Sylvia’s firing is one of the highest-profile consequences to date from Hegseth’s sweeping hunt for officials suspected of leaking information to the news media as the unpopular Iran war enters its ninth month. 

Hegseth’s effort includes a Pentagon task force to identify the source of leaks and the widespread use of polygraph exams on senior officials as part of these investigations. 

Last year, he introduced a media policy that raised legal concerns among press organizations, and revoked the press credentials of journalists who refused to sign it. 

A senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, accused Sylvia of failing three polygraphs questioning him about leaking classified information. 

“The extent of his leaking became so critical that Secretary Hegseth took immediate action and fired Sylvia in order to protect national security. Urgent action was needed and could not wait another second,” the official said.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who misidentified Sylvia as a woman, said the senior US general has “got problems.”

“We’re very much looking for leakers, and she’s going to have big problems, long-term problems,” Trump told reporters. 

Sylvia could not be immediately reached for comment.

Key position

Sylvia led the Directorate for Strategy, Plans, and Policy at the Joint Staff, known inside the military as the J5, a key position that helps advise the top US military official, General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

He previously led the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division. His dismissal was first reported by The Atlantic magazine.

His removal comes as the US military plans for a potential resumption of intensive bombings in Iran, something Trump has called “another little Epic Fury.” The Pentagon has fumed about leaks during the Iran war, including about its planning and the expenditure of munitions. 

Reuters reported on Wednesday that an internal US military analysis estimates it would cost more than $29 billion in munitions alone to restock weapons used against Iran so far. That’s the bulk of the more than $47 billion spent on operations in the war.

Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, said the decision followed an extensive investigation by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

“This matter, along with others, have been referred to the Justice Department for potential further legal action,” Parnell said, without identifying other officials who may also be targeted.

Parnell added: “Our commitment was not an empty promise. We vowed to find you, and we meant it.”

A spokesperson for the Joint Staff withdrew an initial statement expressing gratitude for Sylvia’s 32 years of service, saying “we determined the statement did not appropriately reflect the full circumstances.”

“Out of respect for the service member and the ongoing personnel process, we will not comment further,” the spokesperson said.

One of the officials said the military investigators were in touch with their French counterparts about a similar cyberattack on commercial freezers that disrupted supermarkets there earlier this month.

Reuters was not able to ascertain how far along the Pentagon’s investigation was or whether it had reached any conclusions about what happened or who might be responsible. When asked about the investigation, the Pentagon said that a unit of Cyber Command — the military’s cyber force — was “working in close coordination with interagency and law enforcement partners.” It did not elaborate. 

The US Department of the Army Criminal Investigation Division said its Cyber Field Office was involved in the investigation and that it was working with French law enforcement to better understand “the refrigeration outages in Europe.”

The late August malfunctions in the United States affected at least six commissaries — on-base stores where military personnel buy their food — according to a Reuters review of the military bases’ contemporaneous Facebook posts and website updates. In at least one of the cases, the freezers did not simply stop working; the cooling units’ temperatures were cranked up overnight, yielding mounds of wilted or melted food in the morning. 

The Fort Huachuca, Arizona, Facebook account explained on August 26 that its freezer “went into defrost mode where it heated up all the food. Trust us when we say it was ‘spoiled.'”

The spate of rogue freezer behavior and the possibility of cybersabotage were first reported on August 28 by a recently created blog called Signal and Silence. The involvement of military investigators and their contacts with the French were reported by the newspaper Stars and Stripes and Britain’s Daily Telegraph, respectively. The news that the investigators were treating the incident as a suspected hack is being reported here for the first time.

The French Embassy in Washington said it would have no comment.

French freezers fried

If confirmed to be a cyberattack, the refrigerator malfunctions would be another illustration of how vulnerable critical infrastructure — in this case cold storage — can be to hackers.

The French freezer cyberattack overrode the temperature controls on commercial cooling units in more than 350 establishments, leading to dramatic scenes as supermarkets’ frozen food aisles were cleared of spoiled merchandise.

The French hack involved cranking the temperature inside the units up rather than merely knocking them offline, similar to what happened in Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Some French refrigeration units had the temperature turned up so high they caught fire. The French attack’s total costs could add up to tens of millions of euros nationwide, one supermarket owner estimated earlier this month. 

