Pentagon Planning Ambush
Looks like the Defense Department is getting ready to present a president-elect Obama or president-elect McCain with a tough choice, either abandon domestic spending priorities in favor of a huge and pointless hike in defense spending, or else open your administration with a politically bruising battle with the top brass:
Pentagon officials have prepared a new estimate for defense spending that is $450 billion more over the next five years than previously announced figures.
The new estimate, which the Pentagon plans to release shortly before President Bush leaves office, would serve as a marker for the new president and is meant to place pressure on him to either drastically increase the size of the defense budget or defend any reluctance to do so, according to several former senior budget officials who are close to the discussions. [...]
“This is a political document,” said one former senior budget official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It sets up the new administration immediately to have to make a decision of how to deal with the perception that they are either cutting defense or adding to it.”
As best I can tell it’s been years since anyone with influence in progressive politics tried to make a serious push to reign military spending in, but at the end of the day it’s going to be difficult to implement much of a progressive agenda without facing up to the “guns or butter” dilemma to at least some extent.
80 Responses to “Pentagon Planning Ambush”
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October 11th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
In a week full of depressing news, this might take the cake.
October 11th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Yeah, no thanks. Let the a**hole right wing whine and screech for the next decade just like they did when Bill Clinton enacted George Bush Sr’s base & force reduction plans. Our security will be lot better served by sane foreign & domestic priorities, particularly weaning the world off of oil, than it would by going broke for someone’s Terminator weaponry dreams (RSH’s fetish for whatsherface notwithstanding).
October 11th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
This brings to mind the wisdom of our last respectable Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, about the dangers of the military-industrial complex.
Yet another legacy of the wretched Bush years is a Pentagon (civilian and military) that needs to be checked. Urgently. Quickly.
October 11th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
If the emergent circumstances produced by the current financial crisis are going to impose shared sacrifices on every aspect of American society, then the military cannot seek an exemption. If the Pentagon attempts to ignore their civic responsibility in a time of crisis, it would be nothing short unpatriotic.
October 11th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
The report also brings in something that has been going on for a while. That is, the military has been using supplemental funds for things other than the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. Some really smart people have noticed that funds that true Americans pencil-whip every few months are great sources of funding with no hassles.
October 11th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Why shouldn’t the military-industrial complex get a bailout from Democrats? Wall Street just did. Obviously the party’s policy is to transfer huge amounts of cash to those sectors most responsible for this country’s current sad state.
October 11th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Whyshouldn’t the military-industrial complex get a bailout from Democrats? Wall Street just did. Obviously the party’s policy is to transfer huge amounts of cash to those sectors most responsible for this country’s current sad state.
Because bailing out the military-industrial complex won’t impact the frozen credit markets which are now impacting many state and local governments, not to metnion local banks, and therefore Main Street?
October 11th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
It’s become a progressive article of faith that the F-22 Raptors (pictured) is the epitome of wasteful Pentagon spending, almost as much as that Pentagon spending needs to be lowered, especially when “today’s conflicts” are intra-national counter-insurgency operations in which nothing is less useful than an air superiority fighter.
I’m afraid though of that turning into another instance of fighting the last war. Other than ICBM’s, there’s nothing more strategically important than air superiority. The whole point of military readiness is to be prepared for conflicts that might happen next year even though they seem like ridiculous possibilities now. Raptors are by far the most superior of the world’s air superiority fighters, but without them, our air forces could realistically be out-dominated by Sukhoi 30’s. Lacking a proper fleet of Raptors would therefore leave us weak relative to Russia, China, and even, now, Venezuela.
I can see President Obama confounding and realigning everyone’s expectations by maybe trimming DoD spending by substituting a lot of F-35 orders in favor of cheaper and no less effective F/A-18-EF’s and retrofitting of existing hardware in place of ordering new models for things like refueling tankers, while diverting an entirely newly aggressive program of humanitarian and diplomatic investment in troubled nations, and also pleasantly surprising the fighter jock generals with a hefty order for F-22’s.
October 11th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
from the lined article:
Experts note that releasing such documents in the twilight of an administration is a well-worn tactic, and that incoming presidents often disregard such guidance in order to pursue their own priorities.
So in other words, BFD.
October 11th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
I say bring it on. The American people are tired of going without butter — or having to mortgage their houses to afford it. If the British people could do it in 1945 the American people can in 2008.
October 11th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Also, from the linked article:
This is a good thing.
October 11th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
I don’t understand why we should reign {hold royal office] in milItary spending–or what this statement could possibly mean.
October 11th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I would say to squeeze the needed money out of the Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Kagans, Greenspans, etc., but it might be wiser simply to end our fruitless land wars in Asia.
October 11th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Count me unimpressed with the ability of the outgoing lame duck Bush administration to exert any kind of pressure whatsoever on the next administration.
