THE NEW ‘GANSLER REPORT’


FIGURE 4


BUDGET: PREDICTABLY UNPREDICTABLE


In periods of budget decline, research is the first to go. Gansler said. In this graphic, the black line represents the number of active-duty troops in millions, while the red bars represent the total budget authority from 1948 to 2012. Predicting the near-term future is difficult because of the Budget Control Act (BCA) and sequestration. (SOURCE: Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Preparing for a Deep Defense Drawdown,” Feb. 8, 2013)


bureaucrats in a bloated bureaucracy and, while there are bad apples everywhere, you look around and it’s hard not to respect members of the acquisition workforce. How do you respond to that kind of a slap against the government workforce?


Gansler: I agree with your assessment totally. Tat was my expe- rience when I was in the government twice, the first time in charge of electronics R&D. At the time I was a vice president at ITT, and [then-Secretary of Defense] Bill Perry called me and asked if I would come to the Pentagon and run electron- ics R&D. And so I did. At that time, I took only an 80 percent salary cut.


Te next time, when I came as an undersecretary, I took a 90 percent salary cut. But I found the government people to be extremely qualified, extremely dedicated and extremely competent.


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A lot of those people have retired. Now we clearly need to focus on trying to have people come from the private sector and/or universities into these jobs and not make barriers to them doing it and leaving when they’re finished.


I think there are people in industry—maybe in the think tanks or even in the labs of industry—who could make some signifi- cant contributions but aren’t being encouraged, as you suggested with your question, to take the job, because then they’re the “bureaucrats.” Tat’s why I think we need more flexibility in the decision-making process—because we need to have the ability to work across the sectors. Tere are people in the government who need to have industry experience, commercial experience, preferably even some global exposure. It really is different in the rest of the world. When I was a vice president of ITT, obvi- ously a global company, I was forced to see the rest of the world. To the extent we can, [we need to] get people coming into the


Army AL&T Magazine April–June 2015


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