This is being written as the war in Ukraine is well into its second month. The images and commentaries available on the various news feeds remind one of World War II: much death, much destruction, much armament expended. The tools of war have changed somewhat, with more guided weapons and more long-range rockets, but the improvements have seemed to become more efficient at destroying structures than at killing people. Can one win a war by merely knocking down buildings? If a participating nation simply refuses to be defeated, destroying buildings mainly makes them mad at their enemy. Killing defenseless women, children, and the elderly makes them even madder. Surely, Russian history should have made that obvious to the Russian leaders. Instead, Russia seems to have assumed that a bit of “shock and awe” was all that would be needed to gain their goals. Consequently, Russia showed up with too few people, too few armored vehicles, and too little in the way of supplies. This conflict will only end when one side is too tired or too low in supplies to continue.
Normally, one would assume the much larger Russia would eventually wear down the smaller and more poorly-armed Ukrainians. However, the Ukrainians are being supplied with additional weapons by the NATO countries. That means they can hold out much longer, perhaps even longer than the Russians. Both the NATO countries and the Russians have spent a long time not fighting the kind of war ongoing in Ukraine. The Russians seem to have forgotten how. Could the same thing have happened to the US and other NATO countries? Armed forces and the industries that support them have for decades been preparing to fight the next war. Could this have led them astray?
Andrew Cockburn would claim that both Russia and the US have been poorly served by their military-industrial complexes (MICs). He refers to those structures as viruses in an article for Harper’s Magazine: The Military-Industrial Virus. A successful virus is not one that kills its host, but rather, one that modifies the behavior of the host in order to insure its continued multiplication and propagation. If the host becomes less healthy in the process, then so be it.
To begin with, we must understand what and who make up the military-industrial complex. It involves ever fewer, yet ever larger, corporations, the armed services themselves, the academics and analysts who earn a living pondering over the future of warfighting, and the legislators, both local and federal, who benefit from defense spending in their districts. Cockburn would argue that ignorance on the part of the general public on how the military acquisition system actually works is a big problem. One might assume that the armed services decide what they need and task the defense contractors to deliver it as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Unfortunately, what actually happens is more the inverse of that process. The virus has taught the services that it needs a certain level of income in order to continue providing the products they need. In addition, the virus has forced the system to accept cost overruns and delays in development to be an ordinary part of the process. And since the developers and manufacturers determine what can be done (or what the virus wants done), what armed services want is often what they are told by the virus is available. The virus propagates its influence by demonstrating to military officers, pentagon officials, and legislators that high-paid employment could be available at retirement.
To illustrate the inexorable multiplication of the MIC virus, Cockburn provides the results of a study by Chuck Spinney, a long-time pentagon analyst.
“The analysis that Spinney produced…revealed something intriguing: although the U.S. defense budget clearly increased and decreased over the sixty years following the end of the Korean War, the decreases never dipped below where the budget would have been if it had simply grown at 5 percent per year from 1954 on (with one minor exception in the 1960s).”
This led Spinney to the following conclusion.
“…this behavior even held true for the large budget reductions that occurred after the end of the Vietnam War and, more significantly, after the end of the Cold War. It is as if there is a rising floor of resistance, below which the defense budget does not penetrate.”
Cockburn continues.
“Only during Obama’s second term did it first dip below this level with any degree of significance. Even more interestingly, every single time the growth rate had bumped against that floor, there had been an immediate and forceful reaction in the form of high-volume public outcry regarding a supposedly imminent military threat. Such bouts of threat inflation invariably induced a prompt remedial increase in budget growth, regardless of whether the proclaimed threat actually existed. As General Douglas MacArthur remarked, as far back as 1957: ‘Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters never seem to have happened, never seem to have been quite real’.”
Cockburn also credits Spinney with the first public observation that the military acquisition process was not strengthening our military posture but weakening it.
“In 1983, Chuck Spinney, a thirty-seven-year-old analyst in the Pentagon’s Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, testified to Congress that the cost of the ever-more complex weapons that the military insisted on buying always grew many times faster than the overall defense budget. In consequence, planes, ships, and tanks were never replaced on a one-to-one basis, which in turn ensured that the armed forces got smaller and older. Planes, for instance, were kept in service for longer periods of time and were maintained in poor states of repair owing to their increasing complexity. As to be expected, the high command did not react favorably to these home truths.”
The defense contractors, with captured consumers, relaxed into a sloppy culture that would, in true virus fashion, infect other areas of the economy.