The next president will have his own budget priorities, and his own new leadership team in place at the Pentagon. Nobody is going to care about any wish lists pinned to the bulletin board by the previous leadership team on their way out the door. I doubt even the people at the Pentagon are taking this “marker” seriously.
Matt neglected to quote the key paragraph in the story:
Experts note that releasing such documents in the twilight of an administration is a well-worn tactic, and that incoming presidents often disregard such guidance in order to pursue their own priorities.
October 11th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
One of the blessings of not being the world’s greatest super-power anymore is our obscene and un-audited defense budget will no longer be justified.
Smart defense spending and accountability have been nonexistent for decades.
Unless, of course, we do the North Korean thing and starve the people to feed the DoD.
Unfortunately, it’s probably the latter, if McCain wins.
October 11th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
two can play this game: have a serious accounting review of past budgets, hold hearings (a la waxman or truman) and seriously threaten civil prosecution for waste and abuse; prohibit for three to five years retired military personnel from lobbying for the defense industry. If there is insistence upon a defense hike, demonstrate where waste occurred previously and suggest that money be retrieved.
i believe that the “weak on national defense” argument ’cause of “insufficient” devotion to the defense budget is not going to fly any more. think of it as another casualty of the GOP implosion.
October 11th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
More Andy “Not the guy from Mannequin” McCarthy tinfoil hat fun!
He links to an article suggesting that Dreams from My Father may have been ghostwritten by….wait for it…….Bill Ayers! Truly an intellectual heavyweight, this Andy fella.
http://tinyurl.com/4xrpxd
October 11th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Would it be a good idea to significantly cut defense spending during a recession? The defense cuts of the 90’s wrecked a lot of local economies.
As an Air Force maintainer, I would like to see a large investment in cargo and refueling aircraft. These type of aircraft are extremely useful in peace (humanitarian) missions and during times of conflict. Screw the F-22.
I just don’t see anything that cuts jobs as being a wise choice.
October 11th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Money’s only part of it.
The United States must choose, soon, between reducing its overseas forces comittments, or re-instituting a military draft.
Because the Army’s just about used up.
October 11th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Fine. Let’s have a little horse trading.
OK, let’s increase the size of the military budge several-fold.
In exchange, we dissolve the Air Force and redistribute its personnel and assets to the other branches.
The mere existence of that branch is a waste of money, when the other branches all have combat aircraft. Furthermore, everything they want is designed to combat the Soviet Union of the 24th century. Incredibly pointless toys like the F-22. If you don’t give it to them, they throw wild tantrums.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars both prove that they’re a solution in search of a problem.
October 11th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Air superiority is achieved with a squadron of F-22’s. Why do we need the other couple hundred? I’m a marine, and I know how frustrating it is to shower in ankle-deep water, sleep with the window open because something is dead in the vents, and eat chow hall food that is half a step up from MRE’s (sidenote: Camp Lejeune sucks) – all while hearing about the latest toy that costs billions being rammed through congress. We can expand our capabilities while shrinking defense spending. All it takes is the political courage to audit the pentagon and stand up to the likes of Lockheed and Boeing.
October 11th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Bush’s chiefs of staff preparing to cripple the new Democratic President? Gates and the politicized DoD piling on? The relieve and demote the generals and admirals, then court martial them for violating regulations forbidding involvement with partisan politics. Fire the politicized Defense bureaucrats and prosecute them for the phony contracts the facilitated and lack of oversight that allowed was profiteering. Then reshape the armed services into rapid response strike forces and bring the occupiers home. It’s time to cut the crap and take back this country. A sizable majority of voters now understands the deep doo-doo we’re in and will back Obama to the hilt in slashing Pentagon waste and corruption. We’re taking possible veto-proof majorities by 2010 if strong actions are taken.
October 11th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Hey, SPURIOUS, how about we dissolve the Air Force without increasing the defense budget several-fold?
October 11th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
I say we pull our military out of every country where that is what a simple majority of that country’s population wants (regardless of what puppets want)and then we have a long citizen/government/military/industrial sabbatical where we start with the concept of defense and work toward making it consonant with itself.
A big start would be restoring our commitment to the NPT, which of course, requires a genuine effort to work toward nuclear disarmament. And signing on to (and honoring) a space treaty.
Beef up the State Department (not with generals(silly)) with diplomats who are fluent in many languages and not trained by or in the employ of the C.I.A. or N.S.A.
We need a strategy for peace and living within our means as a nation. Bread or bombs? What kind of choice is that? Who tries to win people by bombing their homes? Losing strategy. Totally insane.
Let’s get sane.
