40 · MT 2/2022 Letter from America Marty Kauchak The US Spends Too Much on Defence Forget the cascading competition between the US and China for influence in the Western Pacific, and the stand-off between the US and its allies with Russia over Ukraine. The stark reality is the Pentagon’s continued near-bottomless access to funds has encouraged a culture of waste and indulgence that is evident across the defence enterprise – from weapons platform acquisition programmes to battlefield failures – most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Biden administration, the US Congress and industry have a once-in-a- generation opportunity to start the herculean task of righting the enterprise, and make it more responsive to the men and women in uniform and US taxpayers. The observation that the US Department of Defense continues to operate with increasingly lavish budgets was not triggered by its latest projected fiscal year 2022 budget authorization (about $768 billion) but, rather, by the expanding instances of programme mismanagement and missteps, on and off the battlefield. The department, industry and US Congress all have a hand in allowing the escalation in levels of waste and inefficiency throughout the Pentagon’s portfolio. Most glaring,are the continued, staggering levels of mismanagement across weapons platform acquisition programmes. At the top of the list of systems having a ‘halo of protection’ in the eyes of Congress, industry and the military services, is the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, which began development in 2001 and remains DoD’s most expensive acquisition effort. The General Accountability Office confirmed last July, “the program is more than 8 years delayed and $165 billion [author’s emphasis] over original cost expectations.” GAO further emphasized, “the Pentagon plans to acquire 500 F-35 aircraft for about $400 billion. It projects spending another $1.27 trillion to operate and sustain them over the fleet’s 60-year life span – an estimate that has steadily increased since 2012.” The tolerated culture of significantly over budget and much-delayed platforms, however, is not the exclusive purview of the air domain. Indeed, during MilTech’s presence at the 2022 Surface Navy Association conference, there was a celebratory mood on 12 January around the final ship in the Zumwalt class, the Lyndon B Johnson (DDG 1002), sailing away from General Dynamics Bath Iron Works, Maine. Once envisioned as a class of eight, ten and even twelve vessels that would help establish and maintain US naval dominance on the world’s oceans, the Zumwalts, with good intentions, were enthusiastically fitted with futuristic, yet often immature, technologies and systems. The attention-getting ships, with their unique silhouettes, are clearly not ready for day-to day fleet operations, and are little more than test beds for future warfighting concepts and demonstrations. Don’t look for the DDG-1000s to be conducting Freedom of Navigation Operations in the South China Sea any time soon. And then there is the expanding quantities of ‘fat’ in US DoD budgets. While in one case the service chiefs have maintained they need no additional C-130Js beyond those in their annual ‘wish lists,’ somehow extra ‘J’ models continue to find their way into the annual defense authorization and appropriations acts Congress delivers for presidential signature. Elsewhere in the air domain, Congress is increasingly forcing the department to maintain in their orders of battle numbers of legacy-era platforms that are now well beyond their service life limits – witness the FY 2022 defence authorization bill’s congressional mandate to retain the Air Force’s A-10 fleet. Beyond materiel are personnel issues – for instance, the persistent cost-consuming and budget-busting imbalance between desk-riding civilians and contractors,at the Pentagon and other behind-the-front-lines commands – numbers which often rival active-duty forces in and beyond the continental US. Following this author’s above bold assertion, it’s appropriate to ask: how much defence spending is too much? The most candid, unvarnished response: some figure less than the attention-getting FY2022 topline. And it will remain too much until the Pentagon can pass audits, field major weapons platforms and systems on-time – and at or under cost – and not provide commanders with what is in essence a ‘blank check,’ allowing them to more easily blunder into debacles and failures, as witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan, when arguably industry, and, in particular, contractors, were the winners – not the US services, the nation’s friends and allies, or US taxpayers. As this article was published, President Joe Biden and his administration were facing challenges across the international and domestic policy fronts. One huge opportunity for a lasting Biden administration legacy rests in working with Congress and industry to start to gain some small, but lasting, control over the ballooning Pentagon budget – which has continued growth projected through the budget outyears. What would please this disgruntled tax payer – who has no political agenda – would be a series of hard-fought, incremental victories to truly craft a budget for military readiness. One starting point: halting the declining ratio of enlisted service members to officers across the department – the current metric adds layers of bureaucracy to chains of command around the globe. Based in New Orleans, Marty Kauchak, a former US Navy Captain, acts as MilTech’s North American Bureau Chief.
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