Managing Military Reform

摘要

In "Restructuring the Military" (Issues, Fall 2008), Lawrence J. Korb and Max A. Bergmann call the Pentagon "the world s largest bureaucracy," implying that it can be managed much like otherrnvery large organizations. They then go on to discuss policies that they believe should be put in place, skirting the question of how such policies would be received in the many semiautonomous centers of power within the Department of Defense (DOD), which in reality is more a loose confederation of tribes than a bureaucracy. "Bureaucracy," after all, signifies hierarchy. Well-defined hierarchies do exist within the DOD, but they are found within the four services and the civilian employees who answer ultimately to the Secretary of Defense. Otherwise, lines of authority are ambiguous and contested, more so than in any other part of our famously fragmented government. To considerable extent, policy in the DOD is what happens, not what is supposed to happen.