This was forwarded to us by our friend Winslow Wheeler who writes:
With a Comptroller, William Lynn, who outdid all of his predecessors and successors with the most populous and preposterous budget gimmicks post-Cold War Pentagon spending has seen, with a level of spending that out-did the plan left on the table by that penny-pincher Defense Secretary Richard Cheney, and a level of shrunken, aging forces unready to fight, the Clinton era was the absolute low for post-World War II Pentagon management, up to then. That it was outdone by the mangling of the Bush years — even today — is no reason to think that a return to the precepts of Clinton-esque defense thinking is a good idea.
The New York Times would seem to disagree. While it does not say so explicitly, the Times’ editorial of December 21, “How to Pay for a 21st Century Military,” articulates all the shallow, even gimmick-laden, thinking about DOD management that characterized the Clinton era in the Pentagon in the 1990s. To some it will sound good, if you are unfamiliar with the more detailed facts buried under piles of press releases from think-tanks, members of Congress, and manufacturer brochures, but what the NY Times is really advocating is business as usual with a cosmetic veneer of reform.
This argument is clearly and strongly articulated by a Pentagon insider who has seen it all before and who has demonstrated frequently the character and insight to call it as it is. Franklin (“Chuck”) Spinney wrote for “CounterPunch” an important and informative analysis of the NY Times’ vision of the past guised as Pentagon reform for the 21st Century. Here it is:
Hackneyed Thinking and the Status Quo
The New York Times Flames Out in Defense Dogfight
By CHUCK SPINNEY
Counterpunch (http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney12232008.html)
The 21 Dec 2008 editorial in The New York Times, “How To Pay For A 21st-Century Military” purports to advocate tough-minded pragmatism to reform a Pentagon that is clearly out of control. Yet its logic is really another example of the kind of hackneyed thinking that serves to protect the status quo. It also suggests indirectly why the mainstream media are in such trouble.
The editors of the Times present a cut list that includes terminating the F-22, the DDG-1000, the Virginia class attack submarine, the V-22 Osprey, halting premature deployment (not R&D) on ballistic missile defense, cutting nuclear weapons, de-alerting nuclear weapons, cutting two air wings from the active Air Force, and cutting one carrier from the Navy. Some of these recommendations make a lot of sense, but even if one assumes unrealistically that there is no cost growth elsewhere and there are no contract termination costs or base closing costs, the cutbacks would “save” $20 to $25 billion. While $25 billion may sound impressive, bear in mind, the upcoming Defense Department’s core budget could be as high as $580 billion in Fiscal Year 2010, according to news reports.
Put another way, even if we believe in the vanishingly small probability of a best case scenario with no cost growth or contract termination costs, these cuts would reduce the defense budget Mr. Obama is about to inherit by only a little over four per cent — and that would be a reduction from a budget level that the editors say is bloated, because the defense budget was increased recklessly by 40 per cent in inflation-adjusted terms since 2001 (not including the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan).
Furthermore, the editors at the Times do not even want to pass on this piddling amount to the taxpayers or Mr. Obama’s infrastructure program, because they say that the “savings” should be plowed back into the Pentagon to increase the size of the Army and Marine ground forces, to buy the Navy’s littoral combat ship, and to resupply the National Guard and Reserve forces. But then they conclude by observing that the era of unlimited budgets is over and that Secretary Gates must make procurement reform a priority.
This is very peculiar logic. And it is made even more bizarre by what the editors of the Times did not say. Consider please just a few things they forgot to mention:
Omission No. 1: The Times’s recommendation to terminate production of the F-22 is a good idea that is long overdue, in my opinion. But included in this recommendation is the idea that we should preserve the F-35 program with a bridge of upgrades to the F-16s. That could be a very long bridge … because the editors of the Times ignored problems in the F-35 program that threaten to make it an even bigger turkey than the F-22.
The F-35 will cost of over $300 billion, making it the most expensive program in the history of the Department of Defense and the world. Moreover, the F-35 is rapidly becoming the heaviest jewel in the Pentagon’s crown of mismanagement. The F-35 has serious technical problems; it is way behind schedule; and is way over cost — facts apparently lost on editors at the Times. Last March, for example, the General Accounting Office (GAO) reported another cost increase of $38 billion, bringing the total estimated cost to $338 billion or 45 per cent more than when the program was approved for its risky concurrent engineering and manufacturing development (i.e., buy before you fly) program in 2001. On November 26, 2008, Bloomberg News reported that an internal team of DoD analysts concluded the F-35 program could cost 40 per cent more than budgeted in the 2010–2015 plan that Mr Bush is about to bequeath to Mr. Obama (and these teams have a track record of underestimating future cost growth).
One of the biggest cost drivers and sources of technical risk in the F-35 is its stealth requirement, but this requirement is a shopworn legacy of the cold war. Set aside the valid criticisms of how well stealth technologies work in the real world or the equally valid criticisms relating to the technical limitations of real-world air defense systems, and just consider where the logic shaping the stealth requirement came from.
The “requirement” for stealth, which is now taken for granted in just about everything, reached a fever pitch during the cycle of threat hysteria that emerged in the mid 1970s and lasted until the Soviet Union collapsed. The Air Force claimed the Soviet Union was ringed by an impenetrable air defense system, made up of dense, overlapping, multi-layered air defense radars. Technologists claimed (falsely as it turned out) that this system was so redundant that it would be impossible to disable it by electronic jamming or to penetrate it at low level, and that the only recourse, therefore, was to reduce the radar reflectivity of our own airplanes. The reduction in reflectivity would in theory shorten the detection range of the Soviet radars. In effect, the idea was to create “holes” in the Soviet’s radar coverage that our planes could then fly through undetected. At the time, no one ever claimed that any other country had such a multilayered air defense system, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is clear that no country has yet developed or deployed anything remotely close to the massive overlapping capabilities portrayed by the Air Force’s threat inflators during the waning years of the Cold War.
In fact, one reason why the F-22 is so expensive was that it had to be stealthy. Now the editors of the Times say correctly that the F-22 should be terminated because it was tailored to the Soviet threat, which has ceased to exist. But in the next breath, they make the peculiar assertion that we should preserve a far more costly and more troubled turkey, the F-35, even though it has a distinction that even the F-22 can not claim: namely it is tailored to meet the same threat that has ceased to exist at least three years before the F-35 R&D program began in 1994.
Omission No. 2: The Times wants to kill the DDG 1000 and the Virginia class submarine, rely on the DDG 51 Aegis destroyers for fleet defense, and plow the “savings” into the littoral combat ship.
Even the Navy wants to dump the problem-plagued DDG 1000. Last July, in a congressional hearing, Navy leaders testified that they intended to truncate the DDG-51 program at 2 ships, nixing earlier plans to buy up to 32 ships. While the editors of the Times recognize this cutback, they say that “Cutting the last two could save more than $3 billion a year.” But for how long? In fact, termination creates only a short term saving (again, assuming unrealistically that there are no contract termination costs), because each DDG-1000 is estimated to cost $3 billion, so the best case estimate is a one shot saving of $6 billion, probably spaced over several years.
