What about the regulars?

Tom Ricks has a post that includes an e-mail from a colonel who discusses the problem of additive bureaucracy in the armed forces. It’s a bit jargon-heavy but worth the read:

We never seem to reduce any of the requirements for existing organizations when we create new ones – all the new good ideas (and every one of the organizations that are established does good work and they are focused on solving a particular problem) just keep getting resourced (Congress is particularly helpful here in creating and resourcing new organizations to solve particular problems). And once an organization is created it follows the “bureaucratic prime directive” of sustaining its existence; therefore it continues to find more problems to solve and more ways to justify a budget and even increase its manpower. Rarely is there an organization established with a sunset clause.

But we should ask ourselves why do we need to create new organizations for every problem? Are not the Service Staffs, the Joint Staff, and the GCC Staffs inherently supposed to be problem solvers? Why can’t we solve problems with the existing staffs?

This whole obsession with the “Special Forces” and increasingly elite units in the armed forces (and elsewhere) seems to be functionally problematic. I am a big-government liberal to the last, but even big government can be less wasteful.

I would extend this question to many problems that we face on a regular basis. We always assume that we need something new added on, when the previous iteration could work fine. Consider the number of czars that President Obama now has for every conceivable policy area (bank bailout, auto bailout, cyber-security, Pakistan, etc.). Couldn’t the State Department alone handle Pakistan? Is there no one at the Department of Transportation that can handle the auto bailout?

One problem is that the new layers of bureaucracy become necessary when previous agents have too many approvals to receive before getting things done. The problem, then, seems to be one of clearing up bureaucracy rather than just creating a new, superseding organization. Each new organization only creates more bureaucratic lines to untangle, which then leads to another new task force or organization.

As a result, unfortunately, there remains the vast majority of regular bureaucrats/soldiers/public servants that must continue to allocate their own resources and do thankless work, while the new, shiny specialists get more power and more latitude to operate.