Author Archive
Airbus, Alabama, Boeing, and McCain
Press reports on the tanker saga have left two points unappreciated. The first is the hidden cost of creating a new aircraft assembly facility in Alabama. The second is how John McCain’s demands for competition in this deal helped Airbus and Northrop – not because McCain is crooked but because competition in defense contracting is phony.
To review: The Air Force needs refueling tankers because we fight far-off wars and don’t want to ask permission for overseas basing rights. B-52 bombers couldn’t fly from Missouri to Afghanistan to bomb the Taliban without tankers. Fighters and cargo aircraft need them too. The Air Force’s tanker fleet of 520 KC-135s and 59 larger KC-10s is old. In 2004, the Air Force tried to begin replacing them by leasing tankers from Boeing, as private airlines do. The deal unraveled when it emerged that leasing the tankers would add $6 billion to the taxpayers’ bill, that the deal was partially intended to prop up Boeing, and that Boeing had bought influence with Pentagon officials. McCain led the opposition. Two Boeing executives and one Air Force official went to prison. The Secretary of the Air Force and the head of Boeing lost their jobs.
Still looking for new tankers, the Air Force solicited another set of proposals for the new tanker, now dubbed the KC-45A. A few weeks ago, Airbus, a subsidiary of EADS, the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, won, along with its partner, American defense contractor Northrop-Grumman. The deal would eliminate jobs in Kansas and Washington where Boeing has production facilities. Congressmen and Senators from those states erupted into patriotic indignation and vowed hearings. Politicians from Alabama, where Airbus will place a new production facility, vowed to fight for the deal. Boeing protested, which forces a GAO review – delaying the start of production by at least 100 days. Now allegations have emerged that McCain aided the victors while taking their money and their lobbyists for his Presidential campaign. Got it?
Don’t Cry for Fox Fallon
The news that the commander of U.S. Central Command, William “Fox” Fallon, is retiring early is going to cause some panic among people concerned about war with Iran. There’s some reason to worry, but not much more than yesterday. Time will tell, but I don’t think this is about bombing Iran.
Whether Fallon got fired or resigned, it happened because he screwed up — he got caught disagreeing with administration policy in an overwrought article by Thomas Barnett in Esquire. Even before that, it was a terribly kept secret that he was out of sync with the White House on Iran, Iraq, and probably China.
I agree with Fallon on all those fronts, but he works for the president. Civilian control of the military means you can’t just go around telling everyone, off the record or no, that you dissent from the administration’s policies, and still work for them, even if those policies are dumb. It’s probably Fallon’s good sense that made it impossible for him to work for this administration.
Democrats who take his side because they dislike Bush administration policy ought to keep in mind that a president they support may be in power soon, and they’re going to have to run the military too.
Happy Birthday, Homeland Security!
I doubt that anyone outside Joe Lieberman’s office is happy with the performance of the Department of Homeland Security, which observed its five-year anniversary this week. To mark the occasion, CQ Homeland Security (part of Congressional Quarterly) asked me and a bunch of more important people to comment on whether creating the department was wise.
The competition for most negative response turned out to be fierce (even Michael Chertoff sounds ambivalent) but I think my entry is a contender. Here’s the first part of what I wrote:
Congress made a large but typical mistake with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security five years ago. James Q. Wilson wrote in 1995 that government reorganizations are usually driven by a perception of crisis that produces a political need to do something quick and extensive. He notes that these circumstances make thoughtful planning for the change unlikely. Reorganizations, he says, are usually victims of a facile urge to clarify lines of authority and end duplication without understanding the incentives of the organizations involved. Congress and the Bush administration followed this model in creating DHS.
The collection of comments is here.
Pentagon to China: Do What We Say, Not What We Do
This week brought the publication of the annual Pentagon report, “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China.” As James Fallows will tell you, this is an important document for China threat inflators, who use the report to make all sorts of lurid claims in their efforts to drag us into a Cold War with China. The report itself, while it tends to put a scary spin on things, is relatively sober.
