Video Player

Key Issues In the Department of Defense for the Obama Administration

Moderator: Barry Posen
Cindy Williams Owen Coté Jr. PhD '96 Harvey M. Sapolsky Admiral William Fallon: January 15, 2009; Running Time: 1:36:01

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

These five security specialists seem dubious about major Defense Department reforms as the Obama administration winds into action.

Cindy Williams first unloads these basics: the U.S. FY 2009 Department of Defense non-war budget is over half a trillion dollars – “about as much money as the rest of the world combined spends on their military endeavors;” another $200 billion is going to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. military is the nation’s and possibly the world’s largest employer, with 1.4 million active duty men and women and another million plus in the guard, reserves and civilian side. But in spite of this manpower and budget, says Williams, “the Secretary of Defense will face daunting constraints,” from the current economic meltdown, to the looming entitlement deficit posed by baby boomer retirement. Williams also notes a set of pressures driving costs skyward, not least of which include the likelihood of global conflicts springing up.

There’s a “popular parlor game in D.C.,” says Owen Coté, of tracking “elaborate, often baroque programs that are over budget, to figure out which will be canceled.” To Coté’s thinking, “dozens of programs fit into that category.” Complicating this “game” is a tug of war among the different services. The perception, says Coté, is of “a zero-sum fight for resources between the Army and Marine Corps, and the Navy and Air Force on the other hand.” Yet all our forces must prepare for both irregular warfare (military operations that don’t involve states), and traditional wars against nations with militaries. The simplest approach to Defense program allocations, Coté says, “is to decide what kinds of wars we think we’re going to fight, and what is the relevance of the program in one of these kinds of wars. If it doesn’t look relevant to either, I’ve got some candidates to help you save money.”

“I don’t think much new will happen in the new administration,” says Harvey Sapolsky. “It helps that Republicans started a big, messy war.” But Sapolsky is worried about “continuities,” including the U.S. “propensity to intervene internationally,” “exploitation of our gullibility about management systems,” and “wishful thinking about inter-organizational agency coordination.” We’re fortunately “out of troops” to do interventions he says, but he imagines we’ll still find ourselves “in the thick of it unnecessarily.” He wishes there could be a “moratorium on management fads in DOD,” the endless discussion of achieving reforms when “defense is inherently an inefficient enterprise.”

William Fallon sees a mountain of DOD “desirements,” stemming from an endless “to-do list of things people want done in the name of security.” Well-intended outsiders, from Congress to the general public, press for new weapons programs, and military interventions. We “have a phenomenal budget, filled with all kinds of things, that if you lay them out, you’re probably hard-pressed to find a connection between that line item and national security.” Nevertheless, “despite all the hand wringing, inefficiencies and angst, overall, security for the country stands in pretty darn good shape.”

Lecture Details

Location: 14W-111

“America is a very secure country. We can reinvent the wheel but basically the wheel’s kept us safe. ”

Harvey Sapolsky

About the Speakers

Moderator: Barry Posen

Ford International Professor of Political Science
Director, CIS Security Studies Program, MIT

Barry R. Posen serves on the Executive Committee of Seminar XXI, an educational program for senior military officers, government officials and business executives in the national security policy community. He has written two books, Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks and The Sources of Military Doctrine, which won two awards: The American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award, and Ohio State University's Edward J. Furniss Jr. Book Award.

Posen is also the author of numerous articles, including "The Case for Restraint," The American Interest, (November/December 2007) and “Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony,” International Security, (Summer, 2003.) He has been a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow; Rockefeller Foundation International Affairs Fellow; Guest Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow, Smithsonian Institution; and most recently, Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Posen's current research interests include U.S. national security policy, the security policy of the European Union, the organization and employment of military force, great power intervention into civil conflicts, and innovation in the U.S. Army, 1970-1980.

Cindy Williams

Principal Research Scientist, Security Studies Program, MIT

Cindy Williams' work examines the way the U.S. government plans for and allocates resources among the activities and programs related to national security and international affairs, a study of options for reform of military personnel policies, and an examination of the transition to all-volunteer forces in the militaries of several European countries.

She has served as an Assistant Director of the Congressional Budget Office, where she led the National Security Division in studies of budgetary and policy choices related to defense and international security. Williams has served as a director and in other capacities at the MITRE Corporation; as a member of the Senior Executive Service in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon; and as a mathematician at RAND in Santa Monica, California.

Williams holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Irvine. She has published in the areas of command and control and the defense budget, and she is the editor of two books: Holding the Line: U.S. Defense Alternatives for the Early 21st Century, (MIT Press 2001) and Filling the Ranks: Transforming the U.S. Military Personnel System (MIT Press, 2004). She is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a member of the Naval Studies Board, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the International Institute of Strategic Studies. She serves on the advisory board of Women in International Security and on the editorial board of International Security.

Owen Coté Jr. PhD '96

Associate Director, MIT Securities Studies Program Co-Editor of International Security

Prior to joining MIT's Security Studies Program in 1997, Owen R. Coté, Jr. was Assistant Director of the International Security Program at Harvard's Center for Science and International Affairs. He received his Ph.D. from MIT, where he specialized in U.S. defense policy and international security affairs. He is the author of The Third Battle: Innovation in the U.S. Navy's Silent Cold War Struggle with Soviet Submarines, a book analyzing the sources of the U.S. Navy's success in its Cold War antisubmarine warfare effort, and a co-author of Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy: Containing the Threat of Loose Russian Nuclear Weapons and Fissile Material.

Coté has also worked at the Hudson Institute and the Center for Naval Analyses.

Harvey M. Sapolsky

Director, MIT Security Studies Program Professor of Public Policy and Organization Department of Political Science

Harvey Sapolsky has served as a consultant to the Commission on Government Procurement, The Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Naval War College, the Office of Naval Research, the Rand Corporation, Draper Laboratory, and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. He received his B.A.from Boston University and earned an M.P.A.and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Admiral William Fallon

Former Head of CENTCOM
Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow, MIT Center for International Studies

William Fallon led U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) from March 2007 to March 2008. During that time, he was responsible for U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and directed all U.S. military activities in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Horn of Africa. Fallon also served as the commander of U.S. Pacific Command (Feb 2005 - March 2007), commander for U.S. Fleet Forces Command and the U.S. Atlantic Fleet (Sept 2003 - Feb 2005) and was the 31st Vice Chief of Naval Operations (Oct 2000 - Aug 2003).

His awards include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Meritorious Service Medal, Air Medal, Navy Commendation Medal, and various unit and campaign decorations.

Fallon joined the MIT Center for International Studies as its 2008-09 Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow upon retiring from the military after 41 years of distinguished service. He is a graduate of the Naval War College, Newport, R.I., the National War College in Washington, D.C., and has a Master of Arts degree in International Studies from Old Dominion University.