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​.coun​ter​punch​.org/​s​p​i​n​n​e​y​1​2​2​3​2​0​0​8​.​h​tml)

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:

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Our good friend Winslow Wheeler and his col­leagues at the Center for Defense Information have just released a new book exam­in­ing the jacked up poli­cies that gov­ern the Pentagon’s spend­ing plans and propos­ing new alter­na­tives to the cur­rent array of pro­grams and strate­gic concepts.

I haven’t even got­ten close to decod­ing the work, but our boy Steve Trimble over at the DEW Line blog pulled this gem from the tome.

Pierre Sprey — father of the A-​​10, co-​​father of the F-​​16 and ardent F-​​22/​F-​​35 critic — has teamed up with ex-​​Vietnam fighter jock Col Robert Dilger to pro­pose a fas­ci­nat­ing vision for an “effectiveness-​​based” air­power fleet. (Read more here, pp 159–162)

• 4,000 smaller, more agile A-​​10s = $60 billion
• 2,500 tur­bo­props as for­ward air con­trollers = $3 billion
• 100 new tankers = $28 billion
• 1,000 dirt-​​strip C-​​123-​​like air­lifters = $30 billion
• 1,100 smaller, faster F-​​16s = $44 billion
• 183 F-​​22s already purchased
• 200 F-​​35s redes­ig­nated as A-​​35s “to meet com­mit­ments to allies” = $50 billion

I’ll take a closer look at the work today and get back with some more of my own take­aways. Also, feel free to men­tion some of your own and I’ll fea­ture them here.

– Christian

Blackwater USA, the pri­vate secu­rity and train­ing com­pany, has shut down a large part of its man­u­fac­tur­ing sub­di­vi­sion after los­ing the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle pro­gram and fac­ing dwin­dling demand for its “Grizzly” Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle.

Reports had pre­vi­ously indi­cated that Blackwater would lay off its JLTV work­ers, some of whom were lured to the Moyock, N.C.-based com­pany from Ford and Volvo. But accord­ing to sources the com­pany is shut­ting down all vehi­cle manufacturing.

Blackwater spokes­woman Anne Tyrrell declined to spec­ify how many employ­ees were laid off by the cut, but sources close to the com­pany say about 50 work­ers will lose their jobs.

“Any time a spe­cific busi­ness ven­ture doesn’t go as planned it is dis­ap­point­ing,” Blackwater pres­i­dent Gary Jackson told Defense Tech. “After a detailed review of our vehi­cle man­u­fac­tur­ing oper­a­tion, we made the dif­fi­cult deci­sion to dis­con­tinue this par­tic­u­lar busi­ness line.”

The cuts do not affect Blackwater’s man­u­fac­tur­ing capa­bil­ity for firearms range sys­tems, Tyrrell added.

Company sources also admit that the military’s shift from pur­chas­ing new MRAP II vehi­cles to keep­ing cur­rent MRAPs and out­fit­ting them with stronger armor con­tributed to Blackwater’s busi­ness losses since demand for the Grizzly shrank with require­ments. And indus­try watch­ers say the mil­i­tary will likely skip over the MRAP II design entirely and take a closer look at the MRAP Light, such as Navistar’s Maxpro vehicle.

The Army recently released a solic­i­ta­tion that called for nearly 10,000 so-​​called MRAP-​​All Terrain Vehicles to add to their fleet of 12,000 heavy MRAPs.

Tyrrell said the vast hanger spaces pre­vi­ously used to build Grizzly’s and to design their JLTV pro­to­type will be con­verted into an avi­a­tion main­te­nance and repair cen­ter to build on the company’s already expand­ing con­tract avi­a­tion sup­port business.

Blackwater will also soon launch a new MRAP vehi­cle driver’s train­ing course at their sprawl­ing North Carolina com­pound, using unsold Grizzlies to pre­pare troops for nav­i­gat­ing the topheavy vehi­cles in tor­tu­ous terrain.

