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chapter three About-Face at the Pentagon? In 1987 the inspector general of the Department of Defense reported that the department’s environmental and natural resources efforts to date had been stymied by a stunning failure to demonstrate their high priority within the military services. Moreover, progress on the greening front would be uncertain unless four objectives were achieved: policies that were excessively fragmented had to be integrated ; effective management structures, which did not at that time exist, had to be developed; communication bottlenecks rife at all levels of DoD had to be eliminated; and inadequate guidance and resource support had to be redressed. Presented with these findings at a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources , an exasperated Reagan appointee, the DoD’s deputy assistant secretary for the environment, Carl J. Schafer, sparred with an equally flummoxed Congressman Mike Synar (D-OK): Synar: What are you doing [about getting into compliance]? Don’t tell me about the problems. Tell me what you’re doing. Schafer: We are doing everything we can. We have issued policies from my office on each and every one of these subjects. Synar: Policies? Schafer: Yes, sir. That’s my function. We are pulling together the policy on these things. We have issued policy. It is easy to say it is fragmented, but camels can’t fly.1 Or could they? After all, academics and major corporate leaders (e.g., at Monsanto and 3M Corporation) routinely were touting how the greening of business could be a win-win situation. The environment got cleaner and corporate profits soared.2 More broadly, the comments of Richard Clarke, chairman and chief executive officer of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, were hardly atypical at this time: “A strong global economy is sustainable only if it integrates economic, social , and environmental well-being.”3 Thus, with some of the nation’s most egregious corporate polluters making the transition to a beyond-compliance ethic in their organizations, the new Clinton administration talked of doing the same in the U.S. military. This chapter focuses on the patterns of politics driving, and subsequently driven by, major, crosscutting, and context-defining offensives launched by the Clinton administration to create a corporate sense of responsibility for greening the U.S. military in the Pentagon. Each began before the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995 but played out in various iterations throughout the Clinton years. Each in turn spawned counteroffensives by opponents. Reviewed first is the historical–structural misalignment for these purposes inherited by the Clinton administration from the Cold War era. Chronicled next are Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Environmental Security (DUSD[ES]) Sherri Wasserman Goodman’s efforts to do three things: (1) shift ENR responsibilities from the military services to the OSD; (2) better align DoD’s personnel, financial management , logistics, information technology, and procurement systems to the new strategic, tactical, and greening emphasis of the post–Cold War era; and (3) create cross-agency councils to promote green values within the Pentagon. Combined , the tensions produced sent mixed signals from the Pentagon to military leaders and their subordinates about the priority given to greening efforts and wrought a significant yet still halting, halfway, and patchwork record of progress in institutionalizing a green ethic within the Pentagon. The Historical–Structural Mismatch at DoD As rational choice institutionalists predict, proponents and opponents of various statutes tend to riddle them with ambiguities, inhospitable implementing agencies, and fragmented implementation structures that can create perverse incentives.4 Their aim is to ensure that they can influence the substance, scope, and pace of implementation in the future. Likewise, students of public administration, public management, and bureaucracy long have appreciated that an agency or program ’s power suffers when located deep within the administrative labyrinth of an organization with multiple responsibilities. These agencies tend to undergo frequent reorganizations, and they are without ready access to key decision makers specifying their budgets, staffing, and decision rules.5 As we shall see in later chapters, this was true when it came to assigning responsibility for implementing many of the major ENR statutes that the military faced. Congress, after all, had assigned responsibility for implementing the Endangered Species Act to the FWS in the prodevelopment Department of the Interior (DOI), and the National Environmental Policy Act to a weak Council on Environmental Quality. Likewise, despite EPA administrators under both Reagan (William Ruckelshaus and Lee Thomas...

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