October 11th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Okay, I hate the Air Force as much as any marine, but what they do has purpose, and all this talk of “other branches have combat aircraft” misses what the air force really does – logistics, and strategic bombing. Maybe we don’t need strategic bombing so much anymore, but logistics are critical and only going to grow more important. Someone has to do it, the Air Force has the infrastructure and know-how already in place, and I don’t think massively adding to the already too-massive Army bureaucracy is a remotely good idea. The progressives who frequently make noise to the effect of disbanding the Air Force are just proclaiming their ignorance of basic military reality.
October 11th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
The US military brass are out of control — dangerously so. Rumsfeld tried to reform the agencies and cut a lot of the fat, and got eaten alive. Their procurement processes are crooked, they pursue one wasteful project after another, and oddly enough they don’t lift a finger for the projects they actually need — it’s a miracle that the C17 line is still going, for example.
We need a Rumsfeld blueprint, except one that is actually implemented in a competent manner rather than in an insulting, ADHD-addled manner. But implemented it must be, or the military will finally bankrupt this country.
October 11th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Eliminate the Air Force and give the other three services whatever they want.
October 11th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
MAX, our central problem is that we can no longer afford a worldwide military. Try to run a war outside the western hemisphere, and we can’t afford the oil it takes — because we don’t yet know how to run energy-efficient wars.
Using the air force for logistics is pleasant, because they can deliver fast. The cost of their avgas, to deliver fast? No longer affordable.
If we’re going to wage conventional wars in places we can’t afford to supply the old ways, we need a lot of innovation. Big fleets of cargo and refueling aircraft will not be affordable until we get big new oil strikes, comparable to the things we were getting in the ’50’s. Or maybe some new sort of fuel.
Currently the USA has enough proven reserves to last us around 900 *days* at current consumption rates. We can’t support a big air force on that. We can’t support a big navy on that. We can’t support a big mechanised army on that.
We have to do something new. In the short run that will probably involve reducing our commitments and hunkering at home while we design something new.
October 11th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
As a veteran of the air force, and nuclear forces, I say the Air Force is responsible for most of the unnecessary killing, and that nuclear forces are responsible for the insane and continuing threat of omnicide.
The Army can fly planes for logistic purposes, and the marines, and apparently private contractors (though I disapprove highly of privatizing military functions.) Rumsfeld’s “stream-lined” military is nothing more than a gravy-train for him and his cronies. There are more mercenaries than U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Clearly our nation is not that interested in fighting “terrorists” over there…
I say, use the Air Force to defend our airspace and get on with disarmament. The world will follow. The only people who want to take food out of people’s mouths to keep up genocidal/omnicidal arsenals are the kind of people who should not have power.
October 11th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Just what we need on top of the market mess and economic depression; the threat of a Pentagon-fueled military coup…
http://www.sunstateactivist.org/ssablog/
October 11th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
$450B in five years. Ho hum. The Treasury gave $459B to the Fed for all the bailouts in the last three weeks. In theory some of that is supposed to come back to Uncle Sam. Right. They will have to pry it out of the cold dead hands of pigmen to get much of it back. Besides which that is after all just three weeks and before Hank gets to throw around another $700B and who really knows how many trillions it will cost to back up the money markets and commercial paper market.
In the big picture, amazingly, the stupendous appetite of the Pentagon has now become almost small change. The $450B political document represents an initiative bargaining position which is just an in your face declaration that actual cuts in Pentagon spending are an impossibility.
Forget new spending on citizens. In fact forget a lot of old spending on citizens. That’s fairy tale stuff now.
October 11th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
MAX HATS, why is logistics something that only the Air Force can do? I’m not advocating eliminating a branch out of spite. The Air Force does perform some useful functions (e.g., strategic bombing, as you said). But is there a reason why such functions can’t be integrated into the other branches?
As you yourself said, the Air Force is on the one hand fixated on the latest hot-rod toys for no apparent purpose. On the other hand, they’re stuck looking for relevance. Hence their attempts to own the SIGINT space, which not only means satellites, but cyberterrorism. How does cyberterrorism have any direct relation to flying planes?
October 11th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Appoint Wes Clark as Military Advisor to the President and task him to head this crap off. Then make him chief of the JCS.
October 11th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Spurious -
Every branch is fixated on the latest toys. The Marine Corps is the cheapest and generally fiscally wisest branch, but their new AAV is a cluster.
The Air Force has a huge airlift capability. It’s basically what they do, and they do it fairly well. Sure, you could roll that all into the army, but what’s would that really accomplish except make the army worse and less efficient? Huge organizations are inherently inefficient. How does creating a even bigger, less efficient organization out of two smaller ones fix any of the many, many underlying problems?
Personally, I think the Army is already dragged down by it’s massive tail. What fraction of the army are actually combatants? 10 percent, maybe? And that leads to an institutional structure more focused on support than combat, which hurts the combat forces. Adding an Air Wing on top of that mess just makes the Army worse.
