Defense Reform for the Long Haul
Noah Schachtman writes about an intriguing element of yesterday’s Pentagon conference call that hinted at the logic of deeper future reforms:
Marine General [and] Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright says the Review will handle all kinds of tradeoffs. For instance: “If you have bombers in the Pacific, do you also have to have aircraft carriers?” he asks. “Do we always have to have every thing in every service? How much of this do we really need, especially given the situation we face which is a much broader spectrum of conflict over a much great geographic dispersal than we’ve had in the past?”
Essentially everyone agrees that this is a problem. At the margin, each service prefers to have more capacity inside its own bureaucratic boxes rather than be dependent on other services. Consequently, around the margins there’s a lot of overlap, even though “jointness” has allegedly been the main strategic concept of the military for a while now. Spencer Ackerman observes that the implications of taking this idea more seriously could be large “if the services and Congress don’t like the fiscal 2010 budget, they’ll absolutely hate the QDR and the fiscal 2011 budget that the QDR informs. Reform is starting to seem like the new normal at the Pentagon under Gates.”
I think that’s right. Early in his remarks, Gates specifically linked the reform-oriented 2010 budget request to a larger process. He said that what he’s doing in this budget flows from the 2008 National Defense Strategy and that the drive to change will continue in both the next Quadrennial Defense Review, the next Nuclear Posture Review, and then the 2011 budget request.
This is important because it’s in the nature of military procurement programs that there are necessarily large lag times. Consequently, over the short run the only way to realize really major savings would be to just abandon existing expensive equipment in a way that’s not very efficient. But the move to curtail the F-22 in favor of increased orders of the F-35, which is both cheaper and “jointer” (i.e., used by more than one service) points in the direction of the possibility of substantial long-term potential savings. That’s not only because you can have direct efficiency gains through more joint procurement, it’s because by moving the services to a more homogeneous set of tools you do much more to lay bare redundancy and overcapacity. In Gates’ example, we’re thinking about the general presence of strategic air power in the Pacific rather than so many carrier-based craft and so many bombers. The presumption that you need “some of everything” in any important region winds up setting an unreasonably high floor for capabilities.
6 Responses to “Defense Reform for the Long Haul”
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April 8th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Two points to consider: military field commanders like to have control of all the basic services they need to complete their mission and keep as many people alive as possible because bitter historical experience shows that “joint” assets (e.g. tankers, or close support aircraft) tend to disappear into to haze of “jointness” at exactly the time they are needed. And the history of the F-111 and similar McNamara programs really needs to be studied before charging off in this direction.
April 8th, 2009 at 10:34 am
Re Not Really at 1: “Two points to consider: military field commanders like to have control of all the basic services they need to complete their mission and keep as many people alive as possible because bitter historical experience shows that “joint” assets (e.g. tankers, or close support aircraft) tend to disappear into to haze of “jointness” at exactly the time they are needed.”
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I think it depends upon what level of granularity you are discussing. An Army division commander likes to have all the pieces of his division together –although various units (Signal, transport,etc) will often not be at full strength.
However, integral military units themselves are chopped to the Unified Command that is most heavily involved in operations at the moment. I.e, military units from Pacific Command may be chopped over to Central Command if things heat up in the Middle East. The Army has sophisticated variations in command –for a defined period, a commander may be given Operational Control (OPCON) over units that are not Organic to his command. He may even ..urp.. receive command of National Guard units.
April 8th, 2009 at 10:45 am
I guess I don’t really see the logic of having the services separated. I understand it is partly historical but does it really serve any purpose today. Is it considered a less dangerous institution to democracy if it is fragmented? would costs be lower if it spoke with one voice rather than many clamoring for allocations or higher? what do you think is the reason they continue to be separate not just in the states either?
April 8th, 2009 at 10:54 am
There’s a key flaw in the homogeneous tools logic. That approach can lead to more complex programs that take longer to implement. F-35 suffers from this some and its particularly noticeable in some of the satellite programs that attempt to combine existing capabilities to save money.
Trying to lead with cross-service platforms will tend just to result in weapon systems with hordes of requirements, huge cost overruns, and delays that push them back past the point of relevance. If you reform the requirements process first, than there’s probably more room for these sorts of savings. However, on the whole, I’d argue we’re better off with more simpler tools than shooting for economics of scale with highly complex ones.
April 8th, 2009 at 11:42 am
All this is shifting the military budget so that it can start rebuilding and filling the holes left behind by the Bush Administration. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have burned through equipment, and replacement has not kept apace.
Gates understands that we must give up on some of these ultra hi-tech weapons that have no real purpose in the foreseeable future (the Cold War is over) in favor of systems that are needed now. Bush was enamored with these shiny objects, and let he military fall in to disrepair.
April 8th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
“I guess I don’t really see the logic of having the services separated.”
Yeah, it is kind of silly that the largest air force is the US Air Force and the second largest air force is the US Navy. In fact, there’s no need for an active duty Army or Air Force (keep the National Guard and Air Guard around I suppose).
The Navy Department has ships, satellites, nuclear missiles, an absurdly large Marine Corps (4 jumbo-size divisions plus air wings), and as I noted above, the second largest air force in the world.
The Navy, backed up by the National Guard, could cover anything short of alien invasion and would save a ton of money… oh yeah, fiscal conservatism only counts for non-defense spending.