Reducing Overhead and Improving DoD's Business Operations
Abstract
The purpose of this briefing is to; outline the need to address the overhead challenge now; describe near-term opportunities for the Department to pursue; and outline longer term systemic fixes necessary to meet the Secretarys goals. There are four major themes surrounding the issue of overhead. First, because the Department has failed to establish adequate controls to keep overhead in-line relative to the size of the warfight, there has been an explosion of overhead work. Second, in order to accomplish all this work, the Department has applied ever more personnel to those tasks which have added immensely to costs. Additionally, the majority of this new work appears to be done by contractors, the cost of which is nearly invisible to the Department as it is buried within Operations and Maintenance (O and M) accounts rather than in the more accountable personnel accounts. Finally, there is a sizable portion of the military who are performing both inherently governmental and non-inherently governmental work that could be more appropriately assigned to DoD civilians. The military are compensated at rates substantially greater than their civilian counterparts but, more importantly, they are needed at the "tip of the spear."
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jul 22, 2010
- Accession Number
- AD1040730
Entities
People
- Arnold Punaro
Organizations
- Defense Business Board