This should be fun to watch:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates visited southern Afghanistan late last week not only to assess the American war effort, but also to showcase the kind of conflict he thinks the military must prepare to fight in the years ahead.
Mr. Gates predicted more of these messy, unconventional wars, and he argued that this kind of conflict requires America to shift spending to items like mine-resistant vehicles, surveillance drones and medical-evacuation helicopters, at the expense of tanks, bombers and aircraft carriers.
But as Mr. Gates returned to Washington on Saturday for what will mostly likely be a lengthy, detailed and often hostile series of Congressional budget hearings this week, opponents of his risk assessment are attacking the spending plan as rendering America unprepared for traditional war.
The problem for Gates, of course, is that while you and I may see and M1A2 tank with dwindling utility, the Senators from PA and Ohio see big jobs in York and Lima, respectively (although to be honest, I’m not even sure where the Abrams is made anymore, but the point remains). Add to that all the little fiefdoms in the Pentagon, and all I can say is good luck.
cleek
somebody needs to tell them that the government has never created a job.
Bob In Pacifica
A decade or so back someone did a deal for Lockheed to make postal vehicles. Maybe they can convert tank factories into making high-speed rail train cars. Or something.
UofAZGrad
For those interested in a humorous yet horrifying overview of the corruption in the military-industrial complex. Read the Pentagon Wars or watch the excellent made-for-HBO movie. It just covers that crap involved with the design and production of one vehicle, the Bradley but it pretty much sums up why defense contracting is a horribly inept process.
Incertus
@Bob In Pacifica: It’s harder to build billions in cost overruns into mine-resistant vehicles and medevac helicopters.
Napoleon
I think the Abrams is still made in Lima.
Foxhunter
Throw Alabama in the M1 lotto, too. They are refurbed at ANAD, Anniston Army Depot. I’m sure Richard Shelby would like to have a talk with Gates about this ‘forward thinking’ strategy.
Brian J
I know this isn’t the likeliest solution or even perhaps an economically sensible one, but if the biggest obstacle to cutting defense spending is that it has some potentially devastating effects on local communities in some states, can’t we figure out some way to simply give money to those who would otherwise be unemployed, even if it’s only on a temporary basis? It wouldn’t allow the government to save as much money, but I can’t imagine that the cost of paying what would be the salaries of those making the equipment is that high. To take a radically simplified example, if for every billion that is spent on defense, about 10-15 percent goes towards salaries for workers in an indirect way, wouldn’t cutting the programs still make sense if what was being produced was no longer worthwhile? Even if it was much higher–and again, I doubt it is–wouldn’t still be worth it?
This would be like a wage insurance program, at least in part. Call it whatever you want, but it seems like a way to get around the idea that we can’t ever cut defense spending in any meaningful way because of all the jobs lost.
Kirk Spencer
Foxhunter, you’ve got part of the problem grasped. Every major weapons system in the US inventory is intentionally spread out. This component is made here, that one there, subassemblies are put together in a third place, and the final assembly somewhere else. Refurbishment is done (if possible) in yet another location. In corporate speak it’s called “buy-in”. If you own a piece, you have an interest in keeping it viable.
To some extent it’s a necessary process – and I don’t mean just politically. However, it’s subject to abuse.
Zifnab
@Brian J:
We could even make a program. An unemployment program. Some sort of government run entity that ensures when people lose their jobs, they continue to receive some fraction of their previous salaries to maintain standard of living until they can transition to a new employer.
Oh, if only such a program existed!
I mean, the joke is that this isn’t about jobs in Lima at all. This is about CEO pay and corporate greed. If the tank factory in Lima were to close, you’d lose several thousand jobs at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars a job. You could then create three thousand teaching positions in primary schools across the country at a fraction of the price. But there would be a billionaire’s club that just lost a member, because Joe The CEO isn’t pulling down ten figure government contracts.
When Republicans talk about job security, they’re not talking about jobs that make less than seven figures.
Cerberus
Ah, military-industrial complex. Making America’s entire job base solely reliant on the amount of traditional wars we fight and fund regardless of the circumstances or our relative safety.
Sigh, there’s so much that needs to be completely uprooted at the system. I can see where we need to be, but how to get there over the screaming of the lunatics and the billionaires or without putting a whole lot of good people through unnecessary Hell…it’s going to be tricky.
dan robinson
Sara, at The Next Hurrah, wrote a couple of great posts back in 2006 about George Marshall. The guy was pretty smart and he made the right moves at times when it was difficult to make the right moves.
http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2006/04/more_george_c_m.html
I’m a vet and I wish we had more George Marshalls and fewer John Murthas.
