Want to Change Our Government? Let's Start With The Defense Department

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, USPolitics.einnews.com

January 20, 2008

A few days ago I sat through one of the more depressing events I've ever attended in Washington, D.C. The event was a discussion of a new book entitled Military Reform, written by two of the capital's most well known reform advocates, Winslow Wheeler and Larry Korb. The discussion was depressing enough. Reading through their book is worse.

Here's what it's all about.

The U.S. military is out of control.

We're spending as much or more money now through the Department of Defense than we spent at the peak of the Cold War. In fact the U.S. spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined---six times more than China, 20 times more than Russia.

In terms of dollars no other nation in the world can touch us.

But for all our might and dollars, a group of Iraqi irregulars have been bleeding us for years. We're losing ground to the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Our ability to protect U.S. interests in the middle east and elsewhere is in question.

It's not for want of money. As Wheeler and Korb point out, "The U.S. defense budget is higher, in real terms, than at any time since the end of World War II. Yet we have fewer ground combat divisions, tactical and strategic air wings, and naval combatants than at any time since 1946."

Why?

---Lack of strategic imagination among uniformed and civilian defense planners who are not creating forces, military or political, that can meet the challenge of Iraq and Afghanistan type conflicts.
---A military-industrial machine that has captured government decision-making for new weapons and the strategy and tactics those weapons represent.
---A military system that cannot account of how it is spending its hundreds of billions of dollars. (The GAO has thrown up its collective hands and just calls the Defense Department "unauditable.")

The depressing part of it is that Wheeler and Korb have come to the conclusion that these problems have become so institutionalized that maybe they can't be fixed at all.

Dozens of blue ribbon committees and congressional studies over the past few decades have recognized the litany of Pentagon problems. Along the way, modest changes were made. In fact, the military reform movement seemed to be in high gear during the 1980s when everyone was talking about $600 toilet seats.

But then the Soviet Union collapsed and the U.S. stood alone as the remaining world super-power. Instead of taking advantage of that window of opportunity to reconfigure our defense doctrines to incorporate the lessons of Vietnam and the brewing problems of the middle east, the nation's defense program merely contracted somewhat to become a shrunken version of its Cold War self.

During Bill Clinton's 8 years as president most of the cuts in defense spending were restored, along with some of the major weapons systems that faced cancellation during the reform efforts of the 1980s.

Don Rumsfeld became defense secretary in 2001 with every intention of attacking the agency's institutionalized problems, but he treated the job as a hostile takeover of the Pentagon and created a massive internal resistance movement. In fact, as Wheeler and Korb remind us, Rumsfeld would probably have been out before the year ended if it had not been for 9-11.

Each new weapon system we buy as a nation---our airplanes, ships, helicopters, etc.----is more expensive and technologically advanced than the ones they replace. They are born as concepts, get some funding to prove viability, and get more funding at each new milestone. The contractors make sure that component parts are built in states with powerful members of congress, which provides a virtual bullet-proof guarantee that they won't be canceled. This has been the history of such troubled aircraft as the F-22 and the Osprey helicopter.

As costs begin spiraling far above early estimates---which they invariably do---the military tries to maintain cost control by buying fewer units. The result has been diminishment of our air, sea and ground weaponry even as we spend more dollars.

Efforts to field test these weapons under simulated combat conditions ("try before you buy") have been fiercely resisted by the military bureaucracy and their industry counterparts.

In 2006 10 contractors, led by Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, General Dynamics and Raytheon received more than $100 billion in defense department contracts.

It's a huge business.

So we're spending more, getting less, and racking up ever more out-of-commission time as technicians wrestle to make ever more complicated equipment battlefield ready.

What's worse is that these new weapons are not the result of carefully considered strategic decisions at the top about threats the U.S. might face today and next year. The inertial force built up in the days when we planned to fight a Russian invasion of Europe and other standing army threats still drives our new weaponry, and at the same time fights off efforts to build the kind of components that might have won us an early lasting peace in Iraq and Afghanistan.

No one running for president in 2008 has addressed this problem. A problem that's draining our resources and putting the nation ever more at risk. As Winslow and Korb put it, "...by objective measures the Pentagon is very probably the worst managed major agency of the U.S. federal government...the DoD has been shrinking our armed forces, while making their equipment...on average...older and doing so at increasing cost...."

I haven't included many examples here. But they do in their book. It's enough to make even the most optimistic among us feel quite depressed.

Joe Rothstein, editor of US Politics Today, is a former daily newspaper editor and long-time national political strategist based in Washington, D.C.

See all previous articles by Joe Rothstein here.