By Thomas McInerney LTG, USAF (Ret) and Paul E. Vallely MG, US Army (Ret)
Guest Editorial: Mackenzie Eaglen
As in all things military, execution, not ideas, is key to achieving lasting reforms in the Department of Defense.
The Department of Defense’s new business-minded leaders under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth are channeling a venture capitalist’s mindset with a flurry of broad and deep reviews: cut the fat, scale what works, kill what doesn’t. These methods, foreign to the bureaucracy, will ensure the overhauls are substantial and enduring.The Pentagon’s tech modernization is being reoriented around mission outcome metrics rather than compliance or procurement throughput. Leaders are taking a hard look at internal inefficiencies, from paper-based processes to bloated and redundant office functions to faster acquisition timelines, especially for software and dual-use systems.
First up was the 8 percent budget scrub to reinvest into higher priority investments within the defense budget. Then there was the major defense weapons program review to identify waste and realign government spending with more shared risk with industry. Now the team is plotting to map the mammoth civilian workforce to warfighter priorities exclusively. The deep dive into the almost-800,000-strong federal defense civilian workforce is especially welcome. This vast group of employees generally only ever gets larger, no matter the push from various administrations to streamline.
In new guidance to senior leadership across the enterprise, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Steve Feinberg, launched a sweeping organizational review to right size the workforce consistent with the Secretary of Defense’s interim National Defense Strategy guidance. The directive calls for a fundamental rethinking of the massive federal defense civilian staff in order to simplify operations, eliminate redundancy, and refocus resources. Feinberg’s instruction aims to put the Pentagon’s sprawling bureaucracy on wartime footing by treating urgency not as a contingency but as the standard for how decisions are made and billets are justified.
“Every civilian role should directly enable lethality, readiness, or strategic deterrence. If not, it should be reclassified, outsourced, or removed,” Feinberg wrote. “Every role must now meet a simple test: If this position didn’t exist today, and we were at war tomorrow, would we create it? If the answer is no, it should be consolidated, restructured, or eliminated.”
The most important part of this initiative is that it targets both headcount and workload at the same time. Previous attempts at workforce reforms failed by cutting people through freezes, caps, or attrition without making corresponding reductions to missions, reporting requirements, or internal processes. The result has been a civilian workforce that only slightly ever shrinks on paper and remains overstretched in practice. The latest effort explicitly asks what functions can be consolidated, automated, or ended altogether. It directs every Pentagon component to redraw its organizational charts from the ground up, realign civilian roles with outcomes like deterrence, lethality, and speed, and identify the tasks that no longer need to be done at all. Positions that exist solely to “manage or track documents between systems” are flagged as signs of broken processes. Supervisory billets with minimal staff, redundant policy offices, and standalone coordinators are all targeted for elimination or restructuring.
Another major shift in the review is its approach to technology. The guidance calls for replacing “manual workflows, paper-based processes, and outdated IT platforms,” and urges the Defense Department to “leverage automation and artificial intelligence to power the mission impact of our civilian workforce.”There is serious room for finding efficiencies through technology, automation, and AI. Research has shown that outdated and underperforming software has cost the Pentagon billions in productivity losses. Pentagon leaders have long acknowledged persistent challenges with fragmented systems, siloed data, and legacy workflows that slow down internal operations.
When paired with a serious effort to eliminate unnecessary work, automation could do more than streamline processes. Smart employment of software could eliminate the need for entire functions and layers of oversight that only exist to manage inefficiency. The memo directs all proposed reorganizations to be routed through the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (P&R). But this office is overdue for serious scrutiny itself. P&R sits atop a sprawling HR and compliance bureaucracy with little demonstrated connection to actual military readiness. While it nominally oversees areas like compensation, housing, healthcare, and training, together accounting for a large share of the defense budget, most of the work is already handled by the services or other agencies. Still, there is much to like in the many ongoing bureaucratic reviews at the Pentagon. Hopefully, significant follow-through is next.
