Frank Kendall III
Frank Kendall III is an American lawyer who served under President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter as the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics until January 20, 2017.
Kendall is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Commissioned in the US Army, he served in Germany during the 1970s before transferring to the Army Reserve, during which time he also lectured at the West Point. He resigned commission as a lieutenant colonel.
He also holds a Master's degree in aeronautical engineering from California Institute of Technology, a Master of Business Administration degree from C.W Post Center of Long Island University and a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center. At the USMA, Kendall was a classmate of Jack Reed, who is currently serving as senior United States Senator from Rhode Island.
In January 2015, a report by the Defense Business Board and consultants from McKinsey & Company discovered DoD was spending $134 billion, 23% of its total budget, on back-office work, and that the back-office bureaucracy staff of over one million people was nearly as great as the number of active duty troops. According to the report, DoD's purchasing bureaucracy staff of 207,000 would be among the top 30 private sector employers in the United States. On January 22, 2015, the Board then voted to recommend adoption of McKinsey's five-year plan to cut $125 billion in waste.
Under Secretary Kendall responded to the management consulting by asking "Are you trying to tell me we don't know how to do our job?" and that the report's conclusions were "essentially a ballpark, made-up number". Kendall then argued that he could not achieve any efficiencies and, instead, that he needed to hire 1,000 more staff. After Secretary Chuck Hagel was replaced by Ash Carter the next month, Kendall warned Deputy Secretary Robert O. Work that the McKinsey report could "be used as a weapon" against the defense budget. Secretary Carter then replaced the Board chairman, classified the McKinsey results as secret, and removed the report from public websites.
After Navy Secretary Ray Mabus gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute highlighting the McKinsey report, Under Secretary Kendall wrote to him asking "please refrain from taking any more public pot shots" and "I do not want this spilling over into further public discourse."
In his civilian life Kendall has performed pro bono human rights work.
According to his official DoD biography he served on the board of directors of Amnesty International, of Human Rights First and of the Tahirih Justice Center.
He has traveled to the Guantanamo Bay detention camps, as a human rights observer.
