I recommend reading in full this interview with one of our top defense analysts. Winslow Wheeler is Director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information (see his bio).
Supporting information:
- America’s Defense Meltdown, Click here to download (2.6 MB PDF).
- A brief description of the book.
- “The Long-Term Implications of Current Defense Plans: Detailed Update for Fiscal Year 2008“, Congressional Budget Office, March 2008 — Essential reading for anyone interested in the condition of our military
“What’s Wrong with the U.S. Military“, interview of Winslow Wheeler by Andrew Cockburn, Counterpunch, 3 December 2008 — Bold are Cockburn’s questions. Excerpt:
Coinciding with the arrival of Obama and his deputies in Washington, the Center for Defense Information is releasing America’s Defense Meltdown — Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress, a primer on what is wrong with our defense system written by men with long and honorable experience in the bowels of the military services and Pentagon bureaucracy. The book’s editor, Winslow Wheeler is familiar to readers of this site for his acrid and knowledgeable commentaries on the defense establishment. CounterPuncher Andrew Cockburn interviews him about the book and its message.
AC: You say in your preface that “the vast majority, perhaps even all, of Congress, the general officer corps of the armed forces, top management of American defense manufacturers, prominent members of Washington’s think tank community and nationally recognized ‘defense journalists’ will hate this book.” Why is that?
WW: The conventional wisdom amongst the elite in Washington is that they have done a pretty good job of taking care of our national defense, that things may be a little expensive but we have the best armed forces in the world, perhaps even in history, and we do the best for our troops by giving them the world’s most sophisticated equipment which is, of course, the most effective. We have, so the elite asserts, demonstrated our ability by knocking off Saddam Hussein’s forces twice and are in general a model to the rest of the world on how to build equipment and provide for forces.
That’s all crap. None of it is true. None of it stands up to scrutiny. Let’s tick through it.
First of all, we now have the largest defense budget in inflation-adjusted dollars since the end of World War Two. That has bought the smallest military establishment we have had since the end of World War Two. We now have fewer navy combat ships and submarines, fewer combat aircraft and fewer army fighting units than we have had at any point since the end of World War Two. Our major items of equipment are on average older than at any time during this period. Key elements of our fighting forces are badly trained. In other words we’re getting less for more. People point to the two wars against Saddam Hussein. His armed forces were pitifully incompetent and even against them in both the 1991 and 2003 gulf wars we demonstrated serious deficiencies while overestimating how good we were.
{FM Note: see the CBO study above for supporting evidence}
AC: But is the U.S. likely to be facing anyone better in the near future?
WW: Apparently we are right now. …
AC: What brought the U.S. to this sorry state of affairs?
WW: The fundamental reason, I believe, is that we are not interested in what works best in combat. Instead, our defense structure in Washington is interested in other things. In Congress they’re interested in jobs and campaign contributions. In the Pentagon they’re interested in various political and bureaucratic agendas. They’re not paying attention to the lessons of combat history. A bloated, declining military structure is the result. …
AC: Given the sort of people he’s selecting for defense position, it looks as though Obama is not necessarily going to follow the course of action you urge in your book. What is your opinion of the Obama defense team as currently formulated?
WW: He campaigned on “Change We Can Believe in” and his transition almost immediately switched to “Continuity We Can Believe In.” The people so far selected, especially Robert Gates, have a track record, and that track record is basically to keep things the way they are. Gates will do what he’s told on issues like Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s already made it clear that as far as managing the Pentagon is concerned he thinks he’s been doing a competent job. But during his tenure things have only gotten worse. The budget’s going up faster than ever before in recent history; the size of our forces is going south; the equipment continues to get older. We have a new report from the Congressional Budget Office that tracks the size of our weapons inventory and its age. This study shows that if everything goes perfectly according to Gates’ plans as revealed in his Pentagon budget, our forces will continue to shrink and the equipment will continue to get older. …
AC: Realistically, do you think there’s any possibility that you could meaningful reform in the Pentagon?
WW: I’m not at all optimistic. The second tier of appointments that they’re talking about in the press for the Obama team are mostly holdovers from the Clinton era, when things were almost as bad as they were during the Bush era. Most of the major hardware programs that are now coming a cropper as major cost and performance disasters were conceived during the Clinton era. …
AC: What about Obama’s National Security Adviser, General Jim Jones? He looks like a fine upstanding Marine.
WW: He is a man of great stature, physically and figuratively, in Washington. He is a Washington ‘heavy’ but if you look at his record, nothing much ever happened. Things went south in Afghanistan pretty rapidly when he was supreme commander of all Nato forces in Afghanistan. When he was Commandant of the Marine Corps, a lot of the marines’ overpriced underperforming hardware programs, such as the V-22 [vertical takeoff troop transport plane] and the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle were endorsed and continued happily along. He seems to have been mostly a placeholder when he had these very senior and important positions.
Afterword
If you are new to this site, please glance at the archives below. You may find answers to your questions in these.
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For more information from the FM site
To read other articles about these things, see the FM reference page on the right side menu bar. Of esp relevance to this topic:
Some posts on the FM site about our military appartus:
- Another cycle down the Defense Death Spiral, 30 January 2008
- DoD Death Spiral – the US Navy version, 31 January 2008
- Update to the “Navy Death Spiral”, 22 April 2008
- A neverending story: DoD’s attempts to stop cooking the books, 2 May 2008
- Secretary Gates would be a hero – if speeches could reform DoD, 6 May 2008
- I was wrong about SecDef Gates – here is a more accurate view of him, 7 May 2008
- The moral courage of our senior generals, or their lack of it, 3 July 2008
- A lesson in war-mongering: “Maritime Strategy in an Age of Blood and Belief”, 8 July 2008
- A step towards building a Navy we can afford, 16 July 2008
- Thoughts on fixing America’s national security apparatus, 11 August 2008
- The foundation of America’s empire: our chain of bases around the world, 8 September 2008
- No coins, no COIN, 6 October 2008
- How can America adapt to a new world? A conference about national security lights the way., 18 October 2008