And what about the Littoral Combat Ship? A case can be made for a low cost combat ship designed to fight in the shallow littorals, if only for attacking pirates. But plowing the money back into the $600 million Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is asking for trouble. Like in the case of the F-35, the editors of the Times forgot to do mention the widely-reported facts this program had turned out to be a grotesque technological, organizational, and economic monster, albeit on a smaller scale than the F-35. It is hard to see how anyone with a modicum of curiosity could miss these problems; all the research you need to do is to google “littoral combat ship” and “cost growth” and your screen will sink under the weight of reports describing of this particular horror story.
If there was ever case for reforming the Pentagon’s acquisition process, it is the LCS. This ship, conceived initially as a small, fast, maneuverable and relatively low-cost ship, came unglued in 2007–2008, when it became clear that technical and organizational problems would take years to solve, if they could be solved at all. It is now clear the LCS will cost more than twice as much as its original cost estimate of $220 million per ship, if it ever gets built in significant numbers, which I doubt.
Omission No. 3: The editors of the Times want to halt premature deployment of a missile defense system to save $9 billion, but continue spending for research, even though they acknowledge that after spending $150 billion over the last 25 years the Pentagon has yet to produce anything close to being a workable solution. Of course, they ignored the billions poured into the earlier efforts going back to 1946 when the USAAF began its ABM efforts with Project Thumper. These efforts (the most prominent efforts being Projects Thumper and Wizard, Nike Zeus, Project Defender, Nike X, Spartan, Sprint, Sentinel, and Safeguard) and others continued with varying degrees of intensity, including one other premature deployment fiasco (Safeguard in 1975) until early 1983, when President Reagan unleashed yet another torrent of spending .
The logic of continuing to pour money down a 50 year old missile defense rathole that has no workable weapon to show for it is a little like the logic which induced Sir Douglas Haig to conclude he should try to redeem failure for four months after taking 60,000 casualties in the first day of the battle of the Somme in 1916 — he just didn’t get the message, and neither, apparently, have the editors of the Times.
Moreover, many theorists of nuclear war argue that a ballistic missile defense targeted against ICBMs is destabilizing because it threatens the deterrent effects of other nations’ nuclear weapons. The Times makes a puzzling recommendation in this regard: The editors say we should reopen negotiations with the Russians to bring about reductions in warheads and that we take missiles off hair-trigger alert. While both these actions would reduce the horror of nuclear war, and would be perceived as mutually stabilizing, they would also be a variance with a vigorous missile defense program, which would make the Russian deterrent less effective. Actively pursuing missile defense would have a more predictable effect of causing the Russians to hedge against our “shield” by fielding more missiles and returning them to hair trigger alert to neutralize the effects of our first strike “sword,” which they would see as being made safer by our shield. That a missile defense system is unlikely to work simply makes such an evolution and exercise in madness.
Omission No. 4: The editors of the Times concluded by saying that reforming the procurement system should be a priority and that Gates has to make some tough calls. True to form, they said nothing about the nature of the reforms. Moreover, their recommendations discussed above make clear that they do not even understand what they want to reform. To understand what is needed, one needs to understand what is really driving budgets up record levels while force structure melts down and why forces readiness is hollowing out under the pressure of two very small wars, when compared to the less costly Korean or Vietnam wars (in terms of the total size of the force level operational tempos). In fact, as has been documented for at least twenty years, patterns of repetitive habitual behavior in the Pentagon have created a self-destructive decision making process. This process has produced a death spiral having three undeniable outward manifestations:
The first manifestation is the long term trend of shrinking forces made up of aging equipment. This is caused by the central fact that unit procurement costs increase much faster than budgets, even when budgets blow through the roof, like they did in the last 8 years. That means new weapons do not replace old weapons on a one for one basis. Over the long term, the changes have been mind boggling: In 1957 for example, the Air Force had an inventory of over 9,000 fighter airplanes with an average age of around 5 years; today, even though the Pentagon is spending more money than at any time since the end of World War II, that inventory is less than 2,000, with an average age of 23 years. The editors of the New York Times call for reform but would have us continue this evolutionary process by protecting the high-cost F-35, while calling for a reduction of two Air Force tactical fighter force by two wings and one Navy’s tactical fighter wing.
The second manifestation of the defense death spiral takes the form of continual pressure to reduce combat readiness. This is due to the high wages of the not-so-all-volunteer force (stop loss is a backdoor draft) and the increased costs of operating more complex weapons that, for the reason stated above, are getting older and more worn out more on average, and hence more expensive to operate. Today, there is general agreement that our military is being hollowed out by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the scales of today’s warfighting efforts are miniscule when compared to equivalent efforts at the peak of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon had a smaller budget in inflation adjusted dollars. For example, today we are fighting two wars with about 180,000 deployed troops, whereas in 1967 and 1968, forces peaked at over 550,000 deployed troops in Vietnam. In terms of airpower, the Air Force was flying tens of thousands more sorties and was dropping more bombs on North Vietnam that it dropped on Germany in World War II. Bear in mind some other differences from today: in the mid-1960s, the United States was also engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet superpower, and we maintained over a million forward-deployed troops in Europe and other parts of east Asia; we also maintained world-wide sea control with a Navy of more than a 1000 ships, and we keep hundreds of strategic bombers and thousands of missiles on hair trigger alert. Yet we had a smaller defense budget then that we have today.
The third outward manifestation of the Pentagon’s death spiral is the corrupt accounting system. As I described in my final testimony to Congress in June 2002, the Pentagon’s bookkeeping system is so broken that it can not pass the simple audits required by the spirit of the Constitution and the letter of the law (i.e., the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990). This makes it impossible to produce the information needed to sort out the priorities needed to fix the first two problems. Until this problem is addressed no amount vapid editorializing about program cuts or swaps will result placing the Pentagon on an evolutionary pathway toward fielding a military force that protects the real security interests of the American people.
Bottom line: The Pentagon is in a crisis, the editors of the New Times would unknowingly reinforce it. Readers interested in how we might reform the Pentagon’s self-destructive-decision process are referred to my testimony cited in the previous paragraph or the somewhat different recommendations in a remarkable new anthology, America’s Defense Meltdown, published by the Center for Defense Information. This new anthology is designed to give President Obama and Congress a guide to placing the Pentagon back onto a pathway toward an effective defense at a cost a nation in recession can afford. Written by retired military officers and civilians with over 350 years experience in the defense business, this book is unique in that it provides a view from the trenches by people who have struggle to reform the way the Pentagon does business.
Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com.
{ 46 comments… read them below or add one }
Uhhh, if the Navy wants to get rid of the DDG-1000 program so badly, why is it planning on transferring funds from the P-8 program to finish the first ship? Am I missing something here?