(Gouge=SS)

– Christian

Saw this lit­tle tid­bit from Defense Industry Daily today. Looks like Iraq is in line to get the best tank in the world…

On July 31/​08, the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced Iraqs for­mal request to buy M1 Abrams tanks, well as the asso­ci­ated vehi­cles, equip­ment and ser­vices required to keep these tanks in the field. It is likely that the tanks them­selves will be trans­ferred from US stocks, but this has not been ver­i­fied. With this pur­chase, Iraq will become the 4th M1 Abrams oper­a­tor in the region, join­ing Egypt (M1A1s), Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia (M1A2-​​SEP variant). 

I’m hav­ing a great time watch­ing as the Iraqi army builds up its capa­bil­ity. We reported sev­eral months ago that it had received elec­tronic counter-​​IED sys­tems for some of their VIP vehi­cles, I’m see­ing a lot more up-​​armored Humvees over there and quite a few MRAP vehi­cles on Iraqi patrols as well.

But the request for M1 tanks takes the build-​​up to a new level. It’s like order­ing F-​​15s for their air force. The DSCA says Iraq wants to buy 140 M1A2M tanks and eight M88A2 recov­ery vehicles.

But the $2.16 bil­lion wish list doesn’t end there, the Iraqi gov­ern­ment also wants:

• 64 M1151A1B1 Armored High Mobility Multi-​​Purpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWV)
• 92 M1152 Shelter Carriers
• 12 M577A2 Command Post Carriers
• 16 M548A1 Tracked Logistics Vehicles
• 8 M113A2 Armored Ambulances
• 420 AN/​VRC-​​92 Vehicular Receiver Transmitters

And the list doesn’t stop there…

35 M1070 Heavy Equipment Transporter (HET) Truck Tractors, 40 M978A2 Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck (HEMTT) Tankers, 36 M985A2 HEMTT Cargo Trucks, 4 M984A2 HEMTT Wrecker Trucks, 140 M1085A1 5-​​ton Cargo Trucks, 8 HMMWV Ambulances w/​ Shelter, 8 Contact Maintenance Trucks, 32 500 gal Water Tank Trailers, 16 2500 gal Water Tank Trucks, 16 Motorcycles, 80 8 ton Heavy/​Medium Trailers, 16 Sedans, 92 M1102 Light Tactical trail­ers, 92 635NL Semi-​​Trailers, 4 5,500 lb Rough Terrain Forklifts, 20 M1A1 engines, 20 M1A1 Full Up Power Packs, 3 spare M88A2 engines, 10 M1070 engines, 20 HEMTT engines, 4 M577A2 spare engines, 2 5-​​ton truck engines, 20 spare HMMWV engines, ammu­ni­tion, spare and repair parts, main­te­nance, sup­port equip­ment, pub­li­ca­tions and doc­u­men­ta­tion, per­son­nel train­ing and equip­ment, U.S. Government and con­trac­tor engi­neer­ing and logis­tics sup­port ser­vices, and other related ele­ments of logis­tics support. 

I want to know who gets the motorcycles.

– Christian

I’m sure you guys have seen this already, but in case you haven’t yet, our friends at Aviation Week ran an inter­est­ing piece the other day on the devel­op­ment of a hyper­sonic demonstrator.

My ques­tion is whether this is the first time (at least in a high-​​ish pro­file) that Boeing has teamed with Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works (I assume Boeing’s Phantom Works crew is involved) for a project that could be a large-​​scale deal?

I think it’s kind of cool to think that all those 10-​​pound brains could be get­ting together to come up with a new plane like this.

This arti­cle first appeared at Aerospace Daily & Defense Report.

Boeing and ATK have joined the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works team bid­ding to build the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Blackswift hyper­sonic tech­nol­ogy demon­stra­tor.

Northrop Grumman is under­stood not to have bid, mak­ing it likely a con­tract will be awarded to Lockheed by September. The unmanned, reusable turbojet/​scramjet-​​powered Blackswift is planned to fly in 2012.