What most irritates me about it (along with its contribution to the overheated cyberwar rhetoric so popular this year) is the implication that China is not allowed to behave like us. Here’s the final paragraph of the executive summary:
The international community has limited knowledge of the motivations, decision-making, and key capabilities supporting China’s military modernization. China’s leaders have yet to explain in detail the purposes and objectives of the PLA’s modernizing military capabilities. For example, China continues to promulgate incomplete defense expenditure figures, and engage in actions that appear inconsistent with its declaratory policies. The lack of transparency in China’s military and security affairs poses risks to stability by increasing the potential for misunderstanding and miscalculation. This situation will naturally and understandably lead to hedging against the unknown.
The briefer who presented the report to the media Monday, David Sedney, echoed this bottom line:
The real story is the continuing development, the continuing modernization, the continuing acquisition of capabilities and the corresponding and unfortunate lack of understanding, lack of transparency about the intentions of those and how they are going to be employed. What is China going to do with all that?”
Expanding and modernizing the military for unclear reasons, huh? Are the authors of this stuff completely blind to hypocrisy? The United States spends over $75 billion a year on research and development alone to modernize the military, never mind procurement. The non-war defense budget has grown 37% since Bush took office. And we are far from transparent. Do we not hide about a tenth of our regular defense spending behind a veil of secrecy? I’m confident we’re not giving the international community thorough briefings on our full surveillance capabilities. What about intentions? We’re vaguer than the Chinese. We explicitly justify our defense capabilities based on uncertainty. The Pentagon’s slogan could be, “Hey, it’s expensive, but you never know.” Will we defend Taiwan if China attacks it? Will we bomb Iran? Join in Sudan’s civil war? I study the U.S. defense establishment for a living, and I don’t know our intentions. No one does.
Maybe we should cut back on the lectures and let the Chinese run their own affairs.
The Arms Race Myth?
Richard Perle has an interesting op-ed on missile defense in Monday’s Washington Post. The point is that arms races aren’t all that they’re cracked up to be; arms controllers’ belief in an iron-clad law of politics saying that rival states engage in arms races is wishful thinking driven by opposition to arms. He’s more right than wrong.
Perle does overstate his point. He claims that there was not arms racing during the Cold War. Wrong. The US-Soviet nuclear weapons dynamic during the Cold War, to use Sam Huntington’s famous distinction, can be accurately described as a quantitative arms race until the 1970s, when the competition became more qualitative. All along, because US nuclear weapons policy consistently aimed at making a preemptive first strike against Soviet nukes possible (mutually assured destruction was a lot of talk never reflected in weapons policy), you could reasonably call our behavior arms racing. Early on, the Air Force largely based its preferred number of bombers and ICBMs on the number of Soviet nuclear weapons launchers – whether bombers or missiles – and routinely exaggerated those numbers for bureaucratic purposes. Later, when arms limitations talks like SALT occurred, we limited total numbers of platforms but strove for higher accuracy to maximize our ability to pull off a disarming strike.
But Perle’s overall point is still accurate. The Cold War was unique. Today pundits often argue that if we build a missile defense system that works against their missiles, the Russians and Chinese will just build more missiles to overwhelm it. Maybe. But this begs the question of why the Russians have been letting their nuclear arsenal (particularly early warning radar) decay since the Cold War, to the point where people like Keir Lieber and my former Professor Daryl Press can write that we have gained a first strike capability against Russia. One reason the Russians let this happen, presumably, is that they were broke, which would imply that they’ll fix things now that they’re not. Another explanation, however, is that the Cold War ended, and they stopped caring about the nuclear balance.
If that condition holds, Russia might view our missile defense system as a nuisance not worth great expense. They probably still dislike an image of weakness, largely because of Russian domestic politics. Putin may therefore bluster that he would never let the US get too large a nuclear lead, but that is more about symbolism that true responses. Where the rubber meets the road, they may avoid investing enough to match us. No arms race. Maybe they’ll settle for simple qualitative steps like developing decoys that can overwhelm the system. That could be called an arms race, but not much of one.
