It’s impossible to understand America’s wars unless one sees its political foundation in Washington — our Versailles on the Potomac. Few can give us that as well as Winslow T. Wheeler, Director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information. He has graciously provided this guest essay. I recommend also reading the other essays in the National Journal article.
National Journal has been sponsoring a weekly blog on defense issues. This week’s question for debate was “After the F-22 Vote, What’s Next?” I was asked to help kick off the blogging with a statement.
Reviewing the other submissions from the national security experts participating in this debate (each selected by National Journal as blog members) is revealing, I believe.
- Most of the experts see the cancellation of the F-22 as “small potatoes” or ill-advised.
- Many see Secretary of Defense Gates’ efforts to focus so heavily on the wars at hand (which they also support) as a threat to US security.
- The focus on Iraq and Afghanistan are a problem not because the wars are ill-advised but because they demand money otherwise directed at what they see as lurking threats from North Korea, Iran, and China.
- What several of them really seem to mean is that Gates does not propose to spend enough additional money on missile defense and high tech conventional weapons: A spending trajectory for the defense budget at or above the very large annual increases established by the recent Bush administration.
In all, I believe it is a remarkable vision of where US national security policy should be going. It has three parts:
- Keep on fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
- increase, in most cases dramatically, the top line of the defense budget to accommodate spending for the selection of weapons the Pentagon has been pursuing for decades (that are also extremely complex, extraordinarily expensive to buy and operate, unreliable, and poorly tested), and
- everything else is pretty much OK.
I am clearly very out of step with each element of this thinking. My own view, and that of twelve other retired military officers and Pentagon insiders, is articulated at length in the anthology America’s Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress. Some of these views are summarized in my submission to National Journal to start off the debate on where US national security policy is in the aftermath of the cancellation of additional F-22 funding. That piece follows.
Winslow T. Wheeler’s essay in the National Journal article
The Senate system, political and otherwise, is not designed to stop producing much of anything — let alone weapons — especially in a lousy economy. The 58-40 vote to put the F-22 out of it misery offers a ray of hope that intelligent defense decisions can be made in Congress, even if it takes a massive effort by a determined secretary of defense, the president, and arm twisting by Rahm Emanuel. Perhaps the single individual to credit most for this important success is John McCain. Without him, and even with Gates, the vote would have been purely partisan, supplemented by pork crazed Democrats, such as Murray, Boxer, Feinstein, Byrd, and many others.
Important as it is, the vote should not be misinterpreted as a manifestation of Gates’ “reform” agenda. Put simply, reform is not his agenda; reorientation is. Clearly he wants to focus on fighting the wars at hand, and he is having some real success at that, but only inside the Pentagon. And, reform it is not.
Reform means a change in business as usual. That ain’t happening. Case in point: look at the F-35 program, which Gates is anxious to promote and which some touted as picking up the slack that killing the F-22 left. The F-35 is a classic example of buying a pig in a poke; in fact, we will buy 500 of them before the first definitive (IOT&E) test report lands on Gates desk, and it is a undiluted example of the same kind of design thinking and execution that got the Air Force into trouble with the F-22. Namely, costs so high, performance so compromised, and availability so un- that we get as a result an air force that is smaller, older, and less ready to fight at vastly increased cost.
The recently enacted Weapon System Acquisition Reform Act is another clear example of the non-, even anti-, reform agenda that dominates in Secretary Gates’ Pentagon. Riddled with loopholes and the thinking that the Pentagon should be left alone to fix itself, the original draft bill was given even more loopholes and self-report card writing after Deputy Secretary William Lynn’s interventions.
Both reform and Gates reorientation both have a long way to go to succeed. Despite a post-mortem death wriggle in the form of a CQ article that pretended there was new, but belated, news that the F-35 program is falling apart and therefore the F-22 merits reconsideration, the F-22 is a-goner. (News that the F-35 is having huge cost growth and serious performance problems is very plainly nothing new.)
