The Gospel According to John

hen Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre finishes his day job, he retreats to his garage to take up his pet project-carving out of oak a detailed model of the Chartres Cathedral in France.

When Hamre talks about the project, it is tempting to draw comparisons to his current effort to reform the Pentagon bureaucracy. The workers who rebuilt the cathedral after a fire in 1194 "were constrained by a lot of what was there originally," Hamre says. "Right now, I'm up to 1194."

At the Pentagon, Hamre is at a similar junction. In December, he and Secretary William Cohen released the Defense Reform Initiative, a blueprint for shifting power from DoD's headquarters staff to the services and for instilling business-like practices in the Pentagon. But the effort is constrained by the tendency to preserve the status quo.

In the reform endeavor, Hamre, 47, is Cohen's "junior partner, who makes sure the trusses hold the damned thing up," says David Chu, who gave Hamre his first defense job 20 years ago as a Congressional Budget Office analyst and more recently advised Cohen and Hamre on the reform package.

Ambitious Plan

The Defense Reform Initiative, developed by a task force that Hamre led, is ambitious in comparison with other recent efforts. It combines all treaty monitoring and Russian nuclear dismantlement work under a single agency. It creates an assistant secretary for intelligence, to replace the one who oversaw command and control systems. And it transfers oversight of international arms development cooperation from a deputy undersecretary to the Defense Security Assistance Agency.

The plan calls for a 33 percent staff cut over the next 18 months at the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Personnel in Defense agencies will be reduced by 21 percent in the next five years, and DoD field activity staff will be cut 36 percent in the next two years. By 2003, military department headquarters staff will be reduced by 10 percent, Joint Staff personnel by 29 percent and combatant command staff by 7 percent.

By 1999, the department will identify functions that could be performed by the private sector and open many of them to competition. A number of functions have been targeted already, including civilian and retiree payroll systems and other personnel services, surplus property disposal, national stockpile sales, property management and drug testing laboratories.

Just six months prior, Cohen released another, more comprehensive, overhaul plan, the Quadrennial Defense Review. But the QDR was declared dead on arrival even by some of its drafters, a victim of turf battles that caused attrition of bold ideas. The Defense Reform Initiative had a more auspicious beginning, as Cohen's pledge to cut his own staff won support from the military.

Another reason for its success so far is that Hamre and Cohen staffed the effort with colleagues they met when Cohen was a senator and Hamre was a top committee aide for Sam Nunn, former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, from 1984 to 1993.

Hamre, his former colleagues on Capitol Hill say, was an indispensable staffer. Arnold Punaro, Nunn's former staff director, claims he still doesn't know whether Hamre is a Democrat or a Republican. Robert Bell, senior director for defense policy and arms control at the National Security Council, who worked with Hamre for eight years on the committee, remembers he wielded a cutting wit in defense of his analysis and arguments. He talked straight but didn't fight dirty.

"I don't think I've ever heard anyone make an unkind statement about John," Punaro says. "That's very unusual in the Washington arena."

Hamre left his mark on much of the legislation he is now executing, but former staffers remember him most for an idea that never passed: a biennial Defense budget act. At DoD, Hamre finds himself in a similarly quixotic battle to convince his former congressional bosses of the need to close more military bases. But unlike others urging base closures, Hamre does not claim they will save money in the next five years, the planning horizon for Defense budgets. Rather, he argues that the infrastructure cuts are vital for posterity.

'This Isn't Us'

If Hamre's time in the Senate and the Pentagon has made him a Washington insider, away from work he leads a humble life. Commuting to the Pentagon in an armored limousine makes him "feel stupid," Hamre says. He's had to get used to the military communications system wired into the house where he lives with his wife, Julia, on a quiet suburban cul-de-sac, and to the barrage of official receptions and functions he must attend. "My wife and I probably say to each other once a week, 'This isn't us,' " Hamre says.

Leftovers from the receptions thrown "by people trying to impress me," Hamre says, go to the homeless women's shelter at his church, Luther Place, in Washington. The Lutheran church was nearly his vocation. Growing up in Willow Lake, S.D., a town so small no one bothered to name its streets, he lived next to the Lutheran church where his grandfather preached. He spent a year at Harvard Divinity School but decided he was not ready for the ministry.

Hamre helped establish and staff the shelter at Luther Place. He also sings in the choir and does a bit of gardening. The latter job nearly cost him the secure communications pager that comes with being Deputy Secretary. The beeper slipped off his belt while he was working, and a young boy found it and proceeded to try dismantling it with a hammer. Hamre rescued it just in time to receive a page from the President's national security adviser.

Hamre's religious beliefs have given him a perspective on government and public service that extends far beyond defense. As DoD comptroller, he prepared and defended the Pentagon's budget, but he sees social services as more worthy of funding than high-tech weapons. "I would much rather have those dollars available for other needs," he says. "But having said that, am I prepared to let our country not have an insurance policy of a strong defense? No."

Hamre isn't shy about sharing his religious convictions with others in the Defense Department. Last October, he delivered a homily in the chapel at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He told the cadets the story of Lazarus the beggar and the rich man who would not give him food.

"It's unbelievable the things that I'm given every day, and yet [God] put me in a congregation of people who have nothing," he told the cadets. "It certainly isn't because I deserve these things."

The visit caused a stir at West Point. Edward Geehan, a professor and former United Church of Christ chaplain, complained in a Washington Post article that Hamre was interfering with the chaplain's right to run his church. "It is the job of chaplains, regardless of their denomination, to secure and protect the religious liberties of soldiers," Geehan said. "In effect what Hamre did was nullify that tasking. He set an incredibly bad precedent. Suppose the next guy in his job is an atheist and he says he wants to preach in the cadets' chapel."

Hamre plans to speak at the Air Force and Navy academies' chapels too, but he says he learned from his West Point experience to ensure academy officials don't interpret his requests to speak as orders.

Though Hamre was accused of exercising undue command influence at West Point, the question of how much influence he can have on the notoriously intransigent Pentagon bureaucracy is still being answered.

The Deputy Secretary's job, which Hamre views as the Pentagon's chief operating officer, can be a launching pad-the past Defense Secretary and central intelligence director were former deputies-but one also can stagnate in the job. Hamre's predecessor, John White, entered the job with a point-by-point plan to reform the Pentagon but accomplished little.

As comptroller, Hamre undertook broad reforms of the Pentagon's finance and accounting system, but he also left a number of projects unfinished, causing Sen. Charles Grassley. R-Iowa, to charge him with neglect of duty in several Senate remarks and letters. But even an aide to Grassley offers Hamre backhanded praise: "Compared to other people over there at the Pentagon, he's superior."

Hamre's own argument for why he'll succeed in his current effort is simple and characteristically blunt: "Because I'm running it and I've got my butt on the line."

Jeff Erlich is a Washington journalist.