The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA) requires all cabinet departments to engage in a cycle of strategic planning, performance planning, and evaluation of achievements against a performance plan. GPRA requirements are phased in over a period of three years. The first step, which the Department of Defense has completed, calls for the submission to Congress of a strategic plan. The May 1997 Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) serves as DoD’s strategic plan. A mission statement and corporate-level goals reflecting the QDR were adopted by the Department shortly after the QDR was completed. The second step, to be submitted to Congress with the budget for FY 1999, is a performance plan—that is, a plan for assessing performance on each corporate-level goal. The third step is the actual assessment of performance on the corporate-level goals. The performance report is to be provided to Congress by March 2000, the first budget submission after the end of FY 1999.

GPRA directs a recurring cycle of strategic planning and assessment of performance on corporate-level goals derived from a strategic plan, which must be updated at least every three years. Thus, for FY 2000, the corporate-level goals will be those adopted in 1998; the corresponding performance plan will be submitted to Congress in February 1999; and the performance report will be submitted by March 2001.

This appendix is DoD’s first GPRA performance plan. The goals adopted by the Department reflecting the results of the QDR are displayed in Table J-1. The task of the performance plan is to specify how success in meeting these goals during FY 1999 will be assessed in the performance report submitted to Congress by March 2000. The material presented here is an overview. Tables J-2 and J-3 provide a roadmap to the much more extensive data and analyses that will be drawn upon in the performance report for FY 1999.

Goal 1 addresses broad geopolitical concerns of U.S. defense policy. Failures in achieving this goal are evidenced by increasing threats, greater instability in an important region, a degradation in the ability of U.S. forces to fight as part of a coalition with allied forces, a decay in international security arrangements, or the outbreak of a major conflict affecting U.S. interests or in which the United States finds it necessary to become involved. Success in achieving Goal 1 is indicated by the absence of these conditions—that is, by a proven ability to engage in coalition warfare, the existence of strong security arrangements, regional stability, and peace in areas of strategic interest to the United States. Important failures on Goal 1 ordinarily will be highly visible. Characterizing success often will be problematic, however, because it is often difficult to conclusively link DoD’s actions (improvements in control of exports of critical technologies, for example) with observed outcomes (such as the failure of a threat to emerge). Accordingly, the evaluation of the Department’s performance on Goal 1 will have three elements.

First, the performance assessment will provide an overall appraisal of the vitality of U.S. security arrangements (for example, NATO) and the ability of U.S. forces to engage in coalition warfare. The assessment will consider such factors as significant combined exercises held during the year, improvements in interoperability among U.S. and allied forces and weapon systems, major changes in doctrine, significant alterations in command relationships, and deployments with allies initiated or ongoing during the year. The assessment also will consider the success the Department achieved during the year in establishing and maintaining cooperative defense relationships with nations that are neither allies nor adversaries but which are, nonetheless, important to U.S. security.

Second, the performance assessment will evaluate the Department’s success in preventing or reducing recognized threats. In that regard, the assessment will consider significant conflicts begun during the year that U.S. policy had sought to prevent, noticeable increases in instability in a major region of the world, and the emergence of new threats or important growth in an already-recognized threat. Threats ordinarily will be characterized quantitatively in terms of the size and capability of a potential adversary’s forces.

Third, the assessment of performance on Goal 1 will identify new DoD programs undertaken to promote regional stability or to reduce threats or conflict. The assessment also will examine the results of major ongoing arms control and nonproliferation initiatives. For example, the performance assessment will report on the cooperative work the United States has under way with Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus to reduce the nuclear legacy of the Soviet Union.

This goal lies at the core of the mission of the Department of Defense. Indeed, the remaining goals may be thought of as providing further amplification of the principles embodied in this goal. To evaluate Goal 2, the Department will use a series of performance measures falling into three categories: overseas presence, mobility, and forces. Readiness, which is closely related to this goal, is sufficiently critical to warrant a separate corporate-level goal (Goal 5, below).

