In 2024, I was the lead researcher for a report exposing new information about the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellows (SDEF) program, which sent US military officers to work at for-profit military contractors for a year and then bring back "recommendations" for policy reform that just so happened to benefit their corporate sponsors. You can read a summary of the report here.
I am happy to announce that this program is no more. I recently discovered a non-public Pentagon memo announcing the cancellation of the SDEF program. The Pentagon press office declined my request to authenticate the memo, but I was able to independently verify that it is real. SDEF will be closing its doors this Summer.
The notion that the government can be made more efficient by giving greater influence to corporate contractors is exactly backward. The companies profiting off of the military-industrial complex are not a solution to government waste and inefficiency; they are a cause of it. Government contractors spend millions each year trying to rig the rules of the game, gain privileged access to contracts, and weaken the transparency and accountability guidelines that keep them in check. With hundreds of billions of dollars in defense contracts on the line, BOND will serve as yet another avenue for big businesses to enrich themselves.
There is little doubt that BOND and Detachment 201 will produce corruption even worse than that of the SDEF program, without any of the benefits. For all of its many faults, SDEF could at least plausibly serve as a skill-building opportunity for U.S. military officers; not so for BOND. And while SDEF had a small group of fellows serving as a bridge between the Pentagon and its contractors each year, BOND’s recruitment of several hundred corporate executives threatens to create a larger, longer-lasting, and more direct channel for contractors to lobby their government customers. These “Business Operators” have a strong incentive to act in their companies’ interest, regardless of how it affects national security.
The purpose of government is to serve the public, and the purpose of a military contractor is to make money. The more that military contractors are allowed to influence the government, the more the government will ignore the common good and adopt a militaristic approach to the world in order to line the pockets of a few well-connected contractors. A rational foreign policy and an efficient military acquisitions process are possible only through reducing contractor influence, not enhancing it.
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