October 11th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Good luck with either one. Huge wads of cash are being spent on propping up banks and mortgages now. Next up will the huge wads of cash that will be needed to deal with the collapse of social security and medicare once they go negative. That will happen at the same time that states and counties across the nation start having to deal with their massively underfunded and over-generous pension systems.
Neither hawks nor progressives are going to be pleased to find out that all the money has been asked for 10 or 20 times over.
October 11th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
spurious, the Air Force, esp. NORAD and Space Command uses satellites for missile warning, air defense, bombing,communications, etc. In fact, our Rumsfeldian military has gotten so dependent on satellite technology that it is a blaring weakness. Everybody has studied us in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is so much technological joy-joy faith in the neo-con army, that there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of manual back ups. Without the satellites and computer networks we’re dead in the water.
China has demonstrated their satellite killing technology. And cyber attack by China and others is a contingency that should be realistically dealt with—not an excuse for paranoid overkill and demonization; but a valid security concern.
It was discovered by one of our red teams, for instance, a few years ago that it was possible to hack into the Pacific Fleet submarines and give them all the order to launch at once. That was allegedly fixed. We should hope so. The risk of 50,000,000 immediate deaths from hacking justifies an excellent progam in cyber-security.
God help us if it’s all run by Windows.
October 11th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
How does creating a even bigger, less efficient organization out of two smaller ones fix any of the many, many underlying problems?
Well, it looks like GM and Chrysler may be about to find out.
October 11th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
wiley -
I agree that cyberspace attacks are a valid threat. But it’s mission creep for the Air Force to try to get into it. Making sure their hardware and protocols can’t be hacked is just good design. Trying to make it their mission (e.g., going black hat) is definitely beyond their assigned scope.
As far as Windows and security — generals love their PowerPoint and Outlook, so they’re not the best emissaries of cybersecurity. I’d like to see one of them say he only uses OpenBSD.
October 11th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
China has demonstrated their satellite killing technology.
Rudimentary at best. The bird they killed was lower orbit than just about everything else up there.
It was discovered by one of our red teams, for instance, a few years ago that it was possible to hack into the Pacific Fleet submarines and give them all the order to launch at once.
And now you’re just making stuff up.
October 11th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I have all the faith in the world that a defense of cutting military spending will be very easy to mount.
October 11th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
I would like to see another war and the installation of the draft. The radical liberals are always calling for socialism when the government already pays for the salaries and benefits for hundreds of thousands of US citizens who serve in our armed forces and work for defense contractors. How can they ask for more? Well, we should give it to them. Our great country is best at creating, using, and selling arms. This is our “specialty of trade” as Adam Smith might say. We should continue to build, use, and export our guns, planes, bullets, body armor, tanks, Humvees, etc. Also, the more citizens we draft into our expanding wars the better, in that there goes our healthcare and unemployment problem!
October 11th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I’ve spent nearly my entire adult life working for major DoD contractors, so I have a vested interest in keeping the goodies coming.
That said, and having reviewed the article, my token advice to President Obama would be to:
- Shitcan the $30 billion contingency fund.
- Request the $14 billion for a one time postwar reset and modernization.
- Call bullshit on the argument that war allotments have hidden the costs of reset and modernizing.
Massive and frequent resets (fast-paced refit and replenishment of combat units between deployments) are a result of the war, not a peacetime requirement.
What modernization that is occurring is strictly what’s needed to meet immediate operational requirements in the field, and in fact pulls away from the sort of stuff the DoD would normally be doing to keep a few steps ahead of the other major powers.
Long term R&D efforts take it in the shorts while the Pentagon shakes every last unspent penny from any contracts or programs that don’t immediately support a war effort. Saw it during and immediately after GW I, seeing it again during GW II and OIF/OEF. When OIF winds down and the DoD isn’t wearing out its shit as fast as it comes off the assembly line, normal long term modernization efforts won’t be getting robbed.
October 11th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
“China has demonstrated their satellite killing technology.”
Rudimentary at best. The bird they killed was lower orbit than just about everything else up there.
Other things equal, don’t you get less debris from a satellite kill the lower the orbit? It’s good world citizenship to minimise that. How good they’d be at killing the higher ones is still open to question, but it isn’t clear they couldn’t do it.
However, part of the agreement the chinese government has made with their people is that they’ll avoid military conflict with the USA. They want to be prosperous, and the military buildup they started after we sent five carrier groups off their coast is sure to slow their economic growth. (Just as we surely slow our own growth by spending about as much as the rest of the world put together.)
So, suppose they were to severely damage our economy, to the point that their investment in us became worthless. It would cost them about a trillion dollars in sunk costs, payments we have made for their exports to us, payments that become worthless. How much would a war with us cost them?
