Chuck Spinney exposes "farce readiness":
Congressman Buck McKeon, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), is in charge of one of the most important committees in the Congress. In theory, the HASC is supposed to oversee the Pentagon via its investigatory and budgetary responsibilities. In theory, the HASC's job should be to protect both the soldiers at the pointy end of the spear and the taxpayers who are sacrificing their hard earned treasure.
In practice the Chairman and most of the committee members are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Pentagon and the defense industry — a self-interested faction in sense defined by James Madison in Federalist #10. In practice, the HASC, and its sister committees, overlook and pump the flow of taxpayer dollars to their allies and patrons in the Pentagon and the defense industry. So, while congressmen and senators wave the flag, asserting ad nauseum that supporting the troops and their combat readiness are their top priorities, the flow real money indicates this is rarely the case.
In Versailles on the Potomac, the iron law of any policy analysis aimed at uncovering real priorities is -Follow the Money. And the best way to begin any analysis of real budget priorities is to trace the flow of funds, patronage, and power around the iron triangle of the military - industrial - congressional complex, aka the MICC.
The revolving door is a (the?) key lubricant to the money flowing around the triangle. The flow sets the incentive structure for the different players:
congressmen and senators (their staff members) retire to become lobbyists and industry consultants or move to high level Pentagon jobs;
ditto for civilian and military employees of the Defense Department (and they also move to congressional staffs);
and members of the defense industry (as well as the panoply of defense oriented think tanks) move back and forth between the Pentagon and industry.
The net result of this perpetual rotation is an upward spiral of personal enrichment, the enhancement of status and power, and most importantly, an industry-friendly defense budget. This “friendliness" manifests itself in continual pressure to shovel money to the modernization accounts (R&D & Procurement) and those contractor-friendly parts of the increasingly privatized Operations and Maintenance (O&M) budgets.
In a decision-making milieu dominated by the Iron Triangle, real combat capabilities: force structure and highly trained, professional soldiers, airmen, and seamen are necessarily a lessor priority.
The pressure to rob readiness to save modernization is present subtly during periods of increasing budget growth, but it becomes blatantly grotesque when the budget comes under pressure imposed by reduced rates of growth or cutbacks, as was the case in the early to mid 1970s, the early 1990s, and today.
The legendary “hollow military” of President Jimmy Carter the late 1970s, for example, was the delayed result of the explicit decisions made during the Nixon administration to rob the the readiness accounts to protect the modernization accounts in 1973. My first report, Defense Facts of Life, produced during the late 70s, documented this result in detail using official DoD data.
Déjà Vu All Over Again
Today, the defense press is again dominated by reports describing the Pentagon’s need to cut force structure and the O&M personnel budgets.
Which brings us to the A-10.
The A-10, one of those rare low cost weapons whose effectiveness in real combat has far exceeded expectations, is rapidly becoming a poster child of the “rob readiness to protect modernization" mentality of the Iron Triangle.
The DoD, the Air Force, and now HASC Chairman Buck Mckeon are determined to send the A-10 to the boneyard, in part because they want to save money by reducing a force structure. In this case that force structure component conveniently has an O&M budget with a low amount of contract services support. This cutback would have a minimal impact on