I'll try to stay off my soapbox, but two points are worth mentioning. First, as noted by McNeal, is that the primary function of the federal government is to provide for the common defense -- not health care, green initiatives (readers: please don't try to combine global warming projections into security, as some are wont to do. It's lame) and corporate bailouts.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, is the fact that our powerful military exists to prevent a war as much as it exists to win a war. Si vis pacem, para bellum, if you will. One can argue that our strategic nuclear deterrent accomplishes this well enough, but I'm not convinced. I'd rather spend 5%-6% of our GDP on ensuring we never have to suffer through another WWI or WWII. One can argue Vietnam, Iraq, et al... but neither of those conflicts came close to the cost of the major theater level wars -- both in lives and treasure lost.
Back in the day, people ridiculed Reagan's "Peace through strength." When December 1991 rolled around, no one was laughing.
Remember Dick Cheney? No, not the vice president, the Secretary of Defense. Well, back in 1991 he cancelled the A-12 "Avenger II" program because of massive cost overruns. But JUST NOW the program was legally terminated. Here's an excerpt from an article running at Military.com:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has affirmed a judgment upholding the Navy's termination for default of a contract with McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics for the A-12 stealth attack aircraft.
In 1988, the Navy awarded the $4.8 billion fixed-price contract for development of the A-12, which was to be a stealthy, carrier-based attack aircraft. The program encountered serious technical difficulties, and in 1991, after the Department of Defense refused to approve additional funding for the program; the Navy terminated the contract because it was substantially over budget and behind schedule.
On appeal for the third time, the court of appeals on June 2, 2009 affirmed the 2007 judgment of Court of Federal Claims Judge Robert B. Hodges Jr., holding that the Navy had properly terminated the contract for default.
Under the decision, the contractors are required to repay the government more than $1.35 billion in principal for funds advanced under the contract, plus interest accruing since 1991, for a total sum that currently approaches $2.8 billion.
Man, I'd hate to be working for McDonnell Douglas these days. Oh, wait . . .
When the Department of the Navy temporarily runs low on spending money, it can't put routine carrier maintenance on a Visa card, nor take out a Citibank mortgage on a hospital ship to pay huge fleet fuel-oil invoices. It has to defer, or forego altogether, things really needed now. The USN is currently suffering a shortfall of almost $420 million in working cash for non-warfighting necessities for the remainder of fiscal year 2009. Defense analysts suggest that this problem, which isn't entirely new or unique to the Navy, arose because the Pentagon doesn't fully budget in advance for routine needs and predictable upkeep costs. Senator Jim Webb (D-VA), a former Secretary of the Navy, and President Obama are among those trying to change that.
In the meantime, ships not now in combat theaters are having cruising time cut back, and the air wings are facing reduced flying hours. While more training is going on in land-based simulators instead, this could lead to reduced readiness when the units deploy overseas -- and it sends a visible, bad message to the warriors about who does or doesn't support them.
Thousands of personnel transfers normally done in the summer months are being delayed into FY10 (which starts on October 1, 2009), when more money is expected to be available to cover moving expenses. This means parents with kids will have to relocate in the middle of the upcoming school year, which puts added domestic strains on everyone involved. Retention bonuses are being abruptly discontinued, at least for a while, in all but the most prized specialties. While Navy retention has been good lately due to unemployment in the private sector, those bonuses were counted on by many Sailors and dependents to help make ends meet. The USN has been striving to better support good home life, secure from unnecessary service-enforced disruptions. Now it seems like all involved are losing ground.
The Navy is also cutting back on or eliminating sending ships to yearly Fleet Weeks and harbor festivals along America's three coasts. Given how hard the Navy worked to try to engage the public on the importance of seapower, during the recent "Conversation with America" program, the conspicuous absence of haze-gray vessels and aircraft this year in so many seaports is bound to erode the benefits of that engagement process. It also means that the general public will become yet more socially isolated from its Sailors, who normally pour ashore during Fleet Weeks to tour and shop and mingle, with positive local media coverage that this year will not happen.
These seem like good reasons for the Department of the Navy to stop relying on mid-year supplementals, whose prompt full approval by Congress is never assured, to pay for normal day-to-day expenditures. The hidden or soft costs of this practice are very real costs.
The Army’s 2010 budget request reflects the service’s shift of focus from the battlefields of Iraq to those of Afghanistan, with a heavy emphasis on delivering more rotary wing aviation, aerial drones and from fielding FCS equipped armored brigades to beefing up the combat power of its light infantry.
The Army requested $142 billion in the base budget for 2010 and an additional $83 billion to fund ongoing combat operations in the 2010 Overseas Contingency Operations request, previously known as emergency supplementals. The budget request fully funded the Army’s expansion to 547,400 active duty soldiers.
The massive FCS program is, of course, the hot budget issue when it comes to the Army and with Gates’ declaration that he would cancel the bulk of the program last month, the Army’s modernization strategy will shift from fielding 15 FCS equipped BCTs to building “a versatile mix of networked BCTs that leverage mobility, protection, precision, information and fires in order to be effective across the full spectrum of combat operations,” said Lt, Gen. Edgar Stanton, the services’ budget chief, in a briefing to Pentagon reporters.
The 2010 budget accelerates “spin-outs,” new technologies such as small ground robots and sensors, to all of the Army’s 72 BCTs, active and reserve, an effort that will probably take until 2025. Gates directed the Army to stop its expansion of BCTs at 45 instead of the originally planned 48. Stanton said the QDR will determine exactly what type of BCT mix the Army needs, as far as heavy, light infantry or Stryker, and he hinted it might include a requirement for more Stryker equipped brigades. I would expect the QDR to call for more Stryker brigades as they proved their versatility in irregular warfare during fighting in Iraq.
He said the service has already begun to “relook” the requirements for new armored vehicles to eventually replace the Abrams, Bradley, M-113 legacy fleet, and as per Gates’ guidance, will incorporate lessons from the ongoing wars in the vehicle’s design, specifically in providing greater protection against IEDs. Stanton made it clear that he didn’t much like Gates’ characterization of FCS as a Cold War relic. The Army expects to deliver a “concept proposal” for new vehicles by late summer. Given such an abbreviated timeline for rolling out a new plan, it’s difficult to imagine that the service will do much more than tweak the existing FCS vehicle design.
I pressed Stanton on that issue and he claimed the Army will “start with a blank sheet of paper,” but he also said it would be “prudent” to take into account the vehicle development work that’s already been done. The Army could even revisit the whole wheels versus tracks debate, he said, although that doesn’t seem very likely. Whatever the final design it would incorporate some form of the V-shaped blast deflecting hull design characteristic of the MRAP series of IED protected vehicles. He said the Army expects to come up with more details of where it goes in terms of new armored vehicles during the QDR strategic review.
The Army had originally planned to replace its Kiowa Warrior scout helicopter with the new Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter, but the ARH program was recently cancelled so $235 million was included in the budget request to upgrade the Kiowa fleet. The Army is also spending around $500 million to train 150 new helicopter crews, and buy new Apaches and Chinooks for flight training, in an effort to bolster Army aviation in Afghanistan. Stanton said the mountainous terrain and lack of roads in Afghanistan puts a premium on helicopter transport.
The Army said its 2010 development and procurement budget is driven primarily by armor and sensor upgrades to the legacy armored fleet, newer helicopters and buying more aerial drones that will “advance the Army’s adaptation to combat environments where remote weapons platforms and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities play an increasingly prominent role.”
Additional 2010 development and procurement highlights include:
• $2.9 billion for further development of the FCS small unmanned ground vehicles, robots, small aerial drones, the information network and the non-line of sight missile system, the FCS spin-outs.
• $738 million for development of the WIN-T information network.
• $1.2 billion for 79 UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters.
• $1.06 billion for 36 CH-47F Chinook helicopters, of which 25 will be new builds and 14 remanufactured aircraft.
• $736 million for 36 Sky Warrior drones, the Army variant of the Predator family armed drone.
• $370 million for remanufacture of 8 AH-64 Apaches to the Longbow Block 3 configuration.
• $326 million for Lakota Light Utility Helicopters.
• $105 million to buy the C-12 Liberty dual prop plane, a modified King Air 350, for tactical surveillance and ground force overwatch.
• $79 million to buy 704 of the small Raven aerial drone.
• $917 million for 59 Patriot missiles.
• $526 million for Bradley fighting vehicle modifications.
• $478.9 million for Stryker vehicle survivability enhancements. No new vehicles will be bought in 2010 but the production line will be kept “warm.”
• $1.5 billion to buy 10,214 new Humvees.
• $471 million to buy 22 M1A2 SEP tanks and for other Abrams modifications.
• $1.6 billion to buy 5,232 FMTV medium trucks, and $1.4 billion to buy an unspecified quantity of FHTV heavy trucks and trailers.
The withdrawal of Army brigades from Iraq has reduced the demand for reset, the initiative to refit war worn vehicles, down to $11 billion in 2010 from around almost $17 billion three years ago, Stanton said. Included in the OCO funding for battle losses were 4 new Apaches and 4 new Chinook helicopters.
Stanton said the Army is “in the process” of looking at unfunded requirements to respond to a request for the same from Congress. The service has not yet sent its unfunded request to OSD.
It's a downsized Navy that, save for pirate sniping, is having a hard time grabbing the limelight in a ground-intensive war (sorry, contingency operation) against Islamic extremists.
So, you've just got to be ready for the knife when the bean counters try to find money for jeeps and cannons and wonder why you're spending $2 billion on subs, right?
Well, when the budget finally shook out for 2010, the Navy didn't stand in terrible shape. A few airplanes cut here, a ship or two there, but in the end, the sea service's top line increased by about $10 billion over 2009 to more than $156 billion, with another kicker of $15.3 billion for "overseas contingency operations" as the new GWOT is called (and most of that money is for Marine Corps vehicles, ammo and personnel).
Navy procurement jumped $5.7 billion to $44.8 billion, while research and development funding slumped $400 after the VH-71 presidential helo was axed.
Winners: DDG-51 with a one ship build in 2010 that restarts the line; one SSN-774 and some advanced money kicked in to build 12 Virginia class subs; two TAKE transport ships and another Joint High Speed Vessel; two more STOVL JSFs for a total of 16 funded in '10; one more C-40A (the admirals will love that); and six P-8A multi-mission aircraft beginning the Lot 1 LRIP buy and 325 new Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System missles designed to compliment the Hellfire rotor wing missiles.
Losers: DDG1000 one ship killed; LPD-17 no ships in 2010; one Maritime Prepositioning Force (Aviation) ship cancelled for a zero buy in 2010; and one MPF Mobile Landing Platform ship deep sixed for a zero buy; cut in half the number of Super Hornets from 18 to nine purchased in 2010, three MH-60Rs cut to 24, one E-2D cut for two; two KC-130Js cut for a zero buy and four T-6A trainers cut for a 38 aircraft buy and one MQ-8B drone cut for a five Fire Scout buy to match LCS needs.
The Navy is devoting $495 million to a ballistic missile sub replacement program for the 2030 timeframe -- the money will be used for propulsion and missile compartment research, LCS gets $361 million, $572 million for the CH-53K and $1.7 billion in R&D funds for the JSF program.
The Corps is finally going to get more of its Growler Internally Transportable Vehicles with 48 purchased in 2010 and 52 new Humvees. The Corps gets the lion's share of OCO funding, buying 18 LW155s, 933 Humvees and -- drumroll please -- ZERO MRAPs.
Navy officials said a lot of this will of course be dependent on Congresses concerns and also the mulling over the next Quadrennial Defense Review.
We'll have a lot more detail in the coming days as we analyze deep into the numbers, but that's a quick wrap up of what's going to the Blue-Green team.
-- Christian
Thoughts on the 2010 Top Line
Well, Pentagon chief Robert Gates finally unveiled the 2010 top line budget with a few nips and tucks here, a smidgen of add ons there, but at the end of the day, entirely predictable and verging on DOA on Capitol Hill.
I loved his line "it is important to remember that every defense dollar spent to over-insure against a remote or diminishing risk – or, in effect, to “run up the score” in a capability where the United States is already dominant – is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in, and improve capabilities in areas where we are under invested and potentially vulnerable. That is a risk I will not take."
I agree with this wholeheartedly, but I will say, it's dangerous to not take seriously prospective threats and deny potential adversaries a "fair fight" -- even if it's a really unfair fight. 2010 SecDef Budget Statement
During the Q&A session, Gates deep sixed HAC-D Chairman John Murtha's idea of a split tanker buy, setting up a big fight on Capitol Hill and he stopped the F-22 buy at 187, sure to draw the ire of powerful lawmakers from Georgia and other Raptor states.
Lawmakers had a hard time applauding Gates' plan, with both Murtha and Skelton saying basically "it's a nice first step, Mr. Secretary, but we're the ones who appropriate here.
I think the CSAR-X decision makes sense, but I worry that it will severely delay a new bird for rescuers. Gates said he wanted a joint solution, but in the end, CSAR is usually joint, even if it resides in the Air Force.
I'm cool with the missile defense numbers -- I like ABL as a technology demonstrator and a test bed for spinoffs and I can see where he's coming from on FCS...I just worry that as the Army is faced with the decision to buy new versions of the Bradley and M1 and other armored vehicles in the future, it will wind up being more expensive than if it were part of a single program -- even one as troubled at FCS is now.
And he couldn't help taking a swipe at the Army on it either:
We will retain and accelerate the initial increment of the program to spin out technology enhancements to all combat brigades. However, I have concluded that there are significant unanswered questions concerning the FCS vehicle design strategy. I am also concerned that, despite some adjustments, the FCS vehicles – where lower weight, higher fuel efficiency, and greater informational awareness are expected to compensate for less armor – do not adequately reflect the lessons of counterinsurgency and close quarters combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I've always said that FCS makes for a great R&D program that can spin off into the current force and press the technological limits to better inform decisions when it's time to build replacement vehicles, so as long as this happens, I think we'll be in good shape. But you just wait until Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) gets his hands on the authorization bill and fights for his prized NLOS-C system. Gates' reform attempt could face death by 1,000 cuts.
I'm not as smart on the DDG-1000 vs. DDG-51 vs. LCS vs. whatever the heck naval ship system...smarter people on this site can try and help me understand the best way to go on that one. Seems to me, though, that our Navy might be a tad small and a tad vulnerable and superiority of the seas has stood powerful nations in better stead than superiority of the air. But I'm agnostic.
It also surprises me he canned the "Presidential Helo" program, though you gotta bet the Sikorsky folks in Connecticut are jumping for joy on that one.
We'll have a bunch more coverage here and at DoD Buzz on this as the service-specific budgets roll out and the R-1s and P-1s become available. We'll do a document dump here when they do and continue with interviews and analysis. Our boy Winslow Wheeler says it's more of the same:
For the defense Department’s broken acquisition system, the Secretary’s endorsement of the Levin – McCain “procurement reform” bill (now watered down at the Defense Department’s urging) means that business as usual is very alive and well. There will be some new bottles for some very old wine, but the bitterness of the taste will still be around as we rush to build untested aircraft (e.g. F-35), endorse problematic, unaffordable ship designs (e.g. LCS), and spend generously to defend against less, not more likely, threats (e.g. missile defense).
For one set of decisions, even if they are unspectacular, Secretary Gates deserves much good credit. He made people his first priority. Hopefully, that was not just rhetorical. The emphasis he put on medical research, caring for the wounded, and family support are all to be greatly commended. I fear, however, that Congress will do little more on this prime issue than simply throw money – as it has in the past.
But let's hear from you guys...what did you think?
-- Christian
Defense Budget Released (kind of)
Here's the Pentagon specific portion of the Obama budget, just released. No commentary as of yet, still have to read it.
Update -- Reader Bdwilcox had me laughing with this comment, down below: Why bother reading it? Congress voted on an $800 billion "stimulus package" without reading it, so why should we hold you to a higher standard? Just comment away...
Senators are pressing President-elect Obama to allow the Air Force to continue buying F-22 Raptor fighter jets.
Deciding whether to buy more F-22s after the final aircraft on order is delivered at the end of 2011 is one of the first strategic and business decisions Obama’s Pentagon leaders will have to make after Inauguration.
A group of 44 senators — 25 Democrats and 19 Republicans — sent Obama a letter with the request. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), a defense authorizer who represents a state where Lockheed Martin builds the fighter plane, and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a defense appropriator whose state is home to Boeing’s operations, headlined the letter. Boeing is a subcontractor for the F-22.
“Continued F-22 production is critical to both the national security and economic interests of our country,” Murray said in a statement. “At a time when we are looking to create jobs and stimulate the economy, eliminating the $12 billion in economic activity and thousands of American jobs tied to F-22 production simply doesn’t make sense.”
The 2009 defense authorization bill requires Obama to decide by March 1 whether to continue the production of the F-22.
--John Noonan
A Bailout I Can Believe In
Over at The Daily Standard, Dan Blumenthal makes some interesting and important points regarding the sale of the super advanced F-22 Raptor to the Japanese Self Defense Force. From an economic standpoint, it's win-win. Lockheed employs over 3300 personnel at their F-22 plants in Georgia and Texas, jobs that will mostly disappear once that last F-22 rolls off the assembly line. Congress, simply by signing over the technology to a trusted ally, can protect every one of those jobs -and perhaps create new ones- on Japan's dime.
I'd even take it a step further, and offer the F-22 to Australia as well. Both nations have clamored for the jet as a replacement to the F-4 Phantom and F/A-18 Super Hornet, respectively, and both have a common interest in containing a rapidly mobilizing China. Furthermore, any additional Raptors that we can sell to our allies, the cheaper the jet becomes for domestic purchase, as assembly line costs are inversely proportional to the number of jets Lockheed can push through its factories.
In a time of economic crisis, we can ill afford ignoring solutions which cost the US taxpayer nothing and indeed save the government money. That beats the Detroit auto bailout any day of the week.
--John Noonan
Gates' Supplemental Plea
So much for the "end of supplementals"...
Yesterday, I saw that InsideDefense.com had reported a letter sent by Def Sec Gates to Hill armed services committees asking for $69 billion through summer for the GWOT/Iraq/Afghanistan fight -- not including any Afghan "surge."
We were forwarded the full report by DT friend Ned Conger, and we're trying to track down the letter and charts from our Hill sources.
Here's part of what they wrote:
Funded in Gates' estimate are $10.8 billion for “force protection” to buy body armor, armored vehicles, and lighter Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles; $1.5 billion for efforts to counter roadside bombs; and $3.6 billion to fund intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance initiatives -- efforts the defense secretary has designated as high priorities.
As expected, the estimate includes $600 million to buy four F-22 fighters for the Air Force to replace one F-15 and three F-16s, according to a Pentagon chart accompanying Gates' letter to lawmakers. Congress in the past has been unwilling to fund new fighter aircraft purchases using supplemental appropriation bills.
In addition, the spending proposal includes $2.3 billion to train the Afghan national security forces; $1.3 billion to buy equipment -- including aircraft, vehicles, and engineering equipment -- and fund training for the Afghan army; $400 million to bolster Pakistan's counterinsurgency capability; and $1.4 billion to reimburse Pakistan, Jordan and “other key nations for their support to U.S. military operations,” according to the Pentagon chart. The request also includes $400 million for the Commander's Emergency Response Program and $1.3 billion for military construction projects, including those “to support realignment of U.S. forces into and within Afghanistan.”
The estimate includes $7.5 billion to modify AH-64 attack helicopters and CH-47 cargo helos as well as mine protection vehicles. Also in the mix is funding to recapitalize High Mobility Multi-purpose Wheeled Vehicles, trainers, tractors and explosive ordnance disposal equipment, according to the chart.
(Gouge: NC)
-- Christian
Larry Korb Unleashed!
Blueprints for a future military are piling up fast in Washington, D.C. It seems like not a week goes by that a new report isn’t released by one think tank or another with the hope of grabbing the attention of defense aides with the incoming Obama administration. While some of these reports are eminently discardable, others actually have some value, if not for their prescriptions, then at least for who wrote the report.
An example of the latter is a new report titled “Building a Military for the 21st Century,” put out by the Center for American Progress, a largely Democratic staffed think tank that is also pulling double duty with the Obama transition team. For that reason alone it might carry more weight than others. So let’s unpack this one.
The report could be called a “progressive” agenda, as it aims to rein in defense spending, which it says is “out of control,” and calls for cutting the familiar list of “gold plated” weapons systems dreamed up during the Cold War. It says lack of fiscal discipline has created an environment where the services are free to spend as much as they want and buy whatever new weapon they fancy.
One of the most important ongoing debates in defense policy circles is over the types of wars the U.S. likely to fight in the future. One camp says protracted counterinsurgency campaigns in failed or failing states on the order of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will dominate. The other says the military must prepare for full scale conventional fights against a regional power, which basically comes down to one of three countries: China, Russia or Iran. The answer to that question reveals where an individual or institution is going with force structure recommendations.
The CAP report comes down squarely in the counterinsurgency and irregular warfare camp. While proficiency in conventional fire and maneuver skills, this applies to the ground forces of course, cannot be allowed to lapse, preparedness for stability operations should take precedence.
CAP’s solution for bringing defense spending under control is a little fuzzy. They say pulling troops out of Iraq will save $140 billion over the next two years, although $22 billion will need to be redirected to operations in Afghanistan; much of the hoped for savings will come from cutting or slowing development of costly weapons programs.
Here are some highlights of the latest Selected Acquisition Report data provided by the Pentagon the other day. It's noteworthy that some key Army programs have price declines and that those that increased did so because of quantity increases rather than any fundamental price problems.
FBCB2 (Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below)– Program costs increased $685.0 million (+25.5 percent) from $2,686.1 million to $3,371.1 million, due primarily to a quantity increase of 28,895 systems from 44,568 to 73,463 systems to support Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom (+$683.0 million) and associated schedule, engineering, and estimating allocations* (+$99.0 million). There was an additional increase in other support for retrofit of Type I encryption for the increased quantities (+$114.1 million). These increases were partially offset by lower unit costs from beneficial contract pricing of the increased quantities
(-$131.3 million) and lower estimates for the aviation A- kits (i.e., modification kits) based on current contract data (-$45.7 million).
FCS (Future Combat System) – Program costs decreased $2,609.9 million (-1.6 percent) from $161,930.1 million to $159,320.2 million, due primarily to the application of revised escalation indices (-$1,331.0 million) and a correction of previously reported costs that were overstated due to the use of incorrect escalation indices (-$913.2 million). There were additional decreases in other support (-$190.6 million) and Congressional statutory reductions and budget decrements (-$146.5 million).
GMLRS (Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System) – Program costs decreased $764.2 million (-11.3 percent) from $6,772.5 million to $6,008.3 million, due primarily to lower estimates of hardware costs for the Unitary variant at the production decision (Milestone C) (-$496.6 million) and an acceleration in the procurement buy profile (-$68.9 million). Because of the shorter buy schedule, there were lower estimates for systems engineering/program management costs (-$84.5 million), engineering services (-$44.8 million), and Government production verification testing (-$19.4 million).
LUH (Light Utility Helicopter) – Program costs increased $208.4 million (+11.1 percent) from $1,881.8 million to $2,090.2 million, due primarily to a quantity increase of 23 aircraft from 322 to 345 aircraft ($139.3 million). There was an additional cost increase for modifications to address issues identified during the Initial Operational Test (+$171.1 million). These modifications included ARC-231 secure radios and cabin ventilation kits for all 345 aircraft, engine inlet (air) filters for 66 aircraft, and medical evacuation kits for 84 aircraft.
STRYKER – Program costs increased by $2,560.2 million (+19.5 percent) from $13,130.9 million to $15,691.1 million, due primarily to a quantity increase of 640 vehicles from 2,887 to 3,527 vehicles (+$1,907.2 million) and associated schedule, engineering, and estimating allocations* (+$621.8 million), and spares and support associated with the quantity increase (+$425.1 million), There were additional increases for survivability enhancements (+$502.6 million), revised testing and management costs (+$375.7 million), and updated MILCON estimates (+$340.9 million). These increases were partially offset by a change in the mix of models procured and new cost estimates (-$797.1 million) and removal of Stryker Product Improvement Program funding (-$816.0 million).
-- Christian
Bush Chucks Defense Budget at the Hill
Here's how the Armed Forces Press Service is reporting on the President's current defense budget making it's way down Pennsylvania Avenue.
A 3.4 percent military pay raise, a 2.9 percent civilian raise, money to continue to grow the Army and Marines and a funding increase to maintain readiness are major aspects of the fiscal 2009 defense budget request President Bush sent to Congress today. The defense budget request is for $515.4 billion, a $35.9 billion increase over the 2008 level. The total federal budget request for fiscal 2009 is $3.1 trillion.
Defense officials said five priorities drive the budget request: winning the war on terror, increasing ground combat capabilities, improving readiness, developing future combat capabilities and improving servicemembers' quality of life.
"The budget request provides the resources needed to prevail in current conflicts, while preparing the department for a range of challenges the nation may face in the years ahead," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said during a Pentagon news conference this afternoon.
He pointed out that the defense request amounts to about 3.4 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. "To give you some basis for comparison, ... during the Korean War the percentage of GDP going to defense was about 14 percent, and during Vietnam it was about 9 percent," Gates said.
The budget funds the operations, training, recruiting and equipping of 2.2 million personnel in the Defense Department.
The service portions of the budget are $140.7 billion for the Army, $149.2 billion for the Navy and Marine Corps and $143.8 billion for the Air Force.
The request is broken into four major funding areas: military pay and health care; family housing and facilities; operations, readiness and support; and strategic modernization.
Military pay and health care would receive $149.4 billion, with pay and benefits receiving $107.8 billion and health care $41.6 billion.
Family housing and facilities account for $23.9 billion, with $3.2 billion going to privatizing 12,324 more homes for servicemembers. Base realignment and closure costs are set at $9.5 billion, fully funding 25 base closures and 24 major realignments. The 2009 request also asks Congress to approve $11.2 billion for training centers and base infrastructure needed as the Army and Marine Corps continue to grow.
The budget continues funds for increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps. Last year, the overall end-strength increase was set at 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 Marines through fiscal 2012.
The budget request asks for $15.5 billion for the Army increase and $5 billion for the Marines in fiscal 2009. If approved, the increase will boost the Army to 532,400 during fiscal 2009 and the number of brigade combat teams from 40 to 42. The Army's goal is a force of 547,400 with 48 brigade combat teams in fiscal 2012.
In fiscal 2009, the Marine Corps will boost its end-strength by 5,000 to 194,000. The Marine goal is 202,000 in fiscal 2011.
The increase will help both services handle the operations tempo required to fight the global war on terrorism, and could potentially mean more time at home for servicemembers. Currently, soldiers deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan for 15-month tours and are at home stations for a year; the Marines are deployed for seven months and home for seven months. Once the growth is finished, soldiers will spend a year deployed and two years at home station, and the Marines will deploy for seven months and be home for 14 months.
Air Force end-strength will be set at 316,600, and Navy end-strength will be 325,300.
Force readiness will experience a 10.4 percent jump in funding over 2008 if the budget is approved. The budget request is $158.3 billion, an increase of $14.9 billion. Operational readiness ? tank miles, ship steaming days and flying hours ? will remain constant, officials said.
The request also includes $33.1 billion for logistical, intelligence and servicewide support activities. Equipment maintenance is set at $11.8 billion, while base operations and facilities maintenance are pegged at $32.6 billion for more than 5,300 sites worldwide. Training is set for $7.4 billion, and recruiting is at $3.3 billion for fiscal 2009.
Strategic modernization is set at $183.8 billion in fiscal 2009, up $10.5 billion from fiscal 2008. The category includes procurement and research and development. Joint air capabilities account for about half of the procurement, and includes 16 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, 20 F-22A Raptors, 36 V-22 Ospreys, 23 F/A-18 Hornets, 16 CH-47 Chinook helicopters and $1.4 billion for the Air Force's KC-X tanker aircraft program.