The French cyberattack appeared to have ​been easy to pull off, experts previously told Reuters. The Danish firm Danfoss, whose controllers ran many of the stricken units, said that many of the devices were obsolete or were running outdated firmware, which could have made it easy for hackers to break in. Reuters could not establish whether Danfoss or any other brand of freezer controller were in use at the affected US bases. Danfoss did not return messages seeking comment.

Chilling hacks

Refrigeration plays a critical role in the distribution of fresh food and the sabotage of cold storage facilities over the internet has long been seen as a nightmare scenario, alongside the loss of electricity or water plants. 

Earlier this year, the Global Food Safety Initiative, an industry body, called on food safety professionals and IT leaders to work together to ensure “robust cybersecurity” for refrigeration technology, noting that “a hacked cooling system is just as dangerous as a broken one.”

Hackers have previously sabotaged fridges and freezers both in the United States and elsewhere.

Danfoss has said that, in 2022, hackers either targeted or broke into supermarkets in Russia and Israel that were using obsolete versions of its cold storage controllers. In December of last year, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles accused a Ukrainian woman of being part of a hacker group that knocked out the refrigeration at a meatpacking facility in 2024, ruining more than 2,000 pounds of meat.

The root problem was that controllers that were initially conceived as isolated interfaces that would be serviced by an in-person technician were increasingly being connected to the internet, said Bill Moore, the chief executive of industrial cybersecurity firm Xona Systems. Concerns about online exposure were not unique to cooling systems, he said, but they could have particularly serious consequences there.

“It can definitely disrupt the supply chain for food,” he said.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its estimate, which has not been shared publicly.

The disclosure about the rising cost of the Iran war comes as Republicans wrestle with the political fallout of the unpopular conflict ahead of the November 3 election that will determine control of Congress for the next two years.

The war’s impact on global energy costs has weighed on support for Republican candidates and hurt President Donald Trump’s approval ratings. Trump’s Republican Party holds a narrow majority in both chambers of Congress.

The Pentagon’s latest estimate was tied to the operational costs of carrying out the war, with a projected cost of more than $29 billion to replace expended munitions used in the conflict.

More than $6 billion would be needed to replace military equipment and so-called “platform losses,” which include the loss of aircraft and drones during the war.

Trump launched the Iran war jointly with Israel in February, predicting ​that the conflict would last a short time.

Trump’s initial strategy in the Iran war focused on first using expensive, high-end precision missiles to bomb Iran’s defenses so it could later use less expensive munitions, including gravity bombs like the air-launched JDAMs, which are plentiful.

But an April ceasefire gave time for Iran to dig out underground storage facilities, bringing back online some Iranian defenses, as well as missiles and drones that had been inaccessible.

Trump has since imposed a naval blockade on Iran to starve it of oil export revenue and held out the possibility of restarting combat operations after the midterm elections. US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say the Pentagon has been planning to restart heavy fighting if ordered to do so.

The latest Pentagon estimate compares to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s July estimate of $37.5 billion for the cost of the war.

While the figures include a host of operational costs, from flight operations to cyber support, the US military’s Iran war cost estimates did not clearly account for the massive expense expected to repair damage to US bases sustained by Iranian missile and drone attacks.

According to a Federal Register notice Tuesday, the $1.4 million committee will focus “exclusively on human performance,” providing guidance and insight on improving function, combating the physical, mental and emotional tolls of military service known collectively as “operator syndrome,” and preventing physical injuries and operational stress. 

“The Council will serve as a high-impact, low-cost mechanism for the [DoD] to secure the expertise of the nation’s foremost leaders at the nexus of warrior health and performance,” the announcement stated. 

The Pentagon established a Warfighter Performance Optimization division earlier this year within Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Anthony Tata’s office. It is intended to oversee and coordinate the individual services’ efforts to improve troops’ readiness and performance.

In May, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed Tata to report on existing optimization initiatives across the services to create a department-wide performance optimization plan. 

Hegseth said he wanted to accelerate fielding technologies that will improve performance — such as wearable devices and other analytics tools — and focus on elevating “cognitive performance as a key to readiness.” 

“By building on and modernizing the principles of Total Force Fitness (TFF), WPO will deliver a unified operational approach to accelerate readiness, dominance, and peak performance across the Force. We will treat the Warfighter as a readiness capability, held to the same disciplined evaluation, maintenance, and optimization we demand of every asset that preserves combat power,” Hegseth wrote. 