But, Gates’ agenda to focus clearly on fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is still very much under siege in Congress. It’s not just the porkers determination to fund more VH-71 helicopters, C-17s, F-18s, and several billions more in pork. Much more importantly, and with little opposition from Gates, the House and Senate Armed services Committees and the House Appropriations Committee are pressing ahead with their beating up on the most important account in the Pentagon budget as far as the two wars are concerned. Specifically, they all recommend billions in reductions in DOD’s Operation and Maintenance account to pay for the pork they add in the Procurement and R&D accounts.
O&M pays for training, weapons maintenance, fuel, and much more of the items basic to any war effort. Congress couldn’t care less; the O&M account (and to a lesser extent the military pay account) is their bill payer for pork. To their credit, Senators Levin and McCain pointed this out when they undid Saxby Chambliss’ revolting raid on these accounts to pay for his extra F-22’s. Very sadly, however, Levin and McCain left in tact other raids on O&M (over a $billion) to help pay for the rest of the pork in their bill. The House Armed Services Committee and the House Appropriations Committee did much the same. The Senate Appropriations Committee will; it just hasn’t reported its bill yet.
Gates has a long way to go in Congress to enforce his effort to take the wars seriously.
As for real reform, the 58-40 vote in the Senate shows that with huge effort some progress can be made. Among the 58 who voted against more F-22s are some potential leaders in Congress against the bad ideas in the defense budget that make us weaker at increasing cost. Based on what I am hearing from some of them, there is a real chance we will see more such actions. The longest journey starts with the first step.
About the author
Winslow T. Wheeler is Director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C.
From 1971 to 2002, Wheeler worked on national security issues for members of the U.S. Senate and for the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). In the Senate, he was the first – and according to Senate records the last – individual to work simultaneously on the personal staffs of a Republican and a Democrat.
He has authored two books: The Wastrels of Defense (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2004) about Congress and national security, and “Military Reform(Praeger Security International, 2007). He was the Editor of America’s Defense Meltdown.
Posts on the FM site about Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
- 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
- Does Secretary of Defense Gates have cojones grande?, 8 April 2009
- Can we answer SecDef Gates’ question about NATO and the Af-Pak War?, 19 May 2009
Afterword
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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 interest these days:
- About America’s national defence strategy and machinery
- About An Army near the Breaking Point – studies & reports
In a military/police state, you need a lot of military and a lot of police. Once upon a time, FIRE — Finance, Insurance and Real Estate — accounted for the profit centers of the U.S. economy. But now that Finance has melted down, Insurance is in the process of getting dismantled courtesy of the Health Care reform, and Real Estate has long since collapsed in an explosion of empty spec luxury homes and deserted strip malls, what’s left to provide profits for the American economy?
Not manufacturing. We outsourced that long ago. Not service jobs. Nobody makes much profit washing windows or serving up McBurgers. Not skilled white collar jobs like software engineering or biotech or robotics. Those are getting outsourced as we speak. So what’s left?
Building superweapons that don’t work and hiring ever more muggers with badgers to taser 6-year-olds on the school playground and arrest Harvard professors in their own homes for the crime of asserting their constitutional rights.
As Gore Vidal points out, “Let us accept the facts staring us in the face—that demonstrably we are no longer a republic. We are no longer governed by laws, only by armed men and force.” (America the Great…Police State, Truthdig, 28 July 2009)
At the rate our former republic is deteriorating, we need a lot more armed men and lot more force, so get ready for paramilitary goons manning checkpoints on every block in your hometown when the money for the failed foreign wars runs out. Soldiers? Cops? What’s the difference nowadays? What goes around, comes around: the way American soldiers treat Iraqis at checkpoints, gunning down innocent families with M60 fire at the slightest whim with no war crimes trials and no consequences, is the way Americans are increasingly being treated here in the U.S. of A.
This is a difficult story to take an angle on, FM, hope you don’t see the scarcity of comments as people not being interested.