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ajzAtUCkwuTQ&refer=home via http://informationdissemination.blogspot.com/2008/12/shipbuilding-at-all-costs.html.
JGH
why do thay alway say we need to cut defence spending and not somthing else such as medacare which is not provided for in the Constatution?
I suppose the ground-based ABM system deployed in Alaska and California doesn’t work either. The above hackneyed thinking isn’t worth wiping your ass with. So it goes… from another military expert floating around in the Med.
Why do thay alway say we need to cut defence spending and not somthing else such as medacare which is not provided for in the Constatution?
NPR did an informative five part series on missile defense for anyone wanting to no more on the issue.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94900239
@ the terminator(s):
I can understand Skynet wanting us to spend more on the military… seriously, though, dude. “Provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare” are right next to one another in the Constitution.
If ‘general welfare’ can be reinterpreted into the bloated waste we have now, then… etc etc etc.
The most expensive military is not necessarily the best, and not all problems can be solved with bullets. At least I hope not.
Merry Xmas, y’all.
I laughed when I read this- they were against just about every program the Pentagon had. It easier to talk about what they liked- they want to keep 30 year old LA class subs- who wants to be at sea in a 50 year old sub?- proof that the NYT staffers have no friends or loved one in the navy. They also like the DDG-51 which is decent design- but pretty old school for 20-30 years from now. They love the littoral ship- which basically is the same design concept as the British Type 21 class- ships that the Argentinians sank with abandon.
They place a lot of faith in the F35 being at weight and at budget- anyone else want to make that bet?
Oh- well-
Merry Christmas
The NYT is in the business of harming America any way they can. When you accept that you will understand what they do and why.
Why does nobody ever think to wonder why the US is the only country with these problems?
Or look to see how they were solved elsewhere?
Just a thought — but there seems to be more opionion than thought here…
The Constitution and it’s 5 fellow frigates were the object of much debate in the 1790s. It was the largest peacetime military expenditure in our short history, and suffered through many delays and cost overruns. A few years later, with the frigates laid up to save money, Thomas Jefferson sought to spend $5 million on about 250 coastal defense gunboats. Only 180 or so were built, at a cost of over $10 million, and they never did a darn thing. Meanwhile the Constitution still floats in Boston, having survived its many battles due to the superiority of its design that was so expensive.
Every weapons system goes over budget, it just works that way.
Mindless pseudo-conservative dogma became a self defeating substitute for conservative principles based on historic reality. The economic reality of “No new taxes” translated defense spending into the largest descretionary spending portion of government being a target for cuts despite declining as a percentage of GDP. Conservatives pay their bills, and account for what they pay. In typical pseudo-conservative practice, no one is held accountable for poor economic, or political perfomance. Don’t blame the NY Times for being the mush-minded pinkos they authentically are, blame the pretenders that know not, or care not, what they do.
Partisanship must be a sickness. Every problem and solution must be filed in either a left wing or right wing category, which makes it pertinent or meaningless based on your leaning. I’m not going to vouch for everything Spinney has said, but much of what he said in that piece made sense. Both conservatives and liberals will swear to God their part of the solution instead of the problem, when in fact it was both of them that contributed to where we are today. George Washington was correct for seeing partisanship for the disease it is.
What a laugher. Perhaps the purpose of Spinney’s piece in the NYT is to make the first piece seem more reasonable in comparison?
I assume the humor in a retired mid-level functionary lecturing on the dangers of spending on defense in lieu of some good ol’ “infrastructure” from the comfort of his yacht in the Med is not lost on others?
Riccione and Spinney. Two peas from the same malcontent pod.
I find it troubling how all these so-called “solutions” to the real problems of defense spending are always backward-looking. The bottom line, it seems, for people like Spinney is that the U.S. can afford to stop investing in new weapons tech because they think they can predict future threats with 100% accuracy.
And somehow, today’s tech is good enough to fight wars 10-15 years from now. Because even then, the NYT and Spinney are so sure that trusty ol’ platforms like the F-15 will still be able to do the job than “unnecessarily expensive” stealth planes like the F-22 shouldn’t be allowed to do because nothing justifies the F-22 today.
One could argue that since we haven’t had a nuclear war yet (except the atom bombs that ended WWII), the TRILLIONS the U.S. spent to build up the nuclear arsenal was a clear waste of money. Luckily, the people in charge saw deterrence as worthy of the cost. And deterrence means keeping your weapons on the cutting edge.
The right solution, it seems, is a mix of the new and the old – not the old and the old.
Have to agree with the recomendation to cut the stealth obsession on the F-35. It adds cost onto a aircraft thats already edging towards expensive even for a revelutionary aircraft like itself. Cut the stealth consentrate on making a good fighter/bomber that can be mass produced and sold to may friendly countries.
BMD yes there retarded in alot of ways but heres a way i see it. We need something to defend our fleets, bases over seas and to defend against threats from small countries with a limited amount of nucleur arms, not russia or china. Use these systems for that. But america does need to creat a missile defense system (yes i know this would destablize the MAD idea but what does the leader of iran care about MAD he f&cking crazy zealot) against threats to our mainland and outlying interest. That though sounds like a better idea to use ground based missile defense laser batteries not missiles.
LCS is a nightmare again so is the DDG 1000. Kick them both incorperate some of the systems(energy, computers..etc) into a heavy crusier with heavy missile defenses and some type of heavy guns/and or missiles for shore bombardment and support(and if the missiles cost 5mil dont buy them). As for the LCS its stupid why is it so hard to just make a fast frigate? with the ability to house and maintaine a couple squads of marines and a seahawk for operations?
anyways i could go on and on but wtf im tired and cranky
Exactly my point. Come to the middle it’s comfy here and there’s a lot of room(it’s largely uninhabited). Why is everything lumped as all or nothing or this or that? You try watching FOX news, Rush(fat assed drug addict), or NPR and everything is so extreme. Just because you have the right to an opinion doesn’t mean it’s supposed to be for everyone.
The latest label that absolutely drives me insane is “flip-flopper”. God forbid anyone learn more about a subject that changes their opinion on a subject, I believe that’s a major trait for a leader. Does anyone really want a leader who’ll hold fast to a strategy or ideal no matter what changes or happens? That’s the trait of a moron, a leader that would lead you to destruction because their too full of pride to admit they might be wrong or didn’t have all the facts.
Steve, you are stupid. First, anyone who is going to so crudely insult Rush Limbaugh just because he is a popular radio conservative, is not “in the middle”. Moderates don’t spew that kind of venom.
Second, the term “flip flopper” means someone who changes positions for political expediency, not because they simply became more educated on a subject. For example, no one accused Bush of “flip flopping” on that pardon he just changed his mind on. Bush has made many such reversals.
Drake, welfare spending, aka “entitlements” is the antithesis of conservative philosophy, whereas a strong defense is important to conservatives. The opposite is true for liberals, who love wealth redistribution but look towards our armed forces with suspicion.
