Pierre Sprey and I have authored a 4,000 word article explaining why we believe that the military reform now in the air in Washington DC is more chaff than wheat. The article ran yesterday on the home and op ed pages of Military.com. Find it at http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,199801,00.html, and below.
We welcome debate and discussion on the article. Military.com has a "Discussion Board" for this article at http://forums.military.com/1/OpenTopic?a=dl&s=78919038&f=1061982486&x_id=199801&x_subject=Will 'Reform' Ever Start?&x_dpp=Y&x_link=http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,199801_4,00.html.
People interested in some of the data behind the assertions that America's defenses have been shrinking, aging, and becoming less ready to fight at ever increasing cost can find some of that data in a presentation I made to the American Helicopter Society at Patuxent, Maryland on August 26. Find a copy of that presentation ("America's Incredible, Shrinking, Aging, Less ready Ever More Expensive Armed Forces") at http://www.cdi.org/friendlyversion/printversion.cfm?documentID=4540. (These data are nothing new; they have been presented and analyzed in a far better informed series of presentations by Pentagon expert Chuck Spinney. Copies of those various analyses are available; just ask.)
People interested in a broader discussion of why America needs military reform and what fundamental reform consists of can find same in the anthology "America's Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress." Find this anthology by retired military officers, Pentagon insiders, and others at Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Defense-Meltdown-Pentagon-President/dp/0804769311/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238011540&sr=8-1
The Wheeler/Sprey article follows:
Pentagon Reform: Will It Ever Start?
by Winslow T. Wheeler & Pierre M. Sprey
In the world of military spending, the word "reform" is back in vogue.
It's not hard to see why. We have a new administration elected on the promise of change. Two small and unpopular wars are going badly--at mind-boggling expense, morally and materially--accompanied by a stream of independent auditors' reports of war profiteering and corruption as bad as we've ever seen. The Government Accountability Office tells us the Pentagon has set a new record for cost overruns, $300 billion. Those overruns pay for weapons programs that are years late, perform badly, and have little combat utility in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else.
Even discounting the corrosive effects of the current wars on our military, the Pentagon's steady decay of the last fifty years continues. Pentagon spending ratchets up every year, causing our combat forces to grow smaller and smaller. Why? Because the military bureaucracies, with near universal acquiescence, use the extra money to run up the costs of new weapons much faster than their budget grows. The nation is now spending more on defense than in any year since WWII, even after adjusting for inflation. The direct result is fewer Army combat brigades, fewer Navy ships and subs, and fewer Air Force fighters and bombers than at any point since 1946. The baroque complexity and expense of our new weapons constrains us to buy so few that our ship, plane and tank inventories are older, on average, than ever before. Worst of all, to help pay for those few hyper-expensive new weapons, we are sending some troops off to war with even less combat training than in the seventies, dubbed the "hollow decade" for its infamously low combat readiness.
Presiding unchallenged over this growing mess has been a remarkably homogenous coterie of congressional committee members and Pentagon civilian officials, closely tied to the defense industry and persisting through three decades of Democratic and Republican administrations. The Pentagon civilians of either stripe stoutly defended business-as-usual. Examples abound: Democratic appointees punched loopholes in the 1990 reform law forcing the Pentagon to actually balance the books for the first time. Republicans kept pouring money into a sixty year old missile defense program that doesn't work against Third World intercontinental ballistic missiles that don't exist. Civilian appointees of both parties steadfastly undermined a 1983 reform law requiring weapons to be tested in the field before spending piles of money putting them into full production.
In Congress, Republicans and Democrats in the Armed Services Committees and the corresponding Defense Appropriations Subcommittees continue a tradition of strenuous partisan debate, usually over how much to increase each president's defense budget. Overriding partisan rancor, every year they manage to agree in adding billions of dollars to be spent in their districts for "earmarks," less euphemistically known as pork.
Is It Reform, or Something Else, in the Air?