On the Navy side, the budget includes money for building the CVN-21 aircraft carrier, a Virginia-class submarine, two littoral combat ships and a DDG-1000 destroyer.
Army buys include 119 Stryker vehicles, 5,249 Humvees, 29 M-1A1 tank upgrades, 1,061 heavy tactical vehicles and 3,187 medium tactical vehicles.
Spec-based capabilities include more launch vehicles, two space-based infrared systems and advanced, extremely high-frequency satellite and ballistic missile defense.
Officials said the department will work with Congress to ensure four specific initiatives mentioned in the president's State of the Union address become realities. The first is to put legislation in place so servicemembers can transfer unused education benefits to spouses or children. The second is to expand and strengthen career opportunities for military spouses. Third is to develop a public-private partnership to increase child-care centers in communities surrounding military bases. The last is to implement the Dole-Shalala Report recommendations for treatment of wounded warriors and their families.
So let's see how this thing flies from this point forward.
-- Ward
Bigger Bucks for Feds in 2008
Today's Washington Post has an article about this year's federal pay forecast. Things are looking good for civil servants, especially those in the DC area. Here's an excerpt from the story:
At the start of 2007, federal employees received an average raise of 2.2 percent, with about half receiving a 1.8 percent raise.
This year, federal employees will see their pay rise by an average of 3.5 percent. About half will get a 2.99 percent raise.
The differences in the raises largely can be attributed to the political process on Capitol Hill. At the end of 2006, Congress had not completed most of the annual appropriations bill and left it to President Bush to set the 2007 raise. Last month, Congress put together a consolidated spending bill and got Bush's signature before the year ended.
To be sure, the 2008 raise, ratified by Bush in an executive order Friday, was shaped by other considerations.
Those factors included data on wage growth in the private sector, a desire in Congress to give a solid raise to the armed forces during a war and efforts by Washington area members of Congress to renew support for the civil service, where baby-boom retirements are on the rise and agencies are finding it tougher to compete with the private sector for top talent.
"I know from having advocated for federal employees since I came to Congress that it's easier to rail against 'Washington bureaucrats' than to recognize the invaluable contributions these dedicated public servants make," Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) said in a written statement.
Federal employees, he said, "protect the homeland, fight crime, battle disease, ensure the wide variety of government functions on which we all depend operate properly and support our troops abroad."
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) played a pivotal role in moving this year's raise through Congress and said he was pleased that Bush took the final step to put the raise in place. "This adjustment will reap significant dividends both in terms of the morale of our federal workforce and in our efforts to recruit and retain vital government personnel," Hoyer said.
Washington area House members and senators "fought hard to secure a fair pay adjustment this year, and we will continue to do so in the future because we believe federal employees deserve compensation equal to that of the great contributions they make in service to this nation," he said.
The article also states that the the projected median federal salary in the DC area will be $90,698. Righteous bones.
So who's going to pay the $609 billion bill created by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Let's just suggest that 2008 will be a bad year to try and buy that super Gucci next-gen weapons system your service has had its eyes on.
"Hey, Rocko, Help the President Find His Checkbook!"
Our friend Amy Butler over at Aviation Week reports the following:
U.S. Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne says his push to garner an extra $20 billion per year to boost the service's procurement plans is "beginning to get some traction" with the White House.
Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley have consistently told Congress that the extra funding is required to pay for aircraft -- including the F-22, Joint Strike Fighter, future refueling tanker and next-generation combat search and rescue helicopter -- in higher quantities and at lower per unit costs.
"We are actually starting to hear a little bit of melody," on this initiative, Wynne told an audience Nov. 28 at the Aerospace & Defense Finance conference . . .
An astute reader passed along this item to Defense Tech yesterday, and we’ve only gotten around to including it today because it’s a pretty long list.
What we got, as first reported by the premier political newspaper in Washington, DC, The Politico, is a comprehensive list of earmarks included in the House version of the 2008 Defense Appropriations Bill passed a couple days ago.
We’ve provided a link to the list, compiled by PorkBusters.org, which outlines every one of the 1,776 (nice number, huh?) earmarks and its sponsor.
DT invites its readers to dive into the (lengthy) list and pull out particularly egregious items for us to include in updated posts. Be that extra set of eyes for us!
-- Christian
House Cuts Major Programs
The House Appropriations Committee’s Defense panel just voted out its 2008 Pentagon budget today.
(Photo: Boeing FCS)
A release from the committee shows reductions in the Army’s Future Combat Systems program, a cut in missile defense spending and the cancellation of the Army’s Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter program.
The committee boosted spending on shipbuilding, bought Stryker vehicles, F-35 Lightning II JSFs, MV and CV-22 Ospreys and F-22 Raptors.
The committee also put restrictions on the use of security contractors in combat zones, curtailed any funds for permanent bases in Iraq and enacted language that prohibits torture of detainees.
One surprise is the inclusion of $288 million in R&D funds to continue the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle Program. This replacement for the current AAV was considered by many to be all but dead going into the budget process. But now it’s being kept on life support. The EFV is indeed a revolutionary leap over the current AAV, but its complexity has kept the program in limbo due to delays and performance issues all along.
Top Navy acquisition officials have proposed that maybe the performance specs should be reduced to match the reality experienced by engineers in testing. It’s unclear as of now if that has happened, but it looks as if House appropriators were convinced enough of the Marine Corps’ case to keep the speedy gator on track.
CORRECTION: From HAC-D..."For the Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter - funding for production is zeroed out, but research and development activities will continue."
The Congressional Research Service has just sent to Congress its latest update of the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11,” dated July 16, 2007. Important elements of the new report include the following:
Assuming Congress’ approval of President George W. Bush’s request for war costs for the upcoming fiscal year 2008 (a request of $141.7 billion), total appropriations related to the wars would reach $758 billion, including $567 billion for Iraq, $157 billion for Afghanistan, $29 billion for other security operations in the US and elsewhere, and $5 billion which can be attributed to “unknown” due to the Defense Department’s inability to track its own money. (See second to last paragraph in the report’s “Summary.”)
Counting all war appropriations to date, including those for not just DOD but also the State Department and the VA, costs per month have risen from about $12 billion in FY 2006 to about $14.4 billion in FY 2007. (See p. 3)
2007 costs total $173 billion. Of that amount, $135.2 billion is for Iraq, and $36.9 billion is for Afghanistan.
In addition to the extra costs of the “surge” of troops in Iraq, the increase in costs from 2006 to 2007 is explained by a dramatic increase in procurement spending to replace warn out equipment and to move acquisition costs for routine modernization (such as for V-22s and C-17s) from the regular annual budget to the separate budget for the war. (See p. 18-19)
Current plans anticipate a reduction of spending in 2008: down to a total of $147.5 billion, of which $116.3 billion would be for Iraq. However, that plan assumes that the “surge” of US troops would terminate abruptly on September 30, 2007. (See p. 6) It would appear logical to assess that a continuation of the surge would require funding above the 2007 total if the size of the US deployment in Iraq and the tempo of operations continue at their present rate for more than six months in FY 2008.
Cost per deployed troop has increased from $320,000 for each troop in 2003 to $390,000 for each in 2006. (See p. 24)
CRS, CBO, and GAO each continue to find major discrepancies in DOD’s reporting on annual expenditures. (See p. 26) GAO’s Comptroller General reported that the continuing inability of DOD to account for its own spending “make it difficult to reliably know what the war is costing, to determine how appropriated funds are being spent, and to use historical data to predict future trends.” (See p. 28)
DOD may be “front loading” its budget requests for “reset” (repair and refurbishment of equipment and units) by requesting funds twice for both the Army and the Marine Corps for reset in 2007. (See p. 32)
While the Congressional Budget Office has made nominal estimates for the future costs of the wars (ranging from $393 billion to $840 billion [See p. 10]), the actual future costs of the wars is truly unknown, especially if one includes long term costs for the wars’ veterans as paid out over decades by the VA. Beyond federal appropriations, there are also other costs, such as to the economy, that have been measured by other studies.
The Pentagon recently sent Congress a $1.7 billion reprogramming request. These are areas where the services take fiscal 2007 money away from some programs that can afford to be delayed, canceled or restructured and transfer those dollars to help boost other programs that can be sped up or more robustly fielded.
You can read more in-depth coverage of the reprogramming from the good folks over at Inside Defense, but here are some of the major moves:
$128 million for B-2 radar modernization.
$123 million cut from CSAR-X due to protest delays.
Army Increases:
$84 million to purchase 40 Strykers.
$38 million to purchase 38 Bradley fighting vehicles.
$16 million to speed up Viper Strike munitions for Hunter UAVs.
$3.9 million for AGM-114 Hellfire missiles to arm Warrior UAVs.
$23 million for Excalibur guided-155mm rounds.
Our friend Joe at Defense Industry Daily has done some brilliant analysis of DoD contract award announcements and come up with the following: The military spent over $4 billion in awarding gas contracts during the month of March 2007 alone. This figure exceeds last year's by over $1 billion.
The hefty sum adds some immediacy to what Steve Trimble reported here some weeks ago. (At this rate the military may be bankrupt by 2050.)
DT obtained a series of after-action notes compiled by Air Force officials during the March 20 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Air Force programs in the fiscal 2008 budget request. They outline some tough choices on transport aircraft options, JSF buys and UAV plans...
Summary of the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing 20 March
Note: This hearing summary contains paraphrased excerpts of statements, questions and answers.
CHAIRMAN LEVIN’S OPENING STATEMENT:
Noted that while the Air Force does not have many of the issues in optempo as the Army and Marines the Air Force does have some critical acquisition challenges. Space programs have cost growth and schedule delays. Congress did not allow B-52 retirements down to 56 in FY07 and still awaits the report on bomber requirements which is now not slated to be out until the end of FY07 and yet the Air Force is still requesting B-52 retirements – this was not likely until FY08.
Concerns over the possible closing of the C-17 line while asking to retire C-5 aircraft.
Cost increases in the C-5 re-engining program.
Praised the transparency in the ongoing tanker acquisition process.
SENATOR WARNER’S OPENING STATEMENT:
Commented that the Air Force should be given the flexibility to manage the fleet and recommended they meet quietly to resolve the acquisition and retirement issues. Questioned the JSF engine single-source decision.
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS:
Supplemental Request
Secretary Wynne indicated the supplemental did meet requirements, but if he had additional money he would spend it on C-130J and strategic deterrence (5th generation fighters and space). When asked why ten C-130Js are in the supplemental and yet only nine are in the normal FY08 budget, Secretary Wynne stated the C-130Es are excluded from support, C-130Hs are being flown double time and the C-130J has shown excellent capability for delivery within theater.
Senator Inhofe noted that the 5th generation fighter [JSF] is not in the supplemental and asked what happened. Secretary Wynne stated that for several years the strategic fighters have been the source of funding. In the supplemental there was a surge in ground forces that was not expected so the department stripped the fixed wing aircraft (to include JSF). He explained the rational for the request was reluctance to acquire new 4th generation aircraft.
Airlift Programs:
C-130J
Senator Levin wanted to know why the Air Force was asking for 17 C-130Js in the supplemental vice the regular budget. Secretary Wynne outlined the C-130 issues in theater and indicated the C-130Js have shown a dramatic affect within theater in reducing the need for convoys. The need for the mission is now.
C-17/C-5
Senator Levin asked about the C-17 and C-5 budget request and how they fit. He asked “how do you reject C-5 re-engining option and put the focus on the C-17s in the unfunded priority list. General Moseley indicated with the increase in the Army and Marines the MCS does not adequately support the larger footprint. We are waiting for the land component numbers from the Army and Marines. We know there will be an increase in requirement for strategic lift. MCS saw a minimum of 300 airlift requirements. Need to retire 25-30 C-5s and work replacements.
Continue AMP on C-5s and RERP on C-5s with the most life. In a case where the land component is growing, strategic airlift is inventory static, C-5 hard to maintain and the C-17 line is about to shut down - we have to make some decisions.
Senator Inhofe asked how many C-17s it would take to keep the line open. Secretary Wynne said he has been pushing Boeing for that figure but still does not have it. His assessment, based on the F-16 line, is less than 1/month.
Senator Thune asked the Air Force to clarify their strategic airlift requirement and how they propose to meet them if authorized to retire C-5As. General Moseley responded we don’t know what the growth of the Army and Marines will do to the airlift requirements. We do know that the MCS did not take into account this growth so we have an unknown. Do not believe the number of airlift assets would go down. Desire to take the worse actors of the C-5 fleet (25-30 aircraft.) and retire them which would provide some revenue to continue mods on the C-5s and possibly acquire more C-17s.
Secretary Wynne reiterated that the Air Force would like to retire 25-30 C-5s. Senator Chambliss expressed that it was not an either/or issue with the C-17 and C-5 but the aircraft complement each other. He then asked if we did cancel the C-5A RERP when would that yield savings. Secretary Wynne explained that if we were to cancel the program (a decision that has not been made) the bulk of the savings would be around 2014-2016. Some immediate savings would be from not having to maintain the aircraft we would retire.
Senator McCaskill asked if the Secretary has read the recent GAO report on airlift/tanker programs. She stated the MCS study is flawed yet the Air Force is basing their tanker acquisition on it. She also outlined the C-130 AMP overruns (+$700M) and reduction in the buy (435 down to 268). Secretary Wynne indicated he has not read the report in-depth. He further explained that while there is disagreement with how GAO sees these programs, the Air Force is complying with DOD-5000 regulations and the Air Force is making “best judgments” on programs.
Joint Cargo Aircraft
Senator Prior asked the status of the JCA. Secretary Wynne outlined the Army has the lead and the Air Force is working with them on requirements. He asked that a letter to foreign Air Chiefs and state governors asking for any requirements they may have be placed in the record.
Tactical Aircraft:
JSF Alternate Engine
Senator Warner asked if it wouldn’t be wiser to keep competition and two suppliers for the JSF engines because it is proven that competition reduces cost and improves quality. He later added, “couldn’t we just buy fewer” JSF to pay for the alternate engine. He expressed concern about the additional thrust needed for the STOVL version. He stated we may need to “buy fewer aircraft.” General Moseley stated it is about $2B we don’t have. He stated there is value in competition and additional sources, but the money is the issue. Senator Lieberman asked “if” Congress ordered the Air Force to have an alternate engine program where would the Air Force get the $2B. Secretary Wynne he didn’t know how it would be funded and if it came out of the JSF budget it would have an impact, especially at very low rate production.
F-22
Senator Chambliss asked about status of the study that supports the F-22 multi-year decision Congress approved last year. Secretary Wynne indicate the study was on track and the FFRDCs and contractors are responsive and he felt the study will show we will achieve greater (or as a minimum the forecast) savings. He indicated he expects to award the multi-year procurement this year.
Synthetic Fuels
Senator Thune asked about the synthetic fuel test on the B-52. Secretary Wynne indicated the Air Force was pleased with the test and will now look at the engines to see if there is a life cycle benefit. Looking to qualify other aircraft and would like to have the Air Force fleet available for synthetic fuel, partnered with JP-8, by 2010.
CSAR-X
Senator Clinton asked about the GAO’s upholding a bid protest and Secretary Wynne’s statement that he would like to “stay with what we have got and get on and get this product going.” Secretary Wynne explained the Air Force will work with the GAO and the competitors to make sure we are in a transparent and open method. We are working for a better read on the protest items and when we re-solicit it will be against the findings the GAO brought up. Senator Clinton asked if there was an AOA for the CSAR-X. General Moseley stated there was an AOA and it was forwarded through the joint system. He indicated there were a JROC, AOA, RFI and a RFP.
UAV
Senator Inhofe asked about the Army and Air Force UAV program. General Moseley believed there was a better way to field and fight with UAVs. He offered to provide a letter he had authored to explain his position.
It looks as if the White House is making some tough choices to fund its increase of 8,200 additional support and combat troops for Iraq and Afghanistan.
In documents released by OMB today, the Navy and Air Force are being forced to swallow some bitter pills. To free up $3.1 billion to fund the “surge” boost – about 4,700 for Iraq and 3,500 for Afghanistan – the White House sent Congress amendments to the fiscal 2007 Wartime Supplemental request March 9.
The list also includes a decrease of over $800 million in Navy operations and maintenance funds that would have gone to pay for “naval forces supporting combat forces in Iraq.”
But some – especially the ground-pounders – will be pleased with the changes.
Among other additions, the White House asked for:
$1.2 billion for Army urgent needs gear, including up-armor kits and MRAP vehicles
$250 million for Marine Corps MRAP purchases
$27 million for small arms and other equipment for Afghan army training teams
It will be interesting to see how Congress reacts to the amendments, since House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha, D-Pa., recently released his own chop of the supplemental request – with additional policy restrictions. This could throw that plan back to the drawing board, though some of the OMB cuts reflect congressional sentiment anyway.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Defense stocks tumbled Tuesday, dragged down by fears of a weakening global economy that sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average down by more than 3 percent.
The defense sector selloff afflicted Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin Corp., Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman Corp., Falls Church, Va.-based General Dynamics Corp. and Providence, R.I.-based Textron Inc.
U.S. stock markets headed lower after a 9 percent slide in Chinese stocks, with the Dow briefly falling by more than 500 points before rebounding somewhat later in the day. The last time the Dow dropped more than 500 points was on Sept. 11, 2001.
Lockheed gained 4 cents to $97.61 in aftermarket trading, after dropping $3.55, or 3.5 percent, to close at $97.57 on the New York Stock Exchange. Shares traded between $69.87 to $103.50 over the last 52-week period.
Shares of Northrop gained 13 cents to $72.04 in aftermarket trading, after dropping $1.93, or 2.6 percent, to $71.91. Shares traded between $61.51 to $75.72 over the last 52-week period.
Textron shares gained 8 cents to $90.91 in aftermarket trading, after dipping $4.33, or 4.5 percent, to close at $90.83 on the Exchange. Shares traded between $80.46 to $98.96 over the last 52-week period.
Shares of General Dynamics dropped $2.76, or 3.5 percent, to close at $75.33 on the NYSE. The company traded between $61.20 and $81.28 over the last 52-week period.
Binge and Surge
According the Associated Press and thinkprogress.org, the Iraq-fueled tension in the Middle East is setting off a defense buying binge. Fears that sectarian violence could spill over into countries like Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia has those countries looking at expanding their weapons programs.
But, it isn't just the Iraq violence that has nations reaching for their checkbooks:
If Iran were threatened or attacked by the United States or Israel, its ballistic missiles could hit land targets or ships, and its mines could block the narrow shipping lanes that carry oil from the Gulf.
That scenario is pushing Gulf defense ministers to consider missile defense systems like the Patriot, sold by U.S. manufacturer Raytheon Co. They also are eyeing warships, including mine sweepers, and early-warning radar, Hughes [an analyst for Jane's] said.
So much for bringing peace and prosperity to the greater Middle East. But then again, if I lived next door to Iraq, I'd be getting bigger guns too. The real bottom line here is the very real and very scary possibility that sectarian violence may expand from low-tech militia and terrorists groups to nation states with devastating consequences. After all, the Iran-Iraq war cost over a million casualties.
We would be well-served to find ways to de-escalate a Middle East Arms race before it begins in earnest and leads to something worse. But, in the interim it might be smart to buy some Raytheon stock.
And you thought your phone bill was high. The Navy is paying about $4 billion a year for calls, according to Defense News. And not surprisingly, there is a whole lot of padding in that tab.
A check of telephone bills in the Jacksonville, Fla., area “found that when we have a digital receipt for a phone bill in the area…we are being overcharged 30 percent,” deputy chief of naval operations Vice Adm. Mark Edwards told a group of military-industrial insiders at a recent conference.
Telephone service with no digital receipt showed overcharges of 18 percent, he added.
The Navy’s top IT official said he wasn’t accusing telephone companies, but he just might not let it slide. “What I’m saying is: It’s my money and I want it back. And we’re going to get it back,” he said, to some chuckles.
By recouping 30 percent of the $4 billion tab over the five-year defense plan, “we could build another carrier, just on the phone bill,” noted Edwards, a former ship and carrier battle group commander. “It won’t be quite that easy, but we’re working it.”
And it might not end there. Edwards wants the Navy to change course by replacing traditional landlines for VOIP, or “voice over IP,” communications, he said. “It would save us over 24 percent the first year” and 24 percent the second year, he estimated.
Amphibious Vehicle Leaks Cash
"After 10 years and $1.7 billion, this is what the Marines Corps got for its investment in a new amphibious vehicle: A craft that breaks down about an average of once every 4 1/2 hours, leaks and sometimes veers off course. And for that, the contractor, General Dynamics of Falls Church, received $80 million in bonuses," the Washington Post's Renae Merle reports in a brutal front page story.
The amphibious vehicle, which can be launched from a ship and then driven on land, is so unreliable that the Pentagon is ditching plans to begin building the first of more than 1,000 and wants to start over with seven new prototypes, which will take nearly two years to deliver, at a cost of $22 million each.
The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle is one of the Pentagon's largest weapons programs and exemplifies the agency's struggle to afford a cadre of new mega-systems that are larger and more complex, but also more trouble, than their predecessors.
Despite reforms meant to rein in costs, it is not unusual for weapons programs to go 20 to 50 percent over budget, the Government Accountability Office recently found. Among the offenders is the Army's sprawling modernization program, which aims to update everything from tanks to drones and is now expected to cost $160 billion [or much more -- ed.], up from $90 billion, and a Lockheed Martin missile-warning satellite program, which is projected to cost more than $10 billion, up from $4 billion...
The overruns are eating away at the Pentagon's buying power but not its appetite. The amount the Pentagon plans to spend on major weapons systems has doubled in the past five years, to $1.4 trillion from $700 billion, according to the GAO...
When it was launched in 1996, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle was promoted as an example of acquisition reform... But the program has struggled with repeated delays, cost increases, budget cuts and dashed expectations, according to military officials and government reports. Problems range from leaks in hydraulics systems to software glitches, according to the reports. Last year, the vehicles completed just two of 14 planned tests.
"They started out really well, and I was really pleased," said Philip Coyle, the Defense Department's former director of operational test and evaluation. "But gradually the complexity of the program has overcome the contractor, so they are years behind schedule."
General Dynamics defends its progress, noting that the vehicle has met many goals, including being able to reach speeds of 30 knots on the water. The vehicle is fast enough to keep up with the Abrams tank on land, it can carry 17 Marines, and its systems can communicate with other ships and tanks, all key performance criteria, the company says...
An independent review released in December by the Navy's acquisition office questioned the company's commitment to solving the development problems that plagued the vehicle. The report said General Dynamics appeared more interested in starting production than trouble-shooting and didn't manage the groups making many of the decisions. The production phase is typically more profitable for a contractor and often marks a point at which a program becomes more difficult to cancel.
General Dynamics "seems to be focused on production rather than on solving significant design and engineering problems," the Navy report said. "This must be changed if the Program is to move ahead successfully."
Undead "Warrior" (Updated)
As expected, the Army has eliminated funding for its high tech soldier ensemble, Land Warrior, in its budget for 2008. The gear -- a collection of radios, electronic maps, and next-gen rifle scopes -- was finally supposed to connect the average infantryman into the growing network for combat. But the Army never could figure out the seemingly-endless weight and usability issues.
DOD planners dream up expensive systems... while ignoring the obvious success of modern digital device formats, such as cellphones, PDAs and even iPods. You may not be able to tap out a text message on a cellphone during a firefight as easily as with the Land Warrior, but what are you doing text messaging anyways? That's what the radio is for!
But Land Warrior isn't quite dead, yet. The 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry will still be taking more than 200 Land Warrior uniforms to Iraq, later on this year. The systems were already bought and paid for, in earlier budgets. And the hope is that Land Warrior performs so well under fire that the Army's chiefs have no choice but to turn the program's cash spigot back on. "It's kind of a Hail Mary pass," one Pentagon insider tells me.
Also, as expected, the Army will trim its mongo modernization project, Future Combat Systems, by cutting "two classes of unmanned aerial systems, one unmanned ground system and remov[ing] the Intelligent Munition System [a sort of smart landmine] from the program," Inside Defense reports. Army budget director Lt. Gen. Dave Melcher says the changes will save $3.3 billion over five years. FCS will still cost taxpayers $10.6 billion in fiscal year 2008 alone, if the Pentagon's budget goes through. Plus, there will be another $222 million for the Warfighter Information Network - Tactical, which is designed to help troops on the battlefield plug into info networks through satellite, airborne and terrestrial links. That's a nearly 100% increase over the previous year.
Defense News lists some of the other items that the Army is buying this year with its $27.8 billion procurement budget:
• $473 million to buy Patriot PAC-3 missiles.
• $596 million to buy 7,000 Humvees.
• $828 million to buy 2,862 trucks in the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles.
• $483 million to buy trucks in the Family of Heavy Tactical Vehicles.
• $172 million to buy mortars rounds.
• $222 million to buy artillery rounds.
• $167 million to buy rockets.
• $132 million to buy combat service support equipment.
• $712 million to modernize AH-64 Apache helicopters.
• $705 million to buy UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.
• $191 million to buy Chinook CH-47 cargo helicopters.
• $468 million to buy Armed Reconnaissance Helicopters to replace OH-58D Kiowa Warriors.
• $230 million to buy Light Utility Helicopters.
• $98 million to buy 5,900 M4 carbines.
“We are trying to procure M4s for all soldiers in theater; the shorter weapon gives a lot more potential,” the service’s budget director, Lt. Gen. Dave Melcher said.
UPDATE 7:44 PM: "The 4th Brigade was also scheduled to test Land Warrior at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., but now that has also been canceled," Federal Computer Week notes. "NTC is a common final stop for realistic training before Iraq deployments."
The unit will be fully supported throughout its Iraq deployment, Atherton said. The Army has funding for unit support and repair parts through 2007 and is confident they will find procurement or operating money to keep the unit alive in 2008.
Meanwhile, the program office for Land Warrior here at home will be shut down. The Army will buy replacement parts and materials to last during the duration of the deployment...
The Army is looking for alternatives to give dismounted soldiers a point of presence on the network, Melcher said. One possibility is something called the Single Infantry Transport System, which has similar capabilities, he said.
The big weapons -- the destroyers, the aircraft carriers, and the stealth jets -- all emerged pretty much unscathed in the Pentagon's latest budget. Some of the more bleeding-edge projects weren't so lucky. Especially at the Missile Defense Agency, which took about a half-billion dollar hit for fiscal year 2008.
Take the High-Altitude Airship, for instance. Just a year ago, the Pentagon handed Lockheed a $150 million contract to build the missile-spotting dirigible. No, it wouldn't be 25 times bigger than the Goodyear Blimp, as originally planned. Nor would it be powered by lasers. But it would still be built to "hover above the jet stream at an altitude of 65,000 feet for months at a time." That is, if major advances in solar panels, fuel cells, aerodynamic controls, and flexible materials could be overcome.
Lockheed won't get the chance any time soon, however. The High Altitude Airship "has been canceled due to funding constraints," according to the Missile Defense Agency. But get too distraught, blimp-lovers; the budget for the Aerostat Joint Program Office just jumped from $243 million to $481 mil.
The Airborne Laser -- the modified 747, meant to zap missiles as they take off -- still gets more than $500 million in the new budget. But its first live-fire test has been delayed, again. Originally scheduled for 2002, the blast has now been rescheduled for 2009, Inside Defense notes. The Laser Jet's alternative -- the "Kinetic Energy Interceptor," a non-explosive interceptor missile -- has been pared back, as well. There's no longer a "kill vehicle," or warhead, part to the program, Defense News observes. Instead, the KEI has been tweaked, to become a "common booster" for all sorts of missile interceptions.
There's much, much, much more in this budget to explore. Expect lots of posts in the week to come.
