Front-loading is the practice of appropriating funds for a new weapons project based solely on assurances by its official sponsors about what it can do. This happens long before a prototype has been built or tested, and it invariably involves the quoting of unrealistically low unit costs for a sizable order. Assurances are always given that the system’s technical requirements will be simple or have already been met. Lowballing future costs, an intrinsic aspect of front-loading, is an old Defense Department trick, a governmental version of bait-and-switch. What is introduced as a great bargain regularly turns out to be a grossly expensive lemon.
Political engineering is the strategy of awarding contracts in as many different congressional districts as possible. By making voters and congressional incumbents dependent on military money, the Pentagon’s political engineers put pressure on them to continue supporting front-loaded programs even after their true costs become apparent.
Front-loading and political engineering generate several typical features in the weapons that the Pentagon then buys for its arsenal. These continually prove unnecessarily expensive, are prone to break down easily, and are often unworkably complex. They tend to come with inadequate supplies of spare parts and ammunition, since there is not enough money to buy the quantities that are needed. They also force the services to repair older weapons and keep them in service much longer than is normal or wise. For example, the B-52 bomber, which went into service in 1955, is still on active duty.
Even though extended training would seem to be a necessary corollary to the complexity of such weapons systems, the excessive cost actually leads to reductions in training time for pilots and others. In the long run, it is because of such expedients and short-term fixes that American casualties may increase and, sooner or later, battles or wars may be lost.
For example, Northrop Grumman’s much touted B-2 stealth bomber has proven to be almost totally worthless. It is too delicate to deploy to harsh climates without special hangars first being built to protect it at ridiculous expense; it cannot fulfill any combat missions that older designs were not fully adequate to perform; and—at a total cost of $44.75 billion for only twenty-one bombers—it wastes resources needed for real combat situations.
Instead, in military terms, the most unexpectedly successful post-Vietnam aircraft has been the Fairchild A-10, unflatteringly nicknamed the “Warthog.” It is the only close-support aircraft ever developed by the U.S. Air Force. Its task is to loiter over battlefields and assist ground forces in disposing of obstinate or formidable targets, which is not something that fits comfortably with the Air Force’s hotshot self-image.
Some 715 A-10s were produced, and they served with great effectiveness in the first Persian Gulf War. All 715 cumulatively cost less than three B-2 bombers. The A-10 is now out of production because the Air Force establishment favors extremely fast aircraft that fly in straight lines at high altitudes rather than aircraft that are useful in battle. In the Afghan war, the Air Force has regularly inflicted heavy casualties on innocent civilians at least in part because it tries to attack ground targets from the air with inappropriately high-performance equipment.
USING THE F-22 TO FIGHT THE F-16
The military-industrial complex is today so confident of its skills in gaming the system that it does not hesitate to publicize how many workers in a particular district will lose their jobs if a particular project is canceled. Threats are also made—and put into effect—to withhold political contributions from uncooperative congressional representatives.
As Spinney recalls, “In July 1989, when some members of Congress began to build a coalition aimed at canceling the B-2, Northrop Corporation, the B-2’s prime contractor, retaliated by releasing data which had previously been classified showing that tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in profits were at risk in 46 states and 383 congressional districts.” The B-2 was not canceled.
Southern California’s biggest private employers are Boeing Corporation and Northrop Grumman. They are said to employ more than 58,000 workers in well-paying jobs, a major political obstacle to rationalizing defense expenditures even as recession is making such steps all but unavoidable.
Both front-loading and political engineering are alive and well. They are in fact now at the center of fierce controversies surrounding the extreme age of the present fleet of Air Force fighter aircraft, most of which date from the 1980s. Meanwhile, the costs of the two most likely successors to the workhorse F-16—the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—have run up so high that the government cannot afford to purchase significant numbers of either of them.
The F-16 made its first flight in December 1976, and a total of 4,400 have been built. They have been sold, or given away, all over the world. Planning for the F-22 began in 1986, when the Cold War was still alive (even if on life support), and the Air Force was trumpeting its fears that the other superpower, the USSR, was planning a new, ultrafast, highly maneuverable fighter.
By the time the prototype F-22 had its rollout on May 11, 1997, the Cold War was nearly a decade in its grave, and it was perfectly apparent that the Soviet aircraft it was intended to match would never be built. Lockheed Martin, the F-22’s prime contractor, naturally argued that we needed it anyway and made plans to sell some 438 airplanes for a total tab of $70 billion. By mid-2008, only 183 F-22s were on order, 122 of which had been delivered. The numbers had been reduced due to cost overruns. The Air Force still wanted to buy an additional 198 planes, but Secretary Gates and his leading assistants balked. No wonder. According to arms experts Bill Hartung and Christopher Preble, at more than $350 million each, the F-22 is “the most expensive fighter plane ever built.”
