Some Thoughts re the Military Today

William Astore spent 24 years in the Air Force, retiring in 2007 and becoming a history professor. He does not think highly of our military today. Here are his thoughts on what we should do:

1. No more new nuclear weapons. It’s time to stop “modernizing” that arsenal to the tune of possibly $1.7 trillion over the next three decades. Land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles like the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, expected to cost more than $264 billion during its lifetime, and “strategic” (nuclear) bombers like the Air Force’s proposed B-21 Raider should be eliminated. The Trident submarine force should also be made smaller, with limited modernization to improve its survivability. 

2. All Army divisions should be reduced to cadres (smaller units capable of expansion in times of war), except the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and the 10th Mountain Division. 

3. The Navy should largely be redeployed to our hemisphere, while aircraft carriers and related major surface ships are significantly reduced in number. 

4. The Air Force should be redesigned around the defense of America’s air space, rather than attacking others across the planet at any time. Meanwhile, costly offensive fighter-bombers like the F-35, itself a potential $1.7 trillion boondoggle, should simply be eliminated and the habit of committing drone assassinations across the planet ended. Similarly, the separate space force created by President Trump should be folded back into a much-reduced Air Force. 

5. The training of foreign militaries and police forces in places like Iraq and Afghanistan should be stopped. The utter collapse of the U.S.-trained forces in Iraq in the face of the Islamic State in 2014 and the ongoing collapse of the U.S.-trained Afghan military today have made a mockery of this whole process. 

6. Military missions launched by intelligence agencies like the CIA, including those drone assassination programs overseas, should be halted and the urge to intervene secretly in the political and military lives of so many other countries finally brought under some kind of control. 

7. The “industrial” part of the military-industrial complex should also be brought under control, so that taxpayer dollars don’t go to fabulously expensive, largely useless weaponry. At the same time, the U.S. government should stop promoting the products of our major weapons makers around the planet. 

8. Above all, in a democracy like ours, a future defensive military should only fight in a war when Congress, as the Constitution demands, formally declares one.

 9. The military draft should be restored. With a far smaller force, such a draft should have a limited impact, but it would ensure that the working classes of America, which have historically shouldered a heavy burden in military service, will no longer do so alone. In the future America of my military dreams, a draft would take the eligible sons and daughters of our politicians first, followed by all eligible students enrolled in elite prep schools and private colleges and universities, beginning with the Ivy League. After all, America’s best and brightest will surely want to serve in a military devoted to defending their way of life. 

10. Finally, there should be only one four-star general or admiral in each of the three services. Currently, believe it or not, there are an astonishing 44 four-star generals and admirals in America’s imperial forces. There are also hundreds of one-star, two-star, and three-star officers. This top-heavy structure inhibits reform even as the highest-ranking officers never take responsibility for America’s lost wars. Pivoting to America

The Lesser Absurdities of 2020

Each year Conn Hallinan of Foreign Policy in Focus looks at some of the weird things that we do every so often, rates them in terms of absurdity and gives awards. He looks at about twenty areas and evaluates them in terms of absurdity. It's an interesting read. Here are the top three in his words.

The Golden Lemon Award goes to Lockheed Martin for its F-35 fifth generation stealth fighter, at $1.5 trillion the most expensive weapons system in history. The plane currently has 883 documented design flaws, including nine “category 1” flaws.

The latter, the Project on Government Oversight explains, “may cause death, severe injury, or severe occupational illness” to pilots and “major damage” to weapons systems and combat readiness (which sounds like those TV ads for drugs that may or may not treat your disease, but could also kill your first born and turn you into a ferret).

But the company got right to work on those flaws — not by fixing them, mind you, but by reclassifying them as less serious. As for the rest of the problems, Lockheed Martin says it will fix them if it gets paid more.The company currently receives $2 billion a year to keep some 400 F-35s flying, a cost of $500 million a plane. It costs $28,455 an hour to fly an F-35.

U.S. aircraft are following industrialist Norman Augustine’s prediction that war plane costs increase by a factor of 10 every decade. He predicted that by 2054 the Pentagon will be able to buy just one fighter plane.

The Silver Lemon goes to the U.S. Navy for moth-balling four of its Littoral Combat ships after less than two decades in service. All 10 Littoral ships apparently have a “fundamentally flawed” propulsion system. The ships cost over $600 million apiece. There are plans to build six more.

The Navy plans to build 82 ships overall in the next six years at a cost of $147 billion, including — at $940 million apiece — 20 frigates to replace the Littoral Combat ships.

The Bronze Lemon goes to the U.S. Army for spending $24 billion to replace its aging, 27-ton Bradley Fighting Vehicle with… ah, nothing? Not that it didn’t spend all that money. First there was the M2, but its armor was too thin. Then it built the Future Combat System, but it was too big and also had inadequate armor. Then they built the Ground Combat Vehicle, which was a monster and weighed three times more than the Bradleys.

