This Newspaper Editorial Should Be Making Pentagon Leaders Sweat

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This week’s dramatic convergence of events should have shocked Pentagon watchdogs, but so far it hasn’t. On Wednesday, the Senate passed a resolution $900 billion defense bill By an overwhelming margin of 77-20. A few days ago, the New York Times devoted an entire 13-page Sunday Opinion section to claiming that much of this budget was a colossal waste of money.

titled “Overmatched: Why the U.S. Military Needs to Reinvent ItselfThe package lists many situations in which the country’s war machine was “unprepared for today’s global threats and revolutionary technologies.”

The findings are largely based on an exclusive leak of a classified, comprehensive review of U.S. military power prepared and informed in 2021 by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (an analytical center that Donald Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has assessed as follows): has since been eliminated. The review not only analyzed recent war games, including against China, but also tracked “a decades-long decline in America’s ability to win a long war with a major power.”

The Times article attributes this decline, which many intelligence agencies and private defense analysts have been following for years, to various factors. The most important of these is the post-Cold War consolidation of more than 50 arms manufacturers, some of them nimble competitors, into a handful of lazy, overfed megacorporations. This trend coincides with the calcification of the Pentagon bureaucracy that nominally oversees the companies and the interests of lawmakers whose districts profit from the companies’ contracts and thus want to preserve their monopoly status.

The piece details two symptoms of the emerging recession, one major, one minor. The leadership of the US Navy, which in the past decades has focused on building a small number of large, overly complex and increasingly vulnerable warships, in 2020 outlined a plan to purchase a fleet of small warships based on ready-made European designs. Then the big contractors and their allies in the bureaucracy and Congress took over the project, resisted any innovation, and stuck to the same patterns. Last month, five years later, $3.5 billionand the project was canceled because zero ships were built.

On a more mundane and therefore in some ways more breathtaking scale, Tenses detailed The army’s plan to buy new pistols for its soldiers in 2011. It should have been simple, but officers found themselves embarking on a soul-shattering “odyssey” that included “350 pages of specifications, years of testing, and a protracted battle between rival weapons manufacturers on Capitol Hill.” The Pentagon now estimates the weapon will be delivered to troops in the field in 2027 “at the earliest.” It will take at least 16 years to develop, build and deploy a system. gun.

Meanwhile, despite hundreds of billions of dollars in the defense budget (much of it spent on large warships, fighter jets, nuclear missiles, and other “legacy” weapons), defense industries find themselves ill-equipped to produce the large numbers of weapons used in large numbers in wartime.

For example, in the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, the United States fired 30 Tomahawk cruise missiles. Every missile It cost 2 million dollars to change. Only a company called Raytheon makes them, and these days it can’t build new ones as fast as the military can fire on one target or another.

Last year, the Pentagon came close to negotiating a partnership agreement with a Japanese company so that together the two could produce many more cruise missiles. At the beginning of the Trump administration, the deal is brokenThe main reason for this was that Raytheon, which wanted to retain sole ownership, found allies in the White House and the Pentagon who wanted to preserve its “America First” monopoly.

The same resistance applies to blocking co-production of ships (South Korea has more shipyards than the United States, but lacks the political appetite to hand out shipbuilding contracts to non-American firms) and even artillery shells. The war in Ukraine shows that millions of these shells are needed to sustain a long war. European countries are cooperating to provide these munitions to Ukrainian soldiers, but the Pentagon is ignoring the lesson on long-term production demands.

The Times series exaggerates some points. Most generally, simulated war games like those informing the Pentagon’s Net Assessment study are designed less to predict the outcome of a battle than to highlight weaknesses, deficiencies and imbalances so commanders can make adjustments.

Still, the games and the study outlined in the Times package highlight many shortcomings and say the Pentagon has done little to make adjustments because the bureaucracy, the defense industry and Congress often work together to make it difficult to do so.

The Times also exaggerates smaller issues. For example, it is correctly stated that China has more warships than the United States, but Firepower of US shipsThe number and range of its missiles and aircraft, and the training of its crews and pilots, far exceed China’s. Then again the United States spherical It has missions and doesn’t have enough ships to fight a major war in multiple parts of the world at once.

More importantly, America’s warships are vulnerable. Deploying an aircraft carrier like the USS Gerald R. Forddelivers a powerful message to a tense space; It is a powerful tool of “gunboat diplomacy”. But it’s doubtful whether commanders will want to send it into an active battlefield, especially against China, which is prepared to launch swarms of accurate drones and anti-ship missiles to disable even a powerful aircraft carrier and turn on cyberweapons to thwart the high-tech sensors and guidance systems that make the carrier and its escort ships so powerful.

Many analysts have been pointing out these problems for some time. A small branch of the Department of Defense, Defense Innovation UnitIt avoids and overcomes many of the bureaucratic hurdles, especially when it comes to streamlining military supply chains and developing autonomous drones. hegseth announced many reforms It was designed, at least on paper, to apply some of DIU’s inventions to larger weapons systems. However, making an announcement is one thing, implementing it is another; and the secretary of defense doesn’t have the staff at the Pentagon, the commitment of the White House, and the resources on Capitol Hill to get a lot done.

The Times special section was highly unusual in its dedication to a single topic, its depth of analysis and its range of prescriptions. Of course, newspaper editorials rarely have much impact, especially these days when no newspaper, not even the Times, can stand on the mass media scene with the supreme authority it once did.

Still, in this time of big budgets and looming threats, this passage from the Times section is worth considering:

This is an old and familiar pattern. Despite numerous warnings, military and political leaders trained with a set of assumptions, tactics and weapons are unable to adapt to change. … This is where the United States risks finding itself. The Trump administration wants to increase defense spending to over $1 trillion by 2026. Much of this money will be wasted on talent that will magnify our weaknesses rather than sharpen our strengths.

So this isn’t just a budget story. This is a story, and potentially a crisis, about global power and how our own political-economic system, which was the source of our power in the past, limits and limits our power in the new age.