Now that the mess created by their handiwork of the last thirty years can no longer be hidden, Washington's national security aristocrats have donned the reform crusader's shining armor.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has been lauded by the New York Times for "sweeping reforms" in his April decisions to truncate a few particularly useless and grossly expensive weapons programs. Looking every bit the crusader, Gates sought to sweep away the F-22 fighter, ludicrous with its $350 million price tag and not a single sortie flown over Iraq or Afghanistan. Demanding that the Pentagon bureaucracy focus on the wars we are fighting today, he also cancelled a Navy-managed Presidential helicopter even more gold-plated and expensive than the F-22. Preserving balance among the services, he axed an Army family of Rube Goldberg-inspired, under-armored vehicles bursting with radios and computers but ignoring the lessons of Iraq.
But these breathlessly described "sweeping reforms" have a dark side that undoes them. A telling example: When Gates very correctly cancelled Lockheed's F-22, he simultaneously endorsed going ahead full speed with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, built by the same company. With the F-35 already overweight, sluggish-performing, behind schedule, and growing in cost as fast as the F-22 ever did, the Gates-endorsed plan pays for more than 500 of them before the first definitive flight test report lands on his desk. The F-35 program exemplifies why the Pentagon cannot be trusted to reform itself. By doing nothing to fix the obvious problems in this turkey of a program, Gates is ensuring a rerun of the F-22 cost and performance disaster, the antithesis of real reform, and a poster child for business-as-usual. So much for sweeping reform.
Rushing to put on its own cosmetically polished armor, Congress has passed the "Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009," their nostrum to cure cost growth, delivery delays and the rest of the Pentagon procurement mess. Written by the bipartisan leadership of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, not a single member of Congress voted against the bill. At his May 22 Rose Garden signing ceremony, President Obama officially joined this landslide enthusiasm for the Reform Act, saying "I'm extraordinarily proud to stand here and sign."
It would surely be something to be proud of if, after decades of decay propelled by their staunch sabotage of every attempt at reform, Congress and the Executive Branch had found the political spine to bring real "change" to the Pentagon. Sadly, barring a few important but isolated events we will discuss below, that spine has not been much in evidence.
Starting at the top, according to his Office of Management and Budget, Obama plans to spend $5.1 trillion between 2010 and 2017, assuming he is elected to two terms. This will be more than George W. Bush, aided by Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, spent from 2002 to 2009. In the eight years of his famous defense "spend-up," Ronald Reagan managed to spend just $4.2 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars. In other words, Obama plans to outspend Reagan by 20%, a whopping $850 billion more!
To move beyond business-as-usual to meaningful reform, Obama and Gates need to change the vector of misdirected spending that has locked us into the long downward spiral of the last fifty years. Regrettably, if we follow the new Obama spending plan unchanged, Congressional Budget Office analyses show that the long term shrinking of our forces and the aging of our weapons will continue unchecked, accompanied by still more gutting of our readiness to fight. These outcomes are not inevitable; clearly, the spending plan needs to be improved in major ways.
Will Old Brooms Sweep Clean?
But wait, today's Pentagon insiders protest. All of this will change. After all, to implement Gates' "sweeping reforms," Obama's Pentagon officials are conducting a new Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a congressionally mandated appraisal of just about everything in the Pentagon.
This will be the sixth such review; Pentagon observers have been thoroughly jaded by the previous five. Each of these reviews did incorporate a new and different buzz word theme. For instance, Rumsfeld's "defense transformation" was a policy wonk's smokescreen for shoveling more money into electronics and big ticket weaponry. Word-smithing aside, each of the five reviews resulted in no perceptible change in the trajectory of Pentagon decay. Taken as a whole, the two decades of QDRs read like report cards written by changeless bureaucrats grading their own vision of a future that looks remarkably like the past.
Perhaps it is not reasonable to condemn the sixth QDR before its completion. But it is reasonable to weigh what can be expected from the track records of the Pentagon officials running this particular QDR iteration.
One of the key players is the Deputy Secretary of Defense, aside from Gates the most powerful person in the Pentagon bureaucracy. William J. Lynn III has a well established track record. During the Clinton Administration he rose to be the Pentagon's comptroller, its CFO. There, his major contribution was to confound financial integrity, not advance it. He strenuously argued, with success, for exempting the Pentagon from major provisions of the Chief Financial Officers' Act of 1990 seeking to force all federal departments to comply with accepted financial integrity standards. He also advocated the notorious bill paying system, known as "pay and chase," under which the Pentagon hands the contractor a quick payout and later tries to figure out what it was for. The mess that continues today's, the lack of Pentagon accountability, stems in large part from his handiwork.