32 iterations and still about 1,000 unresolved deficiencies

You must know that I'm talking about the F-35 once more. The Defense Department’s Operational Testing has released its annual report and, once more, the F-35 has problems beyond being our costliest weapons system. The director of the Testing unit said, the availability of the fighter jet for missions when needed -- a key metric -- remains “around 50 percent, a condition that has existed with no significant improvement since October 2014, despite the increasing number of aircraft.” In fact, there has been ‘No significant improvement’ in aircraft available in years. Aircraft have been sitting idle over the last year awaiting spare parts from the contractor, Yet, Lockheed has been developing the plane for 16 years.

Despite these problems, more than 600 aircraft already will have been built. That’s about 25 percent of a planned 2,456 U.S. jets; 265 have been delivered to date.

Some GAO analyses of the F-35

Click here for more info.

Analyzing the F-35

Bacevich on Mattis etal

Excerpts from an article by Andrew Bacevich in the Atlantic:

The most intriguing aspect of the exchange between Mattis and members of the committee was the absolute absence of interest, from either side, in how the armed forces of the United States have performed in recent years. In Afghanistan, in the now-resumed war in Iraq, in U.S. combat operations, large and small, in Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria—none has yielded anything approximating conclusive victory. However you define U.S. aims and objectives—promoting stability? Spreading democracy? Reducing the incidence of Islamist terrorism?—they remain unfulfilled. Yet no senator thought to ask Mattis for his views on why that has been the case, what conclusions he draws from that absence of success, and how he might apply those conclusions as defense secretary.

None of the lawmakers present—several of whom made a point of promoting weapons systems produced in their state, or engaged in politically correct posturing—thought to solicit Mattis’s views on the this gap between effort and outcomes. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut elicited ironclad assurances that Mattis favored modernizing the navy’s submarine fleet, subs being made—surprise—in Connecticut. And Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York was able to advertise her credentials as a champion of women serving as combat infantrypersons. So of senatorial preening, there was plenty on display. Of questions touching on core issues of national security, there were next to none.

The strategic vacuum in which America’s endless wars drag on went unremarked upon. Whether members of the Armed Services Committee are oblivious to the absence of strategy or don’t see such matters falling within their jurisdiction is unclear. Perhaps they just don’t care.

Mattis responded to senatorial questioning like the career military officer that he is: by making the case for more. More money for maintaining and refurbishing hard-used equipment, more money to buy new weapons, more money to expand the size of the army, navy, air force, and Marine Corps. New nukes? Yes. New strategic missiles? Yes. A new long-range manned bomber? Yes. New submarines? Yes. The gold-plated, years-behind-schedule F-35? Love it. Oh, yes, Mattis promised to be a careful steward of the nation’s resources, a vow that senators pretended to take seriously. The various entities comprising the military-industrial complex, from General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, to Boeing and Raytheon, have got to be licking their chops.

It’s misguided policies based on a flawed understanding of what armed force can and cannot do, and when it should or should not be employed. On that score, Mattis and members of the Senate Armed Services are certainly on the same page. They are clueless.

Will he follow through?

So, Trump says we should kill the F-35 and prevent Defense officials from 'retiring' to military corporations. Will this happen post January 20?

An opponent of the F-35

None other than Chuck Yaeger.  He thinks it's a waste of money.   See this article. 

From our Florida correspondent

More F-35 bad news

Not for lightweights

Today's F-35 news: a series of recent tests revealed serious problems with the jet fighter’s escape system, creating potentially hazardous circumstances, especially for lighter-weight pilots. A 'lighter-weight' pilot weighs less than 136 pounds; the pilots face “potentially fatal whiplash” if they use the ejection seat. Now, pilots must weigh more than 136 pounds. Interestingly, in 2011 the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester said he was concerned that training flights would proceed even though the ejection seat system had not been fully tested. 

Will the problems with this plane ever cease?

Was New Horizons worthwhile?

The New Horizons mission to Pluto cost $700,000,000 over a 15-year period or about $46,700,000 per year. Vox does some comparisons re cost.

• The F-35 fighter will cost 2,142 times as much as the Pluto mission
• Improper Medicare payments cost almost 1000 times as much each year as the Pluto mission
• NFL stadiums cost taxpayers more than five Pluto missions
• Destroyed weapons cost 10 times as much as the Pluto mission
• Minting pennies and nickels costs twice as much annually as the Pluto mission
• Annual payments to dead federal workers cost more than the Pluto mission

Ho Hum

The F-35 keeps coming up short. Now, we find out that it would probably lose an air battle to the F-16 which it is meant to replace. The turning rate of the F-35 was simply too slow to catch up with the nimbler F-16. Consequently, the F-35 also was incapable of adequately maneuvering out of the way of an F-16 attack.

The GAO on the F-35 today

I've written a lot about the F-35. Here's what the GAO has to say about it now.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program had to make unexpected changes to its development and test plans over the last year, largely in response to a structural failure on a durability test aircraft, an engine failure, and software challenges. At the same time, engine reliability is poor and has a long way to go to meet program goals. With nearly 2 years and 40 percent of developmental testing to go, more technical problems are likely.

Addressing new problems and improving engine reliability may require additional design changes and retrofits. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense (DOD) has plans to increase annual aircraft procurement from 38 to 90 over the next 5 years. As GAO has previously reported, increasing production while concurrently developing and testing creates risk and could result in additional cost growth and schedule delays in the future.

