If the 99th Congress

can take at least these two modest

steps it will have gone a very long way toward fixing the major problems that exist. However as your February 11, 1986, letter

to

Let me

Secretary Weinburger notes, there are four other elements of the defense structure that you would like to focus on. shift my attention to these four areas.

(1) Defense agencies. I believe that the defense agency concept is sound, works well, and saves the department and the taxpayer money. During the years that I supervised the largest of the defense agencies, the Defense Logistics Agency, its availability rate for parts was higher than that of the individual services and it managed more items with fewer people per item than the individual services.

tours in DLA.

There are, however, two problems with the defense agencies. First, the individual services are reluctant to provide high quality flag or general officers to the top posts in the defense agencies or to leave them in place for a full tour. I was often dismayed by the rapid turnover in flag officers in DLA and the relatively poor promotion rates for all officers after their Second, the concept of the defense agency is often undermined by the creation of parallel organizations by the services after functions have been transferred to the defense agency. This was especially true in the intelligence area after the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). It is no wonder individuals perceive that there are too many layers, but the problem is caused not by the defense agency but by the

President Eisenhower noted over 30 years ago, we no longer fight

as

individual services. Ι believe we should not manage

separately either.

(2)

Joint military duties and the military personnel system. By and large officers assigned to joint duty, especially the joint staff, are not the "best and the brightest". ΝΟΙ are they as prepared as they should be for joint assignments. Finally, they are not as competitive for promotion

as officers

who have remained close to their services. This is one reason why the joint staff does not function as effectively as it

should.

A partial remedy for this situation is to make meaningful joint assignments an absolute prerequisite, for promotion to star ranks. Although such a requirement already exists, it is often waived and the definition of joint assignment construed too widely. Giving the Chairman of the JCS a role in selection of offers to joint assignments and their subsequent future assignments would also help.

However, creation of a joint specialty is

promotion and

what is needed.

arena, we need

Given the increasing importance of the joint officers who spend a considerable amount of their staff assignments in the joint area. A useful model for this type of career may be the procurement specialty track recently created by the Secretary of the Navy.

I have no philosophical or historical objective to an Armed Forces General staff. However, I believe that we should try the other steps first, and, if they do not succeed in bringing the "best and brightest" into the joint arena, only then should we look seriously at the General staff concept.

(3)

staffs.

Consolidating the military department

headquarters

A service secretary should be entitled to organize his
But, he does not need two

staff in the manner he chooses.

the dominant

the military headquarters staff usually emerged as
figure in the area of manpower, installations, or logistics.

sometimes

The

The service

secretaries perform a vital role and should be retained provided that the Secretary of Defense has the power hire and fire them. Any individual who takes the helm at Do D

to

participants in the DRB their impact has been minimal.

the CINCS need to be involved in the resource

Moreover,

allocation process

well before the DRB. They should have their own "operational force" budgets which should be scrutinized by the DRB.

The best way to ensure that the unified and specified commands operate correctly is to have a strong Chairman of the JCS with the power to see that the command structure adapts to the worldwide conditions and that the CINCS have adequate people and material resources to carry out their responsibilities.

The defense consensus

This is a critical period for DoD. has been shattered by the deficit problem and the perceptions of mismanagement in the department. I am confident we are moving in

the right direction to deal with the deficit.

make the correct changes in the management rebuild the defense consenses.

However, unless we

area, we cannot

You have an historic opportunity

to make a contribution in this area and I urge you to do so.

Mr. NICHOLS. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

You indicated your views on the consolidation of the service secretaries and military headquarters staffs, but I failed to hear you. Would you repeat that for me, please?

Mr. KORB. What I said was that what we ought to do is what we do now for public and legislative affairs, where you have the one staff. I think we ought to extend that to the entire service staff. So if the service secretary wants a military man to be in charge of personnel, fine; if he wants to bring in a civilian, that's fine, too. I think we ought to leave it up to him.

Mr. NICHOLS. I have no further questions. I would just like the record to show that Dr. Korb is the author of three major books on defense policy, "The Joint Chiefs of Staff: The First Twenty-Five Years," "The Fall and Rise of the Pentagon," "American Defense Policies in the 1970's." He served with great dignity and expertise as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower, and he is currently employed as vice president of the Raytheon Corp.