The F-22 has several strikingly expensive characteristics, which actually limit its usefulness. It is allegedly a stealth fighter—that is, an airplane with a shape that reduces its visibility on radar—but there is no such thing as an airplane completely invisible to all radar. In any case, once it turns on its own fire-control radar, which it must do in combat, it becomes fully visible to an enemy.
The F-22 is able to maneuver at very high altitudes, but this is of limited value since there are no other airplanes in service anywhere that can engage in combat at such heights. It can cruise at twice the speed of sound in level flight without the use of its afterburners (which consume fuel at an accelerated rate), but there are no potential adversaries for which these capabilities are relevant. The plane is obviously blindingly irrelevant to “fourth-generation wars” such as that with the Taliban in Afghanistan—the sorts of conflicts for which American strategists inside the Pentagon and out believe the United States should be preparing.
Actually, the United States ought not to be engaged in fourth-generation wars at all, whatever planes are in its fleet. Outside powers normally find such wars unwinnable. Unfortunately, President Obama’s approach to the Bush administration’s Afghan war remains deeply flawed and will only entrap us in another quagmire, whatever planes we put in the skies over that country.
Nonetheless, as he entered office, the F-22 was still being promoted as the plane to buy, almost entirely through front-loading and political engineering. Some apologists for the Air Force also claimed that we needed the F-22 to face the F-16. Their argument went this way: We have sold so many F-16s to allies and Third World customers that if we ever had to fight one of them, that country might prevail using our own equipment against us. Some foreign air forces like Israel’s are fully equipped with F-16s, and their pilots actually receive more training and monthly practice hours than ours do.
This, however, seems a trivial reason for funding more F-22s. We should instead simply not get involved in wars with former allies we have armed, although this is why Congress prohibited Lockheed from selling the F-22 abroad. Some Pentagon critics contend that the Air Force and prime contractors lobby for arms sales abroad because they artificially generate a demand for new weapons at home that are “better” than the ones we’ve sold elsewhere.
Most serious observers believe that this would only make a bad situation worse. So far the F-35 shows every sign of being, in Chuck Spinney’s words, “a far more costly and more troubled turkey” than the F-22, “even though it has a distinction that even the F-22 cannot claim, namely, it is tailored to meet the same threat that . . . ceased to exist at least three years before the F-35 R&D [research and development] program began in 1994.”
The F-35 is considerably more complex than the F-22, meaning that it will undoubtedly be even more expensive to repair and will break down even more easily. Its cost per plane is guaranteed to continue to spiral upward. The design of the F-22 involves 4 million lines of computer code; the F-35, 19 million lines. The Pentagon sold the F-35 to Congress in 1998 with the promise of a unit cost of $184 million per aircraft. By 2008, that had risen to $355 million per aircraft, and the plane was already two years behind schedule.
According to Pierre M. Sprey, one of the original sponsors of the F-16, and Winslow T. Wheeler, a thirty-one-year veteran staff official on Senate defense committees, the F-35 is overweight, underpowered, and “less maneuverable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105 ‘lead sled’ that got wiped out over North Vietnam in the Indochina War.” Its makers claim that it will be a bomber as well as a fighter, but it will have a payload of only two 2,000-pound bombs, far less than American fighters of the Vietnam era. Although the Air Force praises its stealth features, it will lose these as soon as it mounts bombs under its wings, which will alter its shape most unstealthily.
It is a nonstarter for close-air-support missions because it is too fast for a pilot to be able to spot tactical targets. It is too delicate and potentially flammable to be able to withstand ground fire. If built, it will end up as the most expensive defense contract in history without offering a serious replacement for any of the fighters or fighter-bombers currently in service.
THE FIGHTER MAFIA
Every branch of the American armed forces suffers from similar “defense power games.” For example, the new Virginia-class fast-attack submarines are expensive and not needed. As the New York Times wrote editorially, “The program is little more than a public works project to keep the Newport News, Va., and Groton, Conn., naval shipyards in business.”
I have, however, concentrated on the Air Force because the collapse of internal controls over acquisitions is most obvious, as well as farthest advanced, there—and because the Air Force has for years been the branch of the armed services most deeply implicated in the ongoing debate over weapons procurement. Interestingly enough, on April 21, 2008, in one of the few optimistic developments in Pentagon politics in recent times, Secretary of Defense Gates launched a blistering attack on bureaucratism in a speech to officers at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. In it, he singled out for praise and emulation an Air Force officer who had inspired many of that service’s innovators over the past couple of generations while being truly despised by an establishment and an old guard who viewed him as an open threat to careerism.