A conservative, though, would at least be willing to reduce defense spending if welfare spending was cut more deeply. I think we can all agree that the US simply spends too much money on new weapons, as even new projects that were supposed to reverse that trend: the LCS and F-35, both wound up costing much more than expected.
Although I would love to have the best defense tech, at this rate our armed forces will wind up being comprised of 10 giant robots that cost 1 trillion each, but can destroy nations with a dirty look. Liberals will try to stop production at 5 robots, and conservatives will try to build 12. In the end, we will have a bipartisan vote authorizing 15 for 2 trillion each, because congress needs to preserve the jobs and keep the production facilities open.
Kalte, you are exactly the type of idiot I’m talking about. I doubt you even know what a true liberal, conservative, or moderate even is. The reason I hate Rush is he’s the type of radio host who is killing our political system. My crack was because he somehow thinks he’s better than any other drug addict just because it was pills.Rush, O’Reilly, and their ilk are NOT JOURNALISTS. If your mind is made up before you do the report, that’s an epic fail. I’m not going to waste any more time on you or your ilk, you’ll never try to see the other side of things.
Mike J, remember during the first Gulf War when F16 pilots were tank-plinking. I saw an interview with the pilots who were pissed that they were expected to try to get direct hits with bombswhile doing 600 knots. They were basically saying that sort of thing was the A-10s job, since I don’t know, it was designed for it.
“I thought what got demolished was a couple F-117s and the idea that bombers alone could easily force some bad actor to capitulate.”
Ha now see if you can shove that threw the heads of ppl who think you dont need to deploy ground forces to win a war.
Socalism is like communism great on paper but in real life it goes against human nature.
As for coin aircraft why not just an upgrade of the old bronco?
Pure capitalism doesn’t work either after a certain point as well, a greed fueled economy can fail just as surely as communism’s flaw that there’s no reward for trying harder.
I can already see how an updated Bronco would be developed these days. They’ll probably be a spec calling for stealth and or having a laser installed. I remember reading somewhere that an AC-X would have a directed energy weapon on it. God forbid we do anything sensible like take a C130 right off the production line and just make new ones.
“Brings me back around to Pierre Sprey’s A-10. They’ve been updated several times so now they’re night capable and guide their own precision bombs. Best gun over the battlefield, most requested by troops in contact. More cost effective, militarily effective, and proven survivable. Now because not only do they work, but they have nothing to replace them with (in part because of procurement debacles like F-22), they’re gonna fly them until they fall apart.”
Evidently they are already flying planes that fall apart.
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/f/f-15-crash.htm
I’m not disagreeing with you that we don’t need more a-10′s or even more strike eagles for that matter I 100% agree.
On the other hand our largest air supremacy force is are f-15′c’s. Most were built in the 70′s. Not to mention that su-30′s and 35′s were made to counter these with thrust vectoring and rear radar and missiles. I am not necessarily saying that we are going up against Russia or China with these, but we could find them in say Syria, they are areadly 30′s in Venezuela, Without air superiority ground wars become harder, and We need something to replace the c’s unless you propose replacing 700 jets with 181? At this point the f-35 is a better bomb truck then the f-16 and most of the money has been spent on both programs. Not to mention international sales for the f-35, so I can’t see that going anywhere. Just cut the numbers of the f-35, or better yet, just give warthogs and coin over to the army. The marines fly their own coin.
mike j,
No, the the high/low mix of fighters is now a ~$120 million dollar per unit F-22 (if the DOD would let the USAF have the 381 it NEEDS) and a not-yet-delivered F-35 that is already PUBLICALLY stated by the US DOD to be ~$60 million for partner nations. A brand new F-15 runs ~$90 million today & a brand new F-16 runs ~$45 million (unit fly-away costs). In other words the F-22 & F-35 are (or SHOULD be) ~1/3 more expensive than what a F-15 & F-16 would cost to procure in their place. I absolutely guarantee that in terms of cost-effectiveness there is no contest & in that respect the F-22 & F-35 look like a bargain.
THANK YOU for brining up the A-10. Notice how the A-10 of today is MUCH more of an all-weather multi-role attack aircraft than the ‘simple’ CAS aircraft it originally was…times have changed.
Which leads me into what Boyd, Sprey, Riccioni, and Spinney are wrong about. Which is that it is 2008 (almost 2009) & all their thinking is from about 1970. Warfare & air caombat has changed significantly since then. This is the group that called the F-22 a ‘turkey’ & are now doing the same with the F-35 calling it “less manoeuvrable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105″…They have been proven wrong about the F-22 & all indications are that they will about the F-35 as well.
pfcem–hell, yeah, I’d go for that fighter mix too at those prices except that it is never going to happen. Those cost numbers for the F-22 and F-35, even at those procurement levels, are pretty much fantasy and everyone knows it.
mike k,
BS, the 60 F-22 from the last/current contract were procured at an average fly-away price of ~$140-145 million. The price has been coming down ever since the 1st batch were built and we have not even procured 200 yet.
mike k,
BS, the 60 F-22 from the last/current contract were procured at an average fly-away price of ~$140-145 million. The price has been coming down ever since the 1st batch were built and we have not even procured 200 yet.
I’m skeptical of those numbers. I read somewhere Bob Gates mentioning that these planes have had to undergo expensive upgrades by the Air Force after being purchased, which dramatically increases their price tag.
mike k,
BS, the 60 F-22 from the last/current contract were procured at an average fly-away price of ~$140-145 million. The price has been coming down ever since the 1st batch were built and we have not even procured 200 yet.
I’m skeptical of those numbers. I read somewhere Bob Gates mentioning that these planes have had to undergo expensive upgrades by the Air Force after being purchased, which dramatically increases their price tag.
Posted by: Drake at December 29, 2008 12:13 AM
————-
Didnt they have to fix the fact that they had desined it without the ability to communicate information with other planes?
I’ll take responsibility for bringing up pricetags, my bad. I went looking for a reasonable figure to hang those systems and couldn’t find any I like, in part because of the politics associated. The best definition I can think of is this:
A weapon system costs what the taxpayers spend on it. This must be weighed against the value or benefit, of course. A bit hard to quantify the value of F-22s and F-35s right now, the former is untested (maybe ‘unblooded’ is better) and the latter is pretty much notional. Also hard to quantify fights that never occur because you have the bigger stick (or shield), and the flipside, those that might happen because of something you leave unprotected.
It’s pretty obvious that these Reform Movement people are lightning rods for almost reflexive disagreement. SMSgt Mac brought up Riccioni’s emphasis on yank and bank, that half the fight was lost if you get to the merge. Well, best not lose the rest of it, then, right? Or Sprey’s emphasis on low and slow: If I’m on the ground, in a fight against superior forces, I want my air cover over head on time, persistent enough and tough enough to stay there til I don’t need it, and accurate enough to obliterate the bad guys with the first pass. To the extent that high speed/ altitude reduces accuracy, and accuracy is critical with a smaller tactical aircraft and limited stores, it needs to go low & slow enough to do the job.