Military reform is one very greasy pig. The Congress, Pentagon, and industry are in it together. The mainstream media doesn’t understand or care. As Mr. Wheeler points out, killing further F-22 production was not done in the name of reform, so the President and his SecDef are not leading here either. I’m angry, but where am I and other concerned citizens supposed to get ahold of this?
“The $1.75 billion in funding the Senate Armed Services Committee was seeking to continue F-22 production represents about 5 percent of this [32 billion] R&D price tag. Saving such a (comparatively) paltry sum may make Senators feel noble, but it is virtually meaningless now. If Congress wanted to stop wasting taxpayer’s money on what they now say is an overly-expensive program they are more than a decade too late.” (“Myths Of The Raptor – Obama’s ‘victory’ over the F-22“, Reuben F. Johnson, Weekly Standard,
OK, so let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s dumb to throw good money after bad, even if you’ve already sunk 95% of the costs, and even though you’re into production, and even though those are good industrial wage jobs, and even though the airplane is working well now, and even though a hundred operational might not be enough.
But I seem to recall an article by STRATFOR’s George Friedman posted by….Fabius Maximus, that argued the Air Force, in fact, might have a pretty good case for the F-22: Stratfor: “The U.S. Air Force and the Next War”, 13 June 2008 — Excerpt:
BTW, it’s a good thing that air-to-air combat is a thing of the past, because the F-35 is a dog, with nearly 3 times the wing loading of an F-15 Eagle. But don’t worry; Northrop-Grumman assures us that aerial maneuvering is “irrelevant.” (sidebar in article, “Fighter of the Future,” “Maneuverability Is Irrelevant,” Air Force Magazine, July 2009) Sure.
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Fabius Maximus replies: I’ll bet that in 10 years the F-22 and F-35 are both considered obsolete, far too vulnerable to UAVs. Funding either at this time is IMO absurd. Friedman’s comment about international warfare is just nuts, as if WWI is likely to be repeated in an age of nukes. These discussions illustrate nothing so much as the extent to which America’s defense strategy is insane, which is of course why its copied by nobody else. We’re in an arms race with our delusions.
We are not in “arms race with our delusions” F.M. but running out the string on an exhausted and misguided national security system that Jack Kennedy recharged in the face of Eisenhower’s explicit warning — having done nothing himself mind you to curb it. The Internet was a nice gift, but was it worth how many trillions? We are nearing a turning point in our history as a Republic and we are out of luck. Washington is the enemy. We do not have either a national security policy and doctrine or a clear idea of foreign policy that would frame a reasonable defense policy. We are out of control and heading for disaster, the Pentagon on autopilot with Congress its on-board navigator. Disaster looms.
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Fabius Maximus replies: I will not joust as to which is the better metaphor. At some basic level we’re saying the same things in different ways. Here are some differences.
“Washington is the enemy.”
No. If we will be sheep, we will be governed by wolves. That’s life. Our passivity is the cause of our problems.
“We do not have either a national security policy”
That’s absurd. We have one, a consistent one during the past few decades. It works very well for our elites, although not so well for America.
“We are out of control”
If that’s your fear, let me reassure you. Our elites are very much in control, and no matter what happens they will probably do very well. They can call upon our income, our wealth, to buffer any adverse shocks.
Quote of the Day:
“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.”
— James Bovard’s 1994 book Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (in the Conclusion, page 333)
Improved version: Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
For those who are angry that less than ten F-22’s were trimmed from the budget. I have a response: a) WE don’t need them; b) Japan is very eager to purchase 20+ F-22’s but for some reason there is resistance to OUR STRONGEST ALLY in the Pacific purchasing these aircraft. I myself don’t understand why Japan shouldn’t be sold these planes, especially given the economy. But those in Washington who object to cutting FIVE F-22’s from the budget, should be so kind as to explain what their objections are to Japan purchasing these and MORE F-22’s as well.