Under DARPA’s Falcon pro­gram, Lockheed has com­pleted con­cep­tual design of a demon­stra­tor, the HTV-​​3X, that forms the basis for the Blackswift. The goal of the demon­stra­tion is to take-​​off con­ven­tion­ally, accel­er­ate to beyond Mach 6, maneu­ver and return to a run­way land­ing.

Skunk Works also is per­form­ing sub­scale tests of the combined-​​cycle propul­sion sys­tem, which com­prises a high-​​Mach tur­bo­jet and dual-​​mode ram/​scramjet. The tur­bine is used for take-​​off and land­ing, and to accel­er­ate the vehi­cle to Mach 4, where the ram­jet takes over.

Lockheed has ground-​​tested inlets and noz­zles that are shared by the two engines, says Stephen Walker, deputy direc­tor of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. The chal­lenge is in com­bin­ing both flow­paths over the Mach range dur­ing which both the tur­bine and ram­jet are oper­at­ing, he says. 

Be sure to read the rest of this story, a piece on more “war bots” for Joes and a bulkhead-​​by-​​bulkhead look at the death of a frigate from our Aviation Week friends at Military​.com.

– Christian

[EDITOR: Good morn­ing folks. I want to intro­duce to you a new guest blog­ger we’re going to fea­ture here occa­sion­ally. He’s a defense insider and that’s about all I can say here, but you’ll rec­og­nize his post from last week on the HK416.

Earmarks are ear­marks. I don’t care what is being done with those ear­marks right now. 

That is not the case, from the per­spec­tive of American warfight­ing capability.

It is the DoD’s respon­si­bil­ity to tell the President/​Congress what they need, not for an indi­vid­ual politi­cian to decide for him­self what the mil­i­tary needs. 

You assume that the peo­ple run­ning the DoD actu­ally have the best inter­ests of the fight­ing man and woman at heart. 

They don’t. Not when it comes to fund­ing unsexy things like trucks, amphibi­ous ships and cargo planes over their favored toys. 

The var­i­ous ser­vices — who write the require­ments that DoD sends to Congress — game the sys­tem to get the favored toys paid for, while ignor­ing the unglam­orous and non-​​career enhancing. 

The USAF’s fas­ci­na­tion with the F22 over every­thing has been much com­mented on here. 

How the USAF shorts cargo plane and ground sup­port plane pro­duc­tion has been a US Army com­plaint for as long as there has been a sep­a­rate air force. The A-​​10 would not exist at all were it not for leg­isla­tive log rolling that over ruled the “Fighter pilot generals.”

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Oh guys, you’re gonna love this one. 

From today’s front page of Military​.com:

Gates Cautions Against ‘Next-​​war-​​itis’

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The Pentagon must focus on cur­rent war demands, even if it means strain­ing the U.S. armed forces and devot­ing less time and money on future threats, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday. 

Meeting the war-​​fighting needs of the troops now and tak­ing care of them prop­erly when they get home must be the pri­or­ity, Gates said in a speech to a jour­nal­ists at a sem­i­nar here spon­sored by the Heritage Foundation, a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank. 

“I have noticed too much of a ten­dency towards what might be called Next-​​War-​​itis — the propen­sity of much of the defense estab­lish­ment to be in favor of what might be needed in a future con­flict,” Gates said. 

But in a world of lim­ited resources, he said, the Pentagon must con­cen­trate on build­ing a mil­i­tary that can defeat the cur­rent ene­mies: smaller, ter­ror­ist groups and mili­tias wag­ing irreg­u­lar warfare.

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We’re run­ning a story in our head­lines at Military​.com this morn­ing on alleged secu­rity breaches with BAE Systems (a major sub­con­trac­tor to Lockheed Martin…) on the JSF program.

I received a full rebut­tal today from a con­tact over at BAE and I wanted to share it with you in full:

The DoD IG explic­itly found no instances of unau­tho­rized access to clas­si­fied or export con­trol infor­ma­tion on the JSF pro­gram. We strongly dis­agree with the IG’s sug­ges­tion that nonetheless,such infor­ma­tion may have been com­pro­mised in some uniden­ti­fied way by unau­tho­rized access at BAE Systems. There is no basis what­so­ever for that conclusion.