I read them as being skeptical of LO (stealth), not because it’s a bad idea, cause it’s really just a form of camouflage. It’s because it has turned into a catchall-grab-bag of technological stuff that’s driving up the price, an additional plain old excuse for an increase in price without much oversight, and it’s pushing out the development time line into decades.
Pfcem- you talk about their thinking being from the 70′s. Okay, and? You’re saying this in defense of systems planned in the mid/late 80′s. Warfare and air combat have changed, how so? I read my copy of Sun Tzu and it all seems depressingly familiar. I think what you’re hinting at is the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ RAND stuff that says technology will ‘save’ War from nuclear holocaust and make it less bloody through precision, or whatever that was about… I have to go with Boyd on this one- *** People Fight Wars, not machines. *** To the extent that technology of any sort helps win those wars, or better yet, avert them entirely, then fine, let’s have some. But when is enough enough? Taxpayers (us) are footing the bill, and the military industry has been acting like they have a blank check. We don’t seem to know what we want our military to do beyond “whatever we ask it to”, and when they try to oblige is it any wonder we get these overly complex & expensive systems? When the budget leash gets jerked, the bean counters make things worse by chopping budgets in odd places, going after total numbers procured instead of enforcing some discipline on the design to begin with, and the unit costs explode. You have a valid point, the price would drop if we’d buy more. Of course, we’d buy more if the price wasn’t so high… got ourselves cornered, huh?
So, do we really need to keep increasing the budget/ capability in every generation, or is there a point when they’ll blow stuff up good enough? I don’t mean maintain F-15s for 75 years like they want to do with BUFFs, I mean just make the necessary adjustments in new designs to face say, the next ten years. Then stick to the plan, build em quick and get them to the lines. Stealth or COIN may be the thing this time, but threats come and go. If a new threat emerges, can it be dealt with by modifying an old system, or better to build a new one? What best serves the interest of the country- what provides the best defense? That’s pretty much the OODA loop in action at the procurement level, and I think that’s what Spinney is talking about. OODA depends on having a good handle on the situation at hand. Is taking 20 years or so to field weapons at these prices keeping abreast of the world situation? If nothing else, a faster development cycle gives bureaucrats and bean counters a lot less time to impact the process, and if those designs are based on sound and simple principles (e.g. the A-10, or the old M2 .50 cal), we might end up with some excellent cost-and-militarily effective systems which can be developed over time.
What to do about present issues like F-22 or F-35? Let’s not let perfect be the enemy of the good, but also not let good be the enemy of better. Biggest problem short term is money, hopefully sorted out soon. Buy enough Raptors and Lightning IIs to get us through and meet foreign obligations. Then let’s try some more programs in the pattern of the LWF and A-10, since those appear to have worked out well, and not just for fighters, but for ships and vehicles and anything else it can be applied to. Sooner the better.
Don’t think of LO as just another incremental improvement on the state of the art. It is the first real game-changer in air combat since the advent of radar, period- end of story.
Consider the kill chain and the sequence of events that must occur before any aircraft can be brought down….
You have to be 1) detected, 2) acquired(locked-on to) and 3) tracked by some detection system. A weapon has to be 4)cued to your location using the detection system information. The weapon has to 5) sense, 6)acquire, and 7) track you. It has to 8) fly out to where you WILL be until it 9) makes contact and 10) detonates or comes within warhead blast radius. If it is a proximity weapon like most SAMs and a lot of AIMs, then 11) the fuzing system has to detect you as it goes past and 12) it has to detonate at the proper time and 13) blast fragments have to damage you to some varying degree. If the kill chain is broken at ANY point, it begins all over again before anything bad happens to you. ‘Stealth’ improves survivability by improving every susceptability (vs. vulnerability) factor in the kill chain. People tend to think of the susceptability and vulnerability factors rather simplistically — something like “probability of detection times the probability sucessfully locking on” etc. But these factors do not have simple algebraic relationships, they are progressively dependent – one must happen as a condition of the next, such that you end up with something comparable to ‘probability of a kill GIVEN a hit GIVEN a successful flyout GIVEN a launch GIVEN a track GIVEN an acquisition GIVEN a detection’… or more factors in an even longer chain. If any of these factors are small, the probability of a kill (Pk) becomes small. When LO is involved MOST of these numbers become very small and the Pk becomes exponentially smaller than for a non LO system.
The cost of ‘stealth’ pales in comparison to its value. Since we are still relatively early in its employment and development compared to something like oh, the gas turbine concept that has been around since the 1920′s and wasn’t considered ‘mature’ by some folks until the F100/F101 engines came about, it is premature to say LO is ‘too costly’ over the long run.
Minor point: releasing weapons from higher altitudes are not neccessarily less accurate than employing them at lower altitudes. It depends upon the weapon and the launch platform capabilities. Unguided bullets and rockets, yes-less accurate. Guided weapons? probably not less accurate – probably more accurate off heavy bombers (better onboard systems) Google B-1B and ‘Sniper pods’. Recent example of high and accurate: the ’10 Silver Stars for 10 Green Beanies’ episode earlier this year. Those 2000 lb bombs came in ‘danger close’ on request from very high up. Lower speed and altitude fliers provided the little stuff. Its ALL good.
Mike J and others:
Speaking of price tags, the mq-9 reaper costs as much as a small private jet, not sure what the support and infrastructure costs are, but I wonder why we don’t have the assembly lines popping these things out by the hundreds, they are probably the most effective weapon in the US inventory.
Wikipedia: Unit cost: USD 13.325 million for one aircraft with sensors (2006 dollars)
While I generally agree with many of the author’s criticisms of the NYTimes editorial, I must take issue with his claim that the military was doing more with less during the 1950s and the Vietnam War. He notes that in inflation-adjusted dollars we spend more now on our defense budget and are seeing combat readiness decrease. However, as a percentage of GDP, we’re still spending much less than during the epochs he mentioned. Another question I’d like to see answered before railing against our own procurement methods is how much similar programs cost in Russia, China, and the EU, though numbers on cost overruns are probably opaque in the former two. I think that would provide better context.
SMSgt Mac- It’s not whether LO is good, bad, game changing, or what have you… It’s pricey. Valuable maybe, provided someone doesn’t come up with reliable countermeasures. The Serbs- one commander in particular, destroyed one and crippled another F-117 with an old system by being smart while we were being dogmatic- he found a way to make the kill chain link up. It didn’t matter a great deal to the outcome, thank God that guy was the only one smart enough to try it.
General Kent’s own concepts of ‘hi/lo’ and there being value in a mix of forces in instructive, here. The air defense of some notional enemy will not look the same on D-day +2 or +14 as they do initially. There’s no conceivable reason why a bomber that’s just going to orbit in uncontested airspace has to look like a B-1B or B-2. The critical points are weapon systems, sensors and amount of stores, not low level penetration or ECM.