“Once budgets for an optimistically priced new weapon are approved by the Pentagon leadership and Congress, a program schedule is devised so that no single failure to meet a deadline or pass a test can threaten the flow of funding. In addition, the contract, inevitably of crushing complexity, is designed to ensure the contractor gets paid to cover any and all technical and management failures, which generally guarantees another doubling or tripling of the cost beyond the originally inflated estimate.”
The MIC virus has the power to guarantee itself the nourishing funds it needs to survive. Consider the once infamous case of the $640 toilet seat.
“Three decades ago, revelations that the military was paying $435 for a hammer and $640 for an aircraft toilet seat ignited widespread media coverage and public outrage. But when it emerged in 2018 that the Air Force was now paying $10,000 for a toilet-seat cover alone, the story generated little more than a few scattered news reports and some derisive commentary on blogs and social media. (This was despite a senior Air Force official’s unblushing explanation that the ridiculous price was required to save the manufacturer from ‘losing revenue and profit.’) The Air Force now claims to have the covers 3-D–printed for $300 apiece, still an extravagant sum.”
A culture of easy money no matter how poor the performance is a terrible example for others in the economy. The virus did spread. Cockburn highlights the demise of US prominence in the machine-tool industry.
“Research on the impact of defense spending on the U.S. economy as a whole is rarer still, even though weapons account for about 10 percent of all U.S. factory output. A generation ago, Seymour Melman, a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia, devoted much of his career to analyzing this very subject. He concluded that defense spending’s impact on the broader economy was wholly harmful, a consequence of the bad habits injected into the bloodstream of American manufacturing management by a defense culture indifferent to cost control and productivity. The U.S. machine-tool industry, for example, had powered postwar U.S. manufacturing dominance thanks to its cost-effective productivity that in turn allowed high wage rates for workers. But, Melman wrote, as more and more of its output shifted to defense contracts, the industry’s relationship with the Pentagon
became an invitation to discard the old tradition of cost minimizing. It was an invitation to avoid all the hard work . . . that is needed to offset cost increases. For now it was possible to cater to a new client, for whom cost and price increase was acceptable—even desirable.
In consequence, as Melman detailed, the U.S. machine-tool industry gradually ceased to compete effectively with nations such as Germany and Japan, where cost control still reigned supreme.”
Consider also the sorry example of Boeing as a manufacturer of commercial aircraft.
“The airliners that rolled out of its Seattle plant were well designed, safe, and profitable. Boeing had a huge defense component as well, but senior management reportedly enforced an unwritten rule that managers from the defense side should never be transferred to the civilian arm, lest they infect it with their culture of cost overruns, schedule slippage, and risky or unfeasible technical initiatives.”
“That began to change in 1997, when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, a defense company. In management terms, the merger was in effect a McDonnell takeover, with its executives—most importantly CEO Harry Stonecipher—assuming command of the combined company, bringing their cultural heritage with them. The effects were readily apparent in the first major Boeing airliner initiative under the merged regime, the 787 Dreamliner.”
“Among other features familiar to any student of the defense industry, the program relied heavily on outsourcing subcontracts to foreign countries as a means of locking in foreign buyers. Shipping parts around the world obviously costs time and money. So does the use of novel and potentially risky technologies: in this case, it involved a plastic airframe and all-electronic controls powered by an extremely large and dangerously flammable battery. All this had foreseeable effects on the plane’s development schedule, and, true to form for a defense program, it entered service three years late. This technology also had a typical impact on cost, which exceeded an initial development estimate of $5 billion by at least $12 billion—an impressive overrun, even by defense standards. Predictably, the battery did catch fire, resulting in a costly three-month grounding of the Dreamliner fleet while a fix was devised. The plane has yet to show a profit for the corporation, but expects to do so eventually.”
“The two recent crashes of the Boeing 737 Max, which together killed 346 people, were further indications that running civilian programs along defense-industry lines may not have been the best course for Boeing. The 737 had been a tried and true money-spinner with an impressive safety record since 1967.”
So, what has the MIC virus done to the US warfighting capability? Cockburn provides numerous examples.
