his first volume in the Security and Defence Management Series focuses on practical aspects of democratic defence management through the eyes of practioners. Outlining in simple terms the key issues defence professionals must address to ensure good governance of the defence sector from within the defence establishment, the book provides an introduction to these issues for new defence professionals in transition democracies.

Written for both students and practitioners, Management of Defense Acquisition Projects enables the reader to understand the broad range of disciplines and activities that must be integrated in order to achieve successful acquisition outcomes. This second edition features significant updates throughout, and totally new chapters.

Budgeting for national defense is a complex endeavor, particularly for a nation like the U.S. that assumes global responsibility and strives to have the most advanced and lethal force on earth. It is necessary – and challenging – to balance the myriad requirements between current and future readiness, across warfare areas and military services, between having state of the art capability with sufficient capacity, and among people, hardware, and the activities people do with that hardware. As analytically difficult as that problem is, it is embedded in the political budgeting processes and national security must be balanced with every other function of government and there must also be cooperation across branches of government. This text explores that complex endeavor. It takes the position that budgeting for defense is a particular instance of public budgeting which is a particular instance of public policy. Thus, this text starts with a conceptual, empirical, and process foundation before discussing the participants and processes that build the annual defense budget. It then covers the execution of that budget and the ultimate accounting. Compared to the first edition, this text is updated with current figures and examples. There is a new chapter on determinants of military spending in society and burden sharing within alliances. The chapter on budget execution has been disaggregated and a new chapter is devoted to fiscal law. The final chapter seeks to integrate all that came before it by discussing matters that integrate the stages of budgeting and which cross branches of government. Following in the tradition of the first edition, this is intended to be both a textbook for a course in budgeting, but also a desktop reference for defense budgeting practitioners.

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.