Jeff M- Gotta be very careful how we use Reaper/ Predator, I think. The fact that they’re unmanned and therefore ‘low-risk’ to us makes it more likely that we’ll use them, and that can have consequences we hadn’t intended. Destabilizing a weakened allied gov’t, for example, because we blow up the wrong targets too much. There’s more to precision than CEP.
RE: “destroyed one and crippled another F-117″
Lets deal with hard facts only please. One F-117 was shot down. The details of how it happened are STIll classified I believe, and what the Serbs think what happened may not have happened the way they think it did, so nobody on this side is saying how it happened for good reason. One F-117 has been ONLY rumored to have been ‘crippled’ or ‘damaged’ and that rumor has not been asserted as fact anywhere I would identify as reputable. but it still falls under the ‘so what’ category. No one says LO makes you invincible, just much harder to kill. With 1788 sorties in Desert Storm and an estimated 100 sorties over Kosovo/Serbia, that makes the attrition rate up to the end of Allied Force about 5 hundreths of one percent…..against some of the densest threat environments anyone has fought in since WW2. Even a blind pig finds an acorn every now and then.
As a further counter to the F-117 anecdotes, I can point out that the B-2 was used to hit a particularly elusive SAM system by a B-2 that received the target enroute and hit it between two pre-planned targets. This guy had been on the ‘most wanted’ list for days and we had thrown all kinds of stuff at him, but he was careful to shoot his ‘trons and then reposition slightly. His area was innundated with craters from previous attacks but the B-2 was able to pick him out of the clutter near where he was believed to be and spanked him without him knowing what hit him. Gen Short is on record noting the F-117s had a tougher time managing their signatures given their operating speed and altitudes while maneuvering in a very confined airspace. Had we chose to operate them in a manner such that we did not care if we busted neighboring airspace I doubt if anyone would have even known to complain. What the F117 episode highlights is that even when you fight with the best you still have to use your best wisely and there’s no elimination of luck in battle.
Ja, Craig. I made that point (cost vs. value) a few posts back. The measure/ countermeasure game seesaws back and forth all the time, and I’m afraid if we go all-in on some aspects of LO and someone counters it, we’ll find ourselves with a few, very expensive but vulnerable systems, and an obsolete doctrine. Or, we end up fighting lots of little brush fires in places where all this LO money we spend has no value, in fact negative value if it compromises some other relevant aspect- armor, fuel, stores, etc.
LO means different things in different situations- Warthogs are pretty much silent above 5k ft. AGL, and have low IR signature. What does some Talib care if you can see the A-10 on radar?
I’m not arguing for low tech. Make the designs elegant and simple, orient them to specific tasks, and include whatever technology is needed. The YF-16 was totally high tech in what mattered to its designers- flight control and flight envelope, other aspects not so much.
SMSgt Mac talked about the ‘jack of all trades’ fiasco with the F-111 in the 60′s. I think exactly the same is happening with F-35 in it’s own way. Even if they can stick enough computer power and sensors on that thing to make it do all the missions, it’s going to swell the price to a point where they’ll diminish the buy. So here’s a good question-
At what point do you increase the capability so much that you decrease the ultimate value?
BTW, B-29′s were practically failures, sorry to say. They were slow in development due to teething troubles because of high complexity. They killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians for little military effect. The jet stream blew them all over hell above Japan so they flew them low. That meant pressurization was irrelevant… until they dropped the A-bombs, which was honestly of questionable value in hindsight (not at the time, though). When Korea happened, -29′s got shot to pieces by MIGs and quit flying day missions. Attack aircraft were more effective than Superforts in that war. By then the Soviets had their own copy and their own A-bomb; not due to their research, but because of spies (and luck). They used our technology against us. This is not an argument against technology or innovation, just saying any technological edge should be seen as temporary, and we need to stay on our toes and THINK.
-Happy New Year!
Mike J,
While history should never be forgotten for many aspects of warfare, in other areas, especially high tech areas, it is a big “so what.”
So what about B-29s in Japan. So what that radar air-to-air missiles did not work well in Viet Nam. So what about a few F-117s that got shot down.
What you are forgetting are all the other successes in Serbia, Iraq, and Syria (Israel) against highly capable air defenses and fighters…with legacy equipment. What you ignore are the limited threats that Soviet equipment has posed in the air or via ground air defenses. Nations using that equipment have experienced real-world mediocre-to-poor performance, sparce numbers largely eliminated on the ground, and low readiness rates.
What you should focus on is the current and foreseeable future reality of deployment discrepancy to fight the war on terror. A nuke is far more likely to be used by a terrorist cell infiltrating it to the U.S. by sea than against Europe/Israel via a missile! The Center for American Progress recently pointed out how lopsidedly the Army has borne the burden in the current wars fighting Islamic terror.
Branch..#……%..#in Iraq..#in Afghanistan
Army 531,526 (38%)117,100 (64%) 21,700 (68%)
Navy 331,785 (24%)20,800..(11%) 1,300..(4%)
Marines 193,040(14%)24,500(13%)3,600..(11%)
USAF 328,771 (24%)20,700..(11%) 5,100..(16%)
Note that while the Army has just 38% of all DoD servicemen, it has borne 64% of the deployments to Iraq and 68% to Afghanistan. Even the Marines with a similar mission have suffered deployments nowhere near what the Army has endured in numbers or duration of tours. And while the USAF will argue that it has other obligations, so does the Army.
Because personnel are a very expensive part of the DoD budget, and it is difficult to add numbers without ecomonic repercussions, a more fair allocation of servicemembers would see the Navy and USAF growing smaller, the Marines staying about the same, and the Army being much larger.
The Navy can grow smaller through fewer carriers (and hence fewer carrier groups), and more littoral combat ships with smaller crews. My nephew is a nuclear NCO for a Virginia class sub and has had very little sea time during his 8 or so years of service.
While we need a strong Navy,nobody else comes close as a threat except allies. Why not park some of these carriers that use so many personnel, and save them for a rainy day. Pay a contractor or reservists to service them in port. They are quickly becoming long-range missile and diesel-electric sub fodder anyway. Parking some would extend their lives as a strategic reserve. Rotate reservists onto existing carrier groups already at sea.
The USAF should similarly focus on that aspect of airpower that sees the most use in all forms of warfare. We need more C-17s, upgraded C-5s and contracted AN-124s, and more aircraft like A-400Ms and tankers that can double as airlifters. Every additional underutilized F-22 is close to the price of a C-17 that sees daily use throughout the world.
With the 187 or so F-22s and 1,000 (not 1760)USAF F-35s, coupled with those of the Navy and Marines and our Asian/European allies, we would have more than enough airpower for any conventional contingency. Don’t talk about foreign military sales of Su-35s or S-400s. The potential enemies buying them will never have the numbers to pose a threat…while clearly their ground forces and insurgencies could pose a threat that airpower alone cannot begin to fully address.