“The beauty of the system lies in its self-reinforcing nature. Huge cost overruns on these contracts not only secure a handsome profit for the contractor but also guarantee that the number of weapons acquired always falls short of the number originally requested. For example, the Air Force first planned to buy 750 F-22s at a projected cost of $139 million apiece, but rising costs compelled the defense secretary at the time, Robert Gates, to cancel the program in 2009, capping the fleet at 187. With reduced numbers, weapons systems are kept in service longer: the Air Force’s planes average twenty-eight years in service, and some still in use were built well over half a century ago. The F-35, for example, costs almost six times more than the F-16 it is replacing, while the Navy’s Zumwalt-class destroyer ($7.5 billion each) costs four times more than the Arleigh Burke destroyers it was supposed to replace. (The Zumwalt’s overruns were so enormous that although the original plan called for thirty-two ships, production was cut to just three.) On occasion, the system reaches the ultimate point of absurdity when gigantic sums are expended with no discernible results. Such was the case with Future Combat Systems, a grandiose Army program to field ground forces of manned vehicles, robots, and assorted weaponry, all linked via electronic networks, and with Boeing as the prime contractor. Twenty billion dollars later, the enterprise was shuttered, an extensive exercise in futility.”
Consider the F-35 which is being imposed on the US armed services. In order to feed the necessary profits to the defense contractors, it is also being foisted on our allies.
“…we’ve been left with a very poor fighting force for our money. The evidence for this is depressingly clear, starting with our bulging arsenal of weapons systems incapable of performing as advertised and bought at extraordinary cost. Some examples, such as the F-35 Lightning II fighter planes bought by the Air Force, Navy, and Marines, have achieved a certain muted notoriety and served as the occasional butt of jokes made by comedians on cable TV. Yet there is little public appreciation of the extent of the disaster. The F-35 first saw combat last year, seventeen years after the program began. The Marines sent just six of them on their first deployment to the Middle East, and over several months only managed to fly, on average, one combat sortie per plane every three days. According to the Pentagon’s former chief testing official, had there been opposition, these ‘fighters’ could not have survived without protection from other planes. The most expensive weapons program in history at a projected cost of $406 billion, the F-35 initially carried a radar whose frequent freezing required the pilot to regularly switch it on and off. While the radar problem was eventually corrected, the Air Force version of the plane still features an unacceptably inaccurate gun that remains to be fixed, though the Air Force claims to be working on it.”
Cockburn identifies the Navy as the service in the worst warfighting shape.
“Mines, to take one striking example, are a potent naval weapon and ubiquitous among our potential enemies. Fear of mines caused the United States to cancel a major amphibious landing during the Korean War, and concerns over possible Iraqi mines prevented a planned seaborne assault on Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War. A single mine (and Iran has thousands of them) in the Strait of Hormuz, through which a third of the world’s oil transported by sea passes every day, would throw markets into total chaos. Yet the Navy currently possesses a mere eleven minesweepers, dilapidated vessels long past retirement age, with just four available for the entirety of the Middle East. Fifteen of the new and failure-ridden class of Littoral combat ships, known to crews as “little crappy ships,” will supposedly be dedicated to mine-hunting and minesweeping, but none of their specialized equipment—designed to detect and disable mines, including underwater drones—has been found to work. A July 2018 report from the Defense Department’s inspector general found that the Navy deployed the relevant systems ‘prior to demonstrating that the systems were effective’.”
Much has been said about an “Asian Pivot,” or of China as our greatest defense problem. Such a state would put pressure on the Navy’s Seventh Fleet which operates in the western Pacific.
“…the fleet itself has been progressively deteriorating, as became tragically evident when two destroyers, the U.S.S. Fitzgerald and the U.S.S. John S. McCain, collided with merchant vessels in Asian waters in 2017, leaving a total of seventeen sailors dead. The disasters were found to be the direct consequence of incompetent commanders and ill-trained, overworked, shorthanded crews struggling to operate broken-down equipment they did not know how to repair. The failures in leadership, investigations revealed, extended all the way to the top of the chain of command.”
Cockburn presents a picture of a nation wasting enormous sums of money on systems that are too expensive, too unreliable, and too scarce to risk using them in actual combat. No one seems to care. The virus has spread so efficiently that just about every congressional district can claim defense money is contributing to local job creation. What else matters?
Ukraine is fighting valiantly for its freedom against an
enemy whose ruthlessness can only be compared to that of Hitler. Russia may not win because of its armed
might, but it could win because it is willing to destroy an entire country and
kill as many people as necessary to not lose.
The US and the NATO countries appear frightened by the prospect of
making Putin mad. That is unbecoming at
best. Helping Ukraine too much as the
start of World War Three is an issue to be considered. But the considerations should not be tainted
by the possibility that the US and NATO do not have the resources to fight that
battle, which frighteningly could be true.
The best case for the US, but not the most honorable, is that we depend on
Ukraine to fight for us. One way or
another, the US needs Ukraine to vanquish the Russians so we don’t have to take
up that fight directly. We must give
them all the support we can.
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