For the past decade, numerous career military officers and defense analysts--whose politics run the gamut from left to right--have held that U.S. combat in the twenty-first century probably won't mean grand, conventional battles with large standing armies. And September 11 suggests that these experts are right: Rather than a "rogue state" raining down ballistic missiles on us, or hordes of Red Chinese flexing regionally hegemonic muscle, low-tech operatives of an unorthodox army turned airplanes into bombs. For its part, the United States, in taking the fight to the parastatal entity behind the terrorist attacks, won the first round with a combination of highly mobile special-operations forces and the venerable B-52.
So what does the Bush administration do? Ask for a jacked-up defense budget:an increase of $120 billion over the next five years (an extra $48 billion forfiscal year 2003 alone). The increase exceeds any other nation's entire war chest.It includes tens of billions of dollars for weapons systems that aren't likelyto see any action, because they're rooted in a long-gone era and, to make mattersworse, they won't roll off the assembly lines for some time. "For 45 years of theCold War, we were in an arms race with the Soviet Union," says retired AdmiralEugene Carroll of the Center for Defense Information. "Now it appears we're in anarms race with ourselves."
Of course, it would be nice if the administration funneled some tax dollarsinto programs that are of real use to troops or into new systems that wouldactually work on today's altered landscape of war. After all, as DefenseSecretary Donald Rumsfeld said last year, "every dollar squandered on waste isone denied to the war fighter." No such luck. Indeed, in one case, themisappropriated dollar is not only denied the soldier but goes to a weapon morelethal to us than enemy ordnance.
The V-22 Osprey, a tilt-rotor aircraft under the aegis of the U.S. MarineCorps, has killed more Marines than the Taliban has. It's perennially in an"experimental" stage. Four prototypes have crashed in the past 10 years, killinga total of 30 men, including the program's most experienced hand. Not long afterthe last crash, which occurred in December 2000, a report from the Pentagonunderstated in calling the Osprey program "not operationally sustainable." EvenDick Cheney, as defense secretary under the elder George Bush, tried to quash it.The current administration could have followed the March 2000 recommendation bythe Congressional Budget Office to find safer and better applications for thetechnology developed in the program--a move that the CBO estimated would save$6.6 billion over the next decade. President Bush, however, wants Congress togive the Marines another $2 billion for the program. Meanwhile, the Air Force hasrequested $124 million for work on its own version of the disaster-proneaircraft.
How exactly this represents "transformation" of the U.S. military is unclear.But arguably even more puzzling is the blizzard of new dollars for the Army's $9-billion Crusader self-propelled artillery system. This 42-ton behemoth--meant to replace the Paladin self-propelled howitzer--is a screaming contradiction tothe doctrine of "maneuver warfare" that Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinsekiespouses. It is so unwieldy that neither the C-5 Galaxy nor the C-17 Globemaster,the two biggest aircraft in the military's cargo fleet, can carry a completeCrusader system. Although the CBO and the General Accounting Office (GAO) havereported that there is a more cost-effective alternative in the German-madePanzerhaubitze (PzH) 2000 self-propelled howitzer--replacing the Crusader withthe PzH 2000 would save taxpayers $6.7 billion--the Crusader proceeds apace withan additional $467 million.
Elsewhere in the Pentagon, if anything's ripe for a cutting, it's the AirForce's F-22 Raptor program. Already drowning in $9 billion worth of costoverruns, the plane that holds the dubious distinction of being the costliestfighter aircraft ever built does not, in the view of most experts, do anythingvery different from the Joint Strike Fighter, also in development. Nor is it ahuge improvement on the existing F-15's and F-16's. While the Center for DefenseInformation believes that the F-22 program is too far along to eliminate altogether, a strong case can be made for reining it in, as the cost of eachaircraft has ballooned by 24 percent in the past year alone. According to theCBO, restricting production of F-22's and relying more on existing F-15's wouldsave $10 billion over the next decade. For 2003, however, the Air Force wants $5.3 billion--an increase of $1.3 billion--for 23 new pairs of Raptor wings.
When it comes to cost-prohibitive aircraft, the Air Force doesn't have acorner on the market. The Bush administration has also rewarded the ineptitude ofthe Army's Comanche helicopter project, which is currently in its sixthincarnation. Initiated in 1983, the Comanche program has yet to deliver much inthe way of results; at one point, hopes were high that an aircraft might actuallybe produced by this year, but the latest estimate is that the rotors may turn by2004. As far as the GAO can tell, the only thing about the Comanche that flies isits price of production--and soar it has, from $43.3 billion in 1999 to $48.1billion in 2001. The CBO estimates that buying new models of helicopters that areproved to work would enable the Army to save $6.3 billion and still meet itsmission requirements. The Bush administration, however, is pumping another $910million into the Comanche--prompting one senior Pentagon analyst to wonder if"this money can be followed and frozen by law enforcement as part of the war onterrorism, as the program is clearly as much a threat to the U.S. military asany marauding armed force in the world."
Indeed, it is curious that Bush--who professes outrage at the dubious dealingsof Enron and Arthur Andersen--feels so confident asking Congress for all this and more (don't forget the $7.8-billion request for additional work on missile defense) when the Pentagon's accounting practices make Enron and Andersen looklike sticklers for detail. In recent years, the GAO and the Defense Department'sinspector general have found trillions of dollars' worth of unsupportableaccounting adjustments; the books are in such disarray that the DefenseDepartment can't even be effectively audited. And it isn't just the Bush administration that's culpable. Members of Congress from both sides of the aisleare enabling punch-drunk procurement by voting to keep and even expand programsin the name of local jobs--all at the expense of the national interest.