Mr. Kasich.

Mr. KASICH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I wish we could have Mr. Korb come back, his statement was so good and illuminating, particularly since he just finished serving the administration.

One area I want to ask you about, Larry, is DLA. The argument is that they were originally established to buy common items. Now only 38 percent of what they're buying is common items. I understand that common items are in the eye of the beholder. For example, if DLA wants to buy 15 different sets of bolts, those bolts may not be common items, they may be defined as service-unique. Because DLA buys bolts in large quantities, they get a better deal. Is that why we have moved away from

Mr. KORB. That's basically correct. I might point out that when I came into office, the GAO, under Mr. Staats, when he was leaving office, pointed out that we ought to get DLA more involved in buying those things which were not critical to weapons systems performance.

Mr. KASICH. Do you think we can do a better job buying centrally than we can giving some of these purchases back to the individual services? For example, I think the fuel hose or something was mentioned on one of the aircraft. If the Air Force had purchased it rather than the DLA, we wouldn't have had the crash. I believe, at least that was asserted in here. What do you think about that?

Mr. KORB. If you look into that situation-because that has been brought up before-that's basically a cheap shot at the Defense Logistics Agency by saying because they bought it they're responsible for the crash. There have been defective buys on lots of things and it is not just DLA that has bought defective parts.

But I think what you're talking about here is the whole question of whether DLA should be buying fuel hoses which are common to all of the services. Everybody buys fuel hoses. If they buy them in lot, can they not get a better buy? I know that the Chairman has talked about the great growth in DLA's manpower. But my experience has been-and when I left I checked the figures and read the statements of Secretary Wade and General Babers-their manpower has not expanded as fast as their workload and, in fact, the

number of people that they have is less than the services had when they performed the same function.

I might also point out that DLA does lots of things that haven't even been mentioned here; for example, surplus property disposal and hazardous waste disposal. These are lots of missions that they have that do take people and are very important that they be done. Moreover, DLA does have a higher availability rate for its parts than the services. I can't emphasize that too much.

Mr. KASICH. This decentralization question is the key here. If DLA was established to buy common items, and now the tail is wagging the dog and, in fact, they are buying more service-unique items than they are common items, doesn't it make sense to decentralize, go back and let each of the individual services make the purchases, because they know it better and they can contract better; they can do it more efficiently and they can save money? Mr. KORB. I think that's-

Mr. NICHOLS. If the gentleman would yield, before Dr. Korb answers, in defense of DLA let me say a lot of that additional workload has been requested by the respective services. It is not something that DLA has pushed. It is something the services have, in effect, requested. We have testimony to that effect.

Mr. KORB. That is correct.

I think what you

Mr. KASICH. This is the critical question.

Mr. KORB. I understand that. I think if you sent back to the services the items that you're talking about you would not save money and you would have more manpower because you wouldn't be buying things like fuel hoses in common.

One of the issues we had when I was there, and eventually became famous later, was ashtrays.

Mr. KASICH. Right.

Mr. KORB. I think the Navy would probably wish that it was DLA that was buying the ashtrays for all the planes. But since they are unique to each aircraft they, in effect, did not go to DLA while I was there, though that was a recommendation of some of the people who looked at our buying practice.

Mr. NICHOLS. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. KASICH. Yes.

Mr. NICHOLS. I have heard the allegation-whether it's true or not, I'm not certain-but I have heard the allegation made that the Navy, in effect, actually shifted some buying responsibilities to DLA that they perhaps were not conducting in the best fashion. Is there any truth to that?

Mr. KORB. Yes, there is. The interesting thing is-as you well know, because you've been involved in this-that the Navy was very desirous of getting a DLA to do the things that weren't terribly glamorous, so that they could use the people they had to repair the critical parts.

Remember that when DLA first existed we had service manpower ceilings. Now, thanks to the leadership of lots of people on this committee, we have done away with that. But remember, we used to have manpower ceilings both prescribed by OMB and the Congress. Because the services could not get any more people, they were happy to have this other agency manage those things.