A Biden-era DoD official is warning that trying to run the Pentagon like a business is a bad idea.
Mara Karlin, who previously served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities, wrote in a commentary for Foreign Affairs that ignoring the harsh realities of how risk works in the military could backfire.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has said that he hopes the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, can bring “actual businesslike efficiency to government.”
Karlin said that the need for reform at DoD isn’t in dispute— the Pentagon is notorious for waste, and the department has failed seven straight audits. It’s widely acknowledged throughout defense circles that the department needs some serious reform, but treating the Pentagon like a corporation isn’t the answer, she said.
“The Pentagon is not a business,” Karlin said.
For starters, the DoD’s workforce, compromised of an all-volunteer force and legions of lifelong civilian public servants, is 40% larger than the next largest US employer, and it often relies on institutional knowledge because of the department’s complexity.
And unlike a company, the DoD doesn’t have its own CEO or board of directors that can force fast change.
The US military’s board of directors is the hundreds of members of Congress, which has consistently failed to address the broken continuing resolution process, temporary stopgaps that hamper the ability to fund contracts for everything from munitions and equipment maintenance.
It’s Congress that oversees DoD’s massive budget, an eye-popping $850 billion figure that is expected to grow, and ultimately decides where that money is spent.
Additionally, the Pentagon is unable to overhaul its own organizational structure easily, nor can it alone decide to promote tons of its own people. Those also require Congress.
That alone is key to why the Department of Defense is “large” and “unwieldy,” Karlin wrote, but another reason the military isn’t exactly like a business is its unique relationship with national security.
There is a different kind of risk in DoD compared to private sector companies, Karlin said. In the business world, if a startup fails, investors lose money and people lose their jobs. But risk is different in DoD, she said. If the military fails, people die.
“The stakes for risk taking in defense” are “uniquely high,” wrote Karlin, who is now a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She said the DoD has to consider risk “far more soberly and carefully than in the corporate world.”
The difference between the department and private-sector companies means that “attempts to make the Pentagon run more like a corporation will backfire,” Karlin said. “If Hegseth and DOGE continue as they have begun,” they may fail and also potentially “harm the US military in the process.”
“The Pentagon needs change, but effective reform will require appreciating the uniqueness of the organization. So far, the signs are not encouraging,” she said.
Karlin cautioned that a DOGE assault on DoD might end up worse than failure and “could backfire in terrifying ways, like at the Department of Energy. There, “DOGE forced out many employees who handled nuclear materials before the Trump administration realized just how critical these positions are and rescinded most of the firings,” she said.
For right now, Pentagon leadership has been focused on cutting what they consider wasteful spending. Earlier this month, Hegseth announced that the DoD had slashed “$5.1 billion in wasteful Defense Department contracts.”
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