Likewise, since it built nuclear weapons, China has lived under the shadow of a possible disarming first strike from us (and for years, probably the USSR). They have showed little inclination to deal with this situation by making their missiles mobile, building far more, or deploying nuclear missiles on submarines. Today they are moving anemically toward developing those submarines, it appears, and making their ICBMs mobile. But they are not investing heavily in those capabilities. If they’re in a race to assure a deterrent capability against us, it’s a very slow one. Perhaps this is a legacy of our friendly late Cold War relations. Maybe it’s a hedging strategy born of poverty, which is disappearing. Maybe they figure 20 ICBMs is enough to keep us from getting too confident. Whatever the case, it is hardly inevitable that their reaction to our missile defense efforts will be to build-up to overwhelm our system. That depends on lots of conditions, especially the state of bilateral relations. The more we label them as the object of our arms, the more likely this buildup is.
Unlike Perle, by the way, I’m not for national missile defense – not twelve billion a year of it, anyway. It’s wasteful. One reason is that the conditions of hostility likely to make it useful vis-à-vis rich states are precisely the conditions that would cause those states to arms race enough to overwhelm it (assuming, heroically, that it worked). But neither am I alarmed by missiles defense’s independent implications for international relations. That depends on a lot more than defense systems.
Reviving Interservice Competition
I recently complained that the US defense budget fails to adhere to a strategy; that it avoids choice between means. This lack of choice is manifest in the preservation of service shares. Each military service has gotten about the same relative share of the defense budget each year under Bush, despite the war on terror. In fact, the shares have basically held since the Kennedy administration.
In recent decades, the Navy got about 26 percent of the defense budget; 31 percent including the Marines. The Air Force also got around 31 percent, and the Army 25 percent. The rest went to defense-wide programs like missile defense. Annual deviations are rarely ever above two percent. This year brings a slight uptick in the Army share; the numbers are 29 percent Navy and Marines, 28 percent Air Force, and 27 percent Army. Current budget shares deviate more from the historical norm if you include the supplemental war appropriations, which favor the ground forces. But the point of a supplemental is that it does not affect the future baseline.
In today’s Christian Science Monitor, Gordon Lubold writes that a Congressional “Roles and Missions” panel, formed under the auspices of the House Armed Services Committee, is set to release a report that questions this arrangement. That’s good news.
Congressman Jim Cooper (D-Tennessee), who chaired the panel, calls the continuity of service shares “a statistical indictment” of the Pentagon planning process. The current US national security strategy – as seen in official documents, rhetoric, and our two wars – is counter-terrorism via counter-insurgency. That is, counter-terrorism is our primary security task, and to accomplish it we aim to deny terrorists haven with wars of occupation meant to resurrect government in anarchic states like Iraq and Afghanistan. We have other objectives – contain rising powers, stem weapons proliferation, etc, but these are secondary.
This strategy favors the Army. Ground forces take center-stage in counter-insurgency and state-building, with contributing performances from aircraft and other government agencies. It follows that our defense budget would flood money into the Army and Marines and cut the Air Force and Navy’s budget to pay for it. Instead, we have given each service the same bump in funds – roughly 35% percent under Bush.
The Four Percent Folly
James Jay Carafano’s op-ed in Thursday’s Washington Times, “In Defense of Defense Spending,” exemplifies the illogic of those who want to devote a fixed portion of our national wealth to defense.
Carafano is part of group of think-tankers and Bush administration officials trying to lock in a military budget fattened by two wars. By arguing that we should spend at least four percent of GDP on defense no matter what, they effectively say that whenever we draw down from Iraq, we should take all the war funds and put them into the non-war defense budget — creating a huge increase in base defense spending.
The op-ed is wrong-headed in three ways. It ignores the meaning of the statistic — percentage of GDP — that it hangs its hat on; it implies that changes in threat levels should not affect defense budgets, and it pretends that most U.S. defense spending is related to terrorism.
Carafano’s conclusion:
Defense spending as a percentage of GDP is the appropriate way to measure our national commitment to keeping America safe, free and prosperous. That’s the number policymakers should keep in mind as they look at the president’s budget.
Maybe I have undue faith in government, but I think policymakers can keep in mind more than one number. As my professor at MIT, Cindy Williams, points out, what number you should consider in thinking about the defense budget depends on what you want to know.