The first element in Goal 2 is the routine presence of combat-ready U.S. forces overseas. U.S. force deployments abroad amplify deterrence by decreasing response time to events in far-flung areas of the world. These deployments also support allies by providing a visible demonstration of the United States’ commitment to their security. The performance measures for overseas presence relate to the number of forces that establish such presence:

Beyond the presence requirements listed above, forces from all four Services carry out periodic deployments in forward locations, as needs arise.

An essential element of being able to prevail in any major regional conflict, and hence also of deterrence, is strategic, or intertheater, lift capability. U.S. lift assets are the foundation of the nation’s ability to project combat power around the globe. The first priority in the opening phase of a war would be to get U.S. forces to the fight in a timely manner. In many scenarios, U.S. forces would have no more than two weeks to deploy to a conflict theater if they are to mount an effective defense. This places a high premium on forward-stationed and -deployed forces, forces whose main equipment can be prepositioned in or near a theater of potential conflict, and forces that can deploy from their home bases very rapidly and deliver effective combat power. Lift assets also are used in nearly every humanitarian and peace operation undertaken by U.S. forces. The unique transport capabilities they provide will continue to make U.S. participation in many multilateral operations a key to the operations’ success.

The most fundamental element in achieving Goal 2 is U.S. military forces themselves. U.S. forces provide deterrence by their mere presence and by their potential for armed combat. In the event deterrence fails, they provide the means to prevail in a conflict. The performance measures for this category are, therefore, the major forces of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps.

The diverse demands that the U.S. military must be able to meet require the maintenance of highly capable forces prepared to respond rapidly to any contingency. Achieving this goal is one of the Department’s most aggressive and ambitious undertakings. It is also one of the most important. Maintaining the readiness and sustainability of U.S. forces is the number-one priority of the Department of Defense. For this reason, readiness has been made a separate corporate-level goal (Goal 5) and is discussed later in this appendix.

Combat in the 20th century has demonstrated the importance of technology in modern warfare. The atomic bomb provides the most dramatic example of this point. In that case, a single weapon (and the means to deliver it) was capable of having a decisive effect on a worldwide conflict. World War I also provides several examples, of which the introduction of the tank is perhaps the best known. Technology also clearly had a major role in the overwhelming success, with casualties far below historical norms, that the United States and its coalition partners achieved in Operation Desert Storm. These examples remain relevant because technology, and the application of technology to weaponry, continues to advance, in some cases—driven by commercial market forces—at more than Cold War rates. In short, it is vital for the United States to maintain qualitative superiority in key warfighting capabilities.

There are two broad aspects to maintaining qualitative superiority in weaponry. First, the United States must ensure that it remains well ahead of any potential adversary in the development of relevant technologies and their military applications. This requires a robust science and technology (S&T) program. Second, the United States must procure the weapon systems and equipment necessary to ensure its forces retain qualitative superiority over those of potential adversaries. Not all of the investment budget should be devoted to purchases of systems that will be mainstays of U.S. forces, however. A balanced program also must include some spending (in the nature of a hedge) to explore promising but unproven technologies.

The Department has adopted the following performance measure for the S&T portion of Goal 3:

The success of the S&T program is not just a matter of the level of spending, however. Consequently, assessment of the S&T element of Goal 3 will be supplemented by two additional criteria:

The Department has adopted the following performance measure for the procurement portion of Goal 3:

These levels of spending are not ends in themselves, but rather are estimates of the levels of spending needed to achieve Goal 3. The underlying criteria for a successful procurement program are as follows:

These criteria will be considered in assessing performance on the procurement element of Goal 3. Their application will involve, among other data, examination of evidence on the effectiveness of U.S. systems in comparison with threat systems, the average age of systems in U.S. inventories in relation to their useful half-life, and the number of Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrations initiated and completed. Table J-4 gives procurement funding and quantities for major defense acquisition programs in FY 1999.

The term revolution in military affairs (RMA) refers to situations in which major advances in technology, coupled with organizational and doctrinal changes, produce dramatic advances in military capability. Twentieth century examples of RMAs include strategic bombing, the blitzkrieg, carrier aviation, amphibious warfare, and strategic nuclear forces.

