Excerpt from The Status of Financial Management Reform Within the Department of Defense and the Individual Services: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support of the Committee on Armed Services United States Senate, One Hundred Eight Congress, Second Session, November 18, 2004 The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 3:29 p.m. in room Sr-222, Russell Senate Office Building, Senator John Ensign (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Committee members present: Senators Ensign, Warner, and Levin. Majority staff members present: William C. Greenwalt, professional staff member; Gregory T. Kiley, professional staff member; and Thomas L. MacKenzie, professional staff member. Minority staff member present: Peter K. Levine, minority counsel. Staff assistants present: Alison E. Brill and Andrew W. Florell. Committee members' assistants present: D'Arcy Grisier, assistant to Senator Ensign; Erik Raven, assistant to Senator Byrd; and Davelyn Noelani Kalipi, assistant to Senator Akaka. Opening Statement Of Senator John Ensign, Chairman Senator Ensign. The subcommittee will come to order. I want to welcome our witnesses to the subcommittee today, the Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support, and well be happy to receive your testimony after I make an opening statement. Senator Akaka would have loved to have been with us today, obviously, and he and I enjoy a great bipartisan relationship. We work together. Our staffs work together incredibly well on this subcommittee. He would have loved to have been here today, but there was something to do with a little presidential library opening in Little Rock, Arkansas, that he is attending right now. So we know that he is with us in spirit, if not in presence. We talked about 6 months ago about having this hearing, a follow-up hearing. The reason was because in the past people have continued to come before this subcommittee and say changes are underway; well, we are getting our arms around these problems and changes are underway, but we keep hearing, way before I was on this committee, that the problems are going to be fixed, and they are going to be fixed, and they are going to be fixed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Pentagon spending has been the target of decades of criticism and reform efforts. Billions of dollars are spent on weapons programs that are later abandoned. State-of-the-art data centers are underutilized and overstaffed. New business systems are built at great expense but fail to meet the needs of their users. Every Secretary of Defense for the last five Administrations has made it a priority to address perceived bloat and inefficiency by making management reform a major priority. The congressional defense committees have been just as active, enacting hundreds of legislative provisions. Yet few of these initiatives produce significant results, and the Pentagon appears to go on, as wasteful as ever. In this book, Peter Levine addresses why, despite a long history of attempted reform, the Pentagon continues to struggle to reduce waste and inefficiency. The heart of Defense Management Reform is three case studies covering civilian personnel, acquisitions, and financial management. Narrated with the insight of an insider, the result is a clear understanding of what went wrong in the past and a set of concrete guidelines to plot a better future.