A More Expensive and Less Effective U.S. Military
Washington D.C. – A rapidly shrinking, aging and increasingly expensive American military, which is unequipped to carry out real-life combat missions, is the worrying scenario presented in “America’s Defense Meltdown,” a recently published book that contains the results of a survey of the U.S. armed forces conducted by thirteen Pentagon insiders. Winslow Wheeler, Thomas Christie and Pierre Sprey, three of the authors, discussed the decades-long, and continuing, deterioration of America’s defenses at a book launch organized in Washington D.C. by five not-for-profit organizations active in defense-related issues: The Fund for Constitutional Government, the Center for Defense Information (CDI), the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Institute for Policy Studies.
According to official data from the Department of Defense (DoD), the U.S. military budget
America's Defense Meltdown
(in inflation-adjusted dollars) is higher today than it was during the wars in Korea and Vietnam and during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which was heavy on defense spending. Today, the U.S. military budget approximates that of the rest of the world, noted Winslow Wheeler, and it is about three times as large as those of China, Russia, Cuba, Iran and North Korea combined – America’s potential short and long-term enemies. However, in terms of the size of forces, numbers are down from the past, even considering Iraq and Afghanistan. This is true for Army divisions, Navy combatant ships, and Air Force tactical wings; despite steady growth, figures suggest, the defense budget is capable of buying only a decreasing number of weapons systems. As a result, the forces are aging. While in the 1980s the average age of an American fighter aircraft was around 10 years, today it is between 15 and 20 years, and growing.
Thomas Christie, who has five decades of experience in defense acquisition, weapon testing and program evaluation, and who retired as the Pentagon’s most senior career civilian official in 2005, depicted a fouled DoD planning and budget process based on a series of flawed assumptions. For example, one assumption has been that future budgets will grow at a faster rate than the past or that weapon system procurement costs will decrease in the future. These constant misinterpretations of budget cycles lead, according to Christie, to the approval of programs that are unattainable in reality, with subsequent delays and ballooning costs. As a result, for example, the Air Force ended up with a dwindling fighter force because it banked on a higher modernization line than what it could have reasonably expected. According to Christie the problem is not in the acquisition process per se, but rather in the way defense managers have been using it. “We have had enough acquisition reform; we need no more acquisition reform. We need to take this process we have and make it work better,” Christie argued.
There could also be historic and philosophical roots to the failures in the DoD acquisition process. According to Pierre M. Sprey, who worked at the Pentagon and is known to have been part of a group that procured some of the most successful weapons in DoD history, the U.S. Air Force in particular still relies on a strategy devised in the early 1900s by an Italian General, Giulio Douhet. The driving idea of Douhet’s military philosophy was that one can win wars without the use of land force just by heavily bombing the enemy’s territory, population and economy. “This is an appallingly stupid idea,” said Sprey. He argued that this conceptualization of war has led the U.S. to develop the wrong military mission – with the attendant dominance of strategic bombing — and, subsequently, the wrong force, comprising ineffective and expensive bombers. In order to improve the state of things, the defense apparatus should review the last seventy years of military history, Sprey recommended, and should distill what really works in combat. DoD managers would discover that, through the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War and the war in Kosovo, what always worked best was a numerous, light and flexible force capable of providing efficient close air support to beleaguered ground troops. Such a force, Sprey argued, would be large, effective and much more affordable than the current shrinking pool of bomber aircrafts.
Not only was their analysis unforgiving but Wheeler, Christie and Sprey’ forecast for the future of the U.S. military was one might say, discouraging. Sprey admitted to be “extremely pessimistic,” while arguing that it is still important to speak out and try to create public outrage over the missed opportunities that the U.S. will incur if the Pentagon keeps going down the current path. “I’m very pessimistic about making the changes needed happen,” Thomas Christie echoed him, “for how concerning it is to see that we have lost most of the capabilities we had even only 20 years ago.” Winslow Wheeler even went so far as to express his disappointment over the early decisions of the Obama Administration as far as DoD appointments. “Obama has promised change, but so far we are getting none of that. They have brought in people from the past and, as a result, we are headed down the wrong path,” Wheeler said. Particular criticism came in for the selection of the newly confirmed Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn, who served as the Under Secretary of Defense/Comptroller in the Clinton Administration, and who was responsible, according to Wheeler, Christie and Sprey, of making the acquisition process even less transparent than it already had been. “I doubt anything can happen until the whole ethos of our military changes,” Thomas Christie concluded emphatically.