D.O.D.: Iraq Budget "Wrong" from the Start
In its new budget for fiscal year 2008, the Pentagon says it'll parcel out about $142 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the Defense Department doesn't really believe in its own figures, apparently. The number was was calculated before the new 35,00-48,000 troop "surge" plan was put in place, Pentagon comptroller Tina Jonas said in a news conference. So $142 billion is just a "best estimate."
"We know it will be wrong," she added. "Conditions will change, and we'll have to adjust at that point."
The number is also $28 billion dollars less than the $170 billion being spent on Iraq and Afghanistan this year. Does that mean there's some sort of secret plan to start bringing troops home? Hell, no. "White House spokesman Tony Fratto said that fact shouldn't be interpreted as an indication of likely reduction in U.S. troops in Iraq," according to the AP.
There was another item of note from the Pentagon news conference introducing the new budget. Vice Admiral Stephen Stanley, Director for Force Structure, Resources, and Assessment for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, listed a number of major "risks" to the health of the American armed forces. One of the biggest was increased wear and tear that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were putting on military gear. Another was the increased "operational tempo" from those wars, which were grinding down our troops. In other words, the wars themselves are a threat to the American military. Interesting to hear that, in a Pentagon briefing.
New Weapons Get Big Cash in Pentagon Request
You might think, with two wars draining hundreds of billions from the country's coffers, that the Pentagon would be inclined to slow down its modernization efforts. Especially ones that have little or nothing to do with fighting terrorists -- or even battling North Korea or Iran. That'd be wrong.
The Pentagon fiscal year 2008 budget adds another $8.8 billion to its modernization accounts, Defense Department comptroller Tina Jonas justed noted in a news conference. That'll include "the first significant funding" -- $3 billion -- in the next generation of aircraft carrier," the CVN-21. The Joint Strike Fighter fleet will grow from two in FY07, to twelve the following year -- including the first short take-off version. It'll take $6 billion in 2008, the Pentagon projects. Despite major cost inflation, the Defense Department budget request "funds three littoral combat ships and will continue funding for two DDG-1000-class destroyers and another amphibious assault ship," according to a American Forces Press Service article. "The Air Force F-22 Raptor fighter is budgeted at $3.8 billion for 20 aircraft."
The F-22, it should be noted, was recently deemed "too sensitive... to be useful" in places like Iraq. Most of these other systems -- big destroyers, new aircraft carriers, and the like -- wouldn't have much to do with an Iraq-style situation. Neither would the $8.8 billion for missile defense (although that is a more than a half-billion less than what the program got last year).
Of the major service's weapons programs, only the Army's massive modernization effort, Future Combat Systems, seems to have been trimmed. The $3.6 billion requested for FCS is just slightly less than what the Pentagon asked for last year.
One bit of good news is that the Army, after years of requests, is starting to get a bigger slice of the budget. "If the budget is enacted as submitted, the Army will receive $130.1 billion in fiscal 2008, for an increase of more than 20 percent," the American Forces Press Service says. "The Navy will receive $119.3 billion, up 9 percent. The Marine Corps will receive $20.5 billion, up 4.3 percent, and the Air Force will receive $136.6 billion; an increase of 8.2 percent."
Bloomberg's ace Pentagon-watcher, Tony Capaccio, has more.
UPDATE 02/06/07 4:06 PM: "Any fear that war costs would crimp spending on new weapons evaporated Feb. 5 when the Pentagon unveiled its proposed 2008 budget," says Defense News. Check out these stats:
• $14.4 billion for new ships, a 29 percent increase over 2007.
• $6 billion for satellites and related equipment, a 25 percent increase.
• $27.4 billion for warplanes, an 18 percent increase.
• $3.7 billion on the Army’s Future Combat Systems, a 9 percent boost.
Pentagon's Big-Ass Budget
How much cash do we spend on defense, really? Center for Defense Information budget guru Winslow Wheeler provides this handy chart. Check out the $50 billion increase in the "peacetime" Pentagon coffers -- the money that doesn't get spent on Afghanistan and Iraq.
And where does that money go? Healthcare, paychecks, and new weapons, mostly. Check out this Pentagon chart.
Breaking: Double the Troops in "Surge" (Updated)
President Bush and his new military chiefs have been saying for nearly a month that they would "surge" an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq, in a last, grand push to quell the violence in Baghdad and in Anbar Province. But a new study by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says the real troop increase could be as high as 48,000 -- more than double the number the President initially said.
That's because the combat units that President Bush wants to send into hostile areas need to be backed up by support troops, "including personnel to staff headquarters, serve as military police, and provide communications, contracting, engineering, intelligence, medical, and other services," the CBO notes.
Over the past few years , DoD’s practice has been to deploy a total of about 9,500 personnel per combat brigade to the Iraq theater, including about 4,000 combat troops and about 5,500 supporting troops.
DoD has not yet indicated which support units will be deployed along with the added combat forces, or how many additional troops will be involved. Army and DoD officials have indicated that it will be both possible and desirable to deploy fewer additional support units than historical practice would indicate. CBO expects that, even if the additional brigades required fewer support units than historical practice suggests, those units would still represent a significant additional number of military personnel.
To reflect some of the uncertainty about the number of support troops, CBO developed its estimates on the basis of two alternative assumptions. In one scenario, CBO assumed that additional support troops would be deployed in the same proportion to combat troops that currently exists in Iraq. That approach would require about 28,000 support troops in addition to the 20,000 combat troops—a total of 48,000. CBO also presents an alternative scenario that would include a smaller number of support personnel—about 3,000 per combat brigade—totaling about 15,000 support personnel and bringing the total additional forces to about 35,000.
According to the study, the costs for the "surge" would also be dramatically different than the President has said. The White House estimated a troop escalation would require about $5.6 billion in additional funding for the rest of fiscal year 2007. Of that, about $3.2 billion was supposed to go to the Army and Marines for their escalated activity.
But that figure appears to have been grossly underestimated. The CBO now believes "that costs would range from $9 billion to $13 billion for a four-month deployment and from $20 billion to $27 billion for a 12-month deployment." There's a more detailed analysis of the numbers on pages 3 and 4 of the study, which was sent to House Budget Chairman John Spratt today.
UPDATE 1:43 PM: Here's Spratt's reaction, in a statement just released:
“An average of 170,000 military personnel has been maintained in the Iraq theater of operations, and this high deployment level has taken a toll. Last year, CBO reported that the Department of Defense had reduced the amount of ‘dwell’ time for many troops from two years to one year in order to sustain troop levels. ‘Dwell’ time is the time troops spend in training at bases in the United States while living with their families. CBO questioned whether such a high pace of operations was sustainable over the long term. The President’s proposal will increase this level to above 200,000 troops, and to reach this level, the Pentagon will probably have to relax ‘dwell’ time standards even more.
“CBO’s report concludes that the cost of the President’s plan to ‘surge’ troops will be higher than previously indicated, both in dollar terms and in the burdens it places on our military.”
Asked by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., why he had not requested the full five extra brigades that Bush is sending, Casey said, "I did not want to bring one more American soldier into Iraq than was necessary to accomplish the mission."
With many in Congress opposing or skeptical of Bush's troop buildup, Casey did not say he opposed the president's decision. He said the full complement of five brigades would give U.S. commanders in Iraq additional, useful flexibility.
"In my mind, the other three brigades should be called forward after an assessment has been made on the ground" about whether they are needed to ensure success in Baghdad, Casey said. later.
You'd think that the Defense Department's higher-ups would be happy, when their research agencies start demanding results from the scientists and engineers that they fund. Not necessarily. Inside Defense reports that the Pentagon's comptrollers have slashed Darpa's budget by $300 million -- about 10% - for the next fiscal year. Another $200 million is supposed to come off the top, the year after that. The reason: "A project management oversight structure introduced in DARPA... mandat[ing] that projects are reviewed at regular execution intervals to ensure that they are meeting defined program goals and objectives."
The switch "has resulted in more effective linking of resources to outcomes," according to "Program Budget Decision 704," an internal Defense Department document obtained by Inside Defense. Which would be a good thing, ordinarily. Except that Darpa hasn't been spending the money it's been given, apparently. While funding for the agency has gone up, up, up since 9/11, the number of program managers hasn't increased as fast. Combined with the new, results-driven process, that "has slowed execution of DARPA’s funding.... resulting in a significant decline in obligations and expenditures," says PBD 704. So what happened to all that excess cash? I haven't been able to get a straight answer, yet.
The subtext to all this wrangling is the leadership of Darpa chief Tony Tether. In the military research world, he's known as a hands-on manager -- a very, very hands-on manager. No item in his $3 billion budget is too small; even some of the names of Darpa research efforts require his approval. "Nothing happens without his say-so," one Darpa-funded researcher tells me.
That's a change for the agency, which has traditionally let its program managers -- and its researchers -- more or less follow their imaginations. Some current and former Darpa types mumble that the quality of research has been undermined, as a result; after all, "Darpa-hard" problems can take longer than six months to solve. But with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are sucking up more and more money, Defense research budgets are tightening up; demanding results doesn't seem like such a bad thing. We'll see how this one shakes out.
While PDB 704 takes from Darpa, it adds $300 million to the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. That's the widely-criticized effort to build new nukes -- a construction effort many sage observers thinks is completely unneeded.
New Gear Stuck in Labs
Nobody puts more money into bleeding edge R&D than the Pentagon. And a surprising number of those studies actually pan out. So why is the military still relying on gear that's decades old? The problem is crossing the so-called "valley of death" between research projects and "acquisition," when the Defense Department actually starts to buy stuff in bulk. National Defense magazine offers up some examples.
Last year, the Georgia Tech Research Institute developed a lightweight ceramic armor for a vehicle... The message from military officials was that they needed this technology immediately for troops in Iraq. “We prototyped one vehicle and delivered it to Quantico,” where the Marine Corps acquisition command is based. “We are waiting to hear from the Marine Corps on what the next steps are,” Cross says. “This is where we all get frustrated … We think it’s a good solution. There’s no technology impediment for moving forward. It’s the acquisition process.”
The armored vehicle is not likely to go into production any time soon. The Army and the Marine Corps are studying proposed designs from major defense contractors for a new light tactical vehicle that would replace the Humvee. The program is not expected to deliver new vehicles for at least two more years.
Frustrations with the defense bureaucracy also can be found at a California university where Congress created a “technology transfer” office specifically to expedite the transition of promising concepts from the commercial sector to the military.
“The challenge is getting into acquisition programs. That consumes most of our time,” says Stu Gordon, director of the Office of Technology Transfer and Commercialization at California State University San Bernardino...
Recent products that, with CSU’s help, contractors successfully sold to the Defense Department include biological detectors, radios, batteries and fuel cells.
“We have contacts at the office of the secretary of defense,” Gordon says. “They are very supportive … But when we ask them how we get into acquisition programs, frankly, they don’t know. This is true for many of the technologies we have.”
Getting to the right person who can write a purchase order so someone in the military can buy the product is “really a hard thing to do,” Gordon says. Some officials at the Defense Department “want to help us but they don’t know how.”
UPDATE 3:40 PM: John Robb has some interesting ideas on how "tinkerers' networks" should be brought into the R&D process.
Behind the Army's Cash Crunch
Our Army gets $168 billion a year to train and fight. So why do its chiefs keep complaining about a cash crunch? The Wall Street Journal's Greg Jaffe explains, in maybe the best article on the subject to date.
From 1990 to 2005, the military lavished money on billion-dollar destroyers, fighter jets and missile-defense systems. Defenders of such programs say the U.S. faces a broad array of threats and must be prepared for all of them. High-tech weaponry contributed to the swift toppling of the regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but has been of little help in the more difficult task of stabilizing the two countries.
Of the $1.9 trillion the U.S. spent on weaponry in that period, adjusted for inflation, the Air Force received 36% and the Navy got 33%. The Army took in 16%, it says. Despite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both dominated by ground forces, the ratio hasn't changed significantly...
It may seem hard to believe that a country which allocated $168 billion to the Army this year -- more than twice the 2000 budget -- can't cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the two pillars of the Army, personnel and equipment -- both built to wage high-tech, firepower-intensive wars -- are under enormous stress:
The cost of basic equipment that soldiers carry into battle -- helmets, rifles, body armor -- has more than tripled to $25,000 from $7,000 in 1999.
The cost of a Humvee, with all the added armor, guns, electronic jammers and satellite-navigational systems, has grown seven-fold to about $225,000 a vehicle from $32,000 in 2001.
The cost of paying and training troops has grown 60% to about $120,000 per soldier, up from $75,000 in 2001. On the reserve side, such costs have doubled since 2001, to about $34,000 per soldier.
At Fort Knox, Ky., the cash crunch got so bad this summer that the Army ran out of money to pay janitors who clean the classrooms where captains are taught to be commanders. So the officers, who will soon be leading 100-soldier units, clean the office toilets themselves.
"The cost of the Army is being driven up by [Iraq and Afghanistan]. That's the fundamental story here," says Brig. Gen. Andrew Twomey, a senior official on the Army staff in the Pentagon. The increased costs are "not from some wild weapons system that is off in the future. These are costs associated with current demands."
Senior Army officials concede they mistakenly assumed prior to the Iraq war that if they built a force capable of winning big conventional battles, everything else -- from counterinsurgency to peacekeeping -- would be relatively easy. "We argued in those days that if we could do the top-end skills, we could do all of the other ones," says Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the deputy commander of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command. Iraq has proven that guerrilla fights demand different equipment and skills. "I have had to eat a little crow," says Gen. Metz...
The Humvee stands as a metaphor for the problems the Army faces. First fielded in the early 1980s, it was designed to ferry soldiers around behind the front lines of a conventional war. In recent years, the vehicle, which troops drive on the streets of Iraq, has been modified countless times. The Army has bolted layers of armor onto it to protect troops from roadside bombs. It has added sophisticated electronic jammers, rotating turrets, bigger machine guns, satellite navigational systems and better radios.
The result is a Humvee that is much better than the version the Army took to Iraq in 2003. But the add-ons have driven up its cost. The modified vehicle is top heavy and tends to tip over at high speeds. Army officials say they can't add more weight without overwhelming the engine or breaking the axle.
"The Army recognizes that the Humvee has reached a limit of our ability to improve it for the current fight," Gen. Speakes says.
What the Army says it really needs is an all-new vehicle, designed to better withstand roadside bombs that have become part of life in Iraq. But such a vehicle likely won't be ready until 2010 or 2012, Army officials say. In the interim, the Army wants to buy something on the commercial market -- South Africa, Turkey and Australia all make alternatives. Yet it's not clear whether the Army, which is struggling to equip the current force, has the money.
Army Axing High-Tech Uniforms, "Future"
The Army made a big decision, back in October. After 15 years and a half-billion dollars in development, the service would finally take Land Warrior, its ensemble of high-tech soldier gear, to war for the first time. The collection of radios, GPS-locators, and next-generation rifle scopes wasn't perfect -- far from it. But, for infantrymen who typically don't even have a walkie-talkie, it was an important first step towards plugging the average soldier into battlefield network.
But, just six weeks later, the Army appears to have reversed itself. According to Inside Defense, service financiers have decided to kill off Land Warrior in its 2008 budget. It's one of a number of high-tech programs slated for big cuts by the Army.
The service got $17 billion less than what it wanted for its 2008 budget from the Pentagon and the White House. "Earlier in October... Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker said if the service got less than what it needed in FY-08 it would be forced to slow the modernization of the force," Inside Defense's Dan Dupont notes. "In submitting its budget plan to Pentagon leaders last week, the Army contended that budget constraints have forced the service to take what it believes are imprudent risks in the readiness of today’s forces, as well as in its future plans."
Future Combat Systems -- the Army's plan to connect all its next-generation tanks, robots, and fighting vehicles to that battlefield network -- is also slated to take a good-sized hit.
By delaying key milestones, shifting some pieces of the program out of FCS plans and killing others, the Army believes it can save more than $3.3 billion over the next six budget years (fiscal years 2008 to 2013).
The moves would reduce the cost to field each FCS brigade combat team, but it would also push back procurement plans for BCT equipment, delaying by five years the schedule for fielding the teams, according to sources familiar with the plan.
The FCS cuts also entail the removal of some unmanned aerial vehicles from the program and the deferral of some vehicles, as well as some ammunition. The upshot of the moves would be an FCS program consisting of 14 platforms plus the network, down from the 18 envisioned today, with FCS systems to be fielded at a rate of one brigade combat team per year for fifteen years, beginning in 2015. Prior plans called for those 15 BCTs to be fielded at a rate of 1.5 per year over 10 years.
Now, just because the Army has proposed these cuts doesn't necessarily mean they are going to happen. As you may have heard, there's a new party taking over Congress. And, at least in the run-up to the elections, these guys made a lot of noise about giving the Army a boost. Then there's the new Secretary of Defense. He may be more favorably inclined to funding the Army than his predecessor was. Certainly, he seems to look kindly on the larger goal of retooling the military. Check of this exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Dole:
SEN. DOLE: Dr. Gates, the transformation efforts undertaken by Secretary Rumsfeld are critical to meeting the challenges of the 21st century. While Secretary Rumsfeld made transformation of the military a priority, obviously much remains to be done. In your view, which transformation programs are the most important and effective in fighting this war on terror?...
MR. GATES: Senator Dole, one of the things that has impressed me the most in the briefings -- the very short briefings that I've received preparatory to this hearing, is the extent of the transformation that actually has taken place in recent years, compared to when I was in government.
I can't tell you how many crisis meetings I sat through in the Situation Room over a 20-year period, and we would look at military contingencies, and we would be looking at 60 to 90 days to generate a brigade, to get a military force on the move and in place.
So the expeditionary nature of the Army, the mobility, the change in mind-set -- sometimes perhaps those of you who have been really close to it may not fully appreciate just how dramatically the situation already has changed, compared to when I was in government last.
I think that the transformation needs to continue... The two things that I think make a lot of sense has been this shift of the Army from being basically a static force to a more mobile expeditionary force. I think that's very important.
I think that the -- based on very superficial information at this point, this -- the shift from divisions to the brigade structure does make a lot of sense, and I think it provides a lot more flexibility.
I would say that one of the things that I think is very important in the transformation is continuing to strengthen our capacity to fight irregular wars. I think that's where the action is going -- is most likely to be for the foreseeable future. And so I think it's very important that it go forward.
New Congress: Army Up? (Updated Again)
The Democrats weren't the only winners in last night's elections. The Army and the Marines are looking like they just came out on top, too.
There's a long-standing cliche that, when it comes to military spending, "the Republicans are mostly interested in weapons systems. The Democrats are interested in people," as Gen. Wes Clark told a New Hampshire public radio show, back when he was running for President.
You can buy the old saw, or not. But last night was a major power boost for two lifetime buddies of the people-heavy services. Ike Skelton, who's in line to become the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has been close with the Army's leadership for decades. Ditto possible House Majority Leader John Murtha. Both were big Don Rumsfeld haters.
Now, for months, the SecDef's office and the Army have been locked in a cagematch over the service's budget. That might change, with Rummy being shoved out. But if it continues, who do you think Skelton and Murtha are going to back?
Phil Carter says to look out for five items as Skelton, Murtha, and Co. move into the big offices on Capitol Hill:
1) An increase in the military's end strength;
2) Some kind of restriction on multiple reserve callups or deployments;
3) Funding for reset of equipment to peacetime readiness levels;
4) Increased pay, benefits, and incentives tied to recruiting and retention; and
5) Policies geared towards making the military more well-rounded, i.e.
incentives to start Arabic and Chinese language programs.
Notice he didn't mention anything about technology programs. That's because, despite the love for the Army, big weapons systems -- like the $300 billion Future Combat Systems effort -- are going to get a whole lot more scrutiny.
But Skelton could be the least of industry's problems. "I'll tell you the two words that freak then [contractors] out the most," one senior Congressional aide told me a few weeks back, "Chairman Waxman."
That's Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), in line to head the wide-ranging House Government Reform Committee. He's a master of the subpoena. And, Av Week notes, he "has complained about lax supervision under the Republicans and introduced contracting reform legislation in September that would require federal agencies to use at least 1% of their procurement budgets for contract oversight. The bill also requires Congressional hearings to investigate credible evidence of waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement."
If the Republicans hold on to the Senate, things could get even more heated. John McCain likely takes over the Armed Services Committee. He is one of the few people in Congress who truly, truly cares about the Pentagon's out-of-control spending on weapons development. And there is no contractor that pisses him off more than Boeing -- the guys in charge of Future Combat.
UPDATE 1:28 PM: The Navy, which is facing money questions of its own, potentially gets two new, high-profile champions. Retired Admiral Joe Sestak won a congressional seat last night in Pennsylvania. And if former Navy Secretary Jim Webb hangs on in Virginia -- and delivers the Senate to the Democrats, in the process -- he's instantly going to become one of the Dems' most influential voices on national security.
UPDATE 4:56 PM: "Investigations into defense contracting and a re-examination of spending priorities could mean a shift in spending from hardware to troops," former Rep. Jim Turner, D-Texas, tells Defense News.
The Army, in particular, is under strain from the war in Iraq, and Democrats may push for permanent increases in the size of the Army and Marine Corps. That means spending more on personnel and the everyday equipment they need to fight.
As a result, Democrats might try to trim spending on big-ticket weapons such as the F-22 stealth fighter, the Joint Strike Fighter and the Army’s Future Combat Systems in order to pay for more ground forces, Turner said.
Army a 'Cinderella service'
The Army has been short-changed for years in favor of its glamorous and pricey sisters the Air Force and Navy. Now it's the land service's turn for the big bucks, Army chief of staff General Pete Schoomaker tells GovExec.com:
Historically, the Army's been a Cinderella service. We paid the lion's share of the so-called peace dividend in the 1990s. We had a $100 billion shortfall in investment in the 1990s. We cut the Army by 500,000 soldiers -- active, Guard and Reserve. Defense Department investment was $1.89 trillion between 1990 and 2005. And the Army's share of the pie was 16 percent.
The result, Schoomaker says, was an under-manned and under-equipped force, which is only now turning around:
You cut 500,000 soldiers out of the Army and then try to grow 30,000 back -- it's a little like trying to grow oak trees. They're easy to cut down, but it takes years to grow them back. ... Everybody knows the Guard and Reserve had serious equipment shortages; not only that, they had serious modernization problems - Korean War era trucks, shortages of aircraft, wheeled vehicles, older versions of tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles. The active force also had serious shortfalls. We had six active heavy divisions. None of them were the same because of the various degrees of modernization, the various degrees of organization. When you go to war with a $56 billion deficit in equipment, you have to aggregate that equipment and push it forward to the war, which means that on the backside, you now have issues in training, you have issues in reconstitution and reset. That is the challenge that we've been dealing with. If you take a look at our depot backlog, we have over 600 tanks unfunded. Almost 1,000 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, 2,500 wheeled vehicles are sitting in depots right now that if we had the money, we'd be repairing them faster.
Schoomaker says there's increasing appreciation of the Army's unique capabilities. That means more money for the service, especially at the expense of the Air Force, which is shedding 40,000 people and 1,000 aircraft, almost 20 percent of its fleet. The general continues:
I believe in airpower, and there's nothing like having somebody on the other end of the radio when you need something done in a hurry. But to overstate what's possible with airpower is easy to do, and people have a certain tendency to love things that go fast, make noise and look shiny. Like I told you, never confuse enthusiasm with capability. It takes a team. I wouldn't denigrate airpower at all, but anybody who thinks that you can win these kinds of things in one dimension is not being honest.
Fiscal Years 2004-06 were the first in a long time in which the Army got at least as much money as the Air Force and Navy -- and that's not counting supplementals, which last year totalled more than $100 billion, most of it for the Army. The Army got less in '07 than its sister services, but not by much, and supplementals will surely change that.
Schoomaker closes the interview with a plug for his service's prize program, Future Combat Systems, a $250-billion gobbler that rivals the multi-service Joint Strike Fighter for the record of biggest weapons program ever:
FCS right now is on schedule and under cost. We have 3 percent actual cost growth in the program. This is really not just a program of record, it's a strategy. We have already either terminated or adjusted 126 of our programs in the Army to do the things we have to do. I'm fairly sure that we ought to play hardball on FCS, and that's what we're doing.
"Congress said it wants next year’s defense budget to include funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," intead of using a series of so-called "supplemental," emergency requests for cash, Defense News is reporting. But President Bush "has indicated he may ignore that request."
In a "signing statement" released when he signed the 2007 Defense Authorization Act on Oct. 17, the president listed two dozen provisions in the act that he indicated he may or may not abide by...
Among the provisions is Section 1008 of the Authorization Act, which requires the president to submit defense budgets for 2008 and beyond that include funding for the wars and contain "a detailed justification of the funds requested."
The Bush administration has frequently ignored requirements that it does not like by proclaiming exclusions from the law in signing statements, which are written statements about how the president plans to interpret the law. Since he became president, Bush has issued statements carving out exceptions to more than 750 laws — a rate far higher than any previous president.
Yesterday's raids on the homes of Rep. Curt Weldon's daughter and pals is bad news for the Republican party, of course. But it's really, really bad news for the Russian flying saucer community, Wonkette reminds us -- pointing to one of my own dang articles.
Long before he started pushing kooky theories about Saddam's WMD and military data mining, Weldon -- a fluent Russian speaker -- was one a one-man quest to find jobs for former Soviet scientists and engineers. "It keeps them from otherwise working with the bad guys around the world," he told me, for a 2003 Wired News story.
The employment process seemed to begin by getting these Russian firms, like the Saratov aviation company, to hireWeldon's daughter as a lobbyist. Meanwhile, the Congressman would convince arms of the U.S. military to take on projects by the ex-Sovs.
In Saratov's case, Weldon was particularly impressed with "Ekip" -- a flying saucer, relying on vacuum shell for its lift.
"The fact that they had put together a full-scale prototype -- with very limited resources, because of the cutbacks in the military-industrial base -- that was remarkable to me," Weldon said.
So Weldon asked some folks at the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command, or NAVAIR, to take on the saucer project. The initial prototype was supposed to be 500 pounds -- just a speck compared with the 12-ton craft that Saratov claims to have successfully test flown in the early 1990s.
If memory serves, NAVAIR wound up abandoning the project after a while. And if Admiral Joe Sestak winds up beating Weldon in next month's election, it may be a very, very long time before the saucer takes flight.
The Army is quickly going broke, its leaders insist. Worn-out gear can't be replaced; units can't properly prep for combat; some bases can't even afford to mow the lawn.
But there's one Army account that the generals are still managing to keep packed to the brim: marketing. The annual Association of the United States Army convention is going down this week, in Washington. And the Army is pulling out all the stops, to show just how groovy its $300 billion high-tech upgrade, Future Combat Systems, is going to be.
High above conferees' heads, a movie theater-sized screen shows Hollywood-grade videos of how awesomely FCS will work in action. Beneath the display, an Army major and a Boeing executive -- each equipped with wireless mics -- lecture a crowd, seated in stadium seats, about FCS' virtues. Beside them, to the right, is a mock operations center, manned by a trio of soldiers, pantomiming battle commands.
To the left, an defense contractor is demonstrating the new Future Combat video game. "Kaboom!" he shouts, as he directs some simulated next-gen cannon to waste a pixilated foe. Ostensibly, the game is supposed to start getting officers familiar with "the FCS wireless network-centric operating system that seamlessly links advanced communications and networking systems with soldiers, platforms, weapons, and sensors." But when I ask the contractor whether the game is really just a marketing tool for the mega-expensive project, he sighs, "Yeah."
Now, the FCS folks are hardly the only Army team with a booth at the conference. Everyone from Airborne to Special Forces to ROTC has a little set-up -- to market themselves within the Department, to show off to the higher-ups, and to prove their worth to Congress. And that makes some sense, in an organization as big and complex as the Army. But still, you've got to wonder whether it's the right thing to do -- with multiple wars raging and with budgets apparently so tight. "A real 'fleecing of America' story," says one conference-goer. "It's like 'we're going broke, and here's a super-slick presentation to show you why.'"