The technological advances at the center of current thinking in the United States about RMAs constitute what is called information technology and the associated information revolution. RMA encompasses more than the development of new computer hardware and software and communication devices. It includes applications of information processing and communications as diverse as precision strike weapons and electronic manifests for pallets that can be quickly read—that is, searched electronically—from a distance.

In an effort to guide adaptation to the information revolution, and in particular to ensure that needs for associated organizational and doctrinal changes are appropriately considered, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff developed Joint Vision 2010, released in July 1996. Joint Vision 2010, which is particularly concerned with the implication of the information revolution for joint operations, identifies four key operational concepts. The first, called dominant maneuver, requires commanders to have a full picture of the battlefield so that the capabilities provided by agile organizations and advanced mobility platforms will allow U.S. forces to attack enemy weak points directly across the full depth of the battlefield. The second concept, precision engagement, envisions systems that will enable U.S. forces to deliver the desired weapons at the right time on any target. The third concept, full-dimensional protection, points to the emerging requirements of providing U.S. forces with the protection they must have to preserve freedom of action. Fourth, focused logistics addresses the prospects of developing information, transportation, and logistics management systems capable of delivering the right support to the battlefield at the right time. Such enhancements will greatly reduce the huge stocks and cumbersome, vulnerable logistics tails that have become a feature of modern warfare.

The RMA associated with the information revolution is being manifested in myriad changes in DoD systems and ways in which the Department does business. These are not being pursued as a single program, however, and progress on Goal 4 cannot be gauged by progress on any delineated set of initiatives. Rather, at this point, activity on Goal 4 largely is a matter of research, analysis, and wargaming. Accordingly, the Department has adopted the following indicators of progress on Goal 4:

In addition, the Department will assess other activities relevant to operational concepts deriving from Joint Vision 2010 and will evaluate progress in implementing those concepts. The assessment will take into account science and technology efforts, development of doctrine, organizational changes, and relevant hardware procurement.

Goal 5 comprises four distinct elements: the readiness of U.S. military forces; the success of the Department’s recruiting and retention efforts; equal opportunity for all service members and for civilian DoD employees; and the quality of life afforded members of the military and their families. The underlying military consideration is the readiness of the force. Successful recruiting and retention efforts are necessary if a ready force of a specified size is to be maintained. Equal opportunity and quality of life are, in turn, crucial determinants of the military’s success in recruiting and retaining a high-quality force.

DoD characterizes unit readiness in terms of measures known as C-ratings. These comprehensive metrics assess a number of factors affecting the overall readiness of a unit: personnel readiness, manning levels, the amount of equipment issued to a unit and the state of the equipment’s maintenance, and the state of the unit’s training. The highest readiness rating is C-1; this means that a unit is ready at the time of the rating to deploy and perform its mission. The lowest rating acceptable for an active unit ordinarily is C-3; this means that the unit requires additional training time, as well as additional equipment and personnel, to deploy and perform its mission.

The Department does not attempt to keep all active units at the C-1 level. Instead, units are assigned a C-level goal consistent with their intended mission during a contingency. For example, units slated to deploy in the initial days of a contingency are directed to maintain themselves at a C-1 readiness level, while units deploying later might be assigned a C-2 or C-3 standard.

For readiness, the Department has adopted the following performance measure:

Effective recruiting is essential to maintaining a high-quality force. Similarly, retention is key to maintaining a force with the distribution of skills and balance of experience needed to achieve readiness goals and to avoid unnecessarily high training costs.

For recruiting and retention, the Department has adopted the following performance measures:

Equal opportunity is a military necessity. Discrimination, sexual harassment, and disparate treatment jeopardize combat readiness by threatening unit cohesion, good order, and discipline. The Department of Defense has maintained an aggressive program to ensure that all military and civilian personnel are treated fairly. The Department’s policies and programs in this area address all forms of discrimination and harassment, whether based on race, gender, national origin, age, disability, or religion.

