Page 196 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS KNOW WHEN TO COMPROMISE

their behalf. “In a time of war, we were being advised to decrease the
defense budget, and quite frankly, I wasn’t about to accept a decrease in an
already underresourced army,” Harvey said. “Sometimes you’ve just got to
dig your heels in, so I did, and we submitted our budget three and a half
months late. I got a reputation for not being a team player.”

General Schoomaker said that when Harvey was appointed Secretary of
the Army, the expectation was that he would go along with the senior man-
agement of the other services and some at the Defense Department who
were opposed to increased funding for the Army. When Harvey came on
the scene, the service was in the middle of major changes stemming from
its long-term involvement in the wars in the Middle East. Although Pres-
ident Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld supported most of the changes
that were taking place in the Army and understood the need for a fund-
ing increase, other influential players fought hard against it. “The services
are always in competition. But we were unbeatable because we didn’t just
say we needed more money. We approached it by showing the level of
readiness we were being asked to maintain and then showing what that
readiness would cost. It was a very tangible thing,” Schoomaker said.
“When they tried to cut $24 billion from the base budget, we could then
show them what impact that would have and what it meant in terms of
being able to sustain our rotation in Afghanistan and Iraq. These guys were
all trying to fight us on the veracity of our facts, but we had the data. It
was there.”
When the fiscal guidance came down recommending a cut without
regard for what that would mean to the troops on the ground, Schoomaker
and Harvey had three choices. They could cut personnel, cut force structure,
or stand firm and demand that the money be allocated. They chose to stand
firm. They refused to submit their budget, and their tactic worked.
Indeed, during Secretary Harvey’s brief tenure the Army budget more
than doubled from what it had been ten years before. He also sharpened
the Army’s focus on recruiting. Harvey launched a task force that he also
chaired, and that task force came up with a novel idea: Turn all the troops
into recruiters.
“In business, everybody knows that the employees themselves are
usually the best source of qualified personnel. So we started a program that
gave our soldiers a financial reward of a thousand dollars for referring

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