Colonel John Boyd (1927–1997) was a significant military strategist, an exceptionally talented fighter pilot in both the Korean and Vietnam war eras, and for six years the chief instructor at the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas. “Forty-Second Boyd” became a legend in the Air Force because of his standing claim that he could defeat any pilot, foreign or domestic, in simulated air-to-air combat within forty seconds, a bet he never lost even though he was continuously challenged.
Last April, Gates said, in part:
As this new era continues to unfold before us, the challenge I pose to you today is to become a forward-thinking officer who helps the Air Force adapt to a constantly changing strategic environment characterized by persistent conflict.
Let me illustrate by using a historical exemplar: the late Air Force Colonel John Boyd. As a thirty-year-old captain, he rewrote the manual for air-to-air combat. Boyd and the reformers he inspired would later go on to design and advocate for the F-16 and the A-10. After retiring, he would develop the principles of maneuver warfare that were credited by a former Marine Corps commandant [General Charles C. Krulak] and a secretary of defense [Dick Cheney] for the lightning victory of the first Gulf War. . . .
In accomplishing all these things, Boyd—a brilliant, eccentric, and stubborn character—had to overcome a large measure of bureaucratic resistance and institutional hostility. He had some advice that he used to pass on to his colleagues and subordinates that is worth sharing with you. Boyd would say, and I quote: “One day you will take a fork in the road, and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go one way, you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other way and you can do something—something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and get good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you have to make a decision. To be or to do.” . . . We must heed John Boyd’s advice by asking if the ways we do business make sense.
Boyd’s many accomplishments are documented in Robert Coram’s excellent biography Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. They need not be retold here. It was, however, the spirit of Boyd and “the reformers he inspired,” a group within Air Force headquarters who came to be called the “Fighter Mafia,” that launched the defense reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Their objectives were to stop the acquisition of unnecessarily complex and expensive weapons, cause the Air Force to take seriously the idea of a fourth generation of warfare, end its reliance on a strategy of attrition, and expose to criticism an officers’ corps focused on careerist standards.
Unless Secretary Gates succeeds in reviving it, their lingering influence in the Pentagon is just about exhausted today. Despite Gates’s praise of Boyd, one should not underestimate the formidable obstacles to Pentagon reform. Over a quarter century ago, back in 1982, journalist James Fallows outlined the most serious structural obstacle to any genuine reform in his National Book Award–winning study, National Defense. The book was so influential that at least one commentator includes Fallows as a non-Pentagon member of Boyd’s “Fighter Mafia.”
As Fallows then observed:
The culture of procurement teaches officers that there are two paths to personal survival. One is to bring home the bacon for the service as the manager of a program that gets its full funding. “Procurement management is more and more the surest path to advancement” within the military, says John Morse, who retired as a Navy captain after twenty-eight years in the service. . . .
The other path that procurement opens leads outside the military, toward the contracting firms. To know even a handful of professional soldiers above the age of forty and the rank of major is to keep hearing, in the usual catalogue of life changes, that many have resigned from the service and gone to the contractors: to Martin Marietta, Northrop, Lockheed, to the scores of consulting firms and middlemen, whose offices fill the skyscrapers of Rosslyn, Virginia, across the river from the capital. In 1959, Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois reported that 768 retired senior officers (generals, admirals, colonels, and Navy captains) worked for defense contractors. Ten years later Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin said that the number had increased to 2,072.
Almost thirty years after those words were written, the situation has grown far worse. Until we decide (or are fo
rced) to dismantle our empire, sell off most of our military bases in other people’s countries, and bring our military expenditures into line with those of the rest of the world, we are destined to go bankrupt in the name of national defense. We are well on our way, which is why the Obama administration faces such critical—and difficult—decisions when it comes to the Pentagon budget.
_____________
* After a bruising lobbying battle in the Senate, the Obama administration was able to kill the F-22 program in July 2009. Lockheed, however, hardly lost out. A month later, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced his support for the F-35 and even pressed for a production ramp-up for that plane, while publicly emphasizing the need to keep the program on budget and on schedule. Plans were then announced for the purchase of 513 F-35s through 2015 and, ultimately, a fleet of 2,443 planes. In November, word emerged that the program was already behind schedule and over budget. As a result, in January 2010, the Pentagon proposed delays and production cuts for the F-35. Lockheed, however, would still not lose out, since such delays would only curtail the program in the short term, while the total number of planes purchased would ultimately remain unchanged.
PART V
HOW TO END IT
15
DISMANTLING THE EMPIRE
July 30, 2009
However ambitious President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the American living room: our long-standing reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.
Dismantling the Empire Page 16