Consider how bad things got in russia when the USSR stopped being a superpower. There were lots of stories about russian soldiers who deserted en masse because they couldn’t be fed on what the military budgeted for them, and they couldn’t eat on what they were paid either. For awhile there russia’s military was pretty much worthless — lucky for them nobody wanted to invade them. Now it’s strong enough to invade chechnya and georgia….
Things could get that bad here. We could find ourselves disssembling our nuclear stockpile because the chinese give us valuable hard currency to do it. We could wind up with a small military because we flat out can’t afford a larger one.
These are interesting times and it’s hard to be sure what’s plausible.
October 11th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Divide and conquer, the new President needs to buttonhole the Marine Commandant and the Chief of Naval Operations and give them what they want in exchange for their help throwing the Army and Air Force under the bus.
The Army runs the National Guard and that’s all it get. If you want to be an active duty trigger puller, the Fleet Marine Force is in your future. As for the Air Force, kill it dead. Even if we scrape every aircraft the USAF owns (in the event, the other services would just rob the corpse), we’re still number 1. Its true that the US Air Force is the largest air force in the world, but the world’s second largest is the US Navy.
October 12th, 2008 at 12:18 am
Other things equal, don’t you get less debris from a satellite kill the lower the orbit? It’s good world citizenship to minimise that. How good they’d be at killing the higher ones is still open to question, but it isn’t clear they couldn’t do it.
True, it’s not determinative of their abilities. And I’ll willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they shot down the satellite because it was a useless hunk of junk, just like we did around the same time. (But in both cases, the reason it was pretty highly publicized was to say ‘hey! look at me and what I can do!’)
I just wonder if you give missile defense as much of the benefit of the doubt. Or if you think a bunch of canned scenarios with cooperative targets doesn’t really prove its capability in ‘field’ conditions.
They want to be prosperous, and the military buildup they started after we sent five carrier groups off their coast is sure to slow their economic growth.
And you really think the Chinese are only building up their military because the ol’ big bad usa conducted operations in the Western Pacific? I’ve said this before – the chinese have and will build up their military because we *have* at least 5 aircraft carriers. And if their remains political consensus that we want to be able to, for instance, establish no-fly zones over Darfur*, we will continue to need at least five aircraft carriers.
*as stated by Sen Biden in the VP debate.
October 12th, 2008 at 12:21 am
$450B in five years. Ho hum. The Treasury gave $459B to the Fed for all the bailouts in the last three weeks.
Rapier, that may be a completely different thing.
The USA has been importing more stuff than we export. We need foreigners to lend us back our money so we can import more. Over the last 16 years we’ve done a series of scams to get that money. We got foreigners to invest in the dot.com bubble. Then they bought up US mortgages and derivatives. Now they don’t trust those. The most trustworthy investment we have for them is US T-bonds, guaranteed by the US government. So we’re going to try to sell $700 billion plus in T-bonds. The details of how to distribute that money so we can keep buying imports have not been worked out yet. But the “spending” is so far all funny-money.
When the US military spends a billion dollars it makes a different kind of difference. They buy steel and lead and copper and uranium. They buy oil and burn it up. Every barrel of oil we burn up flying US servicemen to iraq and back is a barrel of imported oil that we have to pay foreigners for. Every ton of steel that we ship to iraq, get damaged, and ship back to the USA to be repaired is a ton of steel that doesn’t go into the civilian economy. Every engineer who spends his working lifetime designing military equipment is an engineer who isn’t working on alternate energy or anything actually useful. Tremendous opportunity cost.
Potentially there’s a big difference here. The bank bailout is about who owns what. It will affect how many dollars we pay in interest on T-bills etc. Military spending is about taking real actual stuff that real people might have a use for — oil, steel, plastic, paper, labor, lives — and destroying it.
Every year we take more than 4% of our GDP and give it to our military to get rid of. It’s a great big burden and we don’t get anything in return except victory.
October 12th, 2008 at 12:53 am
Kolohe, it’s clearly a lot easier to hit a satellite that has a fixed orbit than a missile that’s moving fast and variably, that you find out about on short notice. I don’t know much about our defenses against that. We could have satellites that can move a little (though they’d need fuel etc that could stay ready to use for years, and that would inevitably run out fairly fast). We could secretly have military capabilities built into various civilian satellites including some that officially belong to other nations. We could secretly have ways to quickly get replacement satellites up fast.
It’s a different kind of question. If we think it’s unlikely that our current missile defenses will work, how much money should we spend to deploy them?
If we aren’t sure that enough of our satellites can survive war with china, how much money should we spend to defend them, and how much should we spend getting ready to do without them? Also, if we’re considering the choice to deliberately start a conventional war with china, how much do we need those satellites and how much can we depend on them?
Very different questions.
And you really think the Chinese are only building up their military because the ol’ big bad usa conducted operations in the Western Pacific?