The services have created their own approaches to health, fitness and human performance within the last several years. Army introduced its Holistic Health and Fitness initiative in 2020 to improve the health of the force and reduce the number of soldiers considered non-deployable because of chronic medical conditions. 

The Navy introduced its Human Performance Optimization program as a pilot in San Diego in February, providing training and education on nutrition, sleep, injury prevention and stress management.  

The Marine Corps has had a total fitness strategy since 2023 that combines wellness, fitness, mental health and data to improve the health of members, while the Air Force is building a new human performance optimization facility at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, which is designed to support Air Force Special Warfare airmen. 

The new advisory committee will have up to 20 members with expertise in an array of scientific and medical fields, including urology, endocrinology, nutrition, neurology, combat stress, orthopedics, preventive medicine, wearable technology or spiritual, psychiatric or psychological health, sleep medicine and human factors engineering.  

As with all federal advisory committees, volunteers are unpaid and only receive travel pay and per diem reimbursement when conducting council-related business. 

The announcement described the council as “an exceptionally cost-effective resource.” 

The newly formed group, the announcement stated, will provide information that helps the services create “lethal, operationally ready warriors prepared physically, psychologically, for successful large-scale, high kinetic, combat operations against peer adversaries who are imbued with the essential Warrior Ethos to win decisively,” the announcement stated.  

Shortly after Hegseth took office last year, he dismissed the members of roughly 40 Defense Department advisory boards and launched reviews to determine whether they supported his goal to “revive the warrior ethos” in the U.S. armed forces. 

The Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services and the Defense Advisory Committee for the Prevention of Sexual Misconduct were among those terminated.

Hegseth has also created several new advisory boards since being sworn in, most recently, the Homeland Defense Board, announced Sept. 11, which he plans to chair. The board will provide guidance on military support for homeland security missions. 

All Department of Defense personnel are forbidden from such financial transactions either directly or through a third party when using insider information, according to a memo signed last week by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“The lives of our service members often depend on the enemy not knowing what is coming,” Hegseth wrote in the memo. “The men and women who carry our flag into harm’s way deserve a Force that protects them — not one that exposes them to the enemy for personal gain.”

The memo comes six months after a U.S. soldier involved with the capture of ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was charged with using insider information to win $400,000 by betting on his removal through the prediction market Polymarket. The soldier, a master sergeant with U.S. Army Special Forces, later pleaded not guilty, and his criminal trial is slated for early December.

The same month, individuals across the globe used Polymarket to place bets on the rescue mission of Dude 44 Bravo, one of the airmen who ejected from a U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle that was shot down over Iran by enemy fire during Operation Epic Fury. 

Polymarket later took down the wagers, saying it didn’t meet the site’s integrity standards, but other war-related markets users can bet on were created before and after the Iran war began, causing concern over national security among lawmakers and experts. 

Another instance of an individual betting on military operations involved an anonymous Polymarket account making $550,000 off of trades on the first day of strikes in Operation Epic Fury, wagering on the U.S. strikes against Iran and the removal of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed by Israeli air strikes on the war’s first day.

The recent memo, which was shared with senior Pentagon leadership, combatant commanders, defense agencies and field activity directors, reinforces federal law that prohibits government employees from using nonpublic information from their work for personal financial gains.

The ban extends to all financial platforms, including betting platforms and prediction markets, with the directive pointing to Polymarket and Kalshi as specific examples. 

The memo first publicly circulated on the unofficial Facebook page Air Force amn/nco/snco. A Defense Department official shared a copy of the memo with Military Times, confirming the authenticity of the one circulating on social media.

The directive asserts that signals are generated when personnel engage in a financial transaction on a military outcome. The signal can then be watched by adversaries in these markets and exploited by hostile foreign intelligence services to anticipate American movements, targets and timing.

“The memorandum from the Secretary of War regarding predictive markets is a reminder that engaging in financial transactions using nonpublic information, and using nonpublic information to further private interests, is prohibited and may result in punitive action,” the Pentagon official told Military Times.

“The Department takes this misconduct seriously and will take appropriate action, to include coordinating with the Department of Justice, to ensure anyone who engages in this misconduct is held accountable,” the official concluded.

Violations can result in administrative, disciplinary or criminal action under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or applicable federal law, the memo says.

Alongside operational security unease, Hegseth argues in the memo that financial stakes can negatively impact judgment and weaken the “warrior ethos” as personnel become invested in certain outcomes. 

