The plane that won't die ... or
fly By Miriam Pemberton
Calling the V-22 Osprey a Rube Goldberg
contraption does some disservice to the American
cartoonist who died in 1970. US Vice President
Dick Cheney tried to kill the V-22 in the early
1990s, when he was defense secretary. But it lives
on today, and the US Marine Corps announced on
April 13 that in September the plane will begin
flying its first combat missions in Iraq. A
combination helicopter-plane with bells and
whistles galore might have appealed to Rube, but
he wouldn't have unveiled it in public until
he'd
made it work.
The V-22, by contrast, was
grounded by malfunctioning flight-control systems
as recently as a month ago. The latest engine fire
occurred in December; no one died (this time)
because the plane had already landed. The saga of
unreadiness goes back through this plane's 25
years of development and US$20 billion worth of
taxpayer funding. It is supposed to transport
troops around Iraq and go on rescue missions to
retrieve them. But its design hampers its capacity
for evasive maneuvering. And the
guns originally
designed for the front had to be moved to the
back, partially blocking the doors and making it
harder for troops to get on and off.
This
is what happens when you: take an aircraft that
was already trying to do too many things for the
Cold War; try to retrofit it for the post-Cold War
period, then the "war on terror"; and then rush it
into a war while it still ... needs work.
What keeps this thing alive (if not,
reliably, capable of flight)? Certainly, there are
the obvious suspects of enormous stables of
dedicated lobbyists and jobs carefully dispersed
in key congressional districts. Then, there's a
federal budget process that keeps money flowing in
the pipeline for weapons systems the US doesn't
need, and fails to examine the big-picture
question of what, overall, the US does need to
make it safer.
As the United States seeks
to find its way out of a disastrous war, this
question must no longer be deferred. While
projecting spending on the war to decline in
future years, Pentagon officials are making the
case to the budget and appropriations committees
that military spending overall must rise during
those years. If Congress funds President George W
Bush's request for fiscal year (FY) 2008,
Americans will already be spending more on the
military in real terms than at any time since
World War II.
Is this the right way to
make Americans safer? Majorities in the country
don't think so. Recent polling from
WorldPublicOpinion.org shows that most see
America's current aggressive, unilateral foreign
policy as eroding its standing in the world and
making terrorist attacks more likely. They support
a less militarized, less unilateral approach.
Though Rube's contraptions were ridiculous
and useless, the gears did mesh and the parts were
delicately balanced. In America's teeteringly
unbalanced security budget, 90% of US resources
will go to the military, 6% to homeland security,
and 4% to non-military international affairs. The
US is putting 21 times as much money engaging the
rest of the world through the military as by any
other means, including diplomacy, programs to curb
the spread of nuclear weapons, peacekeeping and
peace-building, economic development, and
contributions to international organizations.
This is the sad story laid out in "A
Unified Security Budget for the United States, FY
2008", released recently. Every year a task force
of experts in each area of security spending -
offensive (the military), defensive (homeland
security) and preventive (non-military
international affairs) - reports the facts of the
relative balance (or imbalance) among these
security tools.
Then we lay out a way to
fix it. This year we make the case for cuts to
military programs, such as the V-22, that can be
made with no sacrifice to US security. And we
propose additional spending on homeland security
and non-military international affairs. This shift
would convert a highly military 9:1 security ratio
into a better balance of 5:1.
The hard
part will be getting this done in the real world.
A budget process working through "stovepiped"
committees that rarely talk to each other makes
this difficult. A new feature of this year's
report, therefore, is a set of suggestions for how
these stovepipes might be transcended.
Putting together the pieces of a broken
budget process in a new way will be a necessary
step in repairing a broken foreign policy.
Miriam Pemberton is a research
fellow with Foreign Policy in Focus at the
Institute for Policy Studies, and co-author, with
Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress,
of "A Unified Security Budget for the United
States, FY 2008".
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guns originally
designed for the front had to be moved to the
back, partially blocking the doors and making it
harder for troops to get on and off. 
