Inefficient Bureacracy: Department of Defense?

While searching through the New York Times for articles that would apply to my post, I found a quite disturbing article, found at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/09/international/middleeast/09rumsfeld.html?oref=reg, on the Defense Department and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as its senior bureaucrat. Yesterday, Rumsfeld visited the Iraq-bound troops during a town hall discussion at Camp Buehring in Kuwait. Although he came expecting a morale boosting visit, Rumsfeld was faced with complaints "about aging vehicles that lacked armor for protection against roadside bombs" and questions about what would be done about this problem, revealing an inefficiency within the Defense Department. However, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld argued that the military was producing the necessary equipment--extra armor for Humvees and trucks--but it would take time. This article's dialogue between the involved soldiers and the bureaucrats resembles issues in Niskanen's model of bureaucracies and their inefficiencies. Niskanen argues there are three reasons why bureaucracy is inefficient: output is not easily measured, monopoly supply, and senior bureaucrat compensation is not linked to efficiency. In the article, the Defense Department appears to be inefficient at producing the supplies necessary for the troops in the Iraq War. This inefficiency could be because of the first reason presented by Niskanen. The output of the Defense Department is very difficult to measure for the general public. Pentagon spokeman, Lawrence Di Rita, claims in the article "that the military was now producing 450 armored Humvees a month, compared with just 15 a month in the fall of 2003, when the threat of roadside bombs began to emerge. He also said that three out of four Humvees in the war zones were armored, and that unarmored vehicles were used in back-up operations." This appears to be a large number, but those affected by the output--the soldiers--claim they are having to "scrounge through landfills here for pieces of rusty scrap metal and bulletproof glass - what they called "hillbilly armor" - to bolt to their trucks." Therefore, there is an efficiency that is due to the lack of the public being able to easily discern output. The amount of equipment being produced by the Defense Department appears to be enough in number, but the troups argue this amount is still inefficient. The true effective output is difficult to determine.