“We are restoring lethality, discipline, and singular focus on fighting and winning our Nation’s wars, and nothing should distract us from that sacred mission,” Hegseth writes. “Not entertainment. Not a payout.”

^{Under federal law, former spouses may receive up to half a service member’s time-based military retirement pay. But medical-based military retirement pay and any Veterans Affairs disability pay is protected and not divisible.}

^{In Marschner v. Marschner, which was accepted by the high court earlier this month, Roxane Marschner, who married North Dakota Army National Guard soldier Richard Marschner, is seeking to enforce a clause in her divorce settlement in which Richard agreed to pay her the equivalent of her portion of military retirement pay if any of it was offset by disability compensation.}

^{The couple married in 1994 and divorced 22 years later. In their settlement, Roxane was to receive a percentage of Richard’s military and federal civilian benefits when he retired. But Richard later was medically retired as a result of service-connected injuries and received medical retirement pay and VA disability compensation — neither of which is divisible under the Uniformed Services Former Spouses Protection Act.}

^{Roxane then took Richard to court, arguing that he had agreed to pay her if she did not receive her share of benefits. The lower court ruled in her favor. Richard then petitioned the North Dakota Supreme Court, which said the provision was unenforceable.}

^{Roxane Marschner then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the case, saying that the law and a previous Supreme Court ruling only limited courts from instating provisions that divided disability compensation and did not apply to private agreements negotiated by spouses.}

^{She also argued that other states, including Virginia, Illinois, Nevada and Alaska, have allowed enforcement of such agreements, known as indemnification provisions, in divorce settlements, and a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court was necessary to ensure equity across the legal system.}

^{Richard Marschner’s attorneys have said the state courts don’t have the authority to divide federally protected benefits and the North Dakota district courts order to Richard to pay Roxane is invalid as a result.}

^{Marschner’s attorney, Johanna Clyborne of Minnesota-based Brekke, Clyborne and Ribich, told Military Times that divorce agreements such as the Marschners’ happen “more than people realize” because veterans — and attorneys — often don’t understand federal protections of disability benefits and medical retirement payments.}

^{“Congress has spoken on this issue, right, and it is non-divisible. There’s going to be different sorts of interpretations, but Congress thought that the veterans were entitled to disability benefits and basically prioritized, and to allow them to be stripped by a state court in very narrow circumstances is not what was intended,” Clyborne said in an interview.}

^{Several previous cases have addressed the division of retirement pay and disability benefits in military divorces. In Howell v. Howell, the Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that state courts cannot require a veteran to compensate his spouse half his retirement pay when he waived a portion of it to receive non-taxable VA disability compensation.}

^{The Court has not scheduled a date for Marschner v. Marschner, although the case could be heard as early as January.}

^{Clyborne said the case has the potential to affect divorce agreements for veterans who receive Combat-Related Specialty Compensation, Concurrent Retirement Disability Pay and other benefits.}

^{“Hopefully it will settle a lot of questions folks have been wrestling with,” Clyborne said.}

Texas Republican Rep. Ted Poe has proposed a bill that would take away Pakistan’s status as a major non-NATO ally, or MNNA. The move comes amid multiple reports the Trump administration will press Islamabad to crack down on Pakistan-based militants like the Haqqani network, which launched attacks in Afghanistan.

“Pakistan must be held accountable for the American blood on its hands,” Poe said while introducing the bill on Thursday. “For years, Pakistan has acted as a Benedict Arnold ally of the United States. From harboring Osama bin Laden to backing the Taliban, Pakistan has stubbornly refused to go after, in any meaningful way, terrorists that actively seek to harm opposing ideologies.”

Poe said the U.S. must make a clean break with Pakistan or at least stop providing it with sophisticated weaponry and treating it like a close ally.

Poe chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade Subcommittee, and he has offered similar legislation several times over several years. This bill, co-sponsored with Rep. Rick Nolan, D-Minn., is more likely to make a statement than to become reality, and it faces a long legislative road if the administration doesn’t beat it to the punch.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has hinted the U.S. strategy review for Afghanistan due in mid-July will include a shift on Pakistan. He told Congress last week the strategy would be included in “a regional approach.”

But Pakistan’s embassy in Washington warned against “scapegoating” to explain the stalemate in Afghanistan, pointing instead to Afghanistan’s own troubled internal dynamics.