It is unlikely the program will be able to sustain such a high level of annual funding and if required funding levels are not reached, the program's procurement plan may not be affordable.

Because supplier performance has been mixed, late aircraft and engine part deliveries could pose a risk to the program's plans to increase production.

GAO recommends that DOD assess the affordability of F-35's current procurement plan that reflects various assumptions about technical progress and future funding.

Problems with the F-35 summarized

I've been writing about the F-35 boondoggle for almost ten years.The Center for Defense Information has a good summary of the major issues. The summary is in the form of an article's table of contents:

• Cooking the Numbers 
• Testing Being Deferred, Not Completed 
• Significant Safety Risks Are Still Unresolved 
• Wing Drop Concerns 
• Engine Problems Continue to Hold the F-35 Program Back 
• Dangerous Helmet Failures 
• Initial Combat Capabilities for the Marien Corps Variant Will Be Even More Limited Than Planned 
• ALIS Software Failures 
• Software Snarls Jeopardize Combat Suitability 
• Hiding Today's Failings While Building a Huge Future Cost "Bow Wave" 
• A Maintenance Nightmare 
• Conclusion: Exquisitely Limited Capability

For more on the F-35, click here.

The Atlantic and The Military

The January/February issue of The Atlantic has a lot to say about the inadequacies of our military. James Fallows talks about the dangers inherent in the separation of the military and the people. Robert Scales criticizes our failures to provide adequate guns to infantrymen. And Joseph Epstein tells us how important being drafted was to him and can be to our country.

Fallows has a fairly long article, but definitely worth reading in its entirety. His basic point is that we are so separated from our soldiers that we no longer evaluate their successes and failures as we did for just about every 20th century war. Fallows places great emphasis on the word "chickenhawk", which describes a person who strongly supports war or other military action (i.e., a war hawk), yet who actively avoids or avoided military service when of age.

To quote Fallows: "Ours is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. By all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. No decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but respectful of them and grateful for what they do. Yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes. Or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war."

Leaving the question of the draft alone for now, one of the primary problems we have is that our politicians use the Pentagon budget to bring federal contracts and money to their districts. There is no attempt at analyzing the use of the money or whether the district and the nation might be better off without spending money this way. For example, much of the budget is spent on high tech weapons which may or may not work some day (vide the F-35) and we ignore such basics as providing proper guns to infantrymen.

Fallows thinks a start on rectifying the problem is to adopt three of the recommendations of a group chaired by Gary Hart which was appointed by Obama in 2011:

Appoint a commission to assess the long wars. This commission should undertake a dispassionate effort to learn lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq concerning the nature of irregular, unconventional conflict, command structures, intelligence effectiveness, indigenous cultural factors, training of local forces, and effective combat unit performance. Such a commission will greatly enhance our ability to know when, where, how, and whether to launch future interventions. Clarify the decision-making process for use of force. Such critical decisions, currently ad hoc, should instead be made in a systematic way by the appropriate authority or authorities based on the most dependable and persuasive information available and an understanding of our national interests based on 21st-century realities. Restore the civil-military relationship. The President, in his capacity as commander-in-chief, must explain the role of the soldier to the citizen and the citizen to the soldier. The traditional civil-military relationship is frayed and ill-defined. Our military and defense structures are increasingly remote from the society they protect, and each must be brought back into harmony with the other.

Scales, a retired major general, speaks of the vast superiority of the AK-47 to the M-14 used by our troops. Epstein gives his personal experience as a draftee to describe the personal beenfits that the draft provided him.

F-35 Fails Again

In July the F-35 will make its debut at an international air show in London. It's still having problems. Twice this month training flights have had to be cancelled, once because the plane caught fire, the other because of an oil leak.

The comedy continues.

Another no vote re the F-35

I've been writing about the F-35 since 2010, so readers know my feelings on the issue. It was good to see another article by someone who has extensive experience with the Air Force. Col Michael W. Pietrucha thinks that the program should be stopped now.  He cites the usual reasons of program delays, low payload, short range, unmet performance requirements, and spiraling costs. But he argues that the assumptions that led to its birth are no longer relevant; they were based on the Cold War. The issues today are the Pacific theater and a China with very strong air defense capabilities 

Another look at the F-35

The GAO has been reviewing the development of the F-35 each year for the past four years. This year they focused on developmental flight testing. This deals extensively with testing of software. Of course, in order to test software you have to have it in-house. Well, as has been the pattern for several years, software is late (now it looks like 13 months late)and it doesn't do the job required.  So, costs rise. 

Not only do development costs rise, so do operational costs. These costs are now estimated to exceed $1 trillion.

When is DOD going to kill this boondoggle?

Defending the bottom line or the country

I've written a few times about the impracticality of the F-35 fighter plane that seems to have almost no redeeming qualities other than improving the bottom line of Lockheed Martin. This video shows why this program should be stopped today. It's worth watching for the 8 minutes it plays. You'll want to tell your congressman to kill this insane project.