Percentage of GDP is useful for historical comparisons of defense’s economic burden. Carafano substitutes the question of what we can afford for what we ought to spend. The United States can afford to spend four percent of its GDP on defense; indeed we can afford to spend far more. That doesn’t mean we should. Whatever your politics, money spent on defense means money not spent on something else: private investment, deficit reduction, infrastructure, a car, etc. The problem is opportunity cost, not economic malaise.
Air Force vs. Taxpayers
This week’s Air Force Times reports that the Air Force wants an extra $59 million of your tax dollars next year to pay for a campaign to win tens of billions more of your tax dollars.
You see, the Air Force’s research shows that the American public does not appreciate the Air Force as much as the Air Force thinks it should. Air Force generals worry that Americans may conclude that our current wars, which are relatively low-tech, ground power-centric affairs, are a reasonable basis for making procurement decisions. That conclusion may produce budgets that favor the ground forces, thwarting the Air Force’s plan to become the service that runs future wars. And the administration has already refused the Air Force an extra $20 billion for its annual budget.
So the defense budget submitted recently to Congress would more than double the Air Force’s advertising spending to insure that the public doesn’t figure out that platforms like the F-22 are white elephants.
The Air Force defends the funds in this, surprisingly forthright, way (from page 652 of their budget estimate for FY 2009):
Without the funding the ability to educate the American public about Air Force roles and mission will be limited and [sic] ultimately creating a gap between the public and the Air Force that will influence public opinion and the Air Force’s ability to maintain its stature amongst the other Services. Other recruiting programs aided in meeting accession goals but did little to illustrate the Air Force story. This funding purchases capabilities to illustrate the Air Force’s vital role in national defense today and in the future, hi-light the unique capabilities delivered by no other service, depict the most complex and challenging assignments, and show case the USAF.
According to the Air Force Times:
Air Force officials believe Congress and the public are focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the Army and Marine Corps do most of the fighting. Therefore, efforts to expand the Air Force’s high-tech fleet of aircraft and the service’s cyber mission are taking a backseat to the immediate needs of the wars.
If that is what the public thinks, I commend our common sense. Silly op-eds and press releases asserting how essential airpower is to counter-insurgency apparently failed to do the trick.
Satellite Shooting
The U.S. Navy is going to shoot down a malfunctioning National Reconnaissance Office (spy) satellite that is due to hit earth in March. A missile fired from an Aegis cruiser will do the deed.
The official reason for doing this, according to Aviation Week, is that:
The spacecraft carries a full tank of hydrazine — a toxic propellant — that would have been used to reposition the satellite in orbit. Government analysts say the odds are that the tank will crack open during re-entry or that it will land in the ocean, which makes up 70 percent of the area where the breaking-up satellite might land.
Hydrazine, a widely used rocket fuel, is certainly hazardous. But suspicious minds are bound to wonder whether the motive behind this action is not what we are told, especially because satellites crash to Earth frequently without harm.
It could be, as Aviation Week speculates, that sensitive technology on the satellite might survive reentry, land in the wrong place, and reveal U.S. secrets.
Another possibility is that the safety concern may provide a rationale for those in the Pentagon who want to conduct an anti-satellite test, a business that the U.S. has been out of for decades. Even if that is not the case, observers in China and other foreign states may believe it anyway.
Our Big, Fat Defense Budget
I suppose I should be happy to live in a country that can afford to spend nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars a year on defense even though we are relatively safe, historically speaking. But the defense spending that the President proposed to Congress Monday is so excessive that I can only manage outrage. Everyone complains about earmarks, but they cost $17 billion across the government last year. That’s just two months in Iraq; pocket change in the Pentagon.
Hawks, like Admiral Mike Mullen, the new Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, argue that, hey, it is only 4 percent of GDP. After all, they say, we used to spend far more of our wealth on the military, especially during wars – 35 percent of GDP in World War II and 9 percent in Korea.
That argument, popular as it is, baffles me. The US is about six and half times as rich it was in 1950, adjusting for inflation. Economic growth means that devoting a pegged portion of GDP to the Pentagon is to annually increase defense spending, whatever happens with foreign threats. That’s a silly way to spend tax dollars, to put it mildly. The sensible way to provide defense is look at your enemies’ capabilities and likely scenarios for defeating them and back spending out from that – whether that amounts to one percent of GDP or 30.
