Gates Directs Military to Cut Budget of Bureaucracy and Pet Projects

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said today he’s directing the military services in their fiscal 2012 budgets to cut spending on bureaucracy and infrastructure and transfer the savings to weapons and personnel accounts.
The joint staff, regional commanders and the Pentagon’s myriad civilian agencies are being told “to take a hard, unsparing look at how they operate -- in substance and style,” Gates said a speech prepared for delivery at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas, on the 65th anniversary of the allied victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.
“The goal is to cut our overhead cost” enough to allow two to three percent real growth in spending on the “resources needed to sustain America’s combat power,” Gates said. ......

Rather, he said, his target is a bureaucracy that hasn’t done enough to “flatten and streamline” itself in the way the private sector has.
“Consider that a request for a dog-handling team in Afghanistan -- or for any other unit -- has to go through no fewer than five headquarters” headed by a four-star general -- to be processed, Gates said.
Read the rest at Business Week.