BAE Systems takes very seri­ously their oblig­a­tion to pro­tect clas­si­fied and export con­trolled infor­ma­tion and has a com­pli­ance pro­gram that reflects the high­est of stan­dards. BAE Systems has a long and proven track record of safe­guard­ing sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion entrusted to it.

BAE Systems also strongly dis­agrees with the sug­ges­tion that we did not per­form required audits and fully com­ply with our Special Security Agreement. That sug­ges­tion is sim­ply false.

BAE Systems pre­vi­ously requested a meet­ing with the DoD IG to resolve what appears to us to be a mis­un­der­stand­ing of the under­ly­ing facts. 

A major hat tip to DT friend Nick Schwellenbach over at the Project on Government Oversight for break­ing this story into the open. Here’s a link to the IG report.

– Christian

Most of the Pentagon’s weapon sys­tems cost much more than they should, are built much more slowly than they could be and the entire sys­tem needs fun­da­men­tal reform. 

Those were the con­clu­sions of most law­mak­ers and one senior defense acqui­si­tion expert at a hear­ing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in Washington ear­lier this week. 

Perhaps most damn­ing, senior staff mem­ber Michael Sullivan from the Government Accountability Office told law­mak­ers that the sys­tem had not really been any bet­ter or worse when he started inves­ti­gat­ing defense pro­cure­ment in 1986, though he con­ceded there were some recent small signs of improvement. 

The hearing’s poster child for botched Pentagon buy­ing was a $13.2 bil­lion Marine Corps pro­gram called the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. The pro­gram for the updated AAV started in 1996 when the Marines issued a con­tract to General Dynamics. Initially, the pro­gram won plau­dits for its inno­v­a­tive man­age­ment and it passed through the pro­gram def­i­n­i­tion and risk reduc­tion phase in mid-​​2001. Then things began to fall apart. The Marines issued a con­tract for the next phase of the pro­gram which was sup­posed to cost $712 mil­lion but quickly rose by the end of 2006 to an esti­mated $1.2 billion. 

The mod­ern­ized amtrac, accord­ing to a report pre­pared for the Oversight Committee’s chair­man, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-​​Calif.), weighed too much to carry combat-​​ready Marines and still go as fast as it should. It oper­ated only four-​​and-​​half hours before requir­ing major main­te­nance instead of the planned 47 hours. It was so loud that Marines could not speak to each other and had to wear ear plugs.

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Defense indus­try advo­cates seem to see bud­get cuts com­ing and they’re try­ing to get out of the way. 

The Aerospace Industries Association on Tuesday called on pol­icy mak­ers to start think­ing about defense spend­ing — and con­sider ways to make sure weapons pur­chases don’t get pushed aside. Operating costs and per­son­nel are get­ting more expen­sive, the big trade group said, and the next admin­is­tra­tion will also face a host of other bud­get pres­sures. But that won’t stop the Pentagon’s air­planes and heli­copters from get­ting older, or ease the need to replace them, the group said. 

“Our country’s cur­rent path for mil­i­tary aero­space mod­ern­iza­tion is not viable,” AIA’s new defense mod­ern­iza­tion man­i­festo said. “As part of ade­quately fund­ing national defense, DoD needs to increase annual pro­cure­ment spend­ing to a steady state range of $120 billion150 bil­lion, in con­stant dol­lars, sim­ply to mod­ern­ize an aging, increas­ingly obso­lete and poten­tially vul­ner­a­ble force.“ 

The trade group said Congress needs to keep pass­ing emer­gency spend­ing bills, so that war costs don’t make mod­ern­iza­tion unaf­ford­able. It also called for the next admin­is­tra­tion to give a lit­tle extra thought to the defense bud­get, so that weapons buy­ing won’t fall to the bot­tom of the pri­or­ity heap as mil­i­tary sup­port costs rise.

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