“Singling out Pakistan and pinning the entire blame on Pakistan for the situation in Afghanistan is neither fair nor accurate, nor is it borne out by the ground realities,” said Abid Saeed, press minister at the embassy, told Reuters. 

In 2004, President George W. Bush granted Pakistan MNNA status in an effort to get Pakistan to help the United States fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

That status makes it eligible for priority delivery of defense material, an expedited arms sale process and a U.S. loan guarantee program that backs up loans issued by private banks to finance arms exports. It can also stockpile U.S. military hardware, participate in defense research and development programs and be sold more sophisticated weaponry.

Pakistan has since become one of the leading recipients of U.S. foreign assistance, as Congress appropriated more than $18 billion in aid between 2002 and 2015, including $7.6 billion in security-related aid.

According to data compiled by the Center for International Policy, Congress was notified in 2014 of more than $600 million in major arms sales to Pakistan, including $200 million in Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles and GRC43M cutters worth $350 million. In 2015, there was nearly $1 billion in U.S. sales to Pakistan, including Viper attack helicopters and Hellfire missiles. The U.S. subsidized some of this under foreign military financing funds.

The powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., was instrumental in blocking U.S. subsidies for the $700 million sale of eight F-16 Block 52 fighter jets to Pakistan in 2016. He also fended off efforts to scuttle the sale completely.

Corker, on Wednesday, declined to comment on the idea of changing Pakistan’s status but said he hoped the Trump administration would take a tougher stand toward Pakistan over its alleged support of the Haqqani network.

“We have spent billion and billions and billions of tax-payer dollars toward their country, and I’m certainly unsatisfied,” Corker said. “The No. 1 threat to American soldiers is the Haqqani network, and Pakistan allows it to have safe haven in their country.” 

Email:   jgould@defensenews.com         
Twitter:   @reporterjoe     

White House officials say they plan to increase the base defense budget by $54 billion to $603 billion by slashing domestic spending and foreign aid. That netted a swift rebuke from House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, and his Senate counterpart, Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who have each proposed a $640 billion base budget and argue this is a meager $18 billion more than President Obama had planned.

McCain, in a statement, said the figure was, “a mere 3 percent above President Obama’s defense budget, which has left our military underfunded, undersized, and unready to confront threats to our national security… With a world on fire, America cannot secure peace through strength with just 3 percent more than President Obama’s budget. We can and must do better.”

The comments came as White House budget director Mick Mulvaney told reporters Monday the budget blueprint represents President Trump’s priorities, including the military, the nuclear arsenal and border security  –  without adding to the 2018 deficit. The non-defense side of the budget will be $462 billion, Mulvaney said. 

“We are taking his words and turning them into policies and dollars,” he said. “It reduces money to other nations, eliminates duplicative programs and eliminates programs that just don’t work.”

Asked how the defense top-line would carry forward Trump’s pledge to rebuild the military, Mulvaney said it was too soon to say. The Defense Department would over the next two weeks craft its budget to the top-line provided by the White House. The White House will issue a fuller budget proposal in early May.

Big questions about the plan remain, including whether that defense money would be just for the Pentagon or for broader defense programs such as the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration; whether foreign aid and security assistance programs from the Department of State could be shifted over to DoD; or whether the money will flow into the Pentagon’s base budget or the Overseas Contingency Operations fund.

The biggest question of all — how a proposal that guts the non-defense budget would survive on Capitol Hill — suggests the White House has offered an opening negotiation position rather than a viable number. It’s a proposal sure to net a violent reaction from Senate Democrats, who have in recent years asked that defense increases be matched dollar-for-dollar on the non-defense side.

Democrats quickly signaled Monday they would oppose the plan. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement, “This budget proposal is a reflection of exactly who this president is and what today’s Republican Party believes in: helping the wealthy and special interests while putting further burdens on the middle class and those struggling to get there.”

Squeezing Trump and Mulvaney from the opposite side of the aisle, in the lower chamber, Thornberry said, “we can and should do more” for defense.

“While we cannot repair all of the damage done by those cuts in a single year, we can and should do more than this level of funding will allow,” Thornberry said in a statement. “The administration will have to make clear which problems facing our military they are choosing not to fix. We cannot make repairing and rebuilding our military conditional on fixing our budget problems or on cutting other spending.”

Katherine Blakeley, a defense budget expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says a number of questions need to be addressed before the real details of the budget plan can be assessed. But one thing is clear, she said – that this plan is designed to be “politically untenable for the Democrats while trying to be as favorable as possible for the Republicans.”