Big War Machines Pushed for Korea Fight
There are still a whole heap of unknowns, in the wake of North Korea's nuclear test. But here's something you can take to the bank: every admiral, every Air Force general, and every Congresscritter with a big, hulking, weapon system is going to crow about how his gazillion-dollar machine is the key to fixing the Korean problem.
Even before Kim's October surprise, Air Force officials like Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap Jr. were railing against "boots-on-the-ground zealots" and "neo-Luddites" who "quot[e] counterinsurgency manuals from the horse cavalry era." Instead, Dunlap insisted, we should be pouring money into "air power — our most effective national security component."
With the Army lobbying for a bigger chunk of the Pentagon budget, expect the volume on these Air Force and Navy-first screams to be turned up several notches in the months to come. Wanna shell the Norks' nuke facilities from way out in the sea? Then you need a big ol' DD(X) destroyer to do the shelling. Attacking from the air? For that, you just have to have a next-generation, long-range bomber. Oh, and a whole bunch of conventionally-armed Trident ballistic missiles, too. And so on...
Of course, "American air units in South Korea, Japan, and the United States, plus the US Third and Seventh Fleets, are available to blockade North Korea and strike at targets of opportunity" today, Arms and Influence notes.
However, it remains to be seen what opportunities for punitive and disarming strikes exist, or what the North Korean response would be... The facilities are too dispersed, often in the worst kind of geography for precision bombing, mountainous terrain. Even if the US were able to hit every North Korean nuclear and production facility, the obvious question would be, What's next?
We can predict at least one immediate consequence: a North Korean attack on South Korea. Whether the North Korean army tries to seize control of the South, or merely retaliate with conventional and chemical artillery attacks on Seoul and other population centers, the US would need ground forces to take the next step: eliminate the North Korean government. Even with its nuclear fangs removed, the North Korean government would remain a menace to the South, and perhaps would have reasons to try for one last gamble to end the decades-long stalemate on the Korean peninsula...
The United States has an impressive array of carrier battle groups, attack submarines, tactical air assets, and strategic bombers that it can hurl at North Korea. However, the last several years have taught Americans an important lesson about warfare: your own strength matters far less than what you actually do with it.
The military in North Korea is by far the largest consumer of the country’s scarce resources. But even so, its combat jet pilots get only about two hours of flying time a month, its soldiers sometimes have to grow their own food, and much of its equipment is old and outclassed by that of its neighbors. According to South Korean and Western experts, if a conventional war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula, the best the North Korean military could manage would be to fight to a bloody stalemate.
It is the deep insecurity born of these shortcomings, the experts say, and not any desire to grab attention or gain leverage, that drove President Kim Jong-il’s decision to defy international warnings and declare this week that his country had tested a nuclear weapon.
Comedian 2, Internet Arms Dealers 0
South London comedian Mark Thomas has always been a rather unusually political gag man -- leading protests, giving out leading spies' cell phone numbers, launching one-man WMD inspections, showing up at a Nestle factory "dressed as a huge teddy bear, and then produc[ing] a huge ghetto-blaster playing Zimbabwe's health minister making serious allegations about Nestle's baby-milk marketing methods." Think Michael Moore meets Sy Hersh. But way more pissed off.
Thomas' most provocative stunt may have come earlier this year, when he helped a bunch of teenaged schoolgirls set up an online arms dealership. Before long, they were pricing out tanks, negotiating for grenade launchers, and -- in his words -- buying up stun batons and other "equipment intended for torture or ill-treatment."
It was enough to get Parliament involved. MPs "praised comedian Mark Thomas for unearthing evidence of stun batons being sold through websites in the UK," according to the BBC. And the politicians began leaning on the trade and defense ministries to do something about the sales.
Yesterday, they did. "Two men have been arrested during raids by police investigating the sale of military weapons over the internet," the Times of London reports. "The men, aged 61 and 40 years old, were detained when more than 40 police officers swooped in on two properties in Kent early this morning. Both men were arrested on suspicion of possessing prohibited weapons."
"Mark Thomas, the stand-up comedian, has done more to expose illegal arms deals than the Ministry of Defence, the Export Control Organisation and HM Revenue and Customs put together," the Guardian proclaims, "simply by searching the internet and the trade press and attending the arms fairs the British government hosts."
Here's to those simple searches.
Army's Funds Drying Up
For nearly forty years, Fred Kaplan notes, "the Army, Air Force, and Navy... have abided by an informal agreement that gives each of them a roughly equal share of the total military budget... In this way, the chiefs have avoided the interservice rivalries that tore the military establishments apart throughout the 1940s and '50s."
There are ways to treat the Army's ailments without opening the purse strings. [It could stop stuffing R&D projects into its Iraq war budget. -- ed] For instance, [Army chief of staff Gen. Peter] Schoomaker could cancel or postpone the Army's Future Combat Systems, a $200 billion confabulation that may be way overdesigned for any realistic scenario of future combat. But the FCS is the Army's only big-ticket weapon system, and the procurement commanders wouldn't surrender it unless the Air Force and Navy chiefs junked their big fighter planes and submarines, which isn't about to happen, either.
Early on in his regime, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld might have had the clout to force such a bargain, but no longer. He has already abdicated his authority, allowing Schoomaker to appeal directly for more money to the White House's Office of Management and Budget. (According to Army Times, this is another unprecedented move: No service secretary has ever dealt directly with the OMB — all such appeals are supposed to be made through the secretary of defense.)
This bureaucratic turbulence only reflects a broader dilemma that higher political authorities will soon have to address, whether they'd like to or not. Schoomaker's central complaint is that he doesn't have the money to maintain the Army's global missions. The president and the Congress can pony up the money (a lot more money) or scale back the missions. To do otherwise — to stay the course with inadequate resources — is to invite defeats and disasters.
UPDATE 11:44 AM: One more quick point on this. Traditionally, the Army has been thought of as the low-tech, low-cost service. That's no longer so. Back in the day, you could send an infantryman into battle with just a rifle and a helmet. Now, he takes all kind of gear -- body armor, night vision goggles, you name it. Equipment costs, per man, have gone from something like $2,000 a soldier during Vietnam to around $25,000 today. It's another reason why doling out the Army's traditional slice of the budget pie ain't gonna work this time around.
Sats Hit Snags
Just about everything the U.S. military does these days depends on satellites: spying on insurgents, relaying orders, keeping drones and soldiers pointed in the right direction. The idea, in the future, is to go even more sat-centric. Too bad the Air Force is having such a tough time getting contractors to build the next generation of orbiters it says are so critical.
Last week, the Air Force decided to cut fees owed Boeing, citing a $260-million cost overrun and delays of three years in the company's work on new Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites (pictured). Meanwhile, an Air Force review of the program recommended rescheduling first launch of the new satellites from January 2007 to May 2008.
Nearly the entire slate of Air Force satellite programs, valued at around $40 billion through 2010, faces cost, schedule and technical challenges. All this, despite years of warnings of "systemic problems" with the military space program. Space Radar, a $5-billion program to field orbiting radars for ground targeting, has suffered Congressional budget cuts in recent years amid concerns that its cost and schedule are poorly defined. Transformational Satellite, or TSAT, is intended to support secure wideband communications with a five-satellite constellation beginning in 2013, all in an effort to ward off an impending military bandwidth crunch. But the Congressional Budget Office contends that even TSAT -- part of a portfolio of communications satellites that accounts for the majority of space spending -- will fail to satisfy the military's enormous (and growing) appetite for secure bandwidth.
UPDATE, 13:25 EST: This just in from Defense News regarding the 2007 defense budget:
Expressing concern over cost growth in the troubled Transformational Communications Satellite program, senators cut $230 million from the $867 million requested for program. They cut $100 million from the $266 million sought for the Space Radar, citing “uncertainties with the program.”
Pentagon Closing Transformation Shop
In the 1990s, Admiral Arthur Cebrowski began pushing the unorthodox idea that the Pentagon had to change itself, from a relatively-small collection of heavy, plodding forces to a larger array of lighter, quicker, cheaper, better-networked units. By 2001, the notion -- known alternatively as "revolution in military affairs" or "force transformation" -- had become official doctrine. The Army began a massive modernization effort, based, in part, around Cebrowski's ideas. Presidential candidate George W. Bush embraced the concept during the 2000 election. Donald Rumsfeld adopted it as the cornerstone of his return to the Pentagon, and installed Cebrowski as the director of a new department: the Office of Force Transformation, or OFT.
The office initiated a series of novel, seemingly off-the-wall projects: armored vehicles equipped with pain rays, sneaky ships silently bringing commandos to shore, orbiting mirrors to send lasers across the globe.
But early last year, Cebrowski was forced to retire, as he fought a losing battle with cancer. Observers wondered whether OFT and its projects would survive his passing.
The office, at least, probably will not, according to Defense News. Pending approval by deputy defense secretary Gordon England, "the office [will] be dissolved by Sept. 30."
Defense analyst Bob Work thinks it "may be an indication of just how hard it is to balance the competing demands for transformation in the midst of this protracted campaign" in the Global War on Terror. The Armchair Generalist fears this could be the final "nail in the coffin" for transformation. But military theorist Tom Barnett, long allied with Cebrowski, sees the shift as the final move in bringing Cebrowski's ideas into the heart of the U.S. military.
"Art's success in mainstreaming his thinking meant that OFT always had a limited shelf life. [His ideas are] everywhere now," Barnett writes. "Art himself saw this coming and had no problem with it. He simply would have moved on to the next great definition."
Besides, the office is "not really shutting down," an OFT source tells Defense Tech.
It is being split apart and embedded in two other areas of OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense]. The analysis and study portion of OFT is to be rolled into a new office as part of a larger reorg of OSD Policy. [More about that here -- ed.] All of the other initiatives here, like... Redirected Energy and Operationally Responsive Space are to go into a new office under [Director, Defense Research and Engineering] John Young...
So, in a sense, this is a good move. Since OSD had no interest in appointing anyone to replace Cebrowski, the office was hobbled.... If this is approved, OSD is saying we like this OFT approach [so much] that we are willing to apply it more broadly across the entire department.
Could be. But with costs piling higher and higher for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- and with the budgets for many "transformational" projects swelling, fast -- I worry that this could jeopardize Cebrowski's work, not institutionalize it.
Hot Off the Presses
Just out on InsideDefense.com:
The Marine Corps is planning steep cuts to one of its largest modernization programs -- the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle -- as part of a wider effort to recalibrate its forces to better fight irregular combatants, according to internal Pentagon budget documents.
The cuts are spelled out in a summary of the Marine Corps' new six-year spending plan obtained by InsideDefense.com. The plan also includes “significant changes” to tactical aviation, including purchases of 25 fewer MV-22 tiltrotor Osprey aircraft and 35 fewer Joint Strike Fighter aircraft between fiscal years 2008 and 2013.
The Marine Corps six-year program “has been rebalanced to shift resources from conventional to irregular capabilities and capacities,” states a 10-page executive summary of the service’s program objective memorandum for FY-08 to FY-13.
Sorry: This one ain't free. But it's available here. (And new users can get it free.)
UPDATE: This new report on Marine Corps equipment post-Iraq, which I linked to earlier today, has this to say on EFVs:
The Marines need a new Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) to replace the Amphibious Assault Vehicle (AAV), but it is not clear that the service can fill all of its future needs with the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) given the system’s high cost. The Marines should seriously consider cutting back the number of EFVs that they plan to purchase from 1000 to between 600 and 700 vehicles. The Marines should instead consider purchasing a mix of EFVs and LAV II vehicles or other similar APCs. While these vehicles are not amphibious, the likelihood of the Marines storming heavily fortified beaches on the scale of WWII remains remote. Instead, the Marines should main tain a sizeable portion of the legacy AAV fleet as a strategic reserve in case there is a need to undertake a substantial amphibious operation.
Another great decision was brought to us this week by T.S. Ellis, the U.S. District Court judge who is making his own very special legal mark on the Global War on Terror.
In a surprise ruling, Ellis decided that defrauding the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), though not such a nice thing to do, wasn’t the same as defrauding the U.S. government (presumably that’s bad, too).
What? Yes, yes, the word “coalition” is in the name, but we assumed that was just window dressing, sort of like the Nicaraguans who were part of the “Coalition of the Willing.”
I guess some people took that coalition stuff seriously.
Let’s revisit the case. Custer Battles a Virginia-based security firm with no substantive experience in security, got a lucrative security contract from the CPA. In 2006, they were found to have defrauded the U.S. government—something that didn’t come as a surprise to those who worked with them (“probably the worst I've seen in my 30 years in the Army" was a memorable quote). The case was prosecuted on the False Claims Act, which allows citizens with insider knowledge of fraud to make claims against these bad-boy companies.
The False Claims Act was expected to be used against a number of companies operating in Iraq, according to the New York Times. Ellis' ruling throws a wrench in those plans, the article says:
But an underlying issue raised by Custer Battles during its trial and on appeal was whether bills submitted to the Coalition Provisional Authority could be regarded as bills presented to the United States government. The coalition authority was an entity created and largely financed by the United States to run Iraq, and largely staffed by American officials, but with an ambiguous legal status.
The Justice Department in an advisory opinion, and the jury in the Custer Battles case, said that some of the Custer Battles invoices were indeed claims against the American treasury and that the False Claims Act applied.
But in an opinion issued Wednesday and posted yesterday, Judge T. S. Ellis III, of the Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., said the plaintiffs had “failed to prove that the claims were presented to the United States.” The coalition authority, the judge ruled, was an international entity, and bills presented to American officials then detailed to the authority were not subject to the False Claims Act.
Did we miss something here? Wasn’t Paul Bremer, the CPA’s head, reporting to the U.S. government? Wasn’t the CPA funded and controlled by the U.S. government? Did the United Kingdom really have much of a say (or maybe it was Nicaragua pulling the strings)? The ruling, if upheld, simply makes a bigger mess of U.S. policies in Iraq, particularly as it pertains to private contractors’ accountability.
What about Judge Ellis? Let’s look at some of his other fascinating decisions:
* Earlier this month, Ellis allowed espionage charges to proceed against two former employees of AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobby, to continue. The Federation of American Scientists says this precedent could have radical implications (like for the Federation, which posts a lot of national defense documents).
* In May, the same judge dismissed a lawsuit against the CIA and assorted contractors by German citizen Khalid El-Masri. The judge said the charges of torture, if true, were sad, but national security is national security (of course, I thought national security was about protecting the rights of U.S. citizens and citizens of our allies).
Of course, now I’m surprised that Ellis didn’t question whether the CIA was actually controlled by the U.S. government.
Welcome to the final post in my series on the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program and the future of U.S. nuclear stockpile stewardship. In this post, I'll review where RRW stands today, and touch briefly on some of the political dimensions of the debate over the program.
There's a lot of material on this program – from the government, from outside experts and from policy advocates of all orientations – that I won't be able to cover, so to those interested in reading more, I recommend checking out CDI's guide to government documents on RRW, as well as articles on the program at the Arms Control Association website and over at Arms Control Wonk.
In May 2005, the two nuclear design labs, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, began an 18-month RRW Feasibility Study, as mandated in the fiscal year 2006 Defense Authorization Act. The study consisted of a design competition between the two labs (both with help from Sandia) to produce plans for the first RRW warhead, a replacement for the W76 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead.
The preliminary designs were completed and submitted in March, and underwent peer review in the labs in May. Currently, the teams are back at the drawing boards, incorporating suggestions from the peer reviews and from the Project Officers Group, the representatives of the nuclear stockpile's Department of Defense "customers." By November, NNSA is expected to pick a winning design.
As reported in Defense Tech last week, however, RRW is well on its way to expanding beyond a single warhead design. It has been clear for some time that one RRW design would not be enough to replace all nine warhead models currently in the stockpile. Still, many RRW observers were disappointed and concerned to hear that the Senate is planning to commission a design competition for the next RRW warhead and to allocate $62 million for RRW in 2007 – more than double the department’s $27 million request, and the program’s $25 million budget for 2006 – before the first feasibility study is even completed.
The arguments in favor of RRW have mostly been described in previous posts: redesigning the stockpile to increase performance margins would, if possible, help put to rest concerns about the effect of modified manufacturing practices on warhead performance, and would provide work for the nuclear weapons complex.
The arguments against RRW, meanwhile, take issue with both the program’s desirability and its feasibility.
The first argument against the program is that, according to the program’s opponents, there is no need to change the current warhead designs. In the example of the pit remanufacturing debate discussed in my last post, this means that the program’s opponents believe that the new pits have been proven conclusively to be as reliable as the old pits, and can be incorporated into existing warheads.
(Dr. Jeanloz, by the way, is on the record as an RRW "skeptic," rather than an outright critic, but several other experts have offered views similar to his as arguments against RRW.)
This assessment contradicts the NNSA’s assessment that the RRW designs will "be certifiable and producible without nuclear testing" even though the plans call for "redesigning" the warheads' nuclear subsystems. Nuclear testing is almost universally regarded as a very bad thing – the Bush Administration is formally committed to continuing the current testing moratorium, in no small part due to concern that a U.S. test would inevitably lead to Chinese and Russian tests.
Critics who cite this concern point out that even if the nuclear weapons complex ever brought itself to certify a warhead design which had never been tested, U.S. Strategic Command, as the stockpile's "customer," would be unlikely to accept such an unproven product.
It is worth noting, by the way, that there are certain modest modifications which can increase warheads' performance margins to a certain extent without adding uncertainty – these changes are not controversial, and are being considered outside of RRW.
Finally, critics point out that the program's supposed contributions to the goal of "stockpile transformation" are not consistent with each other.
On the one hand, RRW is supposed to lead to long-term cost-savings by producing a stockpile which can be maintained without a complex stockpile stewardship effort. On the other hand, RRW is also supposed to "continuously exercise" the nuclear weapons complex and "enable" the transition to a "responsive infrastructure."
The two goals are clearly incompatible – a good-for-a-century warhead design which met Congress' goal of reducing the cost and complexity of stockpile maintenance would not meet NNSA's goal (and Congress' secondary goal) of keeping the production complex "exercised" for a possible future arms race. (Ryan jokes that to some people, RRW seems to stand for "Reliably Recurring Work.")
As the Congressional Research Service points out, "RRW is a new program with no specific, tangible product yet defined. In deciding how to proceed on RRW, Congress has a number of options available to it." It is possible that a version of the program will emerge which can satisfy the concerns of all sides – of those who worry that the current stockpile stewardship paradigm will lead to a dangerous accumulation of minor changes, and of those who worry that a significant overhaul of warhead designs will destroy, rather than fortify, confidence in the stockpile. Until such a version emerges, though, we can expect to see both confusion and controversy continue to rage.
In my last post, I discussed the origins of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program (RRW). In this post, I'll look at one example of a change which is being made in the manufacturing of an essential nuclear component, and at what this change means for the debate over RRW.
The component in question here is the "pit," the sphere of plutonium which sits at the heart of a thermonuclear warhead's primary stage.
During the Cold War, pits were made at the Rocky Flats site in Colorado. After Rocky Flats was shut down in 1989, the United States was left without the ability to make new pits for its stockpile.
In 1996, under the leadership of then-director of Los Alamos Siegfried Hecker, the Department of Energy started working on a new pit manufacturing line at Los Alamos’ Technical Area 55 (TA-55). A decade later, replacement pits are finally starting to roll off the line at TA-55. But a debate has broken out over whether or not those pits are functionally the same as those made at Rocky Flats. As a result, the new pits are still waiting to receive their certification for stockpile use.
At the heart of the debate lies precisely the sort of improved manufacturing technique which I mentioned in the last post. At Rocky Flats, plutonium was shaped into pits by stamping, folding and welding, in what’s known as a wrought process. Unfortunately, the wrought process is very infrastructure-intensive, making it good for an industrial-scale facility like Rocky Flats, but less so for a smaller facility like TA-55. The wrought process also creates lots of dangerous plutonium sawdust and shavings, and leaves behind a product with an uneven microscopic texture.
So under Dr. Hecker’s enthusiastic leadership, TA-55 developed a new technique for making pits. The new pits are made using a cast process – that is, molten plutonium (alloyed with some other metals for stability) is poured into pit-shaped molds. The cast process, if done properly, produces a much more uniform product, with less complex equipment and less hazard.
Fast forward ten years.
New pits have been cast and have undergone a gauntlet of tests and computer modeling, but, of course, not underground nuclear tests. Some scientists at the labs, and in the greater nuclear policy community, are ready to certify the pits as functionally equivalent to the Rocky Flats pits in every way. One of these scientists is Raymond Jeanloz, a professor of planetary science at UC Berkeley who does not work at Los Alamos, but is one of the country’s foremost scientific advisors on nuclear issues, and has served as lead author on severalJASON studies on stockpile stewardship.
But other scientists are hesitant to certify the pits. They feel that however many tests the cast pits have undergone, they are still irreducibly different from the old wrought pits, and that without a nuclear test, no one can say that they would behave the same. These scientists argue that the new pits should be introduced into the stockpile, but only after the labs have had a chance to modify the warheads to increase their performance margins – that is, only as part of RRW.
Ironically, one of these scientists is Dr. Hecker – the grandfather of the TA-55 pits. He stands by his decision to switch manufacturing techniques, and he insists that the new pits are of excellent quality, but he denies that the labs have been able to test the pits as exhaustively as Dr. Jeanloz claims.
To make matters worse, Dr. Hecker and Dr. Jeanloz disagree just as vehemently on the subject of plutonium aging. Dr. Hecker claims that not enough is known about the different processes which take place as plutonium metal ages to predict safely when aging will begin to affect the dynamics of the pit implosion – and therefore the yield of the warhead primary. He therefore claims that the only responsible thing to do is to replace the current pits after a conservative 50-year shelf-life – and to keep replacing the pits every half-century. This schedule would keep the nuclear labs perpetually busy building, certifying and installing new pits.
Dr. Jeanloz doesn’t buy Dr. Hecker’s claim that plutonium aging is poorly understood. He points out that the nuclear labs have learned so much about plutonium aging just in the last six years that they’re planning on wrapping up a major review of pit lifetimes this coming fall (see page 58 of this report).
Dr. Jeanloz is convinced that the review will give estimates of pit lifetimes "substantially" longer than 60 years. If he's right (and he may not be alone), then there's no need to keep up a high rate of pit production – to say nothing of RRW. Of course, whether the results of that review will be published if the NNSA doesn’t like what it sees is anyone's guess....
Taken as a whole, the dispute between Dr. Hecker and Dr. Jeanloz over pit aging and remanufacture offers a useful behind-the-scenes view of the sorts of arguments which are shaping the technical debate over RRW. Of course, plutonium aging is far from being the only concern behind the drive for RRW. Other parts of the nuclear explosives package, such as the high explosives and the secondary, also raise serious technical concerns. And the political and institutional forces driving RRW, which in some cases have little to do with technical issues, are a whole other subject.
But plutonium science has been, historically, a relatively open field, with much of the progress in the field reported regularly in the open literature. The plutonium aging issue therefore allows us a rare glimpse at the type of scientific and technical debates whose outcomes will determine the future of the nation's nuclear weapons infrastructure and stockpile.
In my fourth and final post on RRW, I'll discuss where RRW stands today, and examine briefly some of the political issues raised by the program.
The goal of the life extension programs (LEP) is to add anywhere from 20 to 30 years onto the (nominal) design lifetimes of the various warhead models in the stockpile (of course, "there is no such thing as a 'design life'"...). The W87ICBM warhead became the first warhead to complete its LEP in 2004. The B61bomb warhead and the W76SLBMwarhead – the first warhead slated for replacement under RRW – are currently undergoing LEPs, while the W80 cruise-missile warhead’s LEP was recently canceled by the Nuclear Weapons Council in order to free up funds for RRW.
A life extension program is a sort of 50,000-mile tune-up for a nuclear warhead: limited-lifetime components such as batteries and neutron generators are replaced, along with any other parts – "cables, elastomers, valves, pads, foam supports, telemetries, and miscellaneous parts" – which may have degraded. Most of these replacements take place outside the warhead’s nuclear explosives package, however.
While these tasks sound mundane, manufacturing the replacement components is no mean task. Manufacturing lines still exist for some components, but in other cases, lines have been dismantled, suppliers have canceled product lines or gone out of business, and health, safety and environmental regulations have grown stricter.
In these cases, a dilemma arises: should the nuclear production complex go to extreme lengths to recreate the processes needed to remanufacture these components exactly according to the original specifications? Or should they look for ways to make replacement parts that will work just as well, if not better? Since the part has to be replaced anyway, why not make maintenance easier for future generations already?
For components outside the warheads' nuclear explosives package, modifying the manufacturing specs is an attractive option, since each new component can be tested exhaustively without underground nuclear testing.
If too many of these minor changes pile up, though, a sort of "Grandfather’s axe" effect may kick in: if enough components have been modified and replaced, is the warhead design still the same one that was once tested? For this reason, the guiding philosophy has been "change-control discipline": make the fewest number of changes possible, and only after proving exhaustively that the changes will not affect warhead characteristics.
For nuclear components, the problem is more serious. While there are ways to investigate how a nuclear component will behave when detonated – computer simulations which model the component, dynamic and quasi-static experiments which measure its relevant physical properties, sub-critical experiments which assess its behavior under conditions similar to actual detonation – none of these methods has the same doubt-erasing effect as an underground nuclear test.
Any modification to proven designs for nuclear components is therefore bound to cause anxiety as long as underground nuclear testing is forbidden.
Conceptually, this is where the Reliable Replacement Warhead program (RRW) enters the picture.
While some members of the stockpile policy community argue that something like change-control discipline can be applied to nuclear components, too, others believe that if any modification is going to be made to the nuclear explosives package, a broader set of changes has to be made to the warhead design try to offset any possible drop in the performance of those modified components.
In brief, the changes being contemplated by those in the latter camp would increase the performance margins of warhead designs. The performance margin is the difference between the energy which the primary stage is expected to produce and the minimum energy needed to set off the secondary stage – essentially, the warhead's margin of error.
Since increasing the performance margin would require modifications to warhead designs that go well beyond what change-control discipline would allow, it would require an entirely new philosophy of stockpile stewardship. This philosophy is to be put into practice through a program known as Reliable Replacement Warhead.
RRW was introduced into the fiscal year 2005 Department of Energy budget by Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's Energy and Water Subcommittee. Hobson, a noted budget hawk, believed that the Bush Administration’s latest nuclear weapons program, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) – or "nuclear bunker buster" – would be both costly and unnecessary, not to mention harmful to the nation’s non-proliferation posture. His committee therefore cut all funds for RNEP, and allocated the funds instead to a "program to improve the reliability [and] longevity... of existing weapons and their components" – and RRW was born.
Almost immediately, rumors began to circulate that the Department of Defense intended to use RRW as an opportunity to expand the capabilities of the U.S. nuclear arsenal – to work around the cancellation of RNEP. These rumors led Hobson, in March 2006, to complain that "sometimes within the [DOE], people hear only what they want to hear," and remind NNSA head Linton Brooks that "this is not an opportunity to run off and develop a whole bunch of new capabilities and new weapons."
This ongoing back-and-forth about RRW’s purpose inspired the Congressional Research Service’s comment, quoted in my earlier post, that "many find RRW to be confusing."
In the third post, I will discuss the changes which are being made to the warheads' nuclear components, and examine the debate over whether or not those changes require a wider set of modifications to the warhead designs – and therefore RRW.
In order to understand what RRW is, and what it might evolve into, it’s important to take a step back and look at where the U.S. stockpile is today, and how it got there. Over the next few days, I’m going to do my best to summarize the history of stockpile stewardship in the U.S. and the debates which led to the creation of RRW (which I wrote about in greater detail here). Then we can get to the meat of what RRW is all about.
Below the jump – the Cold War ends, and Stockpile Stewardship is (re)born.