The Army gets by with 500-600 active and reserve attack helicopters to face any threat. Why do the other 3 services need many thousands of far more costly fighters and bombers? Give the flying services the best possible stealth and technology for the aircraft we do field…and that means F-22 and F-35. But there is no threat out there, given the stealth we WILL have, that requires a fraction of the numbers of aircraft we had in the Cold War.
This will be the last generation of manned fighters anyway. Field the best now and prepare for an unmanned future in the air, on land, and at sea.
Aw geez, we’re back to the myth of the Army being denied capability and bearing terrible burdens because high-tech Airpower is sucking up all the resources……again?
Short answers.
No.
–Army too small, but has lots of toys newer than the F-15.
–AF too small.
–Not spending enough on defense.
–Libs in denial.
–If we arm for today’s war, we get accused of fighting the last one the next time.
–yada yada yada…
For detailed answers just visit all the past threads where this came up to debunk it this time. Maybe we can convince Christian to head this line off in the future with a FAQ thread.
Cole-
I didn’t forget the mediocre performance of enemy air defense over the years, I just hadn’t raised it. That is true, though. Spinney is saying the same thing above when he talks about “threat inflators.”
Regarding the “unmanned future in the air, on land, and at sea”, no thanks. To the extent that unmanned weapons can support and enhance a manned force, fine. The last thing we need is politicians and high command in this country thinking they can start and win wars with no consequence to themselves. We SHOULD be able to win wars quickly, but absolutely NOT start wars easily.
As for more ground forces for GWOT, I’m not sold on that either. The best way to actively fight terrorists is cops, spooks, and SOF. The Pashtuns have been booting occupiers out of their country for millenia. The Afghan gov’t is a mess and seen as our puppet. The history of insurgencies is this: If the local gov’t can’t appear competent or legitimate, neither will its foreign supporters, and they’ll lose. It has nothing to do with being better.
SMSgt Mac- Where’s the money coming from? We already spend more than damn near everyone else combined. We’ve gotta spend smarter, not more.
SMSgt Mac- So if we get this military you want, funded at the levels you want, what should we do with it?
Cole- We need to win wars as quickly as possible, because war is extremely expensive and destructive. I believe any time a trigger gets pulled in anger, that somebody has horribly miscalculated and failed (it could be the other guy who failed first, as long as we don’t fail last). Like it says in the Sun Tzu, the best warriors are not the ones that win all their wars, it’s the ones that get their way without fighting. Even worse are the commanders who don’t understand their enemy, or their own ability.
I have no faith at all that our new COIN doctrine means we can just go around and ‘fix’ all these insurgencies. I do not believe air power by itself can coerce ‘bad guys’ to behave. I dislike the risk-aversion and ‘American exceptionalism’ suggested by the unmanned force. It’s like saying ‘Americans can kill you any time we want, and we’re too good to die for it.’ Any enemy worth their salt isn’t going to be over-awed by that, they’re going to find a way to fight back. Please don’t mistake that for saying I want trench warfare again, “make the other poor bastard die for his country” still applies.
Military power has limits, and it’s generally a very blunt instrument to deal with our problems. Of course, when we do need it, and we WILL need it, it needs to work. We’re not in disagreement there.
Seems to me that the American people and by extension politicians(we bear responsibility for their actions), the already feel like they can wage and fight wars without consequences, because the all volunteer force insulates the country from the true costs of war. You have a small minority of the country bearing the brunt for the good of it. Time for some form of minimum mandatory service in both peace time and times of war, like many other industrialized democracies have.
I also don’t see how the emotional impact of a UAV on the public and by extension politicians is any different from a cruise missile or bombs dropped from a F-117.
Drake- I think you’re on target with regards to the AVF, but I doubt it’s going anywhere anytime soon. Definitely past due to have a national discussion about it, though.
As for manned vs. unmanned, even just a few ‘soft pink bodies’ in danger tends to make politicians think twice. Also, I’m not sure we’ve been asking overflight permission for our UAVs any more than we have for cruise missiles. Probably has to do with who is controlling the mission.
Cole- We’re talking past each other. I agree that F-22s are overkill, and we’re over-invested in carriers. Unmanned systems probably can be powerful force multipliers, no doubt. I’m skeptical that unmanned can replace manned systems in as many areas as you suggest.
I also see no reason why our armed forces need to cost trillions- I keep hammering away with the A-10 and I’ll do it again. It’s cheap, it works, it’s upgradable, it works, did I mention it’s cheap? Oh, yeah… it works. And it’s lasted a long time, too. I wouldn’t roll the thing down the middle of SAM alley, but we can have other systems similarly designed for those threats (maybe UAVs are best there).
The history of strategic bombing, apart from nuclear deterrence, has been an unmitigated failure. Tactical bombing works, close support is even better, quasi-strategic interdiction bombing is iffy (Transportation plan in WWII did pretty much what they wanted, Ho Chi Minh trail did not). Hard to say that deep strike should go away entirely, and I know the arguments… but still. Also need less tanker support if those short-legged fighters are focused where the troops are.
Strategic airlift almost couldn’t be more expensive, tactical is very useful and necessary. Subs are the heart of the blue-water Navy, not carriers. The brown-water Navy needs help, though, you’re right.
As for the long war? Maybe the only good thing about Iraq is that we know we have to plan for and understand how complex that mission is. It definitely knocked some of the hubris out of the neocons and the Wilsonians- there’s plenty of them in both parties so let’s leave that alone- and knocked some sense into the armed forces. But do we plan to fight all wars that way? Absolutely not! After an initial phase, the military component of a counter insurgency becomes less important. That’s one of our larger failures in Iraq, that we haven’t found the civilians to do the civil affairs work… leads directly back to Drake’s point about serving the country for a short stint, maybe it doesn’t always have to be military. If it’s down to us as a foreign occupier to set a country straight, we’ve probably already lost anyway. It also means we need to be very careful about what wars we get into.
I believe a big problem with defense spending is the insane costs for equipment. We have all heard the jokes about the $10,000 dollar toilet seat but it is true. A 1Gb flash drive from Walmart is under $5. Due to contracts with Boeing it costs us over $9000 each. My whole career I have seen items that are purchased at 100-1000x more than can be purchased elswhere. To make it worse the items are greatly inferior to off the shelf items. I also believe we need to cut down on the amount of nuclear weapons we stockpile. We have more then enough to provide a deterence. The one thing they should not do is cut forces. I have not kept up with the deployment numbers in the Navy but the other branches have been getting worn out since right after 9/11. I agree with cutting overpriced aircraft. The swiss amry knife approach to making aircraft is ridiculous. Trying to cram as much stuff on to an airframe sounds cool but as soon as one part of the overprices equipment breaks the whole bird become unusable until it is fixed. They should learn from large aircraft. A c130 hauls stuff, KC130 refuels and a AC130 blows things up. Same aireframe loaded only with the equipment to get the job done. If they actually want to find a way to cut spending the first thing to do is bypass upper leadership and ask the troops. They are more likely to give an educated answer without having a political or financial stake in companies effected by change.
