from above, at wholesale change have repeatedly failed. Even passage of binding legislation, if enacted in a partisan manner, is subject to obstruction by vested bureaucratic interests or politicization and subsequent repeal in future electoral cycles. Although categorized as a volume on security studies, the book will be more germane to those in the field of public administration. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. --Clifton W. Sherrill, Troy University