During the Cold War, high turnover was the key to maintaining confidence in the reliability of the nuclear stockpile. New weapons were constantly being designed, built, tested and added to the stockpile, allowing older weapons to be retired, or relegated to reserve status; warheads rarely accumulated more than a couple of decades of shelf life, at most.
While stockpiled warheads were not often put through further nuclear tests, they were routinely sampled for disassembly, thorough inspection and all sorts of non-nuclear (or above-ground) testing. This activity, known as stockpile surveillance, was intended to catch production defects and aging-related deterioration to any of the warhead's 3000 components. Most of these components are located outside of the warhead's nuclear subsystem, so their full range of functions could be tested without a nuclear test.
The knowledge base developed over forty years of stockpile surveillance (beginning with the introduction of sealed-pit designs in the late 1950s) laid the foundations for the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP), which was officially born in 1994.
Three events which took place at the end of the Cold War led to the creation of SSP. In 1989, the Rocky Flats site in Colorado, where all the plutonium "pits," or triggers, in the stockpile had been produced, was shut down after years of egregious health and safety violations. In 1992, shortly before its dissolution, the USSR declared a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing. In response, Congress passed a similar testing moratorium, and the President George H. W. Bush announced an indefinite moratorium on the introduction of new weapon designs into the stockpile. The era of high stockpile turnover was over, and the Stockpile Stewardship Program was born.
The Stockpile Stewardship Program was organized by Congress from the Department of Energy's existing stewardship activities in the 1994 Defense Authorization Act. The program was part of a new policy aimed at keeping the nation's bomb-making skills and facilities in suspended animation in case a new nuclear arms race were to break out.
In keeping with this policy, resources which were cut from bomb-making and nuclear testing activities were channeled to the three activities necessary for stockpile stewardship: improving the nuclear complex's understanding of the science of warhead performance and aging (known as "stockpile science"), keeping an eye out for signs of deterioration as warheads age ("stockpile surveillance") and repairing problems which may arise ("warhead life extension").
You can find more details about these three activities in the paper I mentioned earlier (including someworryingreports about the problems SSP has had coordinating the different activities).
In the next post, I’ll be focusing on warhead life extension, and looking at the debates over how to replace old warhead components as an example of the technical controversies behind the scenes of the RRW debate.
After years of bigger and bigger budgets, the Pentagon's way-out research arm now faces a $400 million cut to its proposed funds, if the Senate Appropriations Committee gets its way.
Darpa asked for $3.3 billion dollars for next year -- about an 11 percent increase over what it got in '06. The green eyeshades in the House granted it all, and added another $30 mil or so. The Senate, on the other hand, had proposed about a three percent cut to the Defense Department's bleeding-edgers. According to Senate documents, funding for the sub-launched Cormorant UAV would be slashed by $14.6 million; the giant spy blimp ISIS would get a $16.6 million trim; "Orbital Express," the centerpiece of Darpa's next-gen satellite efforts, faces a $10 million whack; the agency's "cognitive computing" effort would get a brain-drain of nearly $71 million.
And these aren't the only cuts Darpa has to contend with. The agency's budget just had $7 million pulled from it, to fund a Pentagon human resource system. Another $25.6 million was yanked from the agency's "advanced aerospace" kitty for this year.
Darpa has been under attack from two groups lately. One says that they're thinking too far out of the box; "I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to delineate between Darpa-hard and Darpa-stupid," a leading Pentagon R&D official told me.
The other wing contends that Darpa is being too practical. "Today Darpa imposes six-month go-no decisions on all their researchers, which stifle innovation and creativity - very un-Darpa-like," a Congressional source fumes. "I have had everyone complain to me about this - from universities to small hi-tech businesses to the big defense contractors."
Apparently, Senators aren't too pleased, either.
Army's Out-of-Control "Future"
As gut-wrenching as today's Times story on runaway Pentagon spending is, the article doesn't touch on what's quickly becoming the biggest defense contracting boondoggle of them all.
Reporter Leslie Wayne pulls out some great factoids in her piece today.
For instance, contractors on the Joint Strike Fighter, a next-generation fighter jet, received their full bonus award of $494 million from 1999 to 2003, even though the program was $10 billion over budget and 11 months behind schedule.
Contractors in the F-22A fighter jet program, over the same time period, received 91 percent of their performance bonus, or $849 million, even though the current phase of the program was $10 billion over budget and two years late.
And a handy chart shows that the per-unit cost of the F-22 was 189 percent higher than originally expected.
But that same chart shows the Army's massive Future Combat Systems modernization program costing a mere $127 billion -- up a paltry 54 percent since it was introduced.
Which was true a couple of days ago.
Now, however, the Office of the Secretary of Defense has a new estimate: $300 billion, to revamp about a third of the Army's gear.
And remember, these costs are soaring in the earliest days of the program, before Future Combat's major hardware purchases are set. The new-fangled tanks, the family of ground robots, the fighting vehicle replacements -- in other words, the collective heart of the program -- are still enormous question marks. How much do you figure the price of FCS will go up, once those projects are set?
That's one of the reasons why Sen. John McCain -- one of Congress' few truly good guys on this issue -- has been pushing the Pentagon to adopt "fixed price" contracts for weapons R&D, instead of the insane "cost-plus" agreements, which give defense firms huge bonuses, even when their projects spin out of control.
But, of course, spinning projects out of control has become a contractor business strategy. Just look at what's happening with the F-22 and JSF. So the Lockheeds and Boeings of the world are fighting McCain's provisions, hard. If they win, how much do you think Future Combat will cost next year?
Defense Pork: Indestructible
Is there anything -- anything - that's harder to kill than a Congressman's pet defense project?
In December 2004, the Pentagon decided to stop funding next-generation, air-to-surface munition called the Joint Common Missile. The weapon has better range than its predecessors. And it featured a mighty cool "tri-mode seeker combining semi-active laser, passive imaging infrared and active millimeter wave radar" to find its targets.
But, in the end, the current crop of weapons -- "the Hellfire II, the laser-guided bombs, the joint direct attack munitions all... provid[e] for this nation the amount of precision munitions needed for the perceived warfights," General Peter Pace told Congress. "Therefore, the [JCM] munition... was recommended to be taken out of the budget so we could apply that $3- plus billion to other programs that were more needed than it, sir."
Congress didn't take Pace's recommendation, however. It pumped $30 million into the 2006 budget for the JCM.
A year later, the Defense Department still sees the weapon as overkill. So the Pentagon has tried to kill the JCM again, in its budget for 2007.
Again, Congress hasn't taken the hint. This year, House appropriators have given the project $35 million, Inside Defense reports. And at least one Senator, Richard Shelby of Alabama, is making noises about doing the same. The fact that the JCM is being built in Troy, AL is just a coincidence, surely.
But at least there has been a common mission for the JCM, throughout its series of deaths and resurrections. That's not always the case when lawmakers adopt a defense program.
Times are tight at the Army -- sorta kinda, at least for the moment. Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody has ordered the service to stop buying "non-critical" spare parts and supplies last week, Inside Defense reports. And if the Army doesn't get some extra money from Congress soon, it'll have to stop hiring new civilian workers, "freeze" all new contracts, and "release service contract employees, [including] recruiters," according to a May 26th memo from Cody.
Sure sounds like a crisis. But it's actually one Cody & Co. cooked up themselves. For years, the Army has been relying more and more on "supplemental" spending bills -- extra cash from Congress, earmarked for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, that's supposed to be provided on an emergency basis.
Except now, the emergencies are routine. Every year, the Army busts through its approximately $160 billion budget. Every year, the service asks for more money -- to cover war costs, sure. But also to pay for stuff like the Joint Network Node, a kind of wi-fi hotspot for the battlefield. And to reconfigure the Army into smaller brigades. It's a form of blackmail, more or less: give us our money, Congress. Or risk being nailed as "anti-soldier."
"I always tell people, thank God for the supplemental. We would not be able to do anything... without them," Lt. Gen. Joseph Yakovac told an Association of the United States Army conference in 2004. "If those don’t happen, we’re in a world of hurt."
This year is no different. Hence Cody's plea for belt-tightening. But wouldn't it be better -- and smarter, and more honest -- to be upfront about all these costs, instead of blackmailing the Hill into action?
Stealth Fighter's Costs Soar
The Pentagon has a motto for its next-generation attack jet, the Joint Strike Fighter: "Lethal, Survivable, Supportable, Affordable." But the military may want to think about modifying that a bit, now that each JSF is going to cost $82.1 million, according to Defense News. Just a few months ago, the head of the JSF program, Rear Admiral Steven Enewold, told me that the most expensive variant of the plane would come in at about $60 million.
The JSF is designed to replace everything from Harrier jump jets to F-16s to Super Hornets with a single class of fighter. At a projected $256 billion, it's already the most expensive weapons program in Pentagon history.
But the fighter makes sense in today's increasingly-tight budgets, RADM Enewold said, because the stealthy JSF not only could beat the air defenses of the future -- it could knock out guerilla hideouts, too.
But that fiscal logic, he acknowledged, hinged on keeping the cost per plane down. Otherwise, sending this high-performance jet after insurgents would be like putting out a fire with Dom Perignon. Even before the latest price jump, the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigational arm, called the JSF’s original business plan "unexecutable." Wonder what they'll say about the program now?
UPDATE 9:10 AM: Here's some more budget news, all courtesy of Inside Defense:
* Army committed to troop cuts
* Operating costs could ground laser jet
* Rail gun not ready 'til 2020
* 2008 deadline for Future Combat Systems?
UPDATE 2:05 PM: This is huge, if it holds up. I'm guessing it won't. A House subcommittee has passed legislation to limit the DD(X) destroyer program "to just two ships," Defense News says.
Rising DD(X) costs have prompted Congress to cut the program repeatedly, from as many as 30 ships planned in the late 1990s to just seven this year. Originally, the ships were supposed to cost about $1 billion each. Last year, the Navy said it could build them for $3.3 billion apiece, but independent estimates put the price at $4 billion or more per ship.
The plan to halt the DD(X) buy at two would leave the Navy with a pair of ships that would serve mainly as demonstration models for a new generation of guided missile cruisers that would be built using the same hull.
Cruise Missiles do Recon?
You can't blame 'em for trying, I guess. Defense contractors want to sell a bigger pile of their gear to the Pentagon. So, from time to time, they come up with all kinds of, shall we say, sub-optimal explanations why their hardware should be used more often. Like jamming IEDs with supersonic fighters. Or delivering commandos with 14,000-ton destroyers.
Here's the latest brainstorm, courtesy of Raytheon: Use Tomahawk cruise missiles to handle reconnaissance. That's right. $750,000-a-shot Tomahawks. Never mind the fact that a Predator drone can handle hundreds of spy missions, for a $4.5 million price tag. (For argument's sake, let's say it costs $45,000 per flight, when you throw in maintenance money and pilot pay.) The Pentagon should spend 750 large for a one-time, one-way unmanned flight.
Now, Tomahawks are certainly faster than Predators -- 528 miles per hour, as opposed to 135. But we've got plenty of fighter jets doing supersonic recon already. And the idea that, somehow, a Tomahawk could be a "cheaper... alternative to unmanned aerial vehicles," as National Defense magazine tries to argue this month? C'mon, guys. I know you've got sales targets to make. But this is taxpayer money here. You need a better explanation than that.
Red Skies at Night, Ray Guns' Delight?
Let's say you're an Air Force bigwig. You need to decide whether to invest in some shiny new directed energy weapon. Sure, "attack at the speed of light" sounds mighty good, but will the weapon actually work under the conditions you’re interested in, or will it run into some obstacle – like, the atmosphere?
You can't just test-fire a mockup – because nothing similar exists yet, and, more importantly, because these things don't really scale very neatly. The experiences of otherDEprograms have got you worried.
Well, now there's a computer model to help you predict just how a high-energy laser (HEL) weapon will behave under real conditions. The High Energy Laser End-to-End Operational Simulation (HELEEOS), described in this upcoming paper, is the outcome of a multi-year, joint effort to create such a planning tool for use throughout the DOD and the military.
Why is this so important? Well, laser physics is not exactly an area in which most high-level decision-makers have a lot of technical intuition. And with all the different effects that go into the performance of a laser weapon – from those inside the laser and its companion optical systems, to the bewildering menagerie of phenomena known collectively as "atmospheric effects," to beam-target interaction effects – it's even hard for the pros to answer such a basic question as "how much range will we gain if we double the laser power?"
The potential for poor decision-making is apparent in the history of the Airborne Laser program. As long ago as 2004, a thorough (and not-unsympathetic) report by the American Physical Society concluded that the ABL’s lethal range would be so short that intercepting an ICBM launched from central Iran, for example, could only be accomplished, at best, from one small area in southwestern Turkmenistan. Yet the program still survives.
In fact, the paper tacitly admits that all is not well within the HEL weapons community, stating that one of the primary purposes of HELEEOS is "the establishment of trust among military leaders."
So, what does this computer program do? Basically, for a set of laser parameters (size, power, wavelength) and engagement geometry (distance from source to target, altitudes and velocities of source and target, and so on), HELEEOS estimates how long the laser would need to dwell on the target in order to achieve a certain probability of kill – if a kill is even possible.
But there's more – and this is where HELEEOS gets really cool. In order to model the effect of the atmosphere, the simulation taps into a massive database of worldwide climate data and into detailed models of atmospheric phenomena. This lets the user tailor the simulation of the weapon's performance to a particular location and time of year, and even to different weather conditions – so you'll know whether your new toy will work not just at Kirtland Air Force Base, but on a muggy night in Pyongyang or a dusty day in Kuwait.
(Of course, there's a catch to this: the climate data is complete only for those corners of the world where the US military has friends – so, for example, there's an inconvenient Iran-shaped blank on the map.)
Now, here's this week's $64,000 question: will this new "investment strategy tool," as the paper describes it, really close the realism-deficit in HEL planning? It might; on the other hand, it might just give any unscrupulous folks a powerful tool for figuring out just which figures they need to fudge. I've argued elsewhere that technology, however useful, will not solve the problem of insurgency warfare alone; the same can be said for the problem of poor acquisition practices.
Rumsfeld came out and said it: He's not sacrificing any of his modernization plans just because there's a war going on.
"We, simply, as an institution, have to not stop doing what we were doing and start doing something new," he told reporters yesterday, introducing the Defense Department's budget for fiscal year 2007.
But some analysts aren't so sure that Rummy is being straight up about how he pays for his new gear. Steven Kosiak, with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, thinks there's a "significant mismatch" between the Pentagon's "modernization plans and [its] projected funding levels. The new budget "would do little to improve the affordability."
Moreover, some of the proposed shifts in priorities — such as the accelerated fielding of a new long-range strike aircraft (in 2018 rather than 2037) — are likely to be dependent, for their implementation, on the willingness and ability of a future administration to make offsetting cuts in other DoD priorities. The QDR and FY 2007 budget request have, for the most part, deferred these difficult choices.
But that's not all. In addition to the gazillion dollar excuse me, $439.3 billion main Defense budget, there's also an extra $120 bill that's supposed to go to supporting the fights over in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kosiak is pretty sure a big chunk of that cash is going somewhere else. Some of it is going to fund an Army reorganization into smaller, more deployable units. Then there's this:
In early 2005, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that sustaining US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan at essentially today’s level would require about $85 billion in FY 2006. This suggests that the administration’s proposed $120 billion in emergency funding for military operations in FY 2006 may be too high by as $35 billion.
Rummy has pulled this kind of stunt before -- dipping into the Army's payroll, and then forcing Congress to make up the difference in a war-funding bill. But I was half-hoping that this time around, he'd act like a man, and really say how much he was spending on his transformation projects. Oh, well.
UPDATE 02/08/06 11:56 AM: "Many of the spending priorities in President Bush's proposed $439.3 billion defense budget conflict with the military requirements outlined in a new long-range plan drawn up by Pentagon officials," Knight-Ridder's Bob Cox reports.
Once again, experts say, the budget drawn up by the Pentagon's top civilian and military leader's calls for massive spending on new high-tech fighter jets, warships and missile defense systems at the expense of bolstering American soldiers' capability to prevail in the low-tech conflicts they're now engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, released Friday, identifies a wide range of problems the military must be prepared to deal with. It calls for enhancing the ability of U.S. forces to conduct a low intensity, "long war" against terrorists in far flung locations, improve the military's homeland security capabilities, and prepare for a possible all-out with an emerging power like China.
It's the latter scenario, which the military foresees fighting with F-22 fighter jets and new high-tech warships built by Lockheed Martin, that gets the biggest investment in the 2007 budget Bush submitted to Congress on Monday...
"The words in the QDR don't seem to bear much resemblance to the numbers in the `07 spending request," said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute defense think tank.
UPDATE 1:28 PM: Despite Sen. Robert Byrd's observation that the Pentagon's budget amounts to "$439 for every minute since Jesus Christ was born," many Senators are worried that Rummy & Co. aren't spending enough, Defense News reports. Shockingly, that's particularly true of guys like Joe Lieberman, who have big weapon-building facilities in their states.
DHS Budget, Broken Down
Homeland security analyst Christian Beckner obviously didn't sleep too much last night. Or he played hooky from his day job. Or both. Those are the only explanations I can come up with for the exhaustive, five part analysis he put together of the DHS budget, just 18 hours after the thing was released.
UPDATE 02/08/06 11:11 AM: Now he's got breakdowns of the aviation and maritime security budgets, too.
Bump: China Tops Iraq, Osama in QDR
I'm bumping this post from ten days ago back to the top, because of the impending QDR roll-out [UPDATE 12:33 PM: It's online now]. According to today's Washington Post:
The United States is engaged in what could be a generational conflict akin to the Cold War, the kind of struggle that might last decades as allies work to root out terrorists across the globe and battle extremists who want to rule the world, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday.
The strategic vision outlined in the QDR has won high marks from defense analysts for diagnosing the problems the U.S. military will likely face. However, it is less successful in translating those concepts into concrete military capabilities, the analysts say...
The strategy does call for devoting resources to accelerate a long-range strike capability directed at hostile nations, and for new investments aimed at countering biological and nuclear weapons -- such as teams able to defuse a nuclear bomb. But it makes relatively minor adjustments in key weapons systems, with the biggest programs such as the Joint Strike Fighter and the Army's Future Combat Systems escaping virtually unscathed. This leaves less room for investments in innovative programs and forces to address the types of problems that the QDR identifies, analysts say.
For months, now, word hasbeenleakingout about the Pentagon's every-four-years master plan, the Quadrennial Defense Review.
Very roughly speaking, there are two factions jockeying for control in the Pentagon. One thinks that the U.S. military is going to spend a big chunk of the next twenty years hunting down terrorists and stabilizing screwed-up states. The other believes that China has to be smacked down, before it bulks up to superpower status.
The first group gets the rhetoric. “[P]repar[ing] for wider asymmetric challenges” is one of the “fundamental imperatives for the Department of Defense.” We’re in the middle of a “Long War,” according to the QDR. Iraq and Afghanistan are just part of it.
There’s organizational and personnel help, to go along with the lofty words. The Combatant Commanders – the guys in charge today of the boots on the ground – will get more of a say in how future weapons are bought. The QDR boosts Special Operations Forces by 15% and “increase[s] the number of Special Forces Battalions by one-third.
U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) will establish the Marine Corps Special Operations Command. The Air Force will establish stand up an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Squadron under USSOCOM. The Navy will support a USSOCOM increase in SEAL Team manning and will develop a riverine warfare capability. The Department will also expand Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs units by 3,700 personnel, a 33% increase. Multipurpose Army and Marine Corps ground forces will increase their capabilities and capacity to conduct irregular warfare missions.
These changes are not insignificant. They’ll require billions to back them up. But the China-watchers, on the other hand, get the kind of gold-plated new hardware that costs tens, even hundreds, of billions to make. As Inside Defense notes, the QDR “leaves intact all of the military services’ most prized weapon system programs. In fact, some programs will see significant increases.
Many involved in the review believed at the outset that the QDR might call for a resource shift between the departments -- specifically from the Air Force and Navy to the Army -- that did not materialize.
The Air Force, which set as its highest goal for the QDR the protection of the F-22A fighter, managed to extend production two years beyond 2008, which means it can work [on] going beyond the planned 183-aircraft buy.
Similarly, the Navy in late November was granted permission to move ahead with its next-generation DD(X) destroyer program, which will consume a big chunk of the service’s shipbuilding account as the QDR-directed enhanced submarine procurement is set to kick in.
…As for the Army, the QDR confirms the service has protected its top priority, the Future Combat Systems program…
“What they’ve done, in effect, is say, ‘Yeah, Rummy, we’ll make all these promises. Of course, you’re not going to be around to hold us to them. In the meantime, we will sustain our programs and build program momentum with Congress and industry,’” said a source familiar with the QDR findings.
The China crowd also gets what looks to be some big-time new, as of yet undefined, weapons programs. That includes a new, long bomber of hypersonic drone that can conduct “global strike” missions against unruly states.
“The United States' experience in the Cold War still profoundly influences the way that the Department of Defense is organized and executes its mission,” the QDR notes. “But, the Cold War was a struggle between nation-states, requiring state-based responses to most political problems and kinetic responses to most military problems. The Department was optimized for conventional, large-scale warfighting against the regular, uniformed armed forces of hostile states… [Today] many of the United Slates' principal adversaries are informal networks that are less vulnerable to Cold War-Style approaches... Defeating unconventional enemies requires unconventional approaches.”
But it does not require, apparently, a wholesale change of direction. Terrorist-type threats will get some new attention. But the Defense Department isn’t about to optimize for that threat, the way it did for the Soviet Union. Big money will continue to be spent on fighter jets designed to duel with the Soviets and destroyers designed for large-scale ground assaults. Grunts on the ground won’t get much more than they do now. The war on terror may be “long.” But, apparently, it’s not important enough to make really big shifts.
UPDATE 3:56 PM: The QDR was "toned down by a year of deliberation and not a single signature weapon system has been terminated," ubiquituous military analyst Loren Thompson tells Defense News. “That tells you that Rumsfeld’s team is not so clear about what to do about this new environment."
UPDATE 01/24/06 10:36 AM: The WaPo puts the QDR on page one, and emphasizes the growing numbers of Special Forces. Meanwhile, the LA Times (via Laura) says the QDR's direction means that Iraq was a "one-off."
The U.S. military has long been accused of always planning to fight its last war. But as the Pentagon assesses threats to national security over the next four years, a major blueprint being completed in the shadow of the Iraq war will do largely the opposite...
For more than two years, Army officials have been fending off questions about whether they have enough troops to complete their mission in Iraq and racing to get armor plates bolted onto Humvees and supply trucks to defend against homemade bombs.
But in the Pentagon blueprint, officials are once again talking about a futuristic force of robots, networked computers and drone aircraft. And they are planning no significant shift in resources to bulk up ground forces strained by the lengthy occupation of Iraq...
Yet some experts say that failure to draw broader lessons from Iraq is dangerous, especially if the U.S. military suddenly faces a new war in a hot spot such as North Korea or Iran that it has no choice but to fight.
"There is a logical disconnect between the lessons learned from Iraq and the conclusions that we can live with a smaller ground force," said Michele Flournoy, a defense policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former top Pentagon official.
There are several decisions coming out of the QDR that are hard to square with what the Pentagon says about future challenges. For example, if the global war on terror really is a "long war" as the QDR report contends, why is the administration eliminating brigades from an overextended Army? And if mobility is so critical to military success, why is it proposing to shut down both the C-130J and C-17 lines -- the only airlifters in production?
Maybe it doesn't matter -- Rumsfeld will be gone soon, and Capitol Hill has ceased caring what he wants anyway. Congress will probably add money for the lost brigades and airlifters, just as it will reject other bad proposals like the idea of creating a monopoly for fighter engines. But with the clock ticking down on Donald Rumsfeld's tenure, it's a little hard to say what he has achieved in the way of a lasting, positive legacy.
UPDATE 3:24 PM: There's a nice little debate going on about this over at Kevin Drum's place.
Boeing: We Screwed Up, Give us $500 Mil
"When a child who is on trial for murdering his parents pleads for leniency on grounds that he is an orphan, we call that chutzpah," says Space News' Washington Aerospace Briefing. "When a U.S. defense contractor botches a program demands a huge termination fee when the contract is cancelled, we call that... standard operating procedure."
So no, we weren't completely shocked to hear that Boeing is seeking about $500 million from the National Reconnaissance Office in termination fees associated with the Future Imagery Architecture spy satellite program. The NRO cancelled the optical portion of Boeing's multi-billion dollar FIA contract last year after becoming fed up with the company's technical struggles and that lead to innumerable delays and soaring costs.
FIA was supposed to be “a constellation of satellites that would gather clearer and more-frequent images -- even at night and when there is a cloud cover -- of enemy military activity than current satellites can,” the Los Angeles Times notes. Originally scheduled to launch in 2005, at one point, FIA looked like it might become the “most expensive program in the history of the intelligence community,” according to Globalsecurity.org.
When Boeing won the FIA contract, back in 1999, it was something of a coup. As the Times observes, “Much of Boeing's space expertise was in making rockets to launch satellites and developing commercial telecommunication satellites. It had little experience manufacturing satellites with optical lenses that can take close-up pictures from space of objects on the ground.” That was Lockheed Martin’s area of expertise. “Boeing bid very aggressively even though it didn't understand the technology as well as Lockheed," the ubiquitous Loren Thompson told the LAT.
So it’s no surprise that Boeing started burning through cash and dropping deadlinesa, once FIA got underway. “As early as 2002, the government had to reprogramming of about $625 million [and possibly as much as $900 million] from other intelligence programs… to get the program back on schedule,” Globalsecurity.org says. “By the end of 2004 the House Intelligence Committee remained concerned about the viability and effectiveness of a future overhead architecture, given the apparent lack of a comprehensive architectural plan for the overhead system of systems, specifically in the area of imagery.”
By 2005 – after $10 billion on FIA, including about $4 or $5 billion in cost overruns – the government finally had enough, taking the project away from Boeing, and giving it to Lockheed.
Boeing's request for a half a B to make up for the lost work is big. But it's not totally unprecedented, Washington Aerospace Briefing says. The company is still arguing with the Pentagon over $2.3 billion for the A-12 stealth carrier aircraft program, cancelled in 1991.
(Big ups: AT, JS)
UPDATE 2:28 PM: AT points out that there were some interesting names associated with Boeing's controversial FIA win. In Boeing's '99 press release, we read:
Ed Nowinski, Boeing FIA Program Manager, stated, 'This was a very hard-fought competition and the win is the result of the total commitment of our team.'
MELBOURNE, Florida, August 5, 1996—Harris Corporation has named Ed Nowinski as vice president of Strategic Planning and Business Development for the company's Electronic Systems Sector.
Mr. Nowinski most recently was the director of imagery intelligence for the U.S. government's National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and director of development and engineering for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Mr. Nowinski joined the CIA in 1967 and rose rapidly to positions of increasing responsibility during his career with the CIA and NRO, including director of the Data Communications Group, deputy director of development and engineering, and director of systems engineering. During his government career, he was instrumental in establishing several of the country's premier intelligence collection systems.
Defense Budget Oinks
Everyone knows that there's pork in the defense budget bill -- hell, in every big bill that moves through Congress. But how exactly all those useless pet projects get crammed in there, that's been a mystery, at least to me. Over the last few days, long-time Senate staffer Winslow Wheeler has been pulling back the curtain in this triooftutorials on military pork.
It turns out that most military pork -- like the $1.6 million for “Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Activities” stuffed into the kitty for soldier pay and benefits -- doesn't actually appear in the main body of the bill at all. Instead, the offensive items are tucked inside the "'Joint Explanatory Statement' (JES) that accompanies the text of the bill as it moves through its final stages of congressional approval. Both the text of the bill in final form and the JES constitute what is called a 'conference report' on Capitol Hill," Wheeler explains.
The JES is especially important. Its ostensible purpose is to provide guidance to the executive branch, and the public, on Congress’ intent and rationale for the various provisions in the legislation. And, indeed, there is often some material that is explanatory. However, most of the document simply lists pork projects...
