Tom Ricks On Reforming Defense Spending

[Valin]

Hugh Hewitt Show:

Hugh Hewitt

March 20, 2015

 

Foreign Policy’s Tom Ricks joined me to talk defense spending on today’s show:

 

Audio

 

 

(Snip)

 

HH: Okay, so you began a conversation yesterday which is way above my pay grade. In the course of my following the Defense number, that’s all I’m trying to do, is figure out how much money they’re going to give to Defense, you began a conversation with a bunch of smart people. And Roger Zakheim was on earlier today, and I’m going to keep bringing on these people. You’re having a conversation no one else is having about fundamental transformation of the American military, where I’m just trying to figure out what the number is. But what’s the point you’re making, Tom, that the page has to be turned before the Defense budget is figured out?

 

TR: That right now, what we’re doing is funding a 19th and 20th Century military. And it’s going to get more and more expensive and less and less successful. What we need to do is look at Defense very differently. And this is not a thought that originates with me. I was very influence in this by a book that General Stanley McChrystal has written that’ll come out in a couple of months, and I think you should have him on when it comes out. The point is basically, we are going to have to cut the Defense budget. It’s too big and too expensive, and really not successful enough. An effective military is not a freestanding thing. A military is only effective as it’s able to change and deal with its environment. And what we saw in the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan was a very big, expensive machine that had circles run around it by al Qaeda and other people for several years. Again, that’s General McChrystal talking, not me. So we’re going to have to cut Defense. It’s too expensive for what we’re getting. The question is how we do it. D you want to cut Defense, Hugh, stupid? Or do you want to cut it smart?

 

(Snip)

 

HH: Now is there consensus on some things, for example, on nuclear submarines and attack submarines and * F-22’s and F-35’s? Does consensus exist within the community you cover better than most as to some weapon systems that are absolutely essential in the next 50 years?

 

TR: Yeah, everybody agrees that you need some boots on the ground in infantry, that you need some ships. But beyond that, there really is a lot of disagreement. This is why I like General McChrystal’s thinking. In his whole book, he doesn’t discuss weapons systems once. His whole book is how you structure the military, how you organize it. And I think he’s totally right there. A 19th Century innovation, the hierarchical military, the Napoleonic military, defeated the other militaries of its time. It was a new, successful organization that harnessed the Industrial Revolution. A 21st Century military is going to look very different from that. It’s probably going to be distributed network. You still have people in charge giving orders, but they’re not sitting at the top of a ladder getting information and issuing orders. They’re sitting in the middle of a network, seeing what’s going on, pushing out information, getting decisions from subordinates made before they even are aware of the situation, and basically grooving on the vibe.

 

HH: Now that’s interesting, because…

 

TR: It’s a very different way to run a military.

 

(Snip)

 

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* I wouldn't say that F’d: How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World’s Worst New Warplane....Is the F-35 the Worst Plane Ever?

 

 

 

 

[Valin]

The F-35 Can’t Use Its Bombs, Either

Mar. 16 2015

 

The news about the F-35’s inadequacies keeps rolling in. A month ago, we learned that software problems meant that the F-35 wouldn’t be able to fire its gun for the first few years it is in service. Now, it turns out it won’t be able to use a bomb critically useful for close air support (CAS) missions until 2022. Military.com reports:

 

(Snip)

 

The U.S. military is the most expensive in the world, and it prides itself on providing the best for its soldiers in all situations. That’s why this development is especially disturbing: the ongoing budgeting fight has F-35 fans in Congress and the Pentagon trying to retire the beloved, proven A-10 “Warthog,” which is famous for its CAS prowess, in order to fund the F-35, which is not as adept. It gets worse, too. Recently it has come out that the F-35 partisans have been knowingly distorting the numbers to make the F-35 look better and the Warthog look worse in order to bolster the case for the former, a program already more expensive than any other in U.S. military procurement history.

 

It was never clear that the F-35 was going to be that good a plane in the first place—a RAND Corporation review famously concluded that the new plane “can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run.” But with the software necessary for the weapons platform to actually use its most important weapons lagging years behind the deployment date, it seems our outmoded procurement policies have wound up trumping other concerns—including the effectiveness of our fighting force.