Like everywhere else. They have to negotiate with their hardliners about how many resources to put into the military instead of invest in their economy. Our hardliners gave their hardliners a great big boost. Maybe their hardliners will return the favor. It’s a pleasant partnership as long as they don’t have to actually go to war.
I’ve said this before – the chinese have and will build up their military because we *have* at least 5 aircraft carriers.
The longer they put it off, the less it costs them. The longer they wait, the more obsolescent our carriers will be.
And if their remains political consensus that we want to be able to, for instance, establish no-fly zones over Darfur*, we will continue to need at least five aircraft carriers.
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.”
Long after our remaining aircraft carriers are in mothballs we will have cheaper ways to create no-fly zones. For that matter the age of military aircraft with human pilots might be approaching its end too.
But in the short run I expect we’ll have to pull in our horns a bit. A collection of nations promised to pay for our Gulf War, notably saudi arabia and china. Why would we pay for our own foreign wars when we can’t begin to afford it?
We might build more JIT automated assembly lines for munitions and drones and such, and build the logistics network for a war after we have a customer who’ll pay in advance for us to attack their enemies.
October 12th, 2008 at 2:51 am
Yeah, spurious, the navy evidently is doing a better job of it, and much better equipped. It’s one of those sibling rivalry things, but someone had to do it. Just for genuine security purposes and not this data mining bullshit.
October 12th, 2008 at 2:52 am
What makes you think I’m making stuff up, kolohe? How long have you been studying nuclear forces?
October 12th, 2008 at 2:58 am
Actually J Thomas, other countries having the ability to shoot down satellites, is a deterrent to one nation dominating space, so I don’t think it’s a bad thing. War is an ongoing tech war and that’s not going to change as long as there is war.
October 12th, 2008 at 3:00 am
beowulf, I find the navy in space to be a rather odd concept. Do you have some personal beef with the air force?
October 12th, 2008 at 3:45 am
rein in
rein in
rein in
rein in
rein in
rein in
Thank you
October 12th, 2008 at 7:56 am
One thing not mentioned so far is stopping the insane growth in military outsourcing. For example, the new President should cancel all the Blackwater contracts immediately – if what they are doing needs to be done, it needs to be done with US Servicemen. The US Government (not just the military) is being consumed by politically well connected contractors getting large sums to do what used to be done more efficiently by the Government itself.
Those contractors are likely not going to be so politically well connected in a short while, and it would be a good thing on a whole lot of levels to stop their gravy train.
October 12th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Wiley, there are various possible reasons to think that it’s better for the USA not to dominate outer space. I don’t want to argue about that.
But if we can’t actually keep our military satellites functional during an important war, it’s important for us not to depend on them.
Similarly we must prepare for the time when we can’t bring an aircraft carrier closer than 800 miles from a hostile shore. Our carriers are uniquely useful now, and we need a smooth transition to the near future when they become far less useful.
Like the battleships, we’ll probably have to lose a carrier in battle before we admit that we have to change. But the satellites are a different problem — when we lose one we’ll probably lose them all within a week. If we aren’t ready to do without them that gives us less than a week to prepare.
October 12th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
The costs of personnel training and medical treatment (active duty as well as VA), plus recruitment of new troops to replace those who will leave the services at the first opportunity, will far exceed budget projections. Just for starters, combat services can anticipate training and replacing more than half of their junior officers and NCOs in the next couple of years.
You can basically write off every piece of mechanized equipment deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, whether or not they’re actually brought back from those theaters.
You can expect extensive refittings or replacement of aircraft and ships, many of which have been deployed and re-deployed without normal down times for maintenance.
Then there’s replenishment of ordinance and other combat supplies.
Unless the military continues to outsource support services to private contractors, many support units will have to be rebuilt almost from scratch.
None of that takes into account any new weapons systems or the transformation of combat, military intelligence and police/peace-keeping forces for counter-insurgency warfare — which so far has been done on a piecemeal, semi-improvised basis.
Anyone who imagined the military budget would shrink, or even continue at the same level, hasn’t given the issue much thought.
October 12th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
How long have you been studying nuclear forces?
I have first hand experience with naval nuclear forces. You say you were in the air force; great, the problem is you’ve seen wargames and crimson tide one too many times.
Your comment was:
It was discovered by one of our red teams, for instance, a few years ago that it was possible to hack into the Pacific Fleet submarines and give them all the order to launch
Which is like saying it’s possible to hack into the OnStar system and give everyone the command to drive into oncoming traffic. The system doesn’t work like that.
And to speak to another comment, I agree that are numerous parallels, both in terms of technology and politics, between unmanned aviation / manned aviation today and manned aviation / battleships back in the 30’s.