DOD [Department of Defense] is not permitted discretion in implementing the add-ons. For “congressional interest items,” DOD is specifically instructed that the amounts specified by Congress in the conference report, and its other reports, must be spent unless DOD specifically asks the appropriations committees for permission to change the amount in a “reprogramming” and the permission is granted. Such permission is rarely sought.
According to Wheeler, "there are 2,966 examples [or pork] costing about $11.1 billion" in the JES. Some are baldly offensive, like the $500,000 for the "Westchester County World Trade Center Memorial," or the $850,000 for the "Des Moines Memorial Park and Education Center." But most sound perfectly legitimate -- at least from their titles. Soldiers in the mountains of Afghanistan could very well use $4 million worth of “fleece insulated liners.” The “Walter Reed Amputee Center” might have a need for an extra $5.5 million, sure.
Regardless, Wheeler argues, they're still pork.
The real problem is that nobody knows the real merit of these and other earmarks, even when they have relevant and useful sounding names. For example, could the $5.5 million for the Walter Reed Amputee Center actually be for a new cafeteria there, or is it for proven-quality wounded veterans’ care? You are not likely to find a meaningful answer by reading the “Joint Explanatory Statement” for the 2006 DOD Appropriations Act or, for that matter, any other report from the House or Senate Appropriations Committee.
The real problem with “pork” is that no one knows whether it is good or bad. Virtually none of these congressional add-ons are put through a rigorous, even competent, review process by any objective entity...
In short, pork is not necessarily “bad stuff” crammed into the defense budget by Congress; it is unknown stuff. Its cost and need are only dimly known, if at all, and effectiveness compared to competitors is completely unexplored. The worst part of the pork process is that no one has established whether any specific earmark is junk or very much needed in even larger amounts.
Congressional add-ons are included in the defense budget, not because a case for them has been made, but because someone wants them.
So how does pork get stopped? A couple of speeches on the Senate floor -- even a scandal or two -- isn't going to help much. What's needed is a more fundamental change, Wheeler contends: Congressmen shouldn't be allowed to insert their pet projects into the defense budget any more. Not without "a written statement on the desirability of the earmark from the manager in DOD." And not without some independent financial review from the Congressional Budget Office.
Some, probably many, in Congress will oppose these suggestions; clearly they would subvert the intent of many members to steer government spending toward selected interests for purposes that may or may not advance national security. However, were there to be in Congress, especially the Senate, members who seek genuine reform, there are tools at their disposal to help them impose their will. Senate rules have been specifically designed to assist them in this regard; all that is needed is the will to do so.
It would likely not be a pretty fight, but it would definitely be worth watching. And it would help the country separate the real reformers from the rest.
"Q Branch's" Stock Market Shenanigans
This post has everything, folks:
* Killer robots!
* Cheeky Brits!
* Cute marine mammals!
* Shady government officials!
* Insider trading!
* Those Trilateral Freemasons over at the Carlyle Group!
* Plus, a gratuitous reference to James Bond!
Here's the scoop: Back in 2001, the UK Ministry of Defence decided to split its research and development division into two parts. The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, (Dstl) would remain as the British military's in-house tinkerers and geeks. The other half, dubbed Qinetiq, would become a private company, focusing on technologies that could be used both by the commercial and the government markets -- the war-makers, as well as the money-makers. It's as if James Bond's "Q Branch" decided to start selling jet packs to Silicon Valley, as well as 007.
But one doesn't simply move from the civil service to the boardroom. To help with the transition, Her Majesty's government picked a pack of corporate financiers. Not just any pack, mind you. But the boogeyman of the conspiracy-minded everywhere: the Carlyle Group. That's right, the former (?) professional lair of illuminati like James Baker and John Major and George H.W. Bush. It bought about a third of the new company.
Under Carlyle's wing, Qinetiq went on a buying spree. One acquisition in particular should be familiar to Defense Techies: Foster-Miller, maker of the Talon robot. That's the squat, treaded machine used by U.S. bomb squads throughout Iraq. The Army now is trying to strap a machine gun or a grenade launcher onto the 3-foot tall 'bot, and send it into the warzone. The armed Talon would probably be in Iraq by now -- if only it could have pass its safety tests.
Qinetiq's purchase meant that, in a sense, the British Ministry of Defence now owned a part of America's robot arsenal. That's because "the MoD retains a Special Share in QinetiQ to ensure that the UK's defence and security interests are protected," according to the company's website. "Robust safeguards also exist to prevent conflicts of interest and to ensure that the Government procurement process' integrity is not compromised."
Those safeguards are being put to the test, now that the Carlyle Group has decided to take Qinetiq public, on the London Stock Exchange. The estimated price: £1.1billion. But the February 15th. event won't be some traditional IPO. Qinetiq shares won't be available to individual investors. Instead, the firm will only be selling stock to the biggest of the big financial firms.
More than a few small investors are pissed. They figure, as taxpayers, they've indirectly poured money into Qinetiq. Why shouldn't they be able to reap the benefits? Spurred on by the Daily Telegraph, over a thousand investors are demanding to buy in. Leaders of the London Stock Exchange are backing the effort. So is the white collar union representing 10,000 QinetiQ employees.
That's not surprising, considering more than 99 percent of the staff can't get in on the IPO. But a few on the tippity-top can. And they are slated to cash in, big. Qinetiq finance director Graham Love is supposed to make off with £18 million, "on an initial outlay of just over £100,000," according to IT Week. "Sir John Chisholm, executive chairman and former chief executive, is set to make more than £20 million from his stake, for which he paid £129,000," notes the Times of London.
Amazing, though, the talk of financial shenanigans isn't the worst of Qinetiq's press in recent days. Remember that cute little whale that swam up the Thames River, and then tragically died? Well, folks are accusing Qinetiq of killing it.
Marine scientists and animal welfare groups believe that navy sonar may have disorientated the whale. Marine acoustics experts supported local residents on the north coast of Kent in blaming huge explosions from a site operated by the defence contractor QinetiQ.
That's gotta hurt.
UPDATE 10:50 AM: Speaking of zany British security-types, what the heck is up with the UK's Russian spooks and their spy rock?!?!?
B-52s Axed for More Raptors
Air Force chiefs want their new stealth fighters, bad -- so bad, they're willing to scrap some of their best-performing planes early, in order to free up cash for their controversial, next-generation jet.
Inside Defense reports that "nearly half the B-52 bomber force and the full U-2 spy plane and F-117 stealth fighter fleets" will be retired ahead of schedule, under a Pentagon budget plan endorsed by the Air Force. It's part of "a bid to save $16.4 $2.6 billion and boost spending" for the F-22 Raptor program.
About a year ago, a similar Pentagon "Program Budget Decision," or PBD, cut $10 billion out of the F-22's budget. Originally designed to duel with Soviet fighters, the Raptor seemed to be a plane without a mission; the Air Force touted the F-22 as everything from a cargo lifter to an IED-stopper. A fleet of 277 Raptors was downsized to 179 -- despite a massive PR campaign from the Air Force.
This PDB, Inside Defense notes, "would allow the Air Force to inject an additional $1 billion into its prized F-22A program," and add a grand total of four planes to the Raptor roster.
Cuts to the long-range B-52 bomber fleet would reduce the inventory from 94 aircraft to 56... The Air Force is banking on $4.6 billion in savings with this early retirement: $680 million in the procurement accounts and $3.9 billion in personnel reductions associated with a smaller B-52 fleet...
The Pentagon also plans to terminate the B-52 Stand-off Jammer System, an electronic attack capability, saving $1.1 billion across the five-year spending plan, according to the PBD.
Convincing Congress to go along won't be easy, however.
Similar attempts in recent years -- including moves to stand down B-1B bombers, KC-135E aerial refueling aircraft, and the F-117 -- have met stiff resistance on Capitol Hill. But this time around, the Pentagon appears to be taking a new approach in proposing to retire three programs at once.
“Now they’re going for the whole enchilada,” Christopher Bolkcom, an aviation expert at the Congressional Research Service, said. “You can see that they seem to be launching a frontal assault.”
UPDATE 12:36 PM EST: "Privately, the Air Force sold the B-52 SOJ [stand-off jammer] on the merits of the very large antennas" that would jam the most dangerous enemy radar, Bolkcom tells Defense News. "If the B-52 is replaced with a smaller jamming platform, one may wonder how these frequencies will now be jammed, or whether the original argument for the B-52 was valid."
UPDATE 2:42 PM EST: "Remember, this is the same Air Force that tired everything it could to retire the A-10s early," Murdoc reminds us. "What is it about these guys that drives them to retire the most effective planes in the inventory for expensive new fighters?"
Pentagon Budget: Read This Blog
News and rumors about the Pentagon's budget plans are pouring out of the Defense Department at a mile a minute. So our buddies over at Inside Defense have launched a Budget Blog, so folks can stay on top of the action. And, unlike the rest of Inside Defense, the blog is free. Check it out.
Troops Cut, Weapons Safe?
A few weeks back, it looked like the Pentagon really might go after some of its biggest, fattest weapons programs with an axe. Now, that's looking less likely.
In fact, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Air Force is "looking to secure much of its savings by cutting active and reserve forces, instead of slashing weapons purchases."
To stay within its expected budget, the Air Force is planning to cut at least 30,000, and perhaps as many as 40,000, uniformed personnel, civilians and contractor-support staff through fiscal 2011, military officials said...
The Army, which is bearing more of the burden of the war in Iraq, doesn't envision similar personnel cuts, but is exploring a modest slowdown in its plans for troop growth as it grapples with a recruiting shortfall... The Army's current plan is to expand to 43 combat brigades from 33 by the end of 2007. The service, however, is considering either postponing or forgoing the addition of one of those 5,000-soldier brigades next year. It also could cut as many as three National Guard brigades from a planned force of 34 combat brigades, said an Army official involved in preparing the budget...
The shift is good news for the nation's major defense contractors, which appear to have dodged major cutbacks in big-ticket weapons purchases... two of the costliest future weapons systems in Mr. England's sights, the Air Force's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter made by Lockheed and the Navy's DDX destroyer made by Northrop and General Dynamics Corp., have escaped the guillotine in this budget cycle. The Army's marquee modernization program, called Future Combat Systems and led by Boeing, also appears set to be spared from another major restructuring.
A system of missile-warning satellites being built by Lockheed, years late and at a cost of more than three times as much as its initial $3 billion budget, once again is likely to survive largely intact, according to Air Force and industry officials familiar with the details. The Air Force appears ready to tell Congress that it believes management shortcomings have been corrected, the technology is headed down the right path and there isn't any viable alternative to pushing ahead with development.
But before Cunningham got cozy with the likes of shady security analysis firm MZM, Inc. and dodgy digital documenter ADCS Inc., the guy was a hero -- the first American fighter ace of the Vietnam War, shooting down five Russian MiGs. He went on to become an instructor at the Navy's "Top Gun" school, and then to Congress, where he got deeply involved with military matters. Especially matters with wings and big price tags.
When Pentagon chiefs wanted to cut $10 billion or so from the Cold War-inspired, $40 billion F-22 Raptor jet, Cunningham "lectured" Rumsfeld that "no airplane in the world can touch the F-22,'" according to Defense News. "Other U.S. pilots 'are going to die 95 percent of the time' if they fight [new] Russian Su-30s and Su-37s [fighter jets]."
Many former Top Gun graduates, like former Marine Gen. Tom Wilkerson, aren't so sure. Earlier this year, he told me that the days of dogfights were over, basically, and that "maybe you don't need any fighter pilots at all." Let's just say he wasn't impressed with the Raptor rationale.
But credit Cunningham with being consistent. He cited the same 95% death rate back in 2000, when he was pushing his colleagues to bankroll the AIM-9X advanced air-to-air missile and Boeing's "look-and-shoot" Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System. "We needed those five years ago," he told Defense Daily. The Su-30s and Su-37s "have a helmet-mounted site that they can turn their head and lock you up, and that missile will make the corner. Ours won't."
A year later -- before 9/11, before the Predator drone became so famously successful over Afghanistan -- Cunningham was agitating for Congress to pay for the development of the next-generation "Predator B" unmanned spy plane. The Air Force in March announced that it would be buying 144 more of the drones over the next five years, for a $5.7 billion.
THERE'S MORE: Will someone please explain why the Bush administration "hired Duke-briber "MZM, a 'defense and intelligence firm,' to buy office furniture for the White House?
The Army's Venture Captialists
Okay. Raise your hand if you knew the Army had a venture capital group. I sure as hell didn't.
OnPoint Technologies was founded in 2002, mostly to kick-start the mobile power sector. Fully-loaded soldiers today are often forced to carry tens of pounds of batteries in their ruck sacks. And the situation is only set to get worse, as more electronics are added to the individual G.I.'s arsenal. So OnPoint has sunk cash into stuff like rechargable batteries and next-gen solar cells.
But don't get too attached to OnPoint, now that you've found out about it. To help pay for Katrina aid, the President wants Congress to take $2.3 billion out of "Download lower-priority federal programs and excess funds." That includes "$14 million in unobligated balances" from OnPoint.
"As of the end of FY 2005, OnPoint had more than $30 million in unused balances," the President's report notes. "The allocation of additional funds to OnPoint is not a high priority and rescinding these funds will have minimal impact on the program."
THERE'S MORE: File this under "Left Hand, Right Hand." OnPoint's "unobligated" $14 million? The Army gave it to the fund at the end of July, Inside Defense notes. Here's what OnPoint expects to see from its investments:
By January, for example, OnPoint expects a “state of charge” capability, now unavailable to the Army, to make it to the field, allowing soldiers to know how much power is left in a battery. Eighteen months after that, Rottenberg expects better, higher-energy batteries to be available, allowing soldiers to carry fewer batteries -- two instead of four for example -- that might weigh a kilogram each. And longer term, he said, the service could see the introduction of fuel cells, allowing soldiers to rely on small cartridges instead of bulky batteries.
Iran's Arsenal for Sale
Grade-B dictators, guerilla chieftains: you are in luck. You've been jonesing to give your troops the latest, greatest gear. But those Lockheed prices? Oy! Even if the Americans let the big contractors sell to you, you'd have to start mortgaging palaces to come up with the cash.
The Tehran-based firm "was established in 1972 and presently is the major producer of electronic systems and products in Iran," according to its website. "The foundation of Iran Electronics Industries took place with the help of some reputable international companies like and at the time being has the co-operation of some well-known companies like L.G., Acer, Deawoo, Kenwood, Sagem, Kyodo, NEC… etc."
"To keep pace with the frontrunners of military technology, IEI has launched ambitious campaigns with focus on modern management methods as well as research and development," the site promises. They've got six subsidiaries, developing everything from a "super data base." to semiconductors. "Pinning its hopes to the six mentioned subsidiaries [and] aggressive managers... IEI is aiming for stronger positions in both regional and global markets."
Army Threatens Retirements to Cut Budget
Acting deputy defense secretary Gordon England is telling the Army to get ready to cut $11.7 billion from its budget over the next several years, Inside Defense is reporting.
But instead of paring back its weapons systems or its massive modernization efforts, the Army is threatening to reduce the number of soldiers in the service.
In a highly unusual development, the Army has classified how it would pay its portion of the England-directed cuts. However, sources familiar with the recommendation say the ground service has turned not to its procurement accounts to pay its share. Instead, the Army -- already stretched thin by current deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan -- is proposing reductions to its force structure, these sources said.
“It’s a gold watch is what it is,” said one industry official who believes the Army is fully aware that the Office of the Secretary of Defense would be loath to reduce the size of the service. “It’s causing quite some perturbations,” said the official.
$1.2 Bil in Guard Gear, Gone
Oy. Somehow I missed this bit of good news from last week: "The Army National Guard estimates that its units left over 64,000 items valued at over $1.2 billion overseas. However, the Army cannot account for over half of these items and does not have a plan to replace them," the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigatory arm, said in a report last week.
The Army talking point for a while now has been that National Guard and Reserve units get treated just as well as regular Joes. And, in many cases, that's true. But it's hard to imagine active duty units being allowed to piss away $600 million worth of trucks and radios and NVGs. According to the GAO, guard units had anywhere from 65 to 79 percent of their "required war-time items" before 2001. These days, "nondeployed Guard units now have only about one-third of the equipment they need for their overseas missions, which hampers their ability to prepare for future missions and conduct domestic operations."
Obviously, the priority has got to be put on the fellas in the field. But, still. The guard obviously has some pretty serious responsibilities at home. And given how often these guys are deploying, they need to be able to train to fight.
Now, the Pentagon is "looking to cut between $13 billion and $15 billion from the U.S. Department of Defense’s 2007 budget," Defense News notes. And after all those billions spent on Katrina and on another year in Iraq, there are indications that the men in uniform might be a little less reluctant about paring back their budgets this time around.
An internal e-mail dated Oct. 11 indicates Vice Adm. Mark Fitzgerald, commander of 2nd Fleet, proposed cuts to those programs in a discussion with fleet admirals about the endgame of the FY-07 program review. Fitzgerald, a former head of the Navy’s aviation requirements office, is but one of many voices shaping the budget. Regardless of whether his ideas are adopted, the e-mail obtained by Inside the Navy reflects the kinds of high-stakes choices that admirals and generals are discussing in private.
“As we look at money vs capability, we clearly cannot afford all these new toys and maintain our current capability,” Fitzgerald writes.
SoCom Scandal
"Faced with a widening bribery scandal, officials at Special Operations Command said Friday they would review all contracts to determine if a kickback scheme left the nation's secret military commandos with inferior war-fighting equipment," according to the St. Petersburg Times.
THERE'S MORE: The Tampa Tribune notes that Rummy is telling Special Forces to "be harder on terror."
"Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley...told a Washington audience it might be time to start 'killing' programs with cost overruns and delays," Reuters reports, hopping on Inside Defense's coverage.
Cuts to major weapons programs could be "well in excess" of $10 billion just for fiscal year 2007, said Loren Thompson of the Virginia-based Lexington Institute, predicting that fighter jets and shipbuilding were particularly vulnerable to cuts...
A Pentagon team on October 5 recommended several steps, such as canceling the DD(X) destroyer being developed by Northrop Grumman Corp.; cutting tactical air forces by nearly a third; further delaying the Army's Future Combat Systems program, led by Boeing Co.; building more fast sealift ships and submarines; and developing a new long-range bomber, according to sources familiar with the briefing.
"The administration is determined to use the need for budget cuts to enforce its investment priorities," Thompson said, predicting the Pentagon would cut Cold War programs such as airplanes, ships and ground vehicles, while maintaining funds for information networks, surveillance systems, communications and satellite programs.
Lawmakers' priorities were exactly opposite, he said, which could signal a big pending fight over the 2007 budget.
Gen. Moseley sent some mixed signals himself, in his talk. He discussed the need to wiping out programs that are "taking too long" and "keep growing and growing and growing and growing." But when Inside Defense asked him if that meant that "Space Radar" -- the Air Force's long-delayed, mega-bloated, all-seeing eye-in-the-sky -- project -- might be put to sleep, "Moseley firmly responded: 'No.'"
THERE'S MORE: "U.S. military services are drafting worst-case budget plans in anticipation of White House orders to slash many billions of dollars from defense spending in coming years," Defense News says.
As the Pentagon awaits mid-November budget guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), services are mapping cut options of more than $10 billion across their six-year spending plans. Sources said the brunt will be borne by the defense budget’s largest discretionary accounts: procurement and research and development, which totaled $143.8 billion in the fiscal 2005 budget request.
Crooked Corp Gets Nuke Controls
I helped run a small business in the mid-90s. And, back then, if someone sold me shoddy supplies -- and then had the stones to lie about it -- I would make damn sure never to do business with the bastard again.
The U.S. military works under a different set of criteria, however. Companies found to be crooked one day are given giant contracts the next. Sometimes this is unavoidable -- like when there's only one firm with has the expertise to tackle a particular task. But more often, it seems, the Pentagon goes out of its way to reward business that screw them over.
Take this story from Defense Industry Daily, for example:
In April 2005, L-3 Communications subsidiary Interstate Electronics Corp. in Anaheim, CA was placed under criminal investigation for providing faulty parts to the CSEL [Combat Survivor/Evader Locator] search and rescue GPS/ beacon/ communicators used by US aviators, special forces teams, et. al. - and concealing test failures.
So, naturally, they've just been awarded a contract to support the test
instrumentation hardware for most of America's nuclear missile fleet,
and all of Britain's.
I've been covering military matters for four years, now. And items like this still leave me slack-jawed. Can someone please explain how these deals are allowed to go down?
Murky Future = Cash Conundrum
We've got a war or two going on. So, obviously, the Defense Department's budget is going to grow. But there's an equally-important reason for the Pentagon's bottom line bloat, Defense News' Greg Grant reports.
The Army could find itself in a simultaneous fight against lightly armed guerrillas, an enemy’s armored forces or terrorists and must prepare to defeat all three...
Lt. Gen. Joseph Yakovac, the Army’s acquisition chief... said it was difficult to plan and make choices in the absence of a clearly identifiable threat and an ambiguous and uncertain strategic environment.
From a weapons and equipment standpoint, “what is not important? Nobody has articulated that. So I don’t know how to prepare for that without having the resources, and equipping to account for all of those contingencies,” he said. Now, the Army must be outfitted to defeat a wider variety of threats than at any time in its history.
Showdown
The Hill has an interesting story today on the budget battles brewing in Congress. House Budget Committe Chairman Jim Nussle, it seems, wants lawmakers to enforce an "across-the-board 2 percent cut to all discretionary spending bills, including those for defense and homeland security.
As we've been discussing this week, the effects of Hurricane Katrina, long commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan and other pressure are leading many analysts to predict big defense cuts just as the Pentagon wraps up its four-year review of defense strategy, spending and strength.
But check out this reaction:
Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, flatly rejected the idea of a 2 percent across-the-board cut yesterday when asked about it by reporters.
“There’s not room,” Stevens said. “I’m going to oppose it.”
What else will he and his colleagues oppose?
-- Posted by Dan Dupont
Command Center
It's a big day at the Pentagon.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is gathering all his combatant commanders -- the four-star leaders of the major commands, like NORTHCOM, which handles homeland defense, and CENTCOM, which runs the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. They get together a few times a year so Rumsfeld can hear from the guys in the field about what they really need, which doesn't always jibe with what the service chiefs want.
The focus of today's meeting is that Quadrennial Defense Review we've been touching on this week.
The QDR is expected to lead to a significant number of changes, all of which will have budgetary implications. Some believe big cuts are coming, but even if major programs are not killed, there will be major impacts across the board.
And today, the Pentagon's QDR folks will explain some of those proposed impacts to the combatant commanders.
Late last December, in a move that spawned headlines around the world, the Pentagon handed down $30 billion in budget cuts to a wide range of programs, including some of the military's biggest -- the F/A-22 Raptor among them.
Some sage Pentagon watchers noted at the time that the cuts weren't likely to stick, and, indeed, nine months later some have not. The C-130J cargo plane was allegedly terminated, but that kill didn't last three months. And the Joint Common Missile was quashed in the December budget decision but looks almost certain to live, thanks to Congress.
Many of those cuts weren't slated to come due for many years, either. But as the Pentagon wraps up its Quadrennial Defense Review and prepares its new defense budget, both of which are due to Congress early next year, whispers about real, deep and lasting cuts are growing more audible.
Ken Krieg, the new Pentagon acquisition chief, gave a speech last month that suggested those whispers might soon lead to screams.
As my colleague Jason Sherman reported, Krieg "served notice to the defense industry that cuts to major programs are coming as the Pentagon tries to find money to invest in new capabilities deemed necessary for a wider range of challenges the military must be prepared to handle."
"Consider how you and your organizations will react to the choices that we have to make in the future,” Krieg said Sept. 21 at a National Defense Industry Association luncheon.
He invoked President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings of a military-industrial complex and cited four examples of efforts to terminate weapons programs -- two of which, he said, were thwarted by that military-industrial complex.
Krieg's appeal to industry makes sense -- he needs the defense companies to accede to the cuts to help the Pentagon make the case for program kills in the service of a broader defense agenda. Congress doesn't often agree to kill anything of size -- just ask Dick Cheney. (One of those four programs mentioned by Krieg was the V-22, just approved for production more than 15 years after Cheney killed it.)
Whether any proposed cuts will be sustained, of course, is anyone's guess. Hurricane Katrina and other budget pressures may make cuts inevitable, but there's no guarantee the Pentagon's choices -- the Joint Strike Fighter? -- won't be propped up or stretched out while other efforts with less support in Congress are scratched.
THERE'S MORE: Expect to see more stories like this one in the coming weeks as Quadrennial Defense Review decisions shake out and the 2007 budget shapes up.
-- Posted by Dan Dupont
Pentagon Weasels on Armor Payback
Everyone in uniform knows that life ain't fair -- that, sooner or later, the government they're trying to defend is going to mess with them, somehow. Set up roadblocks. Make their mission harder. Treat them less than fairly. It'd be crazy to expect anything less from a bureaucracy as giant and disjointed as the Defense Department. So putting up with B.S. just another part of handling the job.
Soldiers and their parents are still spending hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for armor they say the military won’t provide. One U.S. senator said Wednesday he will try again to force the Pentagon to obey the reimbursement law it opposed from the outset and has so far not implemented...
“Your expectation is that when you are sent to war, that our government does everything they can do to protect the lives of our people, and anything less than that is not good enough,” said a former Marine who spent nearly $1,000 two weeks ago to buy lower-body armor for his son, a Marine serving in Fallujah.
The father asked that he be identified only by his first name — Gordon — because he is afraid of retribution against his son.
“I wouldn’t have cared if it cost us $10,000 to protect our son, I would do it,” said Gordon. “But I think the U.S. has an obligation to make sure they have this equipment and to reimburse for it. I just don’t support Donald Rumsfeld’s idea of going to war with what you have, not what you want. You go to war prepared, and you don’t go to war until you are prepared.”
Under the law passed by Congress last October, the Defense Department had until Feb. 25 to develop regulations for the reimbursement, which is limited to $1,100 per item. Pentagon officials opposed the reimbursement idea, calling it “an unmanageable precedent that will saddle the DOD with an open-ended financial burden.”
So wait, let me get this straight: reimbursing 11 Bravos for their body armor is somehow "unmanageable." But sinking hundreds of billions into a flailing, bloated modernization project that changes requirements and deadlines every couple of months, that's perfectly OK? No, wrong. Helping soldiers and marines fight today's war isn't a "burden." It should be a priority. The priority.
The Army's Future Combat Systems overhaul is FUBAR, we all know. But it's just the latest in a long line of big-ticket Pentagon programs to burn cash and squander expectations.
So it there any way for the Defense Department to buy next-gen gear without picking taxpayers' pockets and leaving soldiers ass-out? Pentagon insider Dave has a few new rules on his blog, Garfield Ridge.
-- It has to be cheap...
-- Only one, maybe two, leap-ahead technologies allowed per program. The rest of the program has to rely on stuff we've already done before...
-- Congress must not care about it. If it hates it, it will cut it and ruin program stability, particularly in the early years where it's needed most. If it loves it, it'll add unneeded money and unrealistic demands on the program. The best programs are always the ones that Congress keeps their noses out of.
-- The program must be small enough to fail.
That last one is probably the most important one of all.
Most of the Pentagon's acquisition trouble in recent years has occurred on programs that are quite simply too big to fail. Either the requirement is one that can't be ignored, thus forcing the development program into a fixed schedule -- never a good idea to do this stuff on a deadline -- or the program reaches a point where so much money has been spent on it that in the event of failure no one wants to cut their losses and try something new. The moment the contractor smells fear on the part of the Pentagon, once it knows no one in the Building has the guts to cancel the program as it goes south, that's when the Pentagon takes it in the wazoo from industry, often willingly.
