The Pentagon needs a programming office, but not this one

Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has proposed legislation in his “chairman’s mark” that would do away with the Defense Department’s Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE). Rogers is acting out of sheer frustration with an office that he and a number of his colleagues believe is deliberately slow-rolling compliance with language in the Fiscal Year 2023 Defense Authorization Act that explicitly set 31 amphibious ships as a floor below which the Navy should not go. Despite the legislation, however, CAPE is studying the amphibious ship program yet again.

CAPE and its predecessors have long been at odds with Navy and Marine Corps planners and programmers. The original Office of Programming — created by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1961 and upgraded and renamed four years later as the Office of Systems Analysis — angered the Navy over a number of issues. Most notable was McNamara’s decision to utilize an Air Force design for what became the F-111 fighter while cancelling the Navy version called F-111B.

During the Carter Administration, the again renamed Office of Program Analysis & Evaluation (PA&E) advocated for a severe reduction in Navy aircraft carriers at a time when the Navy was developing plans to expand its twelve-carrier fleet. PA&E continued its opposition even as the Navy, under Secretary John Lehman, argued for a fifteen-carrier force. It was only when President Ronald Reagan made it clear at a National Security Council meeting (at which I was present) that he too supported the Navy plan that PA&E was forced to relent. Not surprisingly, both the civilian and military leadership of the Department of the Navy have continually harbored suspicions that the evaluation office is biased against the sea services.

Rogers’ frustration with CAPE is not the first example of congressional anger at the office and its leadership. It was due to pressure from Senate Appropriations Chairman John McLellan that Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger was forced to fire Leonard Sullivan, then serving as Assistant Secretary for PA&E, with whom McLellan had bitterly disagreed. When Caspar Weinberger became Secretary of Defense, perhaps in response to PA&E’s reputation for anti-Navy bias, he initially downgraded the office to a directorship so that its leader no longer held a Senate-confirmed post. Nevertheless, having developed tremendous respect for the professionalism of the office’s director, David Chu, Weinberger restored the position to that of Assistant Secretary, which it remains today.

At issue for Rogers and those of his like-minded colleagues is that they perceive the office to be more an advocate for a particular position than a source of impartial analysis. In the past, that perception has at least in some instances been accurate. Despite its uneven history, however, CAPE does perform a valuable function by providing the Secretary of Defense and especially the Deputy Secretary, to whom it likewise reports, independent assessments of defense programs. If CAPE did not exist, the Defense Secretary would still have to create an office to fulfill its function.

It is noteworthy that when McNamara first established the analysis office he placed it within the Office of the Comptroller. It was only in 1965 that it became a separate entity reporting to the Secretary and his deputy. Moreover, when Donald Rumsfeld returned to lead the Pentagon in 2001, he initially again placed PA&E within the Office of the Comptroller. Rumsfeld soon reversed himself, however, in part because the culture of the two offices was so different; for example, each employed its own independent database for evaluating program costs.

Nevertheless, the time might once again be ripe for embedding a CAPE-like office within that of the Comptroller. Since the latter is an Under Secretary, the leader of the program evaluation office could retain his or her Assistant Secretary title, with the rank and importance it commands. The change would subject the Assistant Secretary to another level of oversight, however, hopefully correcting for any overzealous advocacy by the program evaluation staff.

Such an organizational change might fit well with another experiment that has been tried but discarded over the past two decades: the merger of the programming and budgeting processes. These processes are integral to the overall Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) exercise, which like CAPE harks back to Robert McNamara’s so-called “managerial revolution.”

It is time to modernize what McNamara himself told me two decades ago was even then an outdated process. The congressionally mandated Commission on PPBE Reform, which is due to issue its final report in March 2024, is meant to do just that. Perhaps it will find a way to maintain the best of what CAPE has to offer the DoD leadership, while minimizing, if not eliminating, the appearance of biases that have so angered Chairman Rogers, as they did some of his predecessors in years past.

Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was undersecretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy undersecretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.