WAIKIKI, Hawaii—As DOGE focuses its attention on the Pentagon, two members of the House Armed Services committee are urging caution.
“I welcome the audit. I welcome the transparency,” Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said in Feb. 14 remarks at the Honolulu Defense Forum. “We’ve always wanted a successful audit of the Pentagon, and we’ve not had a good audit of the Pentagon that’s passed. So I’m glass-half-full on that. All I ask is…don’t throw the baby out with the bath waters…because we’ve been doing that in some of these agencies.”
Bacon used the example of cuts to U.S. foreign aid that could have had significant consequences: “We put a foreign-aid freeze out there, and we realized at the last minute—thankfully, if we had gone another couple minutes it would have been too late—that we prevented the funding of the Kurds that were detaining 10,000 ISIS terrorists. We were within a day or two of releasing these guys because the funding was pulled.”
Rep. Pat Ryan, D-NY, shares Bacon’s concern, and noted in his remarks and in an interview with Defense One that the U.S. military “cannot afford to have any blinks or any pauses” in successful programs.
“I think the focus [of the Trump administration] on driving defense innovation and understanding the urgency, specifically in INDOPACOM, presents a real opportunity,” Ryan said. “The worry I have is: so much of the momentum we have established in things like Replicator, we can’t take our foot off the gas on that… The biggest mistake we can make is: new administration comes in, says ‘Oh, the old guys did this. Everything’s bad that they did,’ and that would dramatically hurt the warfighters and hurt our national security.”
While Ryan said he is in favor of “creative disruption,” he hopes the Pentagon can avoid “destruction.”
On the topic of reform, Ryan and Bacon both praised the Defense Innovation Unit and said the rest of the DOD should take a page from their playbook as the Pentagon works to change its acquisition culture.
“There is no doubt that we’re finding innovations and some new ideas, but we’re having a hard time fielding that at a level that will have an impact [in a] fight with China or a fight with Russia,” Bacon said. “There’s a lot of talk. We’ve got to figure out how to get things into mass production and get things fielded at the unit level, at a level that makes a difference.”
Ryan said the Pentagon has a tendency to engage in “innovation theater,” meaning a loud display of ineffective effort. He said Indo-Pacific Command leader Adm. Sam Paparo “so clearly can articulate where he sees the adversary, what the needs are, what his sort of operational concept is. And yet, if you look at what we’re doing and where dollars are flowing and where programs of record are, and even where leaders’ attention is, it is nowhere near in alignment there, which is incredibly scary and dangerous, given again, the urgency moment that we’re at.”