FCS, for all its necessary wisdom -- after all, it makes no sense to modernize the Army one little piece at a time -- FCS is precisely one of the complex systems that the Pentagon can't seem to run right anymore, if it ever could.
There was traffic on the highway, on my way to New London, Connecticut last Thursday. And as I sat on I-95, I couldn't help but think that there wouldn't be many cars there for long.
The Pentagon had decided to close the area's big employer, the Naval Sumbarine Base New London. And what the Pentagon wants, the Base Closure and Realignment Commission (BRAC) usually delivers.
But not this time.
"In what, in my view, is a landslide victory for maintaining American sea power, the BRAC Commission voted 7 to 1 (with 1 recusal) in favor of preserving Naval Submarine Base New London," notes Joe Buff, the author and undersea commentator, who's been a vocal opponent of the proposed closing.
Naval Submarine Base New London can realistically claim to be the Submarine Capital of the World. The training facilities there are state of the art, covering almost every conceivable skill a submariner needs to survive at sea and do his job. The nuclear-qualified waterfrontage at the Base, if closed, could never be regained elsewhere. Groton is the East Coast base nearest to the shortest and most covert route to the Pacific, which goes under the Arctic ice cap -- a faster route to North Korea than the subs based in San Diego, in fact. And though details are highly classified, submarines are definitely "bringing home the bacon" in the Global War on Terror. So this is a terrible time to be cutting back on their facilities or disrupting their operational flow.
The vote wrapped up a hard-fought battle that lasted all summer, becoming at times surprisingly bitter and personal. The outcome was no foregone conclusion, either. Despite strong counter-arguments from a group of retired admirals including three former CNOs, plus almost every New England politician from either party, not to mention community leaders and thousands of private citizens, the Pentagon remained insistent that both facilities be shuttered... The debate raged on until the final moments before the vote tally was taken live on C-SPAN 2, with a Department of Defense spokesman saying that New London met all the formal criteria for closure, while someone from the Government Accountability Office firmly stated quite the opposite -- and some Commissioners had pointed words of their own.
While many BRACtivists can now breath a sigh of relief that crucial national security assets, and related jobs, will be preserved, troubling questions do remain. The biggest one, in my mind, is what to make of senior DOD and Navy leaders who, despite admonishments to the contrary from many quarters of the nation, remained so fixated on a narrow view of the Global War on Terror in isolation, and so blind to the vital importance of robust undersea warfare to safeguard our country's future. Mr. Rumsfeld, in particular, must be fuming -- he had a lot of credibility invested in pushing through the closure list unchanged. The fight over an adequately-sized submarine force, especially given the rising threat of China, will undoubtedly continue, and given the ways of the Beltway will almost certainly now escalate.
DARPATech 2005 and Tech Leadership
Every year DARPA has its own annual gathering of the clans – DARPATech. This one is the 24th, scheduled for the week of August 9 in Anaheim. The theme for 2005 (and for 2004) is “Bridge the Gap.” The gap is the difference between what U.S. force can do today and the technological possibilities for the future warfighter. DARPATech includes an overview of each program. The link below goes to the public slides from DARPATech 2004. It’s a quick, easy way to see what DOD is up to in technology.
The issue that DARPA had to face this year is whether it is not doing enough on the “R” side of R&D, particularly in basic research. There were hearings on this in Congress (prompted by a New York Times story) where DARPA’s Director, Anthony Tether, defended DOD spending on basic research. DARPA gots $3 billion in 2004 and put a good hunk of it into basic research that could have security payoffs down the road.
The problem is not with DARPA, but with the sense of unease felt by many people as to whether the U.S. is spending enough on research to ensure its long-term security. Some of this is prompted by China and its commitment to R&D, some of it is from the concern created by the long (and largely fruitless) public debate over the alleged decline of education in the U.S. and some comes from the anxiety over globalization and the state of manufacturing in the U.S.
The U.S. spends more than other nations on R&D, but the pressures on this spending have been to focus on the life sciences and on development, rather than basic research. Basic research in phsyics, math, IT and other 'hard sciences are the most useful for military purposes, but the benefits may take years to arrive. Physicists started talking about nanotechnology in the 1950s; products didn’t begin to show up forty years later. Funding for these areas has either fallen or been flat for years.
The bottom line is that while the U.S. has done more than other countries to make scientific research and technological leadership one of the pillars of its military strength, we may not be making the investments needed to keep this pillar strong. The bumper sticker for this problem is: the country with the most physicists wins. It’s hard to increase funding, however, in a year of big deficits and an active war.
Congress has started to worry about technological strength and has asked the National Academy to look at how the U.S. can maintain its leadership – its study starts in August and is supposed to be done before the end of the year.
Over at Arms Control Wonk, I summarized a couple of posts by blogger and export control guru Scott Gearity about the growing liklihood that the Commerce Department will issue expanded export controls for trade with China.
Some folks in the Bush Administration are so serious about cutting off arms exports to China that they are willing to take on Israel.
That is a brave move in American politics.
Yuval Steinitz (right), chairman of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) Foreign and Defense Committee, tellsArms Control Today that "very soon [the US and Israel] are going to agree on a procedure with regard to Israeli exports to China."
You may remember an ugly dust-up between between Washington and Tel Aviv a few years back when the latter tried to sell an AWACS-like PHALCON radar to China.
The controversy flared up last year, after Israel proposed upgrading some Harpy UAVs it sold to China (above, big) in the 1990s with U.S. approval. Israel has canceled this deal, too ... but not before lots of Tel Aviv's friends in Washington turned downright nasty. The ever-charming Danielle Pletka called the deal "disgraceful" and "a situation where Israel acts like France."
Them's fightin' words.
The Defense Department was so pissed about these deals that they dumped Israel from the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program. You'd be forgiven for missing the story because only Brian Bender at the Boston Globe and blogger Laura Rozen seemed to give this story any love.
Anyway, Israel got the message. Scott Wilson at the WaPoreports (via Ha'aretz):
Israel will sign a memorandum of understanding with the Pentagon that will give U.S. officials some discretion over the terms of future Israeli arms exports. Israeli officials characterized the memorandum as a set of guidelines governing future transactions, including those in which the United States and Israel are competing.
You try living on a measly $160 billion a year. The Army can't, apparently. Despite a truly massive annual budget, beefed up by "supplemental" checks to pay for the war, "the Army still will come up $1.6 billion short in its operation and maintenance accounts by the end of September," Inside Defense reports.
Lt. Gen. Jerry Sinn... traced the problem to two different sources: first, an $800 million reprogramming action used to purchase communications and electronics equipment, and second, another $800 million used to bolster the service's recruiting and retention efforts that have flagged since the beginning of the year.
In order to dig itself out of the $1.6 billion hole, the service will look to Congress, or wait to use money in the first weeks of the next fiscal year...
"You would think that with that incredible amount of money, that in the waning days of this [fiscal year], we’d be in great shape. The answer is we are not," Sinn said.
But what's the incentive for financial discipline, if you can always ask -- and receive -- more cash from the Hill?
Pentagon Burns Cash
Eric is right: this story in the Times today, about massive cost overruns in Pentagon weapons programs, is "something of an evergreen." And no, the article doesn't add many branches to the tree.
But still, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars going to waste here. We're talking putting the future of the American military at risk. Isn't that a subject that could use some repeating?
The Pentagon has more than 80 major new weapons systems under development, which is "a lot more programs than we can afford," a senior Air Force official, Blaise J. Durante, said. Their combined cost, already $300 billion over budget, is $1.47 trillion and climbing...
In interviews and public testimony, military leaders, arms makers and government auditors generally agreed on why the nation's arsenal costs so much.
They said the military conjures up dream weapons, like the Extended Range Guided Munition... It sets immensely expensive technological requirements that are far beyond the state of the art of war, weapons executives say. Officials at the handful of major military contractors cross their fingers and promise to fulfill those visions.
Almost no one flatly rejects the wish list for weapons and requirements. The military adds new technologies to many weapons already under development. Those systems add complexity and weight, which add costs to planes, ships and tanks.
Military officials routinely understate the anticipated costs of weapons... When costs rise far beyond the promised ceilings... almost no one takes responsibility.
Training Cuts: Ex-Pilots React
Former Navy F/A-18 pilot Harry Hirschman is disgusted by the Air Force's decision to drastically cut back on training time for fighter jocks.
"There's a lot of gamesmanship that goes into the training and readiness numbers. But you can't game the number of hours each pilot gets to fly," he tells Defense Tech.
In the Navy, it took at least 32 hours per month to even come close to full combat readiness. And that needs to be maintained for several months per squadron per pilot in order to be able to get the myriad types of training in. It's impossible to be 100% efficient on the training too, because senior pilots end up repeating certain types of sorties with junior pilots in order to move them along the learning curve.
A cut like the one described below will hurt across the board because it's so deep. Squadrons will give as much time to the junior pilots as they can in order to get them up to a minimum level of competence and safety but they won't be able to do it all because they'll have to send senior guys along to teach. It's a very difficult situation for a squadron commander and training officer.
But then, there may be some gamesmanship in what the Air Force is doing. By cutting so dramatically into something that defense watchers know will impact combat readiness, they may be hoping for a reprieve.
"The irony is the savings projected are a pittance," adds retired Gen. Tom Wilkerson, who logged over 3,000 hours in the front seats of F-4s and F/A-18s. "What is $272 million against one F-22 [stealth fighter] purchase?"
Air Combat Command (ACC), the primary provider of combat airpower, is cutting 32,000 flying hours to help compensate for its $825 million operations and maintenance shortfall.
The cuts come as Air Force aircrews are heavily worked, flying missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and over some U.S. cities in an attempt to prevent another terrorist attack.
"Starting early this summer, units may have aviators unable to get required training to maintain full combat-ready status," Col. Jim Dunn, deputy director of flight operations for ACC, said in a written statement. "Overall effectiveness will become a growing challenge."
With this cut, the command now has 21,000 flying hours left of the original 53,000-plus hours programmed for the rest of this fiscal year -- a 60 percent reduction...
Retired Gen. Hal Hornburg, former ACC commander, said the cuts are "a big deal" and show the military's grim financial situation.
"They're not cutting fat, they're cutting to the bone," Hornburg said, noting the Pentagon has taken large sums of money away from the Air Force to pay for the Army in Iraq.
Reducing flying hours will free up about $272 million, not quite a third of the command's shortfall, said Col. Dave Goossens, ACC comptroller.
This is bad news -- another sign of how the Iraq war is slowly grinding down American military readiness. But are times really that tight at the Air Force? I mean, if the generals there wanted to save $272 million, couldn't they just take a F-22 Raptor or two out of the budget, instead of staging a giant PR campaign for the dubious stealth jet? Is an extra fighter plane that much more important than every pilot's training time?
And how's this for poor choices: two of the only groups not affected by the flight-time cuts... are the "Raptor squadron [and] the Thunderbird aerial demonstration team," says Defense News.
Buying Regs Gumming Up IED Fight
Until American military chiefs start thinking and maneuvering faster than the guerillas they are fighting, this insurgency is never going to put fully under control. Pentagon-funded researchers are building new technologies to help the fight in Iraq. But the Defense Department is buying the goods with a "slow-moving 20th-century procurement system built for a different kind of enemy," the Wall Street Journal notes.
Consider the case of the "jammer," a device about the size of a breadbox that blocks radio waves emitted from remote-control devices that rebels use to detonate roadside bombs.
Last summer TMC Design Inc. signed a contract with the Army to deliver 845 "Warlock-S" jammers, built to interfere with certain explosion-triggering signals. [These appear to be different from the Warlock Red and Green jammers we've mentionedbefore -- ed.] ...
When insurgents found a way around TMC's jammer, TMC approached the Army in March with a plan to upgrade the product so that it could block some of those "hard to kill" radio signals...
The Army expressed interest, but it took two months to invite TMC to its lab to prove the upgrade worked against some of the signals -- a crucial step to making the change.
One reason for the delay is that the Army was in the middle of preparing to award a new contract for the next generation of jamming devices. The contract could be valued at several hundred million dollars... [And] Army officials worried that TMC might have gained an unfair advantage over rivals competing for the larger contract, since it would have had advance access to the test chambers.
This month, TMC was eliminated from the competition for that larger contract. It also was finally allowed to test the modified, or Warlock-S 1.5, jammer. The upgraded device performed well against several "hard to kill" radio frequencies the Army had identified in February when it first informed TMC that it needed a better device, the company said.
But the TMC jammer couldn't block new frequencies that had appeared since the company was first told by the Army of the problem. "We took care of what we knew about. But there was some stuff we didn't know about that we couldn't handle," said TMC's Mr. Scoughton. (Thanks Eric for the tip)
SUB BASE DEFENDERS POUR IN
It's not just the locals who are gnashing their teeth about the Pentagon's proposed shut down of the giant sub base in New London, Connecticut. Key members of Congress and undersea warfare experts are mad, too.
“I support keeping the base open,” House Armed Service Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-CA) told Defense News. “In discussing base closures with Secretary Rumsfeld, the only facility I talked to him about other than Southern California installations is the Submarine Base New London.
So far, objections to the Pentagon's base closure plan have come in two flavors, mostly. Either folks don't want their neighborhood installation closed. Or they think that the Defense Department's larger consolidation strategy is flawed. Base Realignment and Closure commissioners, for example, are taking a page from Phil Carter's notebook, and voicing concerns that fewer national guard depots "would make it even harder… to retain their forces if members have to travel more than 50 miles to report to their bases," according to The Hill.
But the Naval Submarine Base New London – home to 18 submarines and 33,000 sailors, civilians and family members -- seems to be an exception to the rule, generating far wider support than other installations.
"The Navy's [need for] advanced training is so great that it is hard for me to believe that there would be a significant saving in shutting down Sub Base New London," Rear Admiral Hank McKinney, the former commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet's submarine force, tells Defense Tech. "If the issue is to relocate [the] submarines to Norfolk [Virginia] and Kings Bay [Georgia, the other two sub installations on the East Coast], where there are better maintenance facilities… then there probably is an argument for shutting down the submarine support side of the base. But I am not convinced that it makes sense to shut down and relocate the training establishment. The Navy kept [the] Great Lakes Naval Training Center [near Chicago] open to support training and I believe we should do the same in New London."
Undersea authority Joe Buff is a whole lot less gentle, calling the rationale for closing the base "deeply and dangerously flawed." Click here to read what he has to say.
The report's main justification for closing the New London base is that existing naval berthing space (piers and docks) on the East Coast is in excess of required capacity. The report also states that the reduction from 3 to 2 bases supporting U.S. Navy submarines on the Atlantic seaboard will maintain adequate fleet dispersal without affecting operational capability. Let me pick this "logic" to pieces.
Firstly, America's submarine fleet is barely half the size it was at the end of the Cold War, and is rather badly overstretched due to too many worldwide mission commitments. Slow, meager future submarine acquisition plans only promise to make the problem more severe. Our Silent Service fast-attacks may dwindle to 28 boats by 2029, only half of what we have today -- and what we have today is barely enough.
The Navy itself has stated that in essence every submarine must act as a two-ocean warship, transiting between the Atlantic and Pacific very rapidly in any crisis situation. The most covert route is also the shortest -- through the Arctic, north of Canada. Were New London not available, a round trip from Atlantic to Pacific would be 1,000 miles longer from Norfolk, Virginia, and 2,000 miles longer from Kings Bay, Georgia. The added travel time and wear and tear, over a protracted period of high-tempo ops, become serious crew retention, safety, and cost concerns.
Worse, with weapons of mass destruction in play and continuing to proliferate, the idea of concentrating indispensible skills and installations in very few places defies military common sense. Suppose a terrorist or rogue does succeed in nuking Norfolk or Kings Bay, with New London closed. If one Atlantic Coast base were destroyed, only one would be left, and badly overtaxed. How will new submarine crews be trained? How will vital research be performed? Where will subs that survive the attack, or were at sea during the attack, go as an interim home port that has the unique resources required to adequately support them? Imagine how vulnerable they'd be if they only had one possible refuge, rather than a choice between two. When viewed in this context, the BRAC Report's supposed "excess berthing capacity" suddenly doesn't appear so expendable, does it? To me, it's quite the opposite: New London becomes more vital than ever, not simply as a fully active facility in its own right, but also as a reserve against a future threat of unknown source and nature, whose effects in a single surprise attack could devastate a whole base.
Couldn't this same argument be applied to every military installation? Not really. Submarine bases must be on a coast, and aside from the three existing ones on the Atlantic, all the other ones are on the West Coast or in Hawaii or Guam -- much too far away to provide adequate redundancy.
Planes can use a civilian airport, and troops can live in tents. Nuclear submarines are temperamental, needful beasts that just don't have these sorts of options and protections.
CLARK FOLLOWS CARTER ON BASES
I'm not sure I entirely buy my friend Phil Carter's argument against the latest round of base closures -- that it will widen "today's civil-military divide." Isn't the Pentagon's first goal is to protect civilians, not play nice with them? And wouldn't that job be better handled from fewer, more integrated bases, with less overlap?
But, either way, it sure was interesting to see General Wesley Clark make almost the same case, a day after Captain Carter presented his.
Here's Phil...
This closure will change the relationship between the U.S. military and the society from which it's drawn. Many of these reserve centers, armories, and defense offices play an important role in their communities' lives—reserve armories frequently serve as local meeting halls and polling places, and reserve units often engage in community service projects, for example. When these bases go away, so too will the presence of the military in the lives of the people who reside and work near them. Initially, reservists may drive hours to drill with units at the new consolidated armory locations, but eventually these reservists will move nearer the big bases or quit the reserves. Either way, communities that today contribute reservists to the military will no longer do so.
And here's Wes, via the AP...
Retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark said Saturday that the Pentagon's plan to close military bases around the country and reorganize troops will isolate the military from the American people and the rest of the world.
Clark said the plan to pull U.S. forces back home from abroad and centralize bases takes jobs away from smaller towns.
"We're losing influence abroad when we bring those troops home, and we lose the interaction with America when we create these super bases," Clark said.
Maybe. But the greater danger, it seems to me, is to homeland defense. As Phil writes, the Pentagon's plans to shut down more than 200 national guard armories "may undermine homeland security efforts, which rely in part on the geographic dispersion and availability of reserve units to respond to domestic emergencies. Local governments depend on reserve centers for use as staging areas and temporary shelters in their emergency plans."
Obviously, the big news today is the Pentagon's announcement of which military bases they'd like to pare back, and which ones they want to close down altogether (a complete list is here).
Already, Senators are howling about the bases that might be shuttered in their home states. But lost in the shouting are some seemingly-small changes that have the potential to make an outsized impact on the future of the American military.
The moves will save a bit of money -- $573 million over 20 years, the Defense Department figures. And they'll probably help with security, by taking these groups out of leased office buildings, and onto a military base.
More importantly, being neighbors might help these far-thinking research groups get rid of some overlap as they hand out grants to scientists and engineers. Recently, both Darpa and the Office of Naval Research launched undersea spycam efforts that sound awfully similar; the Army Research Office and Darpa are both funding a Duke professor's studies into "automated self-configuring surveillance networks."
Maybe some of that duplication can be squeezed out, under the new plan. Darpa's been criticized, recently, for straying from its mandate to fund way-out, "blue sky" research. Having agencies nearby that are funding the here-and-now might help Darpa return to its mission.
The Defense Department is also pushing to move all research into ground robots to Detroit. That's where the auto industry is centered, of course. And the Defense Department wants to better "leverage the world’s intellectual capital for automotive/ground vehicle research."
Ft. Monmouth, NJ -- where the Army currently does a lot of its communications, sensors, and anti-IED research -- is slated to be shut down. Much of that work will go to Maryland's Aberdeen Proving Ground. In addition, the Pentagon wants to set up major research and development centers for things like airplanes, helicopters, air armaments, navy sensors, and guns and ammunition.
Obviously, all this is extremely preliminary. There will be major fights -- within the services, among the military's branches, and between Congress and the Pentagon – over nearly all of these changes. Stay tuned.
PORK PLANE'S CUTS RESTORED
So much for those Pentagon budget cuts. Back in January, Defense Department chieftains announced that they were paring $30 billion from their ledgers over the next six years. But it became instantly apparent that few, if any, of those trims were going to stick -- not with all those Congressmen and all those lobbyists and all those Pentagon bureaucrats lined up to keep inertia rolling. Sure enough, within days, senators and generals were pushing to restore the cuts to one of deepest-gouged programs, Lockheed Martin's C-130J Hercules cargo plane.
Today, they got what they wanted. "Three months after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld submitted a budget to Congress that would have killed the C-130J program, he now believes purchases of the Hercules transport should continue," reports Air Force Times. Rumsfeld said ending the program could cost as much as $1.6 billion. So next to nothing would be saved by a cancellation, he argued.
"The C-130J proves that pork flies. In the seven years that we, the taxpayers, have owned the planes, they have never been usable in combat," adds Project on Government Oversight executive director Danielle Brian. "This is Washington politics at its worst: when the legitimate needs of the troops are ignored by politicians pushing for pork."
ARMY PAYROLL = POLITICAL FOOTBALL
If we're going to send hundreds of thousands of young men and women into harm's way, the least we could do is not screw with their paychecks.
Common sense – maybe. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld presumably disagrees. Back in December, regular Defense Tech readers will recall, Rummy's braintrust decided to dip into the Army's payroll into order to fund truck armor and other wartime expenses. Congress would make up the difference later on, they figured, with a second, emergency "supplemental" funding bill. The fact that the payroll accounts would dry up in May didn't seem to factor into the Pentagon calculus -- except maybe as a lever to force Congress into action.
The Army has slowed its spending, so it can continue operations in Afghanistan and Iraq through early May when the funds are due to run out, Rumsfeld said...
Without [the supplemental's] passage, Rumsfeld warned he would have to move funds which would "seriously disrupt other activities," and he might have to invoke the "Feed and Forage Act" to keep the deployed troops operating.
The Feed and Forage Act allows the military departments to incur obligations in excess of available appropriations for clothing, subsistence, fuel, quarters, transportation and medical supplies, according to Pentagon officials.
I suppose it's nice that Rumsfeld cares enough about our soldiers to invoke emergency measures in order to clothe and feed 'em. But wouldn't it have been better not to sneak off with their paychecks in the first place?
THERE'S MORE: "Who in their right mind would vote to stop the production of armored Humvees?" asks Minstrel Boy. "The odds are 39% that it was your senator. That's right. "A simple measure [an ammendment to the supplemental] to keep the production of armored humvees at two shift capacity for a couple of extra months this summer passed by only a 22 vote margin; 61 to 39 in the Senate [last] week."
DRAGON LADY'S "MASSACRE"
"Just when you thought you’d heard the end of the illegal escapades of former Boeing exec Darleen Druyun, along comes another chapter that includes allegations of a 'clean up' and deletion' of documents," the Project on Government Oversight notes. "Government auditors are calling this one the '15 September Massacre.'"
Earlier this year, Druyun began serving a six-month sentence at Club Fed for felony conspiracy in relation to her illegally taking a job with Boeing Company while overseeing a fat Air Force tanker lease contract... Since the tanker scandal Druyun also has been suspected of steering other weapons contracts to Boeing and other defense contractors – more than you can count on your two hands. Druyun’s name surfaced again during testimony Thursday afternoon before the Senate Armed Services’ Airland Subcommittee...
The man pointing the finger at Druyun this time was Daniel I. Gordon, [with] the [Congressional investigators at the] Government Accountability Office. Gordon led an investigation... into the awarding of contracts that the former No. 2 Air Force acquisition official supervised – one a small diameter bomb contract and the other a C-130 avionics modernization contract. Gordon’s investigation concluded that the two contracts were improperly awarded.
During the C-130 Avionics contract, Gordon said, [Druyun] requested that contract evaluators first come to Washington D.C. on September 15, 2000 to discuss the “status” of their evaluations of who should get the contract. During that meeting and four subsequent meetings, Druyun “expressly or implicitly directed multiple changes to the evaluators’ ratings, many of which favored Boeing,” Gordon said. Then following the request for final proposal revisions, the contracting officer (not named in the testimony) sent an email to a recipient list that included “virtually everyone” involved in the source selection process, directing them to “clean up” and “delete” various portions of the evaluation record.
With so many big Defense Department projects going so wrong, it's no wonder McCain is now calling a "broad review" of the Pentagon's system for buying things.
The sleazy Druyun affair is just one "glaring example of a management and oversight failure in our acquisition process," McCain said at an Armed Services subcommittee hearing yesterday. "Clearly, we need to examine the whole procurement process as it works today in the Department of Defense."
EX-SECDEF: RESEARCH CUTS HURT SECURITY
It's not just the geeks who are worried. Last week, computer scientists voiced concerns about the Pentagon's retreat from funding blue-sky research. In a Times op-ed today, former Defense Secretary William Perry and CIA chief John Deutch say they're nervous, too. And not just about the Defense Department's shrinking purse for open-ended, basic research. But about the larger step back from the future that the Pentagon seems to be taking.
Of the Pentagon's $419.3 billion budget request for next year, only about $10.5 billion - 2 percent - will go toward basic research, applied research and advanced technology development. This represents a 20 percent reduction from last year, a drastic cutback that threatens the long-term security of the nation. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should reconsider this request, and if he does not, Congress should restore the cut...
Of course, the administration and Congress need to make tough budget choices. But to shift money away from the technology base to pay for Iraq, other current military operations or research on large, expensive initiatives, is to give priority to the near term at the expense of the future. This is doubtful judgment, especially at a time when the nature of the threat confronting America is changing. New threats, like catastrophic terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, urgently call for new technology.
SENATORS LARD UP WAR BILL
It's bad enough that the Pentagon has crammed an $80 billion bill, supposedly meant to cover last-minute contigencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, with all kinds of military pork.
Now, "senators [have] seized a chance to pack pet projects into an unstoppable bill, adding provisions dealing with oil drilling, forest services, a new baseball stadium for Washington and economic assistance to Palestinians," the Times reports.
Senator Thad Cochran, the Mississippi Republican who is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the draft "a straightforward bill" that "meets the needs of our fighting forces overseas" and "addresses emergency requirements here at home."
His own addition to the spending bill was a measure giving Mississippi control of the mineral rights and the ability to permit certain drilling below the Gulf Islands National Seashore in the Gulf of Mexico. Some environmental groups have opposed the measure.
In a statement, Mr. Cochran said that the provision "removes the cloud of confusion over who owns the mineral rights to the Mississippi barrier islands" while "allowing the National Park Service to continue its good work in preserving the natural and historic features of the Gulf Island National Seashore."
Democrats charged Republicans with using emergency supplemental bills to circumvent the budget debate. "The White House has turned on its head the definition of an emergency supplemental appropriation," Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, said. "This is not truth in budgeting. Tactics like this hide the real costs of the war."
MISSILE AGENCY WANTS MORE CASH
Remember that big cut to the missile defense budget? It could be coming back, if the anti-missile agency has its way.
"Although it expects to reduce spending in the next fiscal year, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) wants to ramp up its budget over the next four years to more than $10 billion annually by fiscal 2009, according to Defense Department budget documents," David Ruppe at the Global Security Newswire reports. That's about $2 billion a year more than what's currently spent.
With the extra loot, the MDA plans to buy some more radars and sea-launched interceptor missiles. According to the Newswire, the agency also wants to "acquire by the end of 2009 an additional 20 land-based interceptor missiles through the midcourse program to bring the projected total to about 40."
Now, buying more of the sea-going anti-missiles, that makes some sense. Those interceptors have been performing pretty well in recent tests. But the land-based missiles are another story. In trials, they've been flopping over and over again. A February test, in which fizzling ground support equipment kept the anti-missile from launching, was only most recent in a long string of examples. Why spend extra to get more of these clunkers?
The Arms Control Wonk has more on the Missile Defense Agency's budget, including which programs got cut, and which "went black."
