BOOK REVIEW Military reform 30 years on America’s Defense Meltdown edited by Winslow T Wheeler
Reviewed by David Isenberg
WASHINGTON - When it comes to the United States military establishment, all the
duly anointed experts, regardless of their political ideology, hold the same
conventional wisdom; namely, that it is currently the finest, most powerful,
best-led, best-equipped, best-trained example in all of its history.
At a time when the US military is being used as the primary instrument to fight
global terrorism such a sentiment strikes many as comforting. There is only one
problem with it - it is wrong. That, at least, is the view of the 13
specialists - including former
Pentagon insiders, retired military officers and defense specialists who
contributed to this book.
This book is not some typical leftist jeremiad against the
Congressional-military-industrial complex that former president Dwight
Eisenhower famously warned against in his farewell address.
It is a sober, dispassionate, detailed, copiously documented examination of the
status of the American military establishment. After reading it one can only
think that it is an establishment out of and beyond control, and one that is
enormously dysfunctional.
If it were any other executive branch department other than defense, its
enormous intake of resources - as measured in taxpayer dollars and its
negligible output in terms of unwanted, over budget weapons systems, lack of
readiness and faulty strategies - would be cause for mass firings. The fact
that has not happened tells one about the enormous power this bureaucracy has
amassed over the decades.
To fully appreciate this book, a little history is in order. For as long as
there has been an American military there have been periodic attempts to reform
it. Some of these were titular and some were serious. The former were usually
blue-ribbon commissions which produced reports often filed away to gather dust.
The serious ones were met with fierce opposition and were fought every step of
the way. If they accomplished anything, it was often only an incremental
improvement over the status quo.
The last serious attempt at reforming the American military took place in the
late 1970s and early 1980s after the Vietnam War. It sought to change US
military strategy, planning, tactics and force structure changes in order to
fight and win in a modern theater of war. The initiative wanted to
significantly change how the Pentagon prepares for war, establish significantly
different war-fighting concepts and the attendant force structure, and change
the way weapons are developed and procured.
The argument was that sheer increases in defense spending would not guarantee
greater military capability. Instead, more spending could yield even less
capability if the United States were to continue to buy expensive, complex and
vulnerable weapons that were costly to operate.
The proponents of change gained prominence in the 1980s due to the increases in
military spending during the Ronald Reagan years. Their key members included
retired US Air Force Colonel John Boyd, whose concept of the OODA (observation,
orientation, decision and action) loop has spread well beyond the military
realm to business and public administration.
Another important member was Pierre Sprey. A former Department of Defense
analyst, Sprey is well known as an uncompromising maverick. Another was William
Lind, congressional staffer for former senator Gary Hart.
Boyd is now dead, but the others are still around and are contributors to this
book, as are others such as well-known retired army officers Colonel Douglas
Macgregor and Major Donald Vandergriff. And the problems they were speaking out
about nearly 30 years ago have only gotten worse. Consider the following:
America’s military spending is now larger in inflation-adjusted dollars than at
any point since the end of World War II, and yet the army has fewer combat
brigades than at any point in that period; the navy has fewer combat ships and
the air force has fewer combat aircraft. The major equipment inventories for
those forces are older on average than at any point since 1947. In some cases
they are at all-time highs in terms of average age.
This is despite the fact that the "official", meaning less than the actual
total, budget will soon hit $600 billion per year; equaling the military
budgets of all other nations combined. When other relevant national security
costs are added in, such as those for the Departments of Homeland Security or
Veterans Affairs, or interest on the national debt for past wars, the total
annual US military expenditure is a trillion dollars annually.
Despite decades of "acquisition reform", cost overruns are higher today in
inflation-adjusted dollars than at any time. Not a single major weapon system
has been delivered on time, on cost and as promised for performance.
Furthermore, the Pentagon refuses to tell Congress and the public how the money
it receives each year is spent for the simple, if appalling, reason that it
doesn't know how it is disbursed. Its bookkeeping is so bad it doesn't even
know if the money is spent. This means that the American military, from the
viewpoint of constitutional checks and balances, is broken.
And apparently almost nobody in Congress knows how to do real oversight. Nor
does Congress or the executive branch know how to formulate an effective
national security strategy.
One particularly worthy chapter deals with the way the Pentagon manages, or
more accurately put, mismanages its human resources. Communism may be dead but
apparently its legacy of centralization is alive and well in the Department of
Defense
This is not a book that merely criticizes; the authors offer detailed solutions
for the problems they describe, which are all too frequently the result of
"data-free analysis and analysis-free decisions." Their recommendations are
both practical and doable.
The issue is whether there will be anyone with sufficient political courage in
the next administration to heed their words.
America’s Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for the New President and Congress,
edited by Winslow T Wheeler, Center for Defense Information, November 2008.
David Isenberg is an analyst in national and international security
affairs, sento@earthlink.net. He is also an adjunct scholar with the Cato
Institute, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, a columnist for
United Press International, a blogger for the Partnership For A Secure America,
and a US Navy veteran. The views expressed are his own.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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