Ash Can
In a perfect world, the Congressional budget hearings will begin, and the usual suspects (of both parties) will immediately start wailing, very publicly, about Gates’ proposals. Then, strangely enough, anonymously-sourced reports of obscenely huge paychecks to military contractors, depraved boondoggles, and other egregious graft and corruption will mysteriously begin to surface. (Rahm Emanuel, if asked about these reports, will express utter bewilderment and no small amount of opprobrium about the reports’ content and timing.) These reports will share news-cycle time with the congresspeople crying crocodile tears about lost jobs in their districts and make said congresspeople look like first-class stoonads. The term “pitchforks” will enter into defense-budget commentary, and sanity will, if not prevail altogether, at least have some impact on the finalized defense budget.
Hey, I can dream, can’t I?
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Kirk Spencer:
And I’m convinced that spreading out of development is part of why so many big systems go over schedule and over budget. The more time zones a project covers, the greater the potential for miscommunication and unrecognized mistakes. Integration is a never-ending parade of failure because processes and equipment vary across subcontractors, and the subs can’t test against each other during development. Not to mention requirements can be a little … vague sometimes, so sub A interprets a requirement to read X, and sub B interprets that same requirement as Y, they go to integration … kaboom.
I’ve been in my special version of hell for the last few weeks because of code that worked well in-house blew up spectacularly when it got to the LSI. I can’t recreate the conditions that led to the crash because I don’t have the hardware or the other services available. So I make a change, it works here, send it to the LSI, kaboom.
InflatableCommenter
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
For the nongeeks out there I am going to suggest that your LSI is the Lead Systems Integrator.
It’s one of those acronyms that has a plethora of possible meanings.
ComradeDread
Part of the reason why the military industrial complex is so vibrant has been it’s strategy with regards to new projects. Costs are low-balled and work is spread through as many congressional districts as feasibly possible.
Cost overruns are so accepted by Congress that they’re rarely criticized and any person who thinks the project is a huge waste of time and resources has to face a hostile cadre of loyal Congresspeople who fear losing the newly minted jobs, as well as an even larger hawkish (GOP and Democrat) swath that views any cuts to the military budget as akin to waving white flags to our enemies.
I don’t expect this will change. The American government will go bankrupt first, and the first things on the chopping block will probably be social entitlements.
deadrody
Of course we don’t need tanks or any of that nonsense since no other country has any or is building any. Like, for instance, Russia or China or North Korea or Iran. They don’t have any tanks, nor do they want any. They just want ponies.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@InflatableCommenter:
Yeah, LSI=Lead Systems Integrator. Sorry for the tla-ism.
InflatableCommenter
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
:)
dmv
It’s worth pointing out that this is a fight playing out inside the military itself. There are those who think that the Army (as a foil for the whole military, I’m sure) is going overboard with its reorientation towards unconventional warfare, and there are those who think that it hasn’t done enough to reorient. Just look at the back-and-forth between Gian Gentile and John Nagl, for instance. Bill and Bob’s Excellent Afghan Adventure keeps some track of the back-and-forth (though they definitely have their own opinion of it, of course).
I’m not saying that this internal debate will drive the defense budget war. Indeed, I think it’s exactly right to see that the defense budget war will be among the politicos who have something to lose or to gain by how spending priorities shift. Nevertheless, the internal debate is an interesting piece of the whole picture.
HyperIon
@Kirk Spencer:
Also I believe the same approach is taken for the “war on drugs”. We “give” Colombia money with the stipulation that they buy US hardware. These helicopters, etc are made in various districts and those congress critters end up supporting the “war on drugs”.
Kirk Spencer
@HyperIon: Yep.
Egos and wallets. If yours are involved, you tend to want to protect them.
cmorenc
@Hyperion
It’s not just a hardware connection. Think of all the people within the US in the federal DEA, and various state and local law enforcement communities who have their careers invested in the “war on drugs”, plus all the perverse seizure and forfeiture bounty to be had to help finance state and local governments in a time of budget shortfalls (let alone how powerful these incentives are even in the flushest of times). But/for the “war on drugs”, these folks would get reassigned (or re-concentrated much more heavily) into more boringly prosaic areas of law enforcement work, or have to get real jobs in private industry instead.