A successful equal-opportunity effort is one that meets two tests. First, it provides today’s all-volunteer military force and the Department’s civilian work force access to the widest possible pool of qualified men and women, reflective of the nation’s diversity. Second, it guarantees that service members and civilian employees will be judged by their performance, trained and promoted according to their abilities, and protected from discrimination, including sexual harassment and extremist activity. In assessing the Department’s success on these tests, the performance report will look to such measures as:

DoD must attract and retain members of the armed forces through competitive labor markets. Compensation, including allowances and especially retirement pay, is key to achieving DoD’s recruiting and retention goals. Moreover, military life imposes a particular set of burdens, which individually have close private-sector counterparts but collectively do not. Those serving in the military, for example, cannot choose where they live, face long separations from their families (and sometimes hardship or physical danger), and often have comparatively restricted influence on what they are assigned to do. Considerations of equity arising from these constraints, as well as market pressures, require DoD to pay particular attention to the quality of goods and services that, because of the constraints imposed by military requirements, are provided by the Department. These include, in particular, health care, schools for the children of military members stationed outside the continental United States, housing, and community and family assistance.

A successful quality-of-life program is one that offers compensation comparable to that of the private sector, along with quality health care, housing, and schools and equal access to strong community and family support.

Two distinct sets of data are relevant to the adequacy of military compensation. First, a good index of whether pay and other elements of compensation need to be adjusted is the ability of the Department to attract and retain high-quality people in all of the occupations required by the military services. Thus, performance measures on the element of Goal 5 pertaining to military recruiting and retention also are relevant here. Second, it is relevant to examine directly the comparability of DoD and private-sector pay. In this regard, the FY 1999 performance report will draw on the Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation published in June 1997.

The Department has a large volume of data bearing on the quality of medical care offered through the Defense Health Program (DHP) as well as on military housing and DoD schools. The quality of the DHP, housing, and schools has not been regularly assessed at the DoD level. Similarly, the availability of community and family support to military members is not routinely reported. During the next year, the Department will review the sources for these data; determine if they are adequate to support an assessment of the quality of DoD medical care, housing, and schools; and, should insufficiencies be found, undertake additional data-collection efforts.

At the end of the Cold War, the United States undertook a major reduction of its military forces. Although most of the reductions had been made by the end of 1995, the last were completed during FY 1997. Compared with the FY 1989 level, active-duty military end-strength in FY 1997 was down 32 percent. Taking account of the situation created by a smaller force, a reduced threat, and the major investments in equipment modernization made during the 1980s, acquisition spending had been reduced even more. In FY 1989, acquisition spending (in FY 1998 dollars) stood at $144.2 billion; by FY 1997, it had declined to $82.6 billion, a reduction of 43 percent.

Infrastructure cuts lagged the reductions in force structure and acquisition. (As the term is used here, infrastructure loosely means all DoD spending except that on acquisition and the direct costs of operating the force.) Recognizing the lag, the Bottom-Up Review (BUR), undertaken at the start of the Clinton Administration, directed a number of steps to reduce the defense infrastructure. These were partially successful, and infrastructure has come down in terms of total dollars; as a percentage of total DoD spending, however, it has remained roughly constant. Nevertheless, infrastructure reductions still lag cutbacks in forces and acquisition, and largely for this reason, infrastructure reductions continue to command top-level attention in the Department. Concern with reducing infrastructure spending is given particular emphasis by the recognized need to increase acquisition spending in the years ahead, the need to maintain a force of the size required by the National Military Strategy, and constraints on the overall level of defense spending. Moreover, it is generally agreed that advances in management techniques and new technologies offer opportunities for substantial cost reductions in some infrastructure areas.

The defense infrastructure is huge—the size of many nations’ economies and hardly less diverse. Accordingly, infrastructure reduction is not one program, but encompasses many initiatives built around a wide variety of premises and approaches. Recent initiatives to reduce the U.S. military infrastructure can be found in DoD’s "Reinvention Impact Center Acquisition Year 2000 Goals" submitted as part of the National Performance Review, and the Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review. In addition, DoD is pursuing infrastructure reduction initiatives begun earlier. Further guidance relevant to reductions has been published in the Defense Reform Initiative Report, discussed in Chapter 16 of this report.

