That’s what defense industry insider and analyst Loren Thompson says. It’s hard to imagine that given the country’s ugly fiscal situation, annual defense outlays of $700 billion will continue. Thompson peruses the 2010 QDR and finds another reason why defense spending will turn south: lack of an urgent threat sufficient to focus lawmakers and taxpayers.

The QDR speaks in very vague terms of an “uncertain” security environment throwing terrorism, a rising China, globalization and weapons proliferation into the mix. Thompson pulls this quote: “Rising demand for resources, rapid urbanization of littoral regions, the effects of climate change, the emergence of new strains of disease, and profound cultural and demographic tensions in several regions are just some of the trends whose complex interplay may spark or exacerbate future conflicts.”

That’s not going to be enough:

“It sounds like Pentagon policymakers are stretching to find a justification for generating nearly half of all global military outlays, and therefore have thrown in every negative trend they can think of. The end result is a diverse menagerie of disconnected concerns that lacks the urgency or focus necessary to sustain a coherent military posture.”

His conclusion: “We’re headed down, and “Exhibit A” in the case for why less defense spending is likely is our inability to find a threat that really scares the average voter.”

– Greg

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.

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.

It’s probably the jading effect of being so close to the biz that’s made our new team mate boil over, so for now, we’ll just call him “military curmudgeon” as he tells us how it really is.]

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.”

The Marines are in the same position versus the US Navy when it comes to amphibious transports with carriers, fighter planes and subs playing the “F22 role.”

The US Army Generals from the “Treadhead,” “Grunt,” and “Gunbunnie” unions (aka Armor, Infantry and Artillery branches) always short the Army supply of trucks during peace time. (The USMC does not do separate unions, but they short trucks as well, since, hey! That is what the Army is for.)

All of the above play budget games shorting unsexy but mission critical trucks, cargo planes and troop transports for their favored projects.

There are no “white hats” in all of this.

This is the normal “clash of competing interests legislative sausage making that our founding fathers anticipated in the Constitution. It is not efficient or pretty, but it works.

The usual results when legislative reformers try and ‘reduce the corruption’ of normal legislative sausage making is that it empowers the permanent bureaucracy at the expense of both the troops and the general public.

Legislative sausage making has the ultimate accountability of elections.

The Permanent Bureaucracy is accountable only to itself.

– Military Curmudgeon

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.

If it means putting off more expensive weapons for the future or adding to the stress on the Army — that is a risk worth taking, he said.

All this coming during 09 budget markup season, supplemental funding fights and the Air Force UAV smackdown. Now I’m beginning to thing Gates really has some Rumsfeldian guts to challenge convention and service momentum…

He also issued a warning to the military services, which have long set their sights on pricey, sophisticated weapons systems that take decades to develop and get onto the battlefield.

The Army has its $200 billion Future Combat System, the Air Force has its F-22 jet fighter. Both programs have been plagued by delays and escalating costs, as well as criticism from Congress.

Going forward, such weapons programs will have show they can be useful now against terror groups and insurgents, he said.

In a recent visit to Red River Army Depot in Texas, Gates saw some pieces of the FCS that can be sent to the war front now — and he said that must continue in order for the program to continue to be viable. Gates, however, will be leaving office long before the FCS or F-22 programs are fully fielded. In his speech Monday night at the 50th anniversary of the launch of NORAD — the North American Aerospace Defense Command — Gates reminded the crowd that his stint as Pentagon chief will end in exactly 254 days.

…and I’m sure there aren’t too many Air Force and Army PMs that are crying about that…

– Christian

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.

Originally, the Pentagon planned to buy 1,025 Expeditionary Fighting Vehicles for $8.4 billion. Now the military plans to buy 593 for $13.2 billion. Costs per vehicle, according to the committee’s report, have increased 168 percent and production has slipped eight years.

But the Marines’ EFV was certainly not alone in being a botched acquisition, Sullivan told the committee. His testimony noted that not one of the 72 weapons programs his office reviewed used “the best practices standards for mature technologies, stable design and mature production processes” He told the committee that “acquisition problems will likely persist until DoD provides a better foundation for buying the right things, the right way.” Right now, the military promises it can do too much, and underestimates how much weapons will cost.

The stakes are enormous. The Defense Department plans to spend $900 billion over the next five years on developing and buying weapons. Current programs are usually 21 months late in getting initial capabilities to the soldiers, Marines and airmen who need them. That is five months later than an analysis done in 2000 indicated, according to Sullivan’s prepared testimony. Almost 45 percent of the Pentagon’s major acquisition programs are paying more than 25 percent more per system than originally planned, compared to 37 percent of programs in 2000.

The biggest problems Sullivan found in his examination of defense spending were: requirements that grew and grew and grew; turnover of program managers that raised issues of “continuity and accountability;” too much responsibility in the hands of companies for work that used to be done by government officials; and difficulty overseeing the increasingly complex job of software development.

The two Pentagon officials at the hearing conceded there was room for improvement but insisted the system is not broken and is actually beginning to improve.

James Finley, deputy undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and technology, said that when he underwent Senate confirmation many people believed the process was broken. After his first 90 days in office he concluded they were wrong. “We needed to add discipline to the process and ensure that the basic blocking and tackling in executing the acquisition process was done correctly,” he testified.

Senior Pentagon leaders developed a three-year plan and is 26 months into implementing that plan. It includes greater focus on the beginning of a program to make sure prototypes are used to get a better handle on performance, cost, how to build the system and how long it will take to build, Finley said. The Pentagon has cut the paperwork for reviews by half and has standardized red, yellow and green indicators for cost, schedule and performance. There is greater focus on program stability — keeping funding steady and limiting turnover of key personnel — and the Pentagon created earned value management system “trip wires” to help identify problems on a monthly basis, Finley said.

– Colin Clark