The Hill News

The U.S. Department of Defense budget has already been trimmed by $450 billion over the next 10 years and larger cuts are on the way.  Failure of the “Super Committee” to deliver a plan by Thanksgiving that would slash the federal budget by $1.2 trillion over the next decade will trigger sequestration of an additional $600 billion in defense spending cuts.  Even without sequestration, we can reasonably expect significant reductions. Any organization facing such spending cuts requires transformational changes, not incremental ones.
 
The question of whether to cut the defense budget has long passed. The question now is where and how.  The Department of Defense is not a corporate entity. However, the experience and lessons learned from transformational restructuring and turn-arounds of large commercial organizations can inform the defense-spending debate.   Consequently, our objective is not to recommend precisely where cuts are best made, but rather to ! offer five guiding principles that may prove useful to Washington policymakers.

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