And it is not just the waste that offends. According to Steve Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the budget will leave the Pentagon short – by $10 to 20 billion a year – of the cash it needs to meet its own requirements. That’s because the budget avoids choice, the essence of strategy. As Fred Kaplan noted the other day, instead of selecting a method of providing defense that would create winners and losers among military services and their platform communities, the non-war budget basically gives the services what they want under a topline. It also gives each service roughly the same relative share of the total as they received in each year since the Kennedy administration, with only a slight uptick this year for the ground forces. That tells you a great deal about George Bush’s claim to have transformed the military.
The worst thing about the budget is that it is bipartisan. No one influential complains. Congressional Republicans on the defense committees are either for it or want more. Democrats knock the Iraq funds, but accept the other $560 billion. History says that the defense budget – at least the non-war portion – that emerges as law next fall will deviate only slightly from what the President submitted.
Why is no one opposed? For one (and I could go on), both parties embrace brands of militaristic hegemony – the idea that that we are better off with massive military predominance over all other powers and that there is a military solution to most foreign policy concerns. Want a liberal world? Buy enough carriers and F-22s so that we can dominate it. China’s growing? Arm so heavily that they cannot compete. Pakistan troubles you? Draw up an invasion plan. Africa is disorderly? Create Africa Command.
But really you can’t blame politicians, who have to get elected. You have to blame the intellectuals who shape public opinion. Blame my field, political science, which has largely decided to avoid studying such unsophisticated questions as the requirements of our defense (and hiring those who do), leaving security debates short of truly independent experts. Blame the beltway pundits who avoid challenging the post September 11 explosion of militarism or lead the parade.
The good news is that bad things, the Iraq war and the growth of entitlements’ cost, are waking people up to the idea that maybe this isn’t the best use of tax dollars. DoD plans and insiders say FY 2009 will be a peak year for defense spending, and that we are about to hit a downward trend. Here’s hoping.
Is The Domestic Terror Threat ‘Overblown’?
As Cato’s new research fellow for Defense and Homeland Security (and someone who’s written extensively on how the terror threat to the United States is hardly an “existential” one), I was glad to see this headline on the cover of latest Rolling Stone (right behind the left ear of Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke): “The Fake Domestic Terror Threat: How the FBI Became a Factory of Fear” — even if it’s a bit hyperbolic. (The article is not online.)
The author, Guy Lawson, does not tell readers much that they could not have gathered from the Washington Post or the New York Review of Books. But he repeats something that bears repeating: Six plus years of fevered searching for terrorists on American soil has turned up precious little of the real thing.
The hunt, led by the FBI, has found several wanna-be jihadis willing to sign up for phony terror plots often organized by FBI informants, various illegal immigrants with shady overseas connections, a number of people gathering funds for foreign terrorist organizations, and only a handful of true terrorists (and not particularly formidable ones). A report from NYU’s Center for Law and Security finds that from September 11, 2001 through September 11, 2006, only “four individuals have been convicted of federal crimes of terrorism” in the United States and “no sleeper cell with logistical or tactical links to al Qaeda has been convicted of plotting an attack to be carried out within the U.S.” That means we have found no terrorist sleeper cells in the United States since September 11, as the FBI admitted.
Time and again, federal officials held press conferences to announce the break-up of a terrorist plot and vaguely described the disaster prevented. The evening news and the headlines repeated their lurid claims. Months later, the inside pages of the papers would report that the plot was not what we were told — and TV doesn’t even bother. The plans have turned out to be unfeasible or preliminary. On other occasions, it turned out the plotters visited a terrorist camp but did little plotting. Some charges have been dismissed. Some have been completely bogus.
Experts, like an FBI agent Lawson quotes, say that just because you haven’t found something, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. That’s indisputable. But when several federal agencies, local police, alarmed citizens, and ambitious federal prosecutors search for terrorists for years and find almost none, you have good evidence that there just aren’t many to find. To that some will say that absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. But that expression is illogical. If you spent two hours spent searching your car for your lost wallet, it is good evidence that it’s not there, though it’s not proof.
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