Well, sorry to have missed the fun for a bit.
RE: SMSgt Mac- So if we get this military you want, funded at the levels you want, what should we do with it?
We should do with it what the Strategies to Task process, or whatever similar process they are using these days, shows where the best investment of funds should be placed
RE:
“RE: The history of strategic bombing, apart from nuclear deterrence, has been an unmitigated failure.
Demonstrably false, even without the effusive
SMSgt Mac-
If the strategy they’re using to determine the requirement is busted to begin with, how can we end up with the right equipment? Do we even have a strategy?
I think you’re presenting a false dichotomy, that a less expensive system can not be as capable vs. a near peer threat. We should not underestimate, neither should we become paranoid about what the other guy can do.
You mentioned in an earlier post that pork spending was cutting into defense, but defense pork is some of the fattest on the hog. That political gaming is part of what drives up the cost.
Finally, overmatching force is not what wins COIN. The tank parked on the corner might be WHY they’re fighting back, and they don’t have to win the fight, just go the distance. As this regards current fighting in Gaza, I’m playing wait n’ see.
RE: “Unmitigated” is a little strong, I’ll admit. I was on a roll. How about “for the most part”? I think I’d have to cherry pick examples of when it succeeded.
OhKayyyy
Cole- I’ve been thinking more about the strategic/ tactical issue. It’s the same idea as a ‘strategic corporal’ who can influence a whole conflict. We have run strategic missions with tactical aircraft, and tactical missions with heavy bombers. Focus is on missions and outcome. As such I have no issue with bombers, I just think we need to dump this silly idea that the bad guy’s going to see our scary airplanes over their capitol and give up. Even if they should, history says they don’t.
As for capability/ numbers: Cost does not always equal capability. For example, the cost of weaponry is inflated for political and bureaucratic reasons. If we could get some downward pressure there, systems would cost somewhat less.
We’ve been talking about inflated threats, and that is driving inflated requirements, which drives up complexity and cost and development time lines. We need to realistically assess the threat.
The capability you have may not be the one you need. However, if you try to make the system good for ‘everything’, how do you not get ‘jack of all trades’?
The flipside of having small numbers of a few super-capable systems is brittleness of the force. If the enemy finds an advantage that limits the utility of a system or attrits it, how fast can you find a work around? How fast can you get more off the assembly line? General Kent talks in that RAND memoir (linked by SMSgt Mac below) about the LWF competition and how “quantity has a quality all its own”. Other aphorisms spring to mind: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”; “Too expensive to lose, too expensive to use.”
In war is it’s best to fill the battlefield with problems more quickly than the enemy can deal with them. For example, that means more planes = more simultaneous aim points and more mission types. Give your side more possibilities and limit your enemy’s. LO has a place, no question, but if that’s all we build I’m afraid we’re actually limiting ourselves.
SMSgt Mac brought up Gen. Kent’s ‘Strategies to Tasks’ concept, and thinking this over has me worried that they’ve flipped it, as in; “We will buy F-35s and Aircraft Carriers. Find a strategy that justifies them.”
SMSgt Mac-
My argument against strategic air is not that air power is useless, rather, that we should focus on those missions that have the greatest effect towards ending a war.
Even tactical missions have strategic consequences, so hunting the German U-boats and the Transportation Plan were absolutely effective and reasonable. Sending the heavies deep into Nazi territory, razing cities to get at military targets, or simply for the sake of destroying them as the RAF did? Missions and resources were likely better spent elsewhere.
Fighters came through WWII with many fewer losses per mission flown than bombers, which also means a much lower casualty rate. Ground attacks by fighters in a ‘tactical’ sense contributed tremendously to ground victories, which sped the overall victory.
Excellent point regarding Doolittle. Didn’t hurt that we were reading Japan’s mail by then. Doolittle also had a hand in the strategy that resulted in the breaking of the Luftwaffe.
re: The atomic attacks; I’d have edited that “probably” if I’d read it twice. Oh, well. In any case, the ‘softer’ Japanese leadership certainly knew the war was lost and were disturbed by the Soviet invasion. The fact that the Soviets were entering the Pacific War also pushed our own time line for using the bomb, we knew what Stalin was likely to try post war. The Soviets did not end the war, but the atom bombs didn’t do it alone (particularly in the mind of the Japanese), and that is my point.
In Vietnam, Linebacker II was an attempt to punch our ticket out of that war, not win it. It had a strategic goal, which was realized. Of course, it might not have been necessary if Kissinger had done a better job in the first place. Don’t fight wars half-a** indeed. Also take care choosing which to join (if you have a choice).
Libya- If the point wasn’t to stop the Libyans from using terrorism, what was it? To get even? Maybe you’re taking issue with ‘eliminate’ because it has a military connotation? The attacks caused blowback. Bombing didn’t have the intended effect.
Desert Storm- I seem to remember Bush 41 giving Saddam one last warning to get out before the ground war, which is how I got the idea of incrementalism: “Get out or we use sanctions; Get out or we bomb; Get out or we invade.” Looking back I can’t see where that was part of the plan, though, so fair enough.
What did air power there accomplish? It degraded Iraq to an extent, though Saddam maintained rule. His departure was more of a wish than a plan, anyway. Air power might have been used to an even greater effect against the escaping Republican Guard units (a very appropriate use in that case), but politics interfered. A-10s were combat proven there, but the take-away for the US was that smart bombs and LO were the way to go. Viewed on its own, Desert Storm looks fairly successful. In a broader context, given what has developed, I don’t know. The aircraft were about as good as one could expect, but the policy was lacking coherence. Maybe it was just “Oil Good”.
Desert Fox can be viewed that way was well, you’re right. In the limited sense, it worked. In a broader one, it was indecisive.
Kosovo- Gen. Clark’s plan was to coerce Milosevic by threatening to bomb. Clark assured his commanders that we wouldn’t have to, and then Milosevic called his bluff. So after 78 days of bombing, we won. During that time, Milosevic hadn’t stopped the mistreatment of the Kosovars. It doesn’t seem to me that air power came anywhere close to doing what was advertised there. That’s a consequence of people in charge not understanding the limitations or utility of air power. The whole thing was such a misbegotten, politically engineered mess, that I’m really surprised you’d defend it. Again, don’t do a war half-a**. Clark committed to the use of force with no plan B, and the results are not auspicious for air power by any means.
The rest boils down to semantics; what’s tactical, what’s strategic? Is the answer more about depth, or effect, or intent? Doesn’t matter much, I guess. Let’s make it a point to understand what works, and why.
Combined arms- that sounds like a real good plan.