Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Crisis looms at the Pentagon
By Chalmers Johnson
Corporation and Northrop-Grumman. They are said to employ more than 58,000
workers in well-paying jobs, a major political obstacle to rationalizing
defense expenditures even as recession is making such steps all but
unavoidable.
Both front-loading and political engineering are alive and well in 2009. They
are, in fact, now at the center of fierce controversies surrounding the extreme
age of the present fleet of air force fighter aircraft, most of which date from
the 1980s. Meanwhile, the costs of the two most likely successors to the
workhorse F-16 - the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter - have run
up so high
that the government cannot afford to purchase significant numbers of either or
them.
The F-16 made its first flight in December 1976, and a total of 4,400 have been
built. They have been sold, or given away, all over the world. Planning for the
F-22 began in 1986, when the Cold War was still alive (even if on life
support), and the air force was trumpeting its fears that the other superpower,
the USSR, was planning a new, ultra-fast, highly maneuverable fighter.
By the time the prototype F-22 had its roll-out on May 11, 1997, the Cold War
was nearly a decade in its grave, and it was perfectly apparent that the Soviet
aircraft it was intended to match would never be built. Lockheed Martin, the
F-22's prime contractor, naturally argued that we needed it anyway and made
plans to sell some 438 airplanes for a total tab of $70 billion. By mid-2008,
only 183 F-22s were on order, 122 of which had been delivered.
The numbers had been reduced due to cost overruns. The air force still wants to
buy an additional 198 planes, but Gates and his leading assistants have balked.
No wonder, according to arms experts Bill Charting and Christopher Preble, at
more than $350 million each, the F-22 is "the most expensive fighter plane ever
built".
The F-22 has several strikingly expensive characteristics which actually limit
its usefulness. It is allegedly a stealth fighter - that is, an airplane with a
shape that reduces its visibility on radar - but there is no such thing as an
airplane completely invisible to all radar. In any case, once it turns on its
own fire-control radar, which it must do in combat, it becomes fully visible to
an enemy.
The F-22 is able to maneuver at very high altitudes, but this is of limited
value since there are no other airplanes in service anywhere that can engage in
combat at such heights. It can cruise at twice the speed of sound in level
flight without the use of its afterburners (which consume fuel at an
accelerated rate), but there are no potential adversaries for which these
capabilities are relevant. The plane is obviously blindingly irrelevant to
"fourth-generation wars" like that with the Taliban in Afghanistan - the sorts
of conflicts for which American strategists inside the Pentagon and out believe
the United States should be preparing.
Actually, the US ought not to be engaged in fourth-generation wars at all,
whatever planes are in its fleet. Outside powers normally find such wars
unwinnable, as the history of Afghanistan, that "graveyard of empires" going
back to Alexander the Great, illustrates so well. Unfortunately, Obama's
approach to the George W Bush administration's Afghan war remains deeply flawed
and will only entrap us in another quagmire, whatever planes we put in the
skies over that country.
Nonetheless, the F-22 is still being promoted as the plane to buy almost
entirely through front-loading and political engineering. Some apologists for
the air force also claim that we need the F-22 to face the F-16. Their argument
goes this way: We have sold so many F-16s to allies and Third World customers
that, if we ever had to fight one of them, that country might prevail using our
own equipment against us. Some foreign air forces like Israel's are fully
equipped with F-16s and their pilots actually receive more training and monthly
practice hours than ours do.
This, however, seems a trivial reason for funding more F-22s. We should instead
simply not get involved in wars with former allies we have armed, although this
is why Congress prohibited Lockheed from selling the F-22 abroad. Some Pentagon
critics contend that the Air Force and prime contractors lobby for arms sales
abroad because they artificially generate a demand for new weapons at home that
are "better" than the ones we've sold elsewhere.
Thanks to political engineering, the F-22 has parts suppliers in 44 states, and
some 25,000 people have well-paying jobs building it. Lockheed Martin and some
in the Defense Department have therefore proposed that, if the F-22 is
cancelled, it should be replaced by the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, also built
by Lockheed Martin.
Most serious observers believe that this would only make a bad situation worse.
So far the F-35 shows every sign of being, in Chuck Spinney's words, "a far
more costly and more troubled turkey" than the F-22, "even though it has a
distinction that even the F-22 cannot claim, namely it is tailored to meet the
same threat that … ceased to exist at least three years before the F-35 R&D
[research and development] program began in 1994".
The F-35 is considerably more complex than the F-22, meaning that it will
undoubtedly be even more expensive to repair and will break down even more
easily. Its cost-per-plane is guaranteed to continue to spiral upwards. The
design of the F-22 involves four million lines of computer code; the F-35, 19
million lines. The Pentagon sold the F-35 to Congress in 1998 with the promise
of a unit cost of $184 million per aircraft. By 2008, that had risen to $355
million per aircraft and the plane was already two years behind schedule.
According to Pierre M Sprey, one of the original sponsors of the F-16, and
Winslow T Wheeler, a 31-year veteran staff official on Senate defense
committees, the F-35 is overweight, underpowered, and "less maneuverable than
the appallingly vulnerable F-105 'lead sled' that got wiped out over North
Vietnam in the Indochina War". Its makers claim that it will be a bomber as
well as a fighter, but it will have a payload of only two 2,000-pound bombs,
far less than American fighters of the Vietnam era. Although the Air Force
praises its stealth features, it will lose these as soon as it mounts bombs
under its wings, which will alter its shape most un-stealthily.
