In a rather silly Newsweek piece entitled “Is Robert Gates a Genius?” Fareed Zakaria wrote that Gates’ budget proposal for the Pentagon has gathered all the “right” opponents (Senator Imhofe, R. Ok.—a man of astounding ignorance—the defense contractors, Beltway consultants). Which means that he must be a genius, according to Jonathan Swift, the great 18th century satirist: “You may know him by this sign; that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.”
It’s totally inappropriate to define Mr. Gates this way. He has done an admirable job at Defense, I think, yet his latest budget proposal isn’t really going to upset the suits from Lockheed Martin. He took away their F-22 but continued the F-35, and this game has been going on since at least 1991 when the F-22 was contracted. Both should have been dumped.
President Obama recently trumpeted his proposed budget cuts of $17 billion, which comes to less than half a percent of the total, as the Repubs cheerfully pointed out. Congress will likely kill the half of that which Defense contributed. Maybe Obama felt he couldn’t demand more in light of his upcoming requests to Congress for domestic dollars, e.g., health care. But he lost a major reform opportunity.
It isn’t enough to kill the F-22 Raptor, though that decision was to Mr. Gates’ credit. There’s also the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The 2010 budget commits to buying some 2,456 of these at a final projected cost of around $200 million per copy. We’re still going to have a token force of 187 F-22s, costing $350 million apiece.
According to those who study such matters, both planes are headed for obsolescence if not irrelevance. They have numerous Achilles heels, design and performance problems, largely owing to the insane procurement programs which have permitted contractors to commit to production without flight testing. Cost overruns have been enormous for both. The full story is here.
Three years ago I worked in Public Affairs at NAVAIR, the Navy’s aircraft procurement and testing command. There was much hoopla about the F-35 and its “transformational” abilities. Yet, three different versions were designed (one each for the Air Force, Navy and Marines), all had problems, and the cost questions were consistently glossed over. We had enough to deal with in deflecting problems suffered by the tilt-rotor V-22 Osprey.
The big question, of course, is whether we are going to continue to let our defense programs dominate the budget, not only in times of stress but as far as the eye can see. The true figures of what we spend are genuinely appalling. And even with these expenditures we can’t figure out how to fight the wars we’re in (or defend against pirates). The system has grown so complex and deep-rooted that even Mr. Gates’ good intentions to reform it seem impotent.
Winslow T. Wheeler’s recent eye-opener in Politico is an accounting of the real costs of national defense. He starts with the Pentagon’s $534 billion budget request in February, adds $6 billion in “mandatory” personnel expenses, $130 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, $22 billion for DOE’s nuclear weapons requests, $106 billion for the Veterans Affairs “human costs” for taking care of our soldiers, $43 billion for Homeland Security, and on and on, including the DOD’s share of our national debt interest payments.
The grand total comes to $974 billion—the real per-year costs of defense. As Mr. Obama said in describing his relatively puny budget cuts, "Even by Washington standards, that should be considered real money."
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