THERE'S MORE: Inside Defense knows where the MDA wants to put $672.9 million of that extra luchre -- into space. Specifically, into an orbiting version of the non-explosive projectiles known as Kinetic Energy Interceptors, or KEIs. They're designed to knock down enemy missiles before they too far off of the ground.
Under the MDA's plan, in 2008 the agency will choose several contractors to design a space test bed... The following year, a contractor team or teams will be selected for the space test bed development and test phase, during which they will qualify the kill vehicles for space use, modify the KEI program's command and control system, develop the interceptor's motors and complete several other tasks.
The team will be required to launch five space-based interceptors and perform space-based intercept testing against medium- to long-range ballistic missile targets, according to MDA. “We anticipate the development and test phase to run through FY-15 [fiscal year 2015] in order to enter a production phase for a small space layer in FY-16,” the agency said...
The agency says a limited constellation of space-based interceptors, housed in 50 to 100 satellites, could offer a "thin boost/ascent defense against intercontinental range ballistic missiles..."
Mixing the space-based interceptor with the KEI program “offers the best defensive combination to defeat both rogue and near-peer adversaries,” MDA told Congress.
DARPA COMES DOWN TO EARTH
There's always been a tension at Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out research arm, between helping fight today's battles and funding projects that might impact the war twenty years down the line... or go nowhere at all. Generals want the latest toys from the Defense Department's answer to James Bond's "Q." But without Darpa's daydreaming, there'd be no stealth fighter, and no Internet.
Back in 2003, the Senate Armed Services Committee was worried enough about Darpa getting overly-practical that it launched an investigation into whether the agency had "raided" its basic research budget to finance "near-term goals."
Now, the Times reports, Darpa is cutting its funds for "open-ended 'blue sky' research by the nation's best computer scientists... in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff."
This week, in responding to a query from the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Darpa officials acknowledged for the first time a shift in focus. They revealed that within a relatively steady budget for computer science research that rose slightly from $546 million in 2001 to $583 million last year, the portion going to university researchers has fallen from $214 million to $123 million.
The agency cited a number of reasons for the decline: increased reliance on corporate research; a need for more classified projects since 9/11; Congress's decision to end controversial projects like Total Information Awareness because of privacy fears; and the shift of some basic research to advanced weapons systems development.
In Silicon Valley, executives are also starting to worry about the consequences of Darpa's stinting on basic research in computer science.
"This has been a phenomenal system for harnessing intellectual horsepower for the country," said David L. Tennenhouse, a former Darpa official who is now director of research for Intel. "We should be careful how we tinker with it."
University scientists assert that the changes go even further than what Darpa has disclosed. As financing has dipped, the remaining research grants come with yet more restrictions, they say, often tightly linked to specific "deliverables" that discourage exploration and serendipitous discoveries.
Many grants also limit the use of graduate students to those who hold American citizenship, a rule that hits hard in computer science, where many researchers are foreign...
"Virtually every aspect of information technology upon which we rely today bears the stamp of federally sponsored university research," said Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington and co-chairman of the advisory panel. "The federal government is walking away from this role, killing the goose that laid the golden egg."
THERE'S MORE: Darpa may be investing more in super-secret computer science research. But overall, the agency's proposed classified budget has shrunk by over a third, a Congressional source tells Defense Tech.
SOLDIER "DEATH BENEFITS" M.I.A.
Last month, the Bush administration announced that, in the Pentagon's 2006 budget, there would a big bump in the so-called "death benefit" for military families. If a soldier was killed in war, administration officials promised, his loved ones would get a $100,000 lump sum -- up from just $12,420 -- plus an extra $150,000 in life insurance payouts. It seemed like a great idea. Everybody cheered.
But then, something curious happened. Or rather, didn't happen. The Pentagon never included the money for a bigger death benefit in its budget. So now, the Army has gone to Congress, asking for an extra $348 million to keep the administration's word.
The money is part is a larger, $4.8 billion package of Army "FY06 Shortfalls and Requested Legislative Authorities" -- programs that the service's chiefs felt should have received more money from the Pentagon budgeteers. Every year, the Army, Navy, and Air Force appeal directly to Congress to infuse these programs with more cash. This year's Army list also includes $443 million for more M16s and other small arms and $227 million for night vision equipment, Inside Defense notes.
Now, maybe the death benefit lack this year was just a simple oversight on the Pentagon's part. Maybe the Defense Department's PR machine spun a little faster than its financial wheels could turn. But given the cynical games the Pentagon has been playing with soldiers' paychecks -- holding them hostage, essentially, as a back-door way to inflate military spending -- I'm inclined to believe the worst.
THERE'S MORE: Inside Defense has a full list of all of the services' "unfunded requirements."
PENTAGON BUDGET BLACKMAIL
Give us more money, or soldiers aren't going to get paid. That's the cynical game the Pentagon's leadership has been playing with the Army's budget in recent months. And now, it's crunch time.
The tab comes due this Spring, Defense Daily reports. The Army needs $41 billion of that supplemental kitty by then, or else it is going to go broke, without cash left to pay G.I.s.
Already, the service has pulled forward some $11 billion in funds from the third and fourth quarters of its [fiscal year 2005] budget, a senior Army budget officer said at a briefing on Friday.
“I think it’s early May when we run out of money,” the official said. The most money is being spent on operations and maintenance. “What we’re doing right now is taking monies from the fourth quarter and the third quarter…we’re already spending, you know, my September paycheck.”
“We’ve pulled in about the last five and a half months to spend in the first six and a half.”
That same official said that this sort of spending has no practical effect on soldiers, according to Defense Daily. And he's probably right, for the moment. What politician would vote to deprive a soldier of his paycheck?
But key members of Congress, like Sen. John McCain, are getting increasingly fed up with this backdoor effort to add tens of billions to the defense budget by essentially holding G.I.'s livelihood hostage. Sooner or later, things are going to come to a head.
SNEAKY SUPPLEMENTAL
You'd think that, two years into a war, a secondary, "supplemental" budget for the Pentagon would be for handling last-minute military contingencies. Responding to battlefield emergencies. Coping with unforeseen turns of events.
But you'd be wrong, unfortunately. Because major chunks of the Pentagon's $82 billion supplemental defense bill are only distantly related to the fights going on in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The most obvious example: the $5 billion or so devoted to Army "modularity." That's the push to break American troops into 43 smaller, more easily deployable brigades, from the current 33. It's part of a long-standing effort by the Army to reorganize its forces. And it's something the brass has seen coming for years, now. There's no reason to lump modularity in with funds for Afghanistan and Iraq.
No reason except for politics, that is. With the supplemental labeled by the White House and the press as an Iraq/Afghanistan bill, it becomes essentially impossible for any self-respecting politician to turn it down. Voting against money for troops in harm's way – that's political hara-kiri.
The supplemental also includes about $13 billion for Army payroll, to make sure G.I.s get paid. But nearly $2 billion of that money wouldn't have ended up in this bill -- if Pentagon chiefs hadn't already taken it out of soldiers' paychecks.
A few months back, the Defense Department leadership realized they hadn't devoted more than a pittance to armoring up their fleet of trucks (a hardly unforeseen circumstance, given the hundreds of roadside bomb attacks on convoys). The Pentagon brass needed money for the job, fast. And so they decided to dip into the Army payroll -- knowing, of course, that there would be a supplemental bill coming down the pike in a few months. And knowing that just about every Senator and every Congressman would vote for the thing.
"I always tell people, thank God for the supplemental. We would not be able to do anything... without them," Lt. Gen. Joseph Yakovac told an Association of the United States Army conference last year. "If those don’t happen, we’re in a world of hurt."
But wouldn't it be better if they planned for these things up front, instead of sneaking them through the back door? Is this any way to fund a military at war?
The Pentagon says it's making hard choices about which of its massive programs to keep, and which of them to cut.
“Well, how serious can they be if they’re not fully accounting for Iraq and Afghanistan? They basically have got two sets of books operating,” Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., a House Armed Services Committee member, tells Defense News. “If you treat [Iraq and Afghanistan] as off the official budget, then how are you ever going to make real adjustments to the portfolio and the investments?”
On Capitol Hill, some Republicans and Democrats have criticized the Pentagon's reliance on the supplemental request, saying it curtails congressional oversight and distorts understanding of defense spending. "It removes from our oversight responsibilities the scrutiny that these programs deserve," Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told military service chiefs at a hearing Thursday.
"Two dozen senators yesterday criticized a Pentagon proposal that would eliminate Lockheed Martin Corp.'s C-130J Hercules aircraft," the Washington Post reports -- without mentioning that more than a few observers think that what the plane's main cargo is pork.
Yesterday, Air Force chief of staff Gen. John Jumper "piloted one over the Florida skies - reaching speeds of Mach 1.7 - before returning to tell waiting reporters that the jet is 'all that any of us had hoped it would be and more.'"
But the Air Force rescue operation -- successful in saving the Raptor from being scaled back during 2002 -- may not work this time.
Mr. Rumsfeld's decision to provide funds for only 180 F/A-22 Raptors, down from a previously planned 277, suggests that the Air Force has become more vulnerable in Washington's endless bureaucratic wars. That is partly a result of a growing political scandal over Air Force procurement practices that contributed to the resignation of Air Force Secretary James Roche, a staunch F/A-22 supporter.
Two years ago, when Mr. Rumsfeld, never a fan of the F/A-22, first attempted to cut it back, Mr. Roche threatened to resign and Mr. Rumsfeld folded. Today, all Mr. Roche can do is raise an objection on his way out the door.
"With these cuts, Rumsfeld has returned to a goal he first tried in the summer of 2002," said Loren B. Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a research group in Arlington, Va., that advocates limited government.
"Rumsfeld didn't succeed because of Roche's threats," Mr. Thompson explained. "Now the Air Force is defenseless. Its political leadership is leaving and its uniformed leadership has been discredited by scandal."
Still, the political forces behind the F/A-22 will not go down without a fight. With the work on the project spread over 43 states and two of its biggest contractors, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, among the most powerful lobbying juggernauts in Washington, backers of the F/A-22 will try to persuade Congress to do what Mr. Rumsfeld will not.
For more on the Raptor's future, check out this debate going on now in the Defense Tech forum.
O'HANLON: DOUBLE THE CUTS
The $30 billion in proposed budget cuts to the Defense Department already have lobbyists, paper-pushers, and Congresscritters squirming. But, according to the influential Brookings Institution defense analyst Michael O'Hanlon, the savings aren't nearly deep enough. In a Baltimore Sun op-ed today, he calls for shaving twice as much from the Pentagon ledgers.
How would he do it? By reallocating forces and by "modernizing what we put on planes, ships and vehicles - electronics, sensors, radios, robotics, computers, munitions - rather than the weapons themselves." For instance:
- Delay the Army's "future combat system" by five years and cut research funding by more than half in the meantime...
- Cut U.S. nuclear forces even more quickly and deeply than envisioned by the Moscow Treaty, allowing retirement of some Minuteman missiles and more conversions of Trident subs to conventional missions. In addition, the Pentagon should scale back the cost of missile defense programs to $6 billion a year rather than $10 billion...
- The Navy, rather than keeping a permanent presence in certain key areas, will increasingly surge ships to participate in exercises or respond to crises. But it will maintain a presence in places such as the Persian Gulf and Western Pacific, home porting more ships near those areas to do it more affordably.
The Navy should increasingly "rotate crews, not ships." With this approach, already used on specialized vessels today, ships can remain overseas 18 to 24 months; crews are rotated in and out by plane, conserving the time that at present is usually wasted in transoceanic travel. As a result, the Navy could get by with 10 carriers and 10 percent to 20 percent fewer surface ships.
PUSHBACK BEGINS ON PENTAGON CUTS
That was quick. It's been just a few days since the Pentagon put out a plan for the most teeny-tiny of budget trims. (You can read the document for yourself here.) And already, Congress is making noise about reversing the cuts. Congress Daily has the scoop:
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., is expected to scrutinize any Navy proposal to reduce its aircraft carrier force to 11 and decommission the USS John F. Kennedy, according to a spokesman.
Although Warner has not commented on specific details of the forthcoming fiscal 2006 defense budget, the chairman "remains convinced of the importance of carrier-based air power to America's efforts against terrorists who train in remote areas of the world," the spokesman said in a statement Monday. "It took five carriers to win in Afghanistan -- and he will keep that in mind as he reviews the department's budget," which is expected to be submitted to lawmakers Feb. 7.
The spokesman said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called Warner last week to inform him of the broad outlines of this year's Pentagon budget, which is still being formulated.
"It is clear that the Department of Defense will not be exempt from the overall budget tightening that the administration intends to put forward this year," the spokesman said, adding that Warner "believes that it is fair for the department to play a role in the overall budgetary discipline this year, as long as the reductions are consistent with preserving our national security and military readiness in the war on terror."
Media reports of the Kennedy's retirement last week immediately sparked opposition from Florida lawmakers. Rep. Ander Crenshaw, R-Fla., last week said the Pentagon's proposal is "short-sighted, short-term thinking, and long on wrong-headedness." Crenshaw said removing a carrier from commission "is not like flipping a switch. She can't come back on in a moment's notice should we need her desperately."
Crenshaw said he sent a letter to President Bush expressing his concern about the proposed cut in the carrier fleet. "I'm going to do everything in my power to convince the president that our national security demands at least 12 carriers, if not more," he said.
THERE'S MORE: Also, it's interesting to note that Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman stand to take the biggest hits in the proposed Pentagon rollbacks. Boeing, which has been drifting from scandal to scandal in recent years, would remain relatively untouched, with a $5 billion shave off of its missile defense program.
AND MORE: Over at the Red Herring, Jennifer Kho takes a look at the possibilities of these cuts sticking. She quotes a certain scruffy blog editor.
AND MORE: Your choice -- read Defense Tech today, or the Washington Post tomorrow. On page A1, DC's big paper weighs in on the Defense Department's budget trim proposal.
AND MORE: It's not just the Congressmen who are squirming. Air Force secretary James Roche is starting to talk about getting back the $10 billion cut from the F/A-22 jet program, too. Future funding for the plane "could be restored," Roche tells the Star-Telegram, "if we can make the case that requirements justify more than the number that this budget would yield."
PENTAGON CUTS: BOGUS?
Don't be fooled by the dollar signs. Pentagon poobahs may say they're trimming $30 billion dollars from their budget over the next six years. But, chances are, those program cuts will be grown back, once Congress has its say and bureaucratic inertia creeps in.
Late last week, while most of us were preparing our hangover remedies, Inside Defense did some damn fine reporting, digging up deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz's order to start paring back new weapons projects.
One of the programs hardest hit: the C-130J cargo plane -- a faster, higher-flying, longer-lasting version of the aircraft currently shuttling supplies to Iraq. $5 billion is supposed to be taken out of the program, as the Air Force's purchase of the plane is terminated, and the Marine Corps' buys are ended early. But, in the end, that reduction will "likely [be] reversed on Capitol Hill," according to one Congressional source.
"This is a favorite cut that Congress always fixes," adds GlobalSecurity.org director John Pike.
Similarly, Wolfowitz' proposal to roll back the $952 million purchase of a San Antonio-class amphibious ship in 2008 likely won't happen, either. The LPD-17 -- the Marines' answer to an aircraft carrier, basically -- has frequently gotten more money from the Congress than the Pentagon originally asked for. And that'll probably happen again, Pike thinks. "They will just put the three units that are proposed for elimination back in the budget when the time arrives."
In fact, of the $30 billion in proposed cuts, only $5.9 billion will come in the next fiscal year, Inside Defense notes. That's less than the $10 billion in savings the White House reportedly requested -- and, as Slate's Fred Kaplan explains, even those modest measures won't really kick in for years to come. The major reductions only begin to take hold in fiscal year 2009. By then, the Bush administration will be just about over. And there will have been plenty of time to restore the money that was allegedly taken out.
THERE'S MORE: "Vice Adm. (ret.) Arthur Cebrowski, head of the Pentagon's Office of Transformation, has already suggested to Rumsfeld that he reject OMB's [the White House's Office of Management and Budget's] call for reduction on the grounds that it will cripple the military's plan to become smaller, but harder hitting, through the introduction of new technology," Aviation Week says. "The military hopes to create a backlash from Rumsfeld, a ploy that may already have succeeded with Cebrowski who is advising the Defense secretary 'to just say no.'"
AND MORE: The Pentagon is proposing a bunch of other big cuts – $5 billion from the hapless missile defense program, $1.2 billion from the crash-prone V-22 Osprey rotorcraft, $5.3 billion from the Virginia-class submarine effort. But the rollback that's mostly likely to stick might be the one to the beleaguered F/A-22 jet.
The $40 billion stealth fighter program has been assailed for years as a Cold War relic. And one of the planes exploded during takeoff late last month.
The Air Force originally planned to buy 339 of the so-called "Raptors." But that number shrank to 277, as the cost-per-plane swelled. Now, the Pentagon is calling for a further cut, to 180 jets – a savings of $10.5 billion. And it may not be the final trim. "The F/A-22 buy could eventually drop to as few as 100 aircraft," Aviation Week reports.
With so few planes, the Raptor's mission could change dramatically. Originally, the jet was viewed as a way to provide American forces with everyday control of the skies. But if there are only 100 or so Raptors in service, "that would make the F-22 more of a silver bullet, kick-down-the-door force rather than our everyday air superiority fighter," a Congressional source says.
AND MORE: Generals, politicians, and pundits across the political spectrum have been calling for a bigger Army, with more troops. But Phil Carter, to put it mildly, isn't convinced.
I suppose, in a Pentagon bureaucrat's Utopia where there were unlimited amounts of money to spend on manpower, machines and bureaucracy, that would be great. But here in the real world, such proposals may not be prudent. Indeed, they may be quite daft, given our real resource constraints...
It's not as easy as simply saying that we should cut expensive weapons systems. Just like weapons systems, soldiers cost money too. Moreover, you don't just pay for the soldier and his personal equipment — you pay for his family, their housing, their medical care, their leadership, their training base, their combat equipment (i.e. trucks and tanks), their training, et cetera. When you consider an increase of this magnitude to the permanent end-strength of the military, you've got to take the long view of how much these increases will cost. And, perhaps more importantly, you must consider quality in addition to quantity — you can't dilute the quality of today's force just to create more force structure. If we fall into that trap, we will have regressed back to the WWI/WWII attrition-based model of warfare.
PENTAGON BUDGET: DECISION TIME
It's starting to happen, finally. After years of giving the Pentagon something close to a blank check to fund wars, buy new arms, and back massive upgrades to U.S. forces, the White House may be saying, at last, "enough."
According to the Los Angeles Times, President Bush's deputies are asking for tens of billions of dollars in cuts – maybe as much as $60 billion over the next six years. "The Air Force and Navy could be hit especially hard, with each branch possibly losing $4 billion to $5 billion in 2006," the paper says.
When he first got into office, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld faced a choice: fund the future, or pay for the past. He could put money into hulking, weapons designed for a punch-out with the Soviet military. Or Rumsfeld could funnel the cash into defense "transformation," to make American forces quicker, better-networked, and more capable (in theory) of fighting the small, nasty battles of the new century.
Then came 9/11. And suddenly, Rummy didn't have to make a choice at all. Questionable Cold War-era programs, like the F/A-22 jet, look on new life. Transformational projects, like the $117 billion "Future Combat Systems" (FCS) initiative, went full steam ahead. Strict spending limits were junked, as America prepared to fight a new series of wars. What was a $310 billion budget in fiscal year 2001 is now slated to grow to $500 billion, or more.
If Iraq had been conquered quickly, Rummy might have been able to duck the choice between the future and the past indefinitely. But the present has gotten in the way. And as the second year of the conflict begins to draw to a close, avoiding decisions in no longer possible. Much of FCS is being rejiggered, to give today's troops technological advantages. Controversial projects like the Virginia-class submarines, Osprey tilt-rotor crafts, and Joint Strategic Fighters are all getting new, harsher looks.
"The Iraqi insurgents have managed to do what Don Rumsfeld in four years has not managed to do, which is bring about cutbacks in a lot of these Cold War-era weapons," the Lexington Institute's Loren Thompson told the Times.
THERE'S MORE: " While the F-22 Raptor is important to the future, it is not something that is needed to fight the Global War on Terrorism," says Military.com columnist H. Thomas Hayden.
Over at 
A check of telephone bills in the Jacksonville, Fla., area “found that when we have a digital receipt for a phone bill in the area…we are being overcharged 30 percent,” deputy chief of naval operations Vice Adm. Mark Edwards told a group of military-industrial insiders at a 
Robot Economist is 
Take the 
In its new 
The Pentagon fiscal year 2008 
That's because the combat units that President Bush wants to send into hostile areas need to be backed up by support troops, "including personnel to staff headquarters, serve as military police, and provide communications, contracting, engineering, intelligence, medical, and other services," the CBO notes.
But, just six weeks later, the Army appears to have reversed itself. According to 
There's a long-standing cliche that, when it comes to military spending, "the Republicans are mostly interested in weapons systems. The Democrats are interested in people," as Gen. Wes Clark 
Everybody knows the Guard and Reserve had serious equipment shortages; not only that, they had serious modernization problems - Korean War era trucks, shortages of aircraft, wheeled vehicles, older versions of tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles. The active force also had serious shortfalls. We had six active heavy divisions. None of them were the same because of the various degrees of modernization, the various degrees of organization. When you go to war with a $56 billion deficit in equipment, you have to aggregate that equipment and push it forward to the war, which means that on the backside, you now have issues in training, you have issues in reconstitution and reset. That is the challenge that we've been dealing with. If you take a look at our 
Long before he started pushing kooky theories about 
But there's one Army account that the generals are still managing to keep packed to the brim: marketing. The annual Association of the United States Army 
Even before Kim's October surprise, Air Force officials like Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap Jr. were railing against "
South London comedian 
Nearly the entire slate of 
The office initiated a series of novel, seemingly off-the-wall projects: armored vehicles equipped with 
The cuts are spelled out in a summary of the Marine Corps' new six-year spending plan obtained by InsideDefense.com. The plan also includes “significant changes” to tactical aviation, including purchases of 25 fewer MV-22 tiltrotor Osprey aircraft and 35 fewer Joint Strike Fighter aircraft between fiscal years 2008 and 2013.
In May 2005, the two nuclear design labs, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, began an 18-month 
The second main argument against RRW is that a significantly modified warhead design which has not been tested cannot possibly be as reliable as a tested design. Critics who advance this argument point out that independent assessments predating RRW by government advisory bodies such as the JASONs found that "
As the Congressional Research Service 
In 1996, under the leadership of then-director of Los Alamos 
But other scientists are hesitant to certify the pits. They feel that however many tests the cast pits have undergone, they are still irreducibly different from the old wrought pits, and that without a nuclear test, no one can say that they would behave the same. These scientists argue that the new pits should be introduced into the stockpile, but only after the labs have had a chance to modify the warheads to increase their performance margins – that is, only as part of RRW.
The goal of the life extension programs (LEP) is to add anywhere from 20 to 30 years onto the (nominal) design lifetimes of the various warhead models in the stockpile (of course, "
For components outside the warheads' nuclear explosives package, modifying the manufacturing specs is an attractive option, since each new component can be tested exhaustively without underground nuclear testing.
Almost immediately, rumors began to circulate that the Department of Defense intended to use RRW as an opportunity to expand the capabilities of the U.S. nuclear arsenal – to work around the cancellation of RNEP. These rumors led Hobson, in March 2006, to complain that "sometimes within the [DOE], people hear only what they want to hear," and remind NNSA head Linton Brooks that "
While stockpiled warheads were not often put through further nuclear tests, they were routinely sampled for disassembly, thorough inspection and all sorts of non-nuclear (or above-ground) testing. This activity, known as 
Darpa asked for $3.3 billion dollars for next year -- about an 11 percent increase over what it got in '06. The green eyeshades in the House granted it all, and added another $30 mil or so. The Senate, on the other hand, had proposed about a three percent cut to the Defense Department's bleeding-edgers. According to Senate documents, funding for the sub-launched 
Reporter Leslie Wayne pulls out some great factoids in her piece today.
In December 2004, the Pentagon decided to 
Times are tight at the Army -- sorta kinda, at least for the moment. Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody has ordered the service to 
The Pentagon has a motto for its next-generation attack jet, the 
You can't blame 'em for trying, I guess. Defense contractors want to sell a bigger pile of their gear to the Pentagon. So, from time to time, they come up with all kinds of, shall we say, sub-optimal explanations why their hardware should be used more often. Like jamming IEDs with 
You can't just test-fire a mockup – because nothing similar exists yet, and, more importantly, because these things don't really scale very neatly. The 
Rumsfeld came out and said it: He's not sacrificing any of his modernization plans just because there's a war going on.
Homeland security analyst 
Finally, we’re starting to see 
It turns out that most military pork -- like the $1.6 million for “Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Activities” stuffed into the kitty for soldier pay and benefits -- doesn't actually appear in the main body of the bill at all. Instead, the offensive items are tucked inside the "'
But one doesn't simply move from the civil service to the boardroom. To help with the transition, Her Majesty's government picked a pack of corporate financiers. Not just any pack, mind you. But the boogeyman of the conspiracy-minded everywhere: the 
Amazing, though, the talk of financial shenanigans isn't the worst of Qinetiq's press in recent days. Remember that cute little whale that swam up the Thames River, and then tragically died? Well, folks are 
In fact, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Air Force is "looking to secure much of its savings by 
Fortunately, there's a solution: 
Acting deputy defense secretary Gordon England is telling the Army to get ready to cut $11.7 billion from its budget over the next several years, 
Oy. Somehow I missed this bit of good news from last week: "The Army National Guard estimates that its units left over 64,000 items valued at over $1.2 billion overseas. However, the Army 
Now, the Pentagon is "looking to cut between $13 billion and $15 billion from the U.S. Department of Defense’s 2007 budget," Defense News notes. And after all those billions spent on Katrina and on another year in Iraq, there are indications that the men in uniform might be a little less reluctant about paring back their budgets this time around.
I helped run a small business in the mid-90s. And, back then, if someone sold me shoddy supplies -- and then had the stones to lie about it -- I would make damn sure never to do business with the bastard again.
The Hill has an interesting 
It's a big day at the Pentagon.
But 
So it there any way for the Defense Department to buy next-gen gear without picking taxpayers' pockets and leaving soldiers ass-out? Pentagon insider Dave has a few 
The Pentagon had 
You try living on a measly $160 billion a year. The Army can't, apparently. Despite a truly massive annual budget, beefed up by "supplemental" checks to pay for the war, "the Army still will come up $1.6 billion short in its operation and maintenance accounts by the end of September," 
But still, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars going to waste here. We're talking putting the future of the American military at risk. Isn't that a subject that could use some repeating?
"There's a lot of gamesmanship that goes into the training and readiness numbers. But you can't game the number of hours each pilot gets to fly," he tells Defense Tech.
Common sense – maybe. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld presumably disagrees. Back in December, regular Defense Tech readers will recall, Rummy's braintrust decided to 
Earlier this year, Druyun began serving a six-month sentence at 
Now, "senators [have] seized a chance to 
"Although it expects to reduce spending in the next fiscal year, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) wants to ramp up its budget over the next four years to more than $10 billion annually by fiscal 2009, according to Defense Department budget 
But then, something curious happened. Or rather, didn't happen. The Pentagon never included the money for a bigger death benefit in its budget. So now, the Army has gone to Congress, asking for an extra $348 million to keep the administration's word.
Since the fall, Rumsfeld & Co. have been dipping into the Army's day-to-day funds -- like 
Meanwhile, the Times has a killer story on the Air Force's attempt to 
- Delay the Army's "
That was quick. It's been just a few days since the Pentagon put out a plan for the most 
The $40 billion stealth fighter program has been assailed for years as a Cold War relic. And one of the planes 
It's starting to happen, finally. After years of giving the Pentagon something close to a blank check to fund wars, buy new arms, and back massive upgrades to U.S. forces, the White House may be saying, at last, "enough."