Thankovsky
There’s also the semi-valid argument that we need to keep our conventional forces in tip-top shape to ensure that we’re prepared for whatever major changes in geopolitical landscape occur within the next few decades. Even so, that really is only a semi-valid argument; one can prepare the U.S. military for all conceivable future developments without pouring billions of dollars into stupid pet projects like the F-22, the V-22 Osprey, or my personal bugbear, the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW).
At any rate, I have to give Gates a lot of credit; even if he can only go part of the way in implementing this absolutely necessary revolution in military affairs before Congress stonewalls him to death, it will be a major step in the right direction. The man really has balls of steel, to move so directly against pork-addicted legislators and the Pentagon bureaucracy.
Robertdsc-iphone
As much of a military junkie that I am, it bugs me to no end that we’re blowing so much money on defense. What’s the point of having 10 or 11 carriers when millions can’t get health care? What’s the point of missile defense or the F-22 if we can’t educate our children?
Ugh.
MNPundit
Also, big honking weapons are FUCKING COOL. There’s a different cool threshold for people in what’s cool v. utility. For me, for example, it’s the F35 (so cool) and not the F22 (not cool).
TenguPhule
Big fat campaign contributions from military contractors, that’s the whole point.
Robertdsc-iphone
A-10 Warthog fo lyfe, bitches!
Yeah, Tengu, you hit it on the head. Goddamed depressing.
opit
You guys are talking way over my head. Last I heard the country was broke and the Chinese were holding notes just by themselves for the total value of the largest weapons maker in the world – by a long long score.
So is the U.S. fiat dollar going to continue to be worth the powder to blow it to Hell in a time when we have Peak Minerals piled on top of Peak Oil : or doesn’t a shortage of feedstock for the industrial machine which has totally polluted the environment with killing toxins count as a consideration ? Just curious.
There was a bit of snark that is still more truth than poetry on an Indian blog that I can’t seem to locate right now : “All countries have an army. One army has a country.”
U No Who.
joe from Lowell
Unprepared for conventional war? Are these people out of their minds?
What, we might have 8 carrier battle groups to the enemy’s 0, instead of having 10 carrier battle groups to the enemy’s 0?
Do you have any idea how many Abrams tanks are sitting shrink-wrapped in Kuwait right now?
feebog
Conventional warfare? Isn’t that why we still have several thousand nukes strapped to missles and ready to bomb any country to oblivion if they should decide to start a war? Oh, I know, mutually assured destruction and all, but what’s the point of having a shitload of nuclear weapons if your’e not willing to trot them out for a test drive from time-to-time?
Brian J
@Zinfab:
I hadn’t thought of it that way. I don’t know how the numbers work, but it wouldn’t surprise me if what you described was a pretty big force behind the budget always increasing.
Perhaps this is just one more reason why the revolving door of lobbyists in government and private business needs new restrictions.
asiangrrlMN
@cleek: You win, cleek. I love this line.
I want one Republican, preferably Boehner or Cantor, to be made to sit in a room until he can articulate how he’ll balance the budget with tax cuts, a spending freeze, an increase in defense spending and not cutting Social Security or Medicare. He cannot just write or say mumbo-jumbo and leave it at that. He has to clearly detail step by step how he’s going to make it happen. He cannot leave the room until he does. This is getting ridiculous.
P.S. War is just another big business/greedy corporation opportunity. Out of curiosity, how many of Dick Cheney’s friends were rewarded with big, fat war contracts?
opit
He shared ? Oh right. Bush.
Brett
I don’t suppose you actually plan to make an argument as to how the US is supposed to prepare for “all developments” while gutting modernization programs that would actually make it possible for the US to prepare for all developments? That includes things like the F-22 (the next-generation air superiority fighter, the best on the market, which is particularly pressing when you consider that our current fighter fleet is 30 years old), or the Reliable Replacement Warhead (I suppose you just forgot that nuclear warheads actually age, become obsolete, wear out, and have to be replaced?).
Barry
Thankovsky: “There’s also the semi-valid argument that we need to keep our conventional forces in tip-top shape to ensure that we’re prepared for whatever major changes in geopolitical landscape occur within the next few decades. ”
I’d point out that we’re not in a position where we’re likely to see massive shifts in the balance of forces in any time less than 10 years, so we’d have lots of time to prepare.
The areas where we *could* see quick, unexpected changes are not conventional (Paki nukes getting loose, economic collapses).