But the largest point remains. As long as everyone wants to be able to get involved in Serbia/Darfur – or Iraq/Iran depending on your political preference – we will will continue to need a pretty sizable military. And so, China will continue to strive to take steps to counteract by building its own sizable military.
October 12th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
yeah, and it’s probably been at least as long that i have been correcting people on the correct use of “reign” and “rein.”
your english teachers are all shaking their heads in dismay.
October 12th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
This budgetary request will go straight to the heart of a tax increase on the top 1%. Payting taxes is patriotic will take on a more defining meaning.
October 12th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
JThomas, I don’t want anyone dominating space, either. And I am about as opposed to weapons in space as it’s possible to be. But until nuclear disarmament happens, we rely on satellite technology for missile warning. That’s so important that there is a legitimate and mutual concern over Russia’s ailing system.
As long as we have nuclear weapons, we need satellite surveillance. Plus, NORAD is supposed to monitor all of our air space and defend it.
I’d prefer disarmament—which is a slow tedious process by nature. But I do think think the satellite part should remain defensive and all ABM and Star Wars projects should be canned because the escalate the arms race, appear to be more useful as offensive weapons, they fail their own rigged tests, and we don’t need more BOOM.
And the Air Force still has a role, IMO, but carpet bombing cities ain’t it.
October 12th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
I really don’t appreciate your personal comments, kolohe. Is it a man thing? To say that I’ve watched Wargames and Crimson Tide too many times with the assumption that you know everything there is to no about nuclear forces and I just watch too many movies is a bit on the anti-social side. To say flatly that I’m just making something up is a rather heavy accusation, in my book.
I study these issues, and have learned a lot more from books, archives, and on-line resources (like the Center for Defense Information) than from the purposefully limited and often lying explanations people get when they’re operators on the inside of a classified military operation.
October 12th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
I really don’t appreciate your personal comments, kolohe
Who started the personal stuff again?
OK, I should have qualified my statement with “…or you’re repeating someone who was told you ‘really, this is a no-s***ter’”
What I am saying, is like most people, your perception of the nuts and bolts on how these things work are probably colored by Hollywood fiction if you think that ‘one of our red teams’ figured out how ‘it was possible to hack into the Pacific Fleet submarines and give them all the order to launch’
This statement makes no sense. It is places, either is too broad or too narrow, confuses orders with operations, totally misstates technical abilities and subtlety misuses terminology. I don’t claim to know everything. But I have more recent first hand experience.
CDI is painful to read (way too conspiratorial); FAS is much better. (UCS otoh, is worse than both) Globalsecurity is also one to peruse if want to make sure you’re getting more than just an opinion that already agrees with your own.
October 12th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I should add that Globalsecurity has many of the same data problems as Wikipedia. A lot of stuff is out of date, and some is just straight up wrong. FAS does seem to be more consistent; I think it helps that they keep a narrower focus.
October 12th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Well I’m just slapping my forehead Kolohe. I should have known that a former Minuteman missilier who served on the Nunn-Lugar team helping Russia pull together and secure their arsenal after the fall of the Soviet Union was just some kind of sloppy and conspiratorial guy who gets his info from wikipedia.
October 12th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Gee, Kolohe. I’m slappin’ my forehead now. I should have known that a former Minuteman missilier who worked on one of the Nunn-Lugar teams helping Russia pull together and secure its arsenal after the fall of the Soviet Union was conspiratorial and sloppy a la wikipedia.
FAS is one of my favorite sources and the Bulletin of Atomic scientists. But I have never seen Red Dawn and thought that Wargames was rather silly, really. You don’t need AI to see that MAD was unwinnable. That’s rather the point, of it all. Isn’t it?
October 12th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
I should have known that a former Minuteman missilier who worked on one of the Nunn-Lugar teams helping Russia pull together and secure its arsenal after the fall of the Soviet Union
Then it’s all the more surprising that your knowledge of how the Trident system works seems so cursory. A Navy MT would have known that story was B.S.
Red Dawn was entertaining, but even sillier than Wargames.
October 12th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Wiley,
Navy in space, well they’ve only had Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles since the 60’s. And I’d note that Alan Shepherd, Neil Armstrong and Jim Lovell were all naval aviators (and John Glenn was a jarhead), so the Navy in space isn’t as freaky as, say, Bowie in space.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4zV4pJ8MwM
No beef against the Air Force, other than they suck. As for why they suck, there are a dozen reasons; from LeMay’s inhumane firebombing raids to consciously thwarting SecDef Gates efforts to replace manned aircraft with drones. However this comparison of AF and Marine Corps close air support in the Korean War is a perfect example:
Notwithstanding the stunning successes achieved by decentralizing operations in the latter part of WW II, the Air Force reverted to earlier WW II practices and insisted on centralizing CAS decisions at the numbered air force level. Also in sharp contrast to WW II practices, the Air Force relied much more heavily on airborne FACs — 95% of the AF CAS sorties were controlled by airborne FACs. The average response time for Air Force CAS sorties was 45 minutes, and generally bombs were dropped to within 3-4 miles of friendly troops.