The top-level metrics used to gauge success in infrastructure reduction are the total dollars spent on infrastructure and infrastructure costs as a percentage of total DoD spending. These have been in use for several years and will be employed in the GPRA performance appraisal for Goal 6. In addition, the performance report will survey major infrastructure reduction initiatives, especially those most pertinent to the degree of success obtained in FY 1999 in reducing infrastructure. It is important in this regard to recognize that the Department is not attempting to cut back all areas of infrastructure equally. Large portions of DoD infrastructure spending go directly for goods and services (depot maintenance and jet fuel, for example) vital to readiness, which remains the Department’s top priority. Other infrastructure expenditures finance key ingredients of quality of life (medical care, housing, dependent schools). While cutting spending in these areas would help on Goal 6, cuts might be precluded by other, higher-priority goals. Some components of infrastructure spending may need to grow modestly to meet other goals; other components will decline modestly; and still others must absorb larger-than-average cuts for the Department to meet the overall goal of ensuring that infrastructure decreases at least in proportion to the reduction in force structure.

This section has outlined the Department’s FY 1999 GPRA performance plan. Emphasis has been placed on defining the criteria that will be used to assess performance on DoD’s corporate-level goals and on identifying the main sources of information that will be employed. The QDR provides an overview of the considerations underlying the corporate-level goals adopted by the Department. Readers of this Annual Report will find numerous portions of the text and tabular material that are relevant to the performance assessment required by GPRA. The most important of these are identified in Table J-3.

GPRA requires each agency to provide a basis for comparing performance with established goals. GPRA also requires a description of the means used to verify and validate measured values. The data that will be used to measure DoD’s GPRA performance will be obtained through existing data systems and reports, many of which have long been employed in support of DoD’s Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS). The data systems use established and proven methods following generally accepted accounting principles to verify and validate information. The methods used to compare program results against performance goals are described in the relevant chapters of this report, along with the data sources for the information. The descriptions will be expanded in next year’s performance plan in preparation for the first annual GPRA performance report, to be published as part of the Annual Defense Report submitted by March 2000. Measures for verifying and validating data systems are included in the documentation for each data system, which is kept with each system.

Part 2 of Circular No. A-11, published by the Office of Management and Budget, also requires agencies to identify those performance goals and indicators that apply to programs or activities of an interagency or crosscutting nature. For DoD, such programs and activities fall into four basic categories. The first category consists of efforts funded outside Function 051. These include civil construction projects of the Army Corps of Engineers, nuclear activities undertaken by the Department of Energy in support of DoD, and foreign military sales administered by the Defense Security Assistance Agency. The second category comprises activities that are similar to functions performed by other agencies but are undertaken by DoD for military purposes, or to serve military personnel and their families. These include but are not limited to: family support; dependent schools; military courts; and purchasing activities of the Defense Logistics Agency (as compared with the General Services Administration). The third category includes DoD activities that complement, but are conducted separately from, comparable functions performed by other agencies, such as the Coast Guard, Federal Aviation Administration, Veterans Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Central Intelligence Agency, Maritime Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Selective Service System, Federal Bureau of Investigation, American Battle Monuments Commission, and Arlington National Cemetery. Programs falling into the three categories listed above encompass either long-standing DoD functions mandated by statute or regulation, or DoD activities that complement or support functions performed by other agencies but do not overlap or duplicate them. There is a fourth category of DoD activities, typically assigned to the Defense Department by Congress or the President, that may be considered duplicative or overlapping of activities of other agencies. Most of these functions fall into the area of research and development. Examples include certain medical research, the commercial operating and savings initiatives, the dual-use research and development program, and the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. Such activities, both individually and collectively, constitute a very small part of the defense program and, in most cases, contribute primarily to domestic, nondefense goals, rather than to DoD corporate-level goals.

Table J-3 provides chapter references to other quantitative data relevant to the evaluation of DoD’s performance in achieving its corporate-level goals.