Courtesy the Heritage Foundation, via Greg McNeal at The Tank.
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.
–John Noonan

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 …

And about that pro­cure­ment reform …

– Ward

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.

– Joe Buff

The Armys 2010 bud­get request reflects the ser­vices 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 Armys 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 Armys 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 Armys 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 vehi­cles design, specif­i­cally in pro­vid­ing greater pro­tec­tion against IEDs. Stanton made it clear that he didnt 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, its 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 thats already been done. The Army could even revisit the whole wheels ver­sus tracks debate, he said, although that doesnt 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 Armys 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.

(more…)

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

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 Departments bro­ken acqui­si­tion sys­tem, the Secretarys endorse­ment of the Levin McCain pro­cure­ment reform bill (now watered down at the Defense Departments 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

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…
Heh, right on.
–John Noonan

The Hill reports –

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 Obamas 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 Boeings 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 doesnt 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

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