Mangled rationale for bigger defense budget by Winslow Wheeler

The New York Post has re-run an argument in the Washington Times from the Heritage Foundation's James Carafano that argues we should increase the defense budget because modern defense technology - like civilian technology - brings vast performance improvements. He argues we should expect to pay more for military hardware, just as we do for civilian technology, such as entertainment electronics. It is a superficially facile argument based on misinformation that so easily passes in Washington DC as informed insight. In this case, it's a double barrel of ignorance: both on economics and technology. A commentary I wrote after this pained logic appeared in the Washington Times was today released by Defense News, just in time to address the re-run in the New York Post.
This commentary "Getting What We Pay For? Mangled Technology at Gigantic Cost" can be found at http://defensenews.va.newsmemory.com/default.php?type=&token=e88c12e66111e7ec1d5c5631645fed36&, or just below.



The Pentagon's budget is now bigger than at any point since World War II as measured in constant 2008 dollars.
Nonetheless, some want more stuffing. They want the money not for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but for the so-called baseline, non-war budget.
Some adopt arguments that destroy their own case. Examin­ing them ex­plains how the Pentagon fails to give us a war-win­ning, combat­-ready military. James Carafano, a senior re­search fellow at the Her­itage Founda­tion, argued Feb. 21 in the Washington Times , "In Defense of Defense Spending," that "Comparing the cost of today's military to what America spent to equip and de­ploy GIs against the Nazis is like comparing today's home enter­tainment center — plasma-screen, surround-sound HDTV with PlayStation 3 and Wii — to Harry Truman's Philco Radio. Sure, to­ day's system costs a lot more. But look what you're getting." A typical example is the F-22 fighter. It may cost more, but it is also a superb fighter, the argu­ment goes.
According to Wikipedia, Harry Truman's Philco radio console "ran into the $500-$800 range." To­day, at Circuit City, a top-of-the-­line HDTV runs about $3,800; a good surround-sound, about $1,800. The PlayStation 3 and Wii are $400 and $250 respectively.
Add a DVD player and a year of broadband TV service for $200 and $600, respectively.
That makes $7,050 for the "lot more" cost of the superb, mod­ern home theater compared with Harry Truman's dowdy Philco console.
According to the Office of Man­agement and Budget (OMB), to compensate for the change in the value of the dollar from 1945 to to­day, the 1945 price should be mul­tiplied by 11.9. That "$500-$800 range" for Harry Truman's Philco calculates to $6,000-$9,500 today.
In other words, if we adjust for inflation, weapons today should cost — very roughly — what they cost in 1945, at most 30 percent more. Of course, the advance in technology should bring a vast im­provement in performance.
Now, let's run the price compar­ison for fighter aircraft. The newest thing in 1945 was the Lockheed P-80 jet, the most ex­pensive fighter Harry Truman could buy. In 1945, the P-80 cost $110,000. Using the OMB index to convert the dollars, we get $1,309,000.
Today's F-22 is a little pricier.
The 184 F-22s the Air Force is now buying will cost $65.3 billion in contemporary dollars. That's $355 million per copy. That's not exactly in the price neighborhood of the inflation-adjusted P-80. In fact, it's in a whole different uni­verse. It's a multiple of 273.
We should not pretend that free market inflation and technology improvement is an excuse for to­day's huge defense budgets. While commercial prices have barely grown in inflation-adjusted terms and brought gigantic performance improvements, military prices have grown astronomically.
A defense process so grossly in­efficient that it can run up weapon costs 273 times faster than infla­tion reeks not of the commercial market but of socialism and bu­reaucracies that breed incestuous­ly ad infinitum.
And what about performance improvements? Does the cost of the F-22, even if astronomical, re­ally help the Air Force win? A 273­fold improvement in capability is unreasonable to expect, but is it worth buying?
On the purely technical level, the F-22 can fly more than three times the speed of the P-80 and al­most twice as high. It has other special characteristics (a reduced signature against some radars at some angles and long-range sen­sors and missiles, and more) that the P-80's creators were incapable of designing.
However, there are conse­quences to the gigantic price.
The F-22 force is too small. Even if the Air Force gets the additional 200 it wants, the United States will have the smallest tactical fighter inventory since World War II.
The F-22 makes our fighter force too old. When the last F-22 is bought, our shriveled fighter in­ventory will be — on average — older than at any previous point in history.
F-22 costs are strangling pilot training. Combat data repeatedly demonstrate that pilot skill is much more important than tech­nical differences in fighters to de­termine who lives and who dies in an aerial fight. To help pay for the F-22's gigantic cost, the Air Force has shrunk its own training budget. F-22 pilots now get a to­tally inadequate 10 to 12 hours of air combat training per month.
Twice that amount would be barely sufficient.
But even worse, the technology in the F-22 may be more analo­gous to 8-track audiotapes. It de­pends on the efficacy of a techno­logical road that has not proved it­self in real war.
The beyond-visual-range, radar-­based air war the F-22 is built to fight has not been proved effective in actual combat involving more than a very few aircraft. Moreover, some serious experts, including the designers of the highly suc­cessful F-15, F-16 and A-10, argue that the F-22 is a huge perform­ance disappointment.
The thinking behind the F-22 gives us massive problems and a bloated budget. Spending more will only make things worse. We need to demand a less bloated budget, and more importantly, radically new thinking about how it all goes together. ■


By Winslow Wheeler , director of the Straus Military Reform Pro­ject of the Center for Defense Information, Washington, and the co-author of "Military Reform."

Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information
301 791-2397
winslowwheeler@msn.com