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Now
How can senators exercise their constitutional
responsibility to vote on President Bush's nomination of Robert
M. Gates to be secretary of defense? In the past there have been
two typical methods.
One is to explore past failings
involving ethics or the law. There are, indeed, two clouds in
Gates's history: one involving the Iran-Contra scandal in the
1980s and another that involves the testimony of co-workers in
the CIA that he allowed his personal biases--and more importantly
those of his superiors--to guide intelligence analysis. That's
not a happy precedent in today's context. Some currently sitting
senators voted against Gates's previous nomination to be Director
of Central Intelligence in the George H. W. Bush administration
for those reasons. However, it is unclear if those same senators,
such as Carl Levin (D-Mich) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass), will find
what were good reasons in 1991 to be good reasons in 2006.
The facts may not have changed,
but the politics could have, and the latter will control. Accordingly,
it seems pointless to probe those issues here--unless some sharp
reporter out there has come up with some interesting new information.
The other method senators have
used on past nominations is to assess how the nominee aligns
with their individual biases. Some typically say they disagree
with the nominee, but "the president should have the person
he wants." Others say they disagree, and that is sufficient
reason for adamant opposition--a stance both parties' ideologues
take with Supreme Court nominees on issues like abortion.
Neither method--politics or
ideology--can give senators a useful guide to whether Gates is
fit to serve as secretary of defense. Perhaps Gates has learned
a useful lesson about intelligence analysis, and whether he agrees
or disagrees with some senator's personal biases on some defense
issue means almost nothing about his fitness to be secretary
of defense.
There is a much better way,
which has been used only rarely in the Senate: does the nominee
acknowledge the existence of various problems, and if they are
serious, does he have a rational plan to address them?
There are at least two horrifying
problems in the Pentagon that Gates should address:
Today's Department of Defense
may be the worst managed agency of the federal government.
The Pentagon does not know
what it does with the half trillion dollars Congress appropriates
to it each year.
The existence of these problems
is pretty much incontrovertible. People who don't think so have
not been doing their homework or are wearing blinkers. More to
the point, a nominee who does not acknowledge them will be both
unwilling and incapable of addressing them and is clearly not
qualified to be secretary of defense.
Who says DOD is the most incompetently
managed agency in the federal government? Try George Bush. His
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) rates the competence of
federal agencies; it's called the "President's Management
Agenda" and OMB releases Bush's scorecard every quarter
of every year. (Click
here to see the latest one.) Scroll down through the agencies;
it is correct that some are rated even lower than DOD, but only
a very few, all of them known losers. Plus, there's reason to
suspect that true ratings for the Pentagon may be worse than
the ones reported.
OMB is a partisan office run
by political appointees. It may not be the most objective rater,
especially of an important agency like DOD. It's conceivable
OMB is letting the Pentagon off easily. Let's try the Government
Accountability Office (GAO), which has a legitimate claim to
be reliable on an issue like this.
GAO produces a series of studies
called "High Risk Reports." They address the most serious
problems GAO finds in government. The most
recent GAO contribution shows that DOD is the subject of
more high risk reports than any other federal agency and--quite
plausibly--is the worst managed agency of the federal government.
What about the other assertion
that the Pentagon doesn't know what it does with its appropriations
from Congress? How can that be? DOD has huge stocks of equipment
and literally hordes of military personnel and civilian bureaucrats.
Both the equipment and the people--and their operations--are
all paid for. Clearly not a case of the money getting lost. Waste?
Sure, but isn't it overstatement to say that the Pentagon doesn't
know what happens to the money?
Ask the Pentagon, specifically
its Office
of the Inspector General (OIG). In its testimony to Congress
on August 3, 2006, OIG declared $3.8 trillion (that's with a
"t") in assets, liabilities, and costs of operations
to be impossible to audit. Note well; they didn't say "flunked
an audit;" they said it was all un-auditable. They said
they couldn't track the money; not that they could track it and
found some problems. The Pentagon would literally be in better
financial management shape if it were able to take an audit and
flunk. This, the OIG stated further, is "the single largest
and most challenging impediment" to financial integrity
in the entire federal government (see page 2).
As in the management assessment
above, GAO took the gilt off the lily. In its testimony to Congress
on the same day, GAO stated that the financial mess in the Pentagon
has "left the department vulnerable to billions of dollars
of fraud, waste, and abuse annually." (Click
here and go to page 2.) GAO described just some of the consequences:
debt collectors chasing soldiers wounded in Iraq because of inaccurate
pay records, billions of dollars appropriated for the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan being miscounted, double-counted, or simply
lost, and DOD's bills being paid twice or not at all.
OK, so how do we use this information
to write questions for senators to ask Gates?
Simple; we don't.
If we write out questions for
the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the senators
will simply read them off (the smart ones will summarize on their
own). Knowing little more than the information conveyed in the
question itself, the inquiring member will have no ability to
identify a bilge-water response. The one they will likely get
will be that DOD has a good plan to deal with those oh-so important
issues. Sure, just like the "good" DOD plan to deal
with the financial management mess promised by Messrs. Aspin,
Perry, Cohen, and Rumsfeld when they were asked about it.
Those with a sharp memory will
recall that when Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) asked Donald Rumsfeld
in December 2000 what he would do about the $2.8 trillion in
transactions DOD could not audit, Rumsfeld quipped he would "resign
the nomination." Just the kind of non-answer a poorly informed
senator is likely to let slide today.
Note, however, that the $2.8
trillion in un-auditables in 2000 is today $3.8 trillion. That's
some plan! Perhaps Gates would like to tell us how he is going
to make it better, not worse.
It is pointless to try here
to micromanage an exchange between any senator and Gates on serious
defense issues. The point is that the senators must prepare themselves
not by seeking scripted questions but by getting into the weeds
of the issues--to study them and to be able to give as good as
he or she takes on the facts. That's why we've provided links
to some of the information. Therein, senators, find not pre-written
questions but a discussion of the issues crammed with facts from
GAO, OIG, and even OMB.
Go read about it, senator.
Then, well-informed, perceptive questions will come easily to
you, and you will have a basis for real probing of Gates on his
fitness for office.
And, yes, we will also have
some basis for assessing the senators and their fitness for office.
Winslow T. Wheeler is the Director of the Straus Military
Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information and author
of The
Wastrels of Defense. Over 31 years, he worked for US Senators
from both political parties and the Government Accountability
Office on national security issues. He can be contacted at: winslowwheeler@comcast.net.
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