It is a non-starter for close-air-support missions because it is too fast for a
pilot to be able to spot tactical targets. It is too delicate and potentially
flammable to be able to withstand ground fire. If built, it will end up as the
most expensive defense contract in history without offering a serious
replacement for any of the fighters or fighter-bombers currently in service.
The fighter Mafia
Every branch of the American armed forces suffers from similar "defense power
games". For example, the new Virginia-class fast-attack submarines are
expensive and not needed. As the New York Times wrote editorially, "The program
is little more than a public works project to keep the Newport News, Va, and
Groton, Conn, naval shipyards in business."
I have, however, concentrated on the air force because the collapse of internal
controls over acquisitions is most obvious, as well as farthest advanced, there
- and because the air force has a history of conflict over going along with
politically easy decisions that was recently hailed by Gates as deserving of
emulation by the other services. The pointed attack Gates launched on
bureaucratism was, paradoxically, one of the few optimistic developments in
Pentagon politics in recent times.
On April 21, 2008, the secretary of defense caused a storm of controversy by
giving a speech to the officers of the Air War College at Maxwell air force
base, Alabama. In it, he singled out for praise and emulation an air force
officer who had inspired many of that service's innovators over the past couple
of generations, while being truly despised by an establishment and an old guard
who viewed him as an open threat to careerism.
Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997) was a significant military strategist, an
exceptionally talented fighter pilot in both the Korean and Vietnamese war
eras, and for six years the chief instructor at the Fighter Weapons School at
Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas. "Forty-Second Boyd" became a legend in the
air force because of his standing claim that he could defeat any pilot, foreign
or domestic, in simulated air-to-air combat within 40 seconds, a bet he never
lost even though he was continuously challenged.
Last April, Gates said, in part:
As this new era continues to unfold
before us, the challenge I pose to you today is to become a forward-thinking
officer who helps the air force adapt to a constantly changing strategic
environment characterized by persistent conflict.
Let me illustrate by using a historical exemplar: the late Air Force Colonel
John Boyd. As a 30-year-old captain, he rewrote the manual for air-to-air
combat. Boyd and the reformers he inspired would later go on to design and
advocate for the F-16 and the A-10. After retiring, he would develop the
principals of maneuver warfare that were credited by a former Marine Corps
commandant [General Charles C Krulak] and a secretary of defense [Dick Cheney]
for the lightning victory of the first Gulf War ...
In accomplishing all these things, Boyd - a brilliant, eccentric and stubborn
character - had to overcome a large measure of bureaucratic resistance and
institutional hostility. He had some advice that he used to pass on to his
colleagues and subordinates that is worth sharing with you. Boyd would say, and
I quote: "One day you will take a fork in the road, and you're going to have to
make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go one way, you
can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn
your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will
get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other way and you can
do something - something for your country and for your air force and for
yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and get good
assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you
won't have to compromise yourself. To be somebody or to do something. In life
there is often a roll call. That's when you have to make a decision. To be or
to do" ... We must heed John Boyd's advice by asking if the ways we do business
make sense.
Boyd's many accomplishments are documented in
Robert Coram's excellent biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art
of War. They need not be retold here. It was, however, the spirit of
Boyd and "the reformers he inspired", a group within air force headquarters who
came to be called the "Fighter Mafia", that launched the defense reform
movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Their objectives were to stop the acquisition
of unnecessarily complex and expensive weapons, cause the air force to take
seriously the idea of a fourth generation of warfare, end its reliance on a
strategy of attrition, and expose to criticism an officer's corps focused on
careerist standards.
Unless Gates succeeds in reviving it, their lingering influence in the Pentagon
is just about exhausted today. We await the leadership of the Obama
administration to see which way the air force and the rest of the American
defense establishment evolves.
Despite Gates' praise of Boyd, one should not underestimate the formidable
obstacles to Pentagon reform. Over a quarter-century ago, back in 1982,
journalist James Fallows outlined the most serious structural obstacle to any
genuine reform in his National Book Award-winning study, "National Defense."
The book was so influential that at least one commentator includes Fallows as a
non-Pentagon member of Boyd's "Fighter Mafia."
As Fallows then observed (pg 64-65):
The culture of procurement teaches
officers that there are two paths to personal survival. One is to bring home
the bacon for the service as the manager of a program that gets its full
funding. 'Procurement management is more and more the surest path to
advancement' within the military, says John Morse, who retired as a Navy
captain after twenty-eight years in the service ...
The other path that procurement opens leads outside the military, toward the
contracting firms. To know even a handful of professional soldiers above the
age of 40 and the rank of major is to keep hearing, in the usual catalogue of
life changes, that many have resigned from the service and gone to the
contractors: to Martin Marietta, Northrop, Lockheed, to the scores of
consulting firms and middlemen, whose offices fill the skyscrapers of Rosslyn,
Virginia, across the river from the capital. In 1959, Senator Paul Douglas of
Illinois reported that 768 retired senior officers (generals, admirals,
colonels, and Navy captains) worked for defense contractors. Ten years later
Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin said that the number had increased to
2,072.
Almost 30 years after those words were written, the
situation has grown far worse. Until we decide (or are forced) to dismantle our
empire, sell off most of our 761 military bases (according to official
statistics for fiscal year 2008) in other people's countries, and bring our
military expenditures into line with those of the rest of the world, we are
destined to go bankrupt in the name of national defense.
As of this moment, we are well on our way, which is why the Obama
administration will face such critical - and difficult - decisions when it
comes to the Pentagon budget.
Chalmers Johnson is the author of three linked books on the crises of
American imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback (2000), The
Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American
Republic (2006). All are available in paperback from Metropolitan Books.
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