How hard is it to run the Pentagon?

A look at the responsibilities Donald Trump is giving to Pete Hegseth, a former platoon leader

 

“So vast is the [Department of Defence] and so multifarious are its missions,” wrote Ash Carter, America’s 25th secretary of defence, “that it dwarfs most institutions on Earth.” He was not exaggerating. The Pentagon owns or maintains almost 30m acres of real estate, he noted, an area larger than the state of Pennsylvania. Its carbon emissions are about 1% of the country’s total. Its annual budget, a little over $800bn, exceeds the gdp of Taiwan, Belgium or Argentina. It is the largest buyer of fuel, the largest owner of ships and among the largest employers on the planet. On January 20th, should he be confirmed by the Senate, Pete Hegseth, a Fox News presenter and former infantry platoon leader, will inherit this sprawling apparatus. What does the job involve?

The secretary of defence, or SecDef in Washington parlance, is one of the most powerful individuals in the American government. The office holder is sixth in the presidential line of succession, sitting below the vice-president, two Congressional leaders and the secretaries of state and the treasury.  Under the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, the military chain of command runs from the president to the defence secretary and then—skipping the joint chiefs of staff and the heads of the army, navy and air force—on to the combatant commanders who oversee different parts of the world. “It would be very hard for a president to override the advice he was getting from the secretary and the chairman [of the joint chiefs of staff],” noted Dick Cheney, reflecting on his experience of running the Pentagon for George H.W. Bush between 1989 and 1993.

Mr Hegseth would not have a role in the nuclear chain of command, which runs directly from the president to nuclear units, though he would expect to be consulted in a crisis. James Mattis, Donald Trump’s first secretary of defence, reportedly slept in gym clothes for fear that the president might order a nuclear strike on North Korea in the middle of the night. “You’re never on vacation, you’re never on leave, you’re always on duty,” noted Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s secretary. “Twenty-four hours means twenty-four hours, including anything that would go wrong..small crises…were constantly going on.” Mr Cheney recalls riding to work every morning with a cia briefer in the car and a copy of the president’s daily brief, the single most important product of the American intelligence agencies.

The secretary’s next task is to keep America’s vast military enterprise ticking over. Parts of it are out of his hands. The Department of Veterans Affairs, for instance, which handles healthcare and other benefits, spends over $300bn annually. It is the Department of Energy which designs and builds nuclear weapons. But the Pentagon has its own fingers in many pies. The National Security Agency, America’s signals-intelligence service, dwarfs the cia and reports to the Pentagon. So too does the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds spy satellites. The department employs around 700,000 civilians, around a third of the entire federal civilian workforce. It contains multitudes: in 2015 it transpired that the Pentagon had spent $84m—more than the entire defence budget of some small countries—on Viagra and other erectile-dysfunction drugs.

The secretary is not just a commander and manager. He is also a diplomat. “This turned out to be a bigger part of the job than I thought when I went into it,” notes Mr Cheney. “You end up having to spend a fair amount of time dealing with other defence ministers, attending nato quarterly meetings, doing all of those things.” Lloyd Austin, Joe Biden’s defence secretary, visited Asia a dozen times in his four years in office, as well as chairing near-monthly meetings of the so-called Ramstein group in Germany, which co-ordinated military aid to Ukraine. In October 2022 it also fell to Mr Austin to phone Sergei Shoigu, his Russian counterpart, twice in three days to warn him that any use of nuclear weapons—a prospect that then seemed real—would be a grave mistake.

In practice, Mr Hegseth would not have to run all this alone. The Pentagon’s chief operating officer is the deputy secretary of defence. He or she essentially runs the department on a day-to-day basis and organises its budget, a crucial job that involves corralling the individual services which have their own, often divergent ideas about which weapons to buy, and their own channels to Congress to lobby in favour of those things. Mr Trump has nominated Stephen Feinberg, a billionaire investor, for that role. But even if Mr Hegseth takes no interest in the minutiae of his department, he would need to offer a vision for its shape and direction, says one former official. When should America use military force? And which forces—conventional or nuclear, ground or naval—should be prioritised? “It’s like running a giant aircraft carrier,” noted Eric Edelman, reflecting on his time as the Pentagon’s policy chief during 2005-09. “You can’t just make…rapid course changes without having ripple effects throughout the whole organisation.”

Mr Trump’s enthusiasm for using the military for domestic tasks, from border security to suppressing protests and riots, has previously sucked the Pentagon into deeply sensitive matters. Mark Esper, Mr Mattis’ successor, warned the head of America’s national guard that the president might seek to use military forces to help overturn the result of the election in 2020. “If at any point in the coming days—before, during or after the election—you get a call from anyone at the White House,” he asked, “call me immediately.” In Mr Trump’s first term, his several defence secretaries largely acted as a brake on his instincts, slowing down troop withdrawals from Syria and Germany, for instance, and resisting the deployment of the military at home. Mr Hegseth is unlikely to take that approach.

The lot of the secretary is not always a happy one. Donald Rumsfeld, who served in the job twice, latterly under George W. Bush, compared the department to “one of the last decrepit dictators of the world”, in thrall to central planning and resistant to change. Bob Gates, the highly experienced former cia chief who succeeded Mr Rumsfeld, seems to have hated almost every minute of the job, complaining in his memoirs about the Pentagon’s suffocating bureaucracy and the torment of dealing with Congress and a domineering Obama White House. In his memoirs, he recalls writing to the families of troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. “[V]irtually every night for four and a half years, writing condolence letters and reading about these mostly young men and women,” he writes, “I wept.”

The magnitude of these responsibilities and the rigours of the job have often weighed heavily on office holders. When Bill Clinton called William Perry, then deputy secretary of defence, to offer him the top job, he initially turned it down, ground down by his year in the Pentagon and wary of exposing his family to the press. Robert McNamara, who had excelled at corporate management and reform, likewise demurred when first asked by John F. Kennedy to serve as secretary of defence weeks after becoming president of the Ford Motor Company in 1960. Despite having run one of the most important companies in the world, he thought it would be “a mistake to put a person as inexperienced as I in government in such a position”. Mr Hegseth does not appear to be encumbered by such qualms.
Excerpts : The economist;

Published: 13th January2025

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