In contrast to the Air Force in Japan, the marines initially made CAS decisions to the marine air wing (MAW) level. They also relied much more heavily on ground FACs — 95% of marine CAS sorties were controlled by ground FACs because when they used airborne FACs in slow O-1E “Bird Dog” prop aircraft they got shot down and men were killed needlessly. Under these arrangements, they were able to achieve response times of 5-10 minutes and were able to bomb within 1600 yards of friendly troops.”
http://www.combatreform2.com/a10cactusairforce.htm
October 12th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
You can basically write off every piece of mechanized equipment deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, whether or not they’re actually brought back from those theaters.
….
Unless the military continues to outsource support services to private contractors, many support units will have to be rebuilt almost from scratch.
….
Anyone who imagined the military budget would shrink, or even continue at the same level, hasn’t given the issue much thought.
I’ve given it considerable thought and I think the military budget might easily shrink despite everything you say. You’re confusing what we need with what we can get.
While the USSR was collapsing their military was at least as worn down from fighting in afghanistan as ours is from fighting in iraq. Their military needed everything ours needs now. They didn’t get it. Because they didn’t have the economy to be a superpower.
Do we have the economy to be a superpower? Our trade deficit is a bit bigger than our military spending. So it wouldn’t be out of line to say that our entire military is funded by foreign debt. How long can we afford that? Only while foreigners are willing to loan us the money and loan us the interest on the loans.
Suppose we are no longer a superpower. Then we have to scale back our goals. And we can handle our downsized goals with a downsized military.
So OK, we write off all the equipment in iraq. Get by with what we have left until we get new and better designs. We couldn’t do that as a superpower because somebody might get away with something while we rebuild. As a superpower we had to build lots of new equipment to replace the old equipment, stuff that will be obsolescent pretty quick. As an ex-superpower we don’t have to do that.
The cost of personnel training can go down because we can’t afford so many people to train. We can increase the new-style training, and gradually build up new forces we hope will be far more effective. Cut back the old stuff that we can’t afford and that we hope we don’t need.
We can rebuild support units at a reasonable pace without depending on contractors to provide that support in the short run, because in the short run most of it will not be provided.
Put the emphasis on new combat systems etc, on a short time frame. We can’t afford a 20-year OODA cycle. Figure out the improvements we need now, make them, figure out what improvements we need next, make those, etc. The big emphasis would be on figuring out how to create a truly effective military, so we’ll be ready when the time comes that we can afford one.
Like pretty much everybody else. We can’t afford to do 45% of world military spending. We can’t afford to do 20%. We aren’t a superpower any more.
October 12th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
I don’t want anyone dominating space, either. And I am about as opposed to weapons in space as it’s possible to be.
I’m not clear I get a choice about that.
Buckminster Fuller had an oversimplified explanation about naval warfare. He said that when there’s an actual naval war, the second-best navy gets sunk. You might almost as well not have a navy as have the second-best navy. (And so our various enemies don’t try to out-carrier us. They do a little bit of carrier stuff as if they want to find out more about where carriers are vulnerable. But they can’t afford to go head-to-head with us. They do better in a world where aircraft carriers are obsolete. All our potential enemies look for ways to sink carriers a lot harder than they look for ways to use carriers, because that’s how they might win.)
Is it that way in space? A satellite sits in space like a cockroach in the jello. It can’t run and it can’t hide. If one side can dominate space I want it to be us, but I don’t have the money to make it so.
Or if it turns out that everybody can shoot down stuff in space while nobody can keep stuff in space, then we need to be ready to fight without assets in space. However nice it would be if we could keep stuff up there, it’s no use if we can’t do it.
It’s interesting if it turns out that lots of players can put stuff up but nobody can shoot stuff down. That results in a new kind of warfare, as long as it stays true. It doesn’t look like it’s true right now, though.
But until nuclear disarmament happens, we rely on satellite technology for missile warning. That’s so important that there is a legitimate and mutual concern over Russia’s ailing system.
You make a strong argument for nuclear disarmament. I believe that nuclear disarmament will be far easier to do after a small nuclear war among small nations. When the world sees the fruits of nuclear victory for the victor, disarmament will get a lot of momentum. It would be unethical to encourage a nuclear war in, say, the middle east. But it might easily happen even when we don’t do anything to encourage it, and that would solve some of our critical problems.
October 14th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Bloody the bastards. The Pentagon is notorious for spending money on big toys and not buying essentials like body armor. If they push this, Obama will have to get his hands in the gear and realign their priorities. Support the army, support infantry, kill big defense boondoggles like missle defense.
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