Untitled Document

02 February 2007

A Department At War

It is a good morning some places. The nomination of Mike McConnell seemed to sail right through the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday, and will go to the floor shortly for final passage.

I heard him on the radio, a little wary in tone, but confident and authoritative. I was proud when he got the question from Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) about the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which has been awaited with baited breath for months.

I don't believe in coincidence, as a matter of course, but apparently the classified and unclassified versions of the document happened to arrive on the Hill just as Admiral McConnell was sitting down for his grilling. Senator Feinstein asked him if he had carefully reviewed the document, and he said he hadn't.

I mean, how could he? He has not been confirmed for his new job, and he is specifically prohibited from starting to work until the legal niceties are complete. That is the cool thing about being a Senator. You can make up your own reality as you go along.

Around the edges of the confirmation hearings there is a lot of money sloshing around out there. The President's Budget is going to the Hill, and the justification books are being published as background. It is an exciting time to be an analyst of numbers.

I'm kidding, of course. But the numbers are still interesting.

There certainly are a lot of them. Let's take a look at the tributaries of the Big Federal Budget that pay for the military and intelligence establishments of the United States. We all pay for them, or have agreed to let our children and grandchildren pay these bills.

The overall Defense budget is around $500 Billion Dollars for this fiscal year, but the Department plans in a future-year cycle of five years (though there are some exceptions). That means the Program of Record is somewhere around $2.5 trillion.

It is a little less than that, technically, but that “top line” number is created through the tricks of the trade. Actually, you would have to add the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which for perfectly good reasons are considered in a separate appropriation called a “Supplemental.”

Bear with me, I promise this won't hurt long, is that the wars are expected to end, and thus not part of the regular Future Years Defense Plan. The wars used to cost around $80 billion, when they were new, but the cost has swollen to over $120 Billion. So, the base cost of what we are doing this year is around $620 billion, though the President has indicated that the surge, like the aftermarket undercoating on a new car, is extra.

The Surge is going to cost $5.9 billion, though there is some quibbling about the real amount. The Comptroller for the Secretary of Defense is the Honorable Tina Brown. My sources tell me that her staff has looked hard at the Surge request, and they can only find around half of it allocated for anything related to sending 21,000 additional troops to Iraq, and reportedly is quite frustrated about it.

So, the running tally for this year is around $625.9 billion dollars. Though I have not added the Intelligence Budget. The Senate has courageously indicated that it intends to declassify the “top line” of the budget, which is the overall amount that the Director of National Intelligence is going to program for the operations and acquisition activities of his sixteen separate organizations.

There was an inadvertent disclosure of the top line last year by a senior official who forgot that the pres was present at a speech she made. She said the number was $44 billion, which was not accurate, but is, as they say, close enough for government work.

It is a little hazy here. The Intelligence budget is only that money programmed for national-level activities, and there are separate accounts in the Services for their tactical-level intelligence personnel and equipment which should rightly be accounted for in the Big DoD budget.

But some entire agencies are “covered” in otherwise innocuous lines in the defense accounts, a left over from other wars, so it is a little more complicated than I am letting on.

But just for the sake of argument, let's just throw the intelligence budget on top of the DoD figures to get a rough order of magnitude of the amount on money on the table. For this year, we are talking $669.9 Billion, which is just a shade north of the number of the Beast, but close enough for government work, as they say.

You would think that amount of cash would be enough to do what needs to be done, but you would be wrong. The cost of the war came out of the base budget, at least at first, since that is not considered to something you program for. In fact, programming money for operations that have not happened yet is illegal. That would amount to establishing a slush-fund, and much as that might be useful, the Congress has been quite adamant about forcing the Administration to come back and ask for money to do things.

It has something to do with accountability, I'm told. Accordingly, the Department and the Intelligence Services have had to spend their base budgets to do things that will be funded, hopefully, in later Supplemental appropriations.

They tell me that is why fifty Joint Strike Fighters are in the latest Supplemental, which would not seem proper. Wars are complex and expensive and do not make sense to the casual observer.

Naturally, the Services that are not actively engaged in the struggle are under intense scrutiny for find money to support the Marines and Soldiers in the field. It is only right. The Navy and the Air Force are tremendously capital-intensive institutions. The Air Force, for example, is flying B-52 bombers that are twice as old as their pilots. They are trying to field the F-22 Raptor aircraft that is quite an impressive piece of work, and costs around $339 million a copy.

It is the second most expensive airplane in the world. The B-2 Spirit bombers cost $2.2 billion each.

As for the Navy, the modern aircraft carrier is designed to last thirty years, though in practice they have been in service for a half-century.

It is expensive to sail into a new century, and with the budgets in a pinch, it makes the Navy defer construction, which only exacerbates the problem down the road.

That is why the newest class of fighting ships has been so problematic. The Littoral Combat Ship, or LCS, has run into problems. The class is supposed to be optimized for operations in the near-shore environment. There are four being built right now, with the intention of launching seventy of them. The cost has soared. They were supposed to cost around $110 million a copy, but the price jumped to the mid-200's because of cost overruns.

Alarm bells began to ring in the E-Ring of the Pentagon.

When the Secretary of the Navy pulled the plug on the program last week- maybe temporarily- the latest cost estimates were around $440 million. Something is very wrong, and big as the budget is, it cannot support that sort of activity.

If you have not been reading the papers, this is going on everywhere the Government is trying to purchase things, be it aircraft or Navy ships, or new cutters for the Coast Guard.

But the Navy needs the ships, or else it ceases to be a Navy. That is why the only wars are not in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is one going on right in the Department, between the Admirals and the civilians who think they run the place.

There are some very strong personalities in the fight, since it is a war about the future, the one after the cost of Iraq has been transferred to the Department of Veteran's Affairs. As far as the construction plans go, the future is now.

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