“Zero Dark Thirty” or “The Pentagon Wars”?

Movies about the US military generally fall into just two categories: one is loaded with superheroes and amazing technology, the other packed with corrupt generals, politicians and defense contractors. Unfortunately, both have elements of truth in them.

How is it that the same national security community that produces such superb social operations personnel, or the truly magnificent submarines or fighter or bombers, or the seemingly “brilliant” weapons that have done such work on the Russian army in the last year, how is it that that community also produces the nightmare that is USS Ford or the Littoral Combat Ship, or the KC-46 program? How is it, with all of the folks in the US Army and Navy and Air Force who have all sorts of advanced degrees in national security studies – to include virtually every admiral and general in the last 30 years – the Pentagon could produce such an unmitigated screw-up as the evacuation of Kabul and the abandonment of billions of dollars of weapons to the Taliban?

And in each ugly case – and there are scores – there is always some 3 or 4 star officer who will begin his defense with “we didn’t make a mistake, what happened was that…” and then “flick the booger” onto Congress, or the White House, or defense contractors or, often, all three.

But if the Admirals and Generals are so smart and virtuous, why have the American people had to endure one tremendous cost overrun after another – for decades, and a regular run of weapon systems that don’t perform as advertised until billions more are spent after the fact; that readiness suffers as soon as anyone looks away, that more and more money goes into pay and benefits and yet we rarely get our personnel problems fixed, and most importantly, in the last 78 years we have arguably had only one clear win (Desert Storm) and a lot of long-drawn-out messes?

Why haven’t the Admirals and Generals sat down with Congress and the major defense contractors and fixed procurement?

Consider the Littoral Combat Ship or LCS. The Navy has already retired a number of these ships – before they were even 10 years old. Inside the Navy, out of ear shot of the senior admirals who like them, LCS is referred to as the “Little C___ Ship.”

How is it that we spend more on national security than the next 4 or 5 countries combined and yet, per the GAO (take a look at GAO report GAO-23-106217 “Weapon Systems Sustainment” – November 2022), from 2011 through 2021 exactly one aircraft type in the US Army, Air Force, Navy or Marines met its assigned mission capable rate every year: the UH-1N helicopter? Just 4 aircraft met their goals between 4 to 7 years; 18 aircraft types met assigned mission capable goals between 1 to 3 years out of 11, and 26 aircraft didn’t meet their mission capable rates as assigned even once.

When a football team fails to have a winning season 11 years in a row, managers get fired, the front office is fired, a whole bunch of people are fired. If a corporation doesn’t have any meaningful profits for 11 years in a row the entire executive suite is probably going to be looking for jobs in the fast food industry.

The war in Ukraine has made it clear that something needs to change. And it needs to change quickly, because China is watching.

The Secretary of the Navy just a few weeks ago said that the US can’t keep up with China on shipbuilding. China will soon have a 400 ship navy; the US has just over 300 ships and that number is going down. What’s the plan to fix it – now?

Last March, as the war in Ukraine began to shift gears into a war of attrition, it was obvious to a bunch of folks that the US was going to be pushing a very large amount of weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.

But just last week, one year later, the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition lamented that the US doesn’t have the machinery to easily ramp up production of ammunition for 155MM howitzers and that these machines will take a long time to build. But, we’re told that the US will get production, currently at 14,000 rounds per month, up to 20,000 per month before summer, and to 40,000 (or 80,000 if Congress has its way) by 2025. One might well ask: What’s the rush?

For the record, we’ve shipped more than 1 million 155MM rounds to Ukraine. Given that we’ll continue to ship rounds to Ukraine as long as the war continues, it’s difficult to figure – at this lackadaisical rate – when our inventories will be back to where they were a year ago, and impossible to imagine when they might be where they should have been a year ago – with substantially more rounds at the ready.

One of the defining hallmarks of good leadership is that good leaders don’t present problems, they show the way out of a problem. Like Moses leading his people out of Egypt, leaders have solutions. Yet there are no answers coming out of the E-Ring of the Pentagon much beyond business as usual. There is, simply, no sense of urgency, no sense that anyone truly recognizes the problem.

And we have a problem; we are facing a war with China some time in the near term. But we really don’t want to fight a war with China because the costs will be horrific. Consider that the war in Ukraine has already caused several hundred thousand deaths and total economic damage to Ukraine is placed at somewhere in the range of $500 billion to $1 trillion, in country with a $160 billion GDP.

What would be the cost of a full blown war that devastated Taiwan? To give you some sense of the scale, a study in 2019 estimated that a second Korean War would result in 1.5 million to 8 million deaths, and property damage in excess of $40 trillion. Taiwan is half the size of South Korea so maybe “only” $20 trillion? A war for Taiwan would almost certainly spread to Korea and Japan and China and the US… so $20 trillion might be low. To put that number in perspective, since 1776 the US has spent a total of about $26 trillion on national security.
Said differently, we need to deter any war with China and cost, as much as it pains me to give the Pentagon more money, shouldn’t be the first issue.

But leadership should.

The only way to deter that war is to build up our forces and our capabilities. And that means first lighting a fire under a bunch of people in the E-Ring, stripping the DOD of everything that doesn’t contribute directly to war fighting, and fixing procurement… we need a leadership team that can think clearly, act quickly and get moving.

Copyright 2023 Arrias
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