Or as Benjamin Friedman of the CATO Institute put it, “This plan won’t happen because Democrats will block it.”

Since the imposition of the budget caps, Democrats have fought to maintain a one-for-one trade between defense spending and domestic spending. That was easier when they had top cover from President Barack Obama, but could prove more challenging with the Trump White House hammering Democrats for holding down on defense levels.

Congress would not only need to pass a 2018 budget resolution, which could pass with Republican alone, but a new law to raise the caps to allow the White House’s proposal. That would require Democratic votes.

“Republicans need 60 Senate votes to overturn the BCA cap for next year,” Friedman said. “I believe Schumer can keep enough of Democrats in line around the idea that an increase in defense must be matched by an increase in non-defense discretionary to stop this.”

Instead, he predicts the two parties will settle on a raising of the budget caps for both defense and non-defense spending, with an influx of cash into OCO.

Blakeley also notes that, by putting its marker for fiscal 2018 down now, the administration is setting up the still-unsettled fiscal 2017 appropriations discussion as a proxy war. The government is currently operating under a continuing resolution to fund the federal government, which expires at the end of April. 

Mackenzie Eaglen, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said of Democrats, “This will really irk them and there’s no reason for them not to go all in on this political battle. Cutting programs like Head Start and National Endowment for the Arts are not even popular among many Republicans.”

Because the plans pays for defense increases through the non-defense side and not deficit spending, the proposal is a nod at fiscal conservatives in Congress. Mulvaney was one of them before he left Congress to join the White House.

“Nobody wants to increase overall spending, and the only way you can do that without huge earth-shaking debates is by reducing other discretionary spending,” said James Jay Carafano, a national security expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “There is a rational limit to how much you can do that.”

It is also a nod toward defense hawks. Carafano described the White House’s number Monday as a “down payment” on the defense build-up Trump has repeatedly promised.

“The important thing to me is this is a clear statement of recognition that we are heading towards a hollow force,” Carafano said. “There’s not just a readiness crisis, there’s enormous modernization challenges, and you have trouble maintaining [operational] tempo. That’s the text book definition of a force that’s heading to hollow.”

The board, a DoD advisory committee comprised of private-sector executives, says the role should focus more on reining in overhead and less on substituting for the defense secretary. The board made the recommendation in a recent, 112-page report on the presidential transition, which comes as Congress and the Pentagon are pursuing their own agendas for DoD reform.

“In the past, it has been quite normal for the Deputy to spend significant time away from the Pentagon, either ‘filling in’ for the Secretary or on matters requiring coordination with other agencies, international partners, or the White House,” DBB chair Michael Bayer said in a letter accompanying the report. “The adverse consequence of this has been an insufficient attention to the important primary function of managing the Department. The management challenges of this, the largest institution on the planet, require the full-time attention of a Chief Management Officer.”

The Defense Department is the nation’s largest enterprise, and if its expenditures were gross national product it would be the seventeenth largest nation, the report notes. It is the nation’s largest employer, with more than 1.3 million people on active duty, more than 700,000 civilian personnel and roughly 600,000 contractors. Another 1.1 million serve in the National Guard and Reserve forces, and about 2 million military retirees and their family members receive earned benefits.

The current deputy defense secretary, Bob Work, has championed a vision for a Defense Department that is more technologically agile and globally engaged, and spearheaded its so-called “Third Offset Strategy.” Work also has called for cost cutting, and, pointing to estimates that the department has 22 percent more in installations and real estate than it needs, urged lawmakers to consider a new round of the politically unpopular base-closure process.

As envisioned by the advisory board, the deputy defense secretary would take bold action to tame the costs associated with overhead, personnel, benefits and unnecessary work, all of which Bayer considers necessary for DoD to “swiftly and shrewdly adapt to maintain its superiority over determined adversaries.”

“Without major surgery, our overhead and personnel costs will continue to eat away at our modernization and readiness,” Bayer’s letter reads. “This is not about policy; it is about running the Department like a modern business.”

The report argues DoD must look closely at off-limits budget areas like intelligence, classified programs and their overhead, the combatant commands and the armed services, and bring in specialized expertise to lead a re-structuring review of the Pentagon. This would ultimately cut entire organizations, activities and contracts, as opposed to picking around the edges of the budget.

Email:  jgould@defensenews.com 

Twitter:  @ReporterJoe