Now promoted to Deputy Secretary of Defense after an intervening hiatus as Raytheon's chief lobbyist, Lynn's predilection for quashing reform remains strong--notably in the fine-tuning of the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act that President Obama so proudly signed into law in May. Lynn's contribution was to take a weak, cosmetic measure and make it worse.
The bill creates a new Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, a cost czar to replace the existing in-house cost shop and to put an end to the phony, understated price tags used to sell weapon programs in their early stages. As crafted by its primary authors, Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ), the bill made sure to not require the Pentagon to actually use the cost czar's estimates in making decisions or in putting together budgets. Even so, the new cost czar remained too much of a threat to Mr. Lynn's hand on the purse strings. He sought to eliminate the new position altogether. Though unsuccessful, he did argue successfully to kill the House wording that actually entitled the cost czar to determine the costs used in Pentagon budgets. The result: Pentagon decision makers remain free to ignore the new czar -- just as they have been ignoring previous independent cost estimates for decades.
Similarly, the bill seems to require the Pentagon to buy competing prototypes of each new weapon--that is, "competitive fly before buy," a practice which has consistently resulted in better weapons at lower cost, on the few occasions when it has been tried. However, Levin and McCain's tepid wording permitted the Pentagon to quickly waive this requirement simply by invoking "critical national security objectives," undefined. Dissatisfied with this gaping loophole, Lynn toiled to widen it. To more thoroughly undo the onerous quasi-requirement to competitively prototype whole weapons, he made sure that competing just one token subsystem would suffice. In case even that was too painful, he added another waiver: now a simple declaration that any competitive subsystems might increase costs allows Pentagon bureaucrats to ignore the requirement altogether.
As originally written in the Senate, the bill's language actually ended the practice, now rife, of permitting contractors to conduct the Pentagon's reviews of their own programs. Apparently finding such contractor self-review indispensable, Lynn objected. At his request, the Senate Armed Services Committee changed the bill to permit corporate subsidiaries to perform reviews of their parent companies' programs. The final wording discarded this embarrassingly obvious charade. As signed, the Reform Act instructs the Pentagon to write any contractor self-review regulation it pleases, subject only to the vaguest legislative guidance.
In essence, through waivers and loopholes, the Act's entire reform program has been reduced to a polite request for the Department of Defense to fix itself. The lesson from this sad legislative history is twofold: first, the Pentagon's leadership is as hostile to real reform as ever; second, Congress, rather than carrying out its constitutional duty to actively oversee the nation's defenses and correct abuses, is in fact the Pentagon's ally in killing change and reform.
Larding the Gates Budget
Though he's no crusader for reform, Secretary of Defense Gates deserves credit for a number of the decisions he announced on April 6; two of them were right on the money.
He very properly said "it was not a close call" to end production of Lockheed's F-22 fighter. Horribly overpriced at over $65 billion just for the 187 authorized and a gigantic performance disappointment, the F-22 was the embodiment of the Pentagon's shrinking-and-aging-at-higher-cost problems. The fact that it was irrelevant to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it has no mission, was just icing on the cake.
The Air Force's C-17 transport, made by Boeing, is very much the same story. At $327 million per copy (counting all procurement and development costs), it delivers far too little cargo at too much cost. A more fuel-efficient Boeing 747-8 freighter costs 10% less and hauls 85% more cargo for 85% longer range. The Air Force claims that the C-17 was designed to be able to land on "unprepared" runways. That ability proved to be only a demo stunt, unfortunately one that imposed major payload and cost penalties on the design. Even for demos, it takes weeks to prepare the "unprepared" landing strip. In the current wars, the rare C-17 landings on such strips are mainly publicity events ballyhooed by Air Force press flacks. Unlike the F-22, the Air Force has funding in hand for more C-17s than the 190 it says it needs. In past years Congress had already ladled out funds for 15 over and above the Air Force's "requirement". Gates was entirely correct, even overdue, to stop this cramming of unneeded C-17s into the budget.
Of course, for both the F-22 and the C-17, the performance features that attract the Congress are unrelated to war: Lockheed and Boeing each trumpet that 40-plus states have been cut in for a piece of the production. The deliberate piecemealing of production, coordinated with a corresponding distribution of campaign donations, quite literally buys votes in Congress--funded by the taxpayer, of course. That same inefficient distribution of non-competitive contracts, loads up the planes with serious quality control problems at lots of extra cost. Result: the military gets less aircraft that cost more to fix and fly less often.
Congress shredded Gates' decision to cancel the C-17, and did so without a murmur from the secretary. On May 12, the House Appropriations Committee added $2.2 billion for eight more C-17s to an "emergency" war supplemental to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The next day, the White House issued an official response to the bill in its OMB Statement of Administration Policy (SAP). Traditionally the vehicle for veto threats to remove unwanted provisions, the SAP was notably silent on the C-17s. A few days later, when asked, the Pentagon spokesman offered no objection to the extra planes, observing that at least the C-17 was "in the fight" in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was all down hill from there. The bill was signed into law by Obama with $2.2 billion in C-17 gravy for 40-plus states. It was never really in doubt. The Congressional porkers rolled over Gates, hardly feeling a bump.
This trampling sent an abundantly clear signal: if Gates can be rolled on the C-17, why not go for more?
The House Armed Services Committee quickly did so. Meeting to mark up the 2010 Pentagon budget in mid June, it added $369 million as a down payment on a roughly $2.5 billion tab for 12 more F-22s in 2011--thereby opening the barn door for many years and many billions more in production. The Committee even opened some ambiguous loopholes for continuing the egregious presidential helicopter boondoogle, planting the seeds to neuter Gates' universally praised cancellation. And, despite the extra C-17s, the Committee raised doubts about Gates' zeroing funds for some elderly, superfluous Lockheed C-5A airlifters he was rightly sending to the boneyard.
Severing the Bacon that Binds
With his "sweeping reforms" of April about to be so publicly dumped into the Congressional trough, Gates and the White House finally acted. Shortly after the House Armed Services Committee voted, the White House issued a new SAP, this time threatening to veto the 2010 bill if the F-22s stayed in.
Just a few days later, the Senate Armed Services Committee marked up its version of the same Pentagon budget. There, the chief advocate of the F-22, Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), conveniently came up with a written statement from a key Air Force four star general, John Corley, head of the Air Combat Command. Corley obligingly wrote "there were no studies" to justify stopping F-22 production at 187 and that Gates' decision put the nation at "high risk." Coming from the commander of all the Air Force's fighters, these timely words gave perfect political cover to any senators choosing to vote for more F-22s, planes that just might be produced in their own states. The Corley encomium did its job: Chambliss garnered enough Committee votes to add 7 more F-22s to the 2010 budget for $1.75 billion.
A classic, even titanic, fight ensued when the bill reached the Senate floor. For once joining together to do it right, John McCain (R-AZ) and Carl Levine (D-MI) - the top Republican and Democratic members of the Armed Services Committee--wrote an amendment that revealed just how corrupt and rotten the effort to continue F-22 production really was. Instead of openly adding new money to the bill to pay for the huge $1.75 billion cost for just seven new F-22s, chief Lockheed booster Saxby Chambliss chose instead to raid other spending accounts.
He used the SASC's time-honored gambit for paying for pork. He raided the Operations and Maintenance account of the bill for $850 million - the part that pays for training, weapons maintenance, and wartime consumables. He raided the Military Personnel account for $400 million - that's right, military pay -- and he raided $500 million in presumed savings from the above-mentioned Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act - a savings so preposterous that even the erstwhile reform bill's authors said was it was completely phony. It was the first time in recorded history that the leadership of the Senate Armed Services Committee noted and acted against the raiding of military readiness accounts to pay for Members' porcine goodies, the very con they allowed so often themselves.
Happy to accept the added spending regardless of source, Lockheed, which had promised the Pentagon to not lobby for the extra aircraft, turned on its covert lobbying afterburners. The company distributed misleading fact sheets in e-mails all over Capitol Hill, but they had an electronic signature of Lockheed's top corporate lobbyist. (While Lockheed was caught in flagrante by us, the press has failed to make mention of the double-dealing.)
When head counts of senators revealed that Lockheed, Chambliss, and pork might win, Levin withdrew his amendment to enable Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to gum up the legislative works with a highly provocative hate crimes amendment to the DOD spending bill. It was a clever if disingenuous stalling tactic to gain time by throwing the Senate into partisan social agenda rancor. Then Secretary Gates delivered a tough speech in Chicago against the F-22 and, more importantly, the White House got on the telephone. Unleashing their rabid pit bull, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, over the weekend to call senators, the White House turned enough votes to win by a healthy 58-40 margin on the following Tuesday, July 21.
It was a major victory not just for Gates and Obama, but also for the embryonic anti-pork, pro-defense forces in Congress. For these forces, it was their first taste of victory in Congress in decades.
Necessary Ingredients for Reform
The victory against the F-22 showed that severing the sinews of pork that bind the Pentagon and the Hill requires ruthless determination and unblinking vigilance.
It required the same kind of toughness that Gates showed in 2008, when he fired the Air Force's Secretary and Chief of Staff for an F-22-boosting end run and when, a year later, he threatened to fire any senior general prematurely leaking budget details to the press or the Hill, a favorite service game for overturning unwanted SecDef budget decisions. Gates has also put an end to a longstanding scam favored by the Joint Chiefs of Staff: ever since the Joint Chiefs learned they could roll the weak-kneed Clinton administration with impunity, they have pimped Congress with lists of so-called "Unfunded Requirements" to the tune of the tens of billions of dollars each year. These budget-busting wish lists announced annually that the SecDef was not the final word on the defense budget. This year Gates forced the Chiefs to submit these expensive lists to him, then whittled them down to almost nothing.
The First Baby Steps
Plainly, the mighty minions in the Pentagon bureaucracy, Congress and the defense contractors that nourish them are working night and day to head off even the slightest changes. But the victory Gates experienced on July 21 with the help of a shockingly large 58-40 majority in the normally change-averse, reform-hostile Senate shows it may be possible to follow a different path, one that doesn't lead back to business as usual every time.
The ingredients are there for those who want to lead America's defenses out of fifty years of decay. They face a long, painful journey and endless tough hurdles. Nevertheless, there's a chance we may be seeing the first steps of that journey.
In the early 1980s, a group of liberals and conservatives from both parties joined in a coalition to reform - quite genuinely - America's defenses. With the Pentagon and the Armed Services Committees fighting them tooth and nail every inch of the way, this Congressional Military Reform Caucus revealed to the public previously untold horror stories of grossly incompetent weapons and waste, maneuvered inside the Pentagon to cancel at least one shockingly ineffective megabuck weapon (the Army's infamous "DIVAD" air defense gun), and legislated serious reforms without huge loopholes. Defense contractors, together with their uniformed and civilian allies reacted vociferously; one complained bitterly to the press that the Military Reform Caucus was cutting them up into "itty, bitty pieces."
Unfortunately, over the following years Capitol Hill's reform impulse waned, crushed by the military-industrial leviathan. Soon, Congress was being lulled by the delusionary argument that the 1991 Gulf War proved America's overwhelmingly powerful defenses needed no reform--a delusion that has become all-too-obvious after six years of Gulf War II.
Today, some congressmen and senators may be discovering that, despite the various reform pretenses of the last 30 years, including this year's charade, nothing has slowed the decay of the country's defenses. Their dawning awareness that pork is not invincible, that real pro-defense measures can prevail, may lead these deeply concerned members to take up the cause of real reform.
Perhaps the defense megacorporations and the congressional bacon mongers, through their excesses, have spawned their own worst nightmare: well-informed, selfless opponents determined to act and supported by a disgusted public.
If so, there are many hard, brutish fights ahead. Corrupted power never surrenders easily. The first such fight is won. Among the list of 58 senators who fought and won against business as usual there may just be some real leaders ready to stand up for curing the rot in our country's defenses.
Patriotic Americans have been waiting too long.
Winslow T. Wheeler is the Director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information in Washington. He worked on national security issues on Capitol Hill for 31 years for US senators from both political parties and the Government Accountability Office.
Pierre M. Sprey, together with Air Force Cols John Boyd and Everest Riccioni, brought to fruition the F-16; he also led the design team for the A-10 and helped implement the program. He is one of a very small number of Pentagon insiders who started the military reform movement in the late 1960s.
Both Wheeler and Sprey are contributors to the new anthology "America's Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress."
_____________________________
Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information
301 791-2397
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