Pentagon spending has been the target of decades of criticism and reform efforts. Billions of dollars are spent on weapons programs that are later abandoned. State-of-the-art data centers are underutilized and overstaffed. New business systems are built at great expense but fail to meet the needs of their users. Every Secretary of Defense for the last five Administrations has made it a priority to address perceived bloat and inefficiency by making management reform a major priority. The congressional defense committees have been just as active, enacting hundreds of legislative provisions. Yet few of these initiatives produce significant results, and the Pentagon appears to go on, as wasteful as ever.

In this book, Peter Levine addresses why, despite a long history of attempted reform, the Pentagon continues to struggle to reduce waste and inefficiency. The heart of Defense Management Reform is three case studies covering civilian personnel, acquisitions, and financial management. Narrated with the insight of an insider, the result is a clear understanding of what went wrong in the past and a set of concrete guidelines to plot a better future.

"There are a handful of public servants who can legitimately claim to be practitioners of defense reform. Peter Levine is one. Having observed reform efforts that originated on Capitol Hill and managed such efforts in the Department of Defense, Peter is uniquely qualified to identify the political and bureaucratic practices that promote successful defense reform." - United States Air Force

"No one know the successes and failures of 'reform' in defense better than Peter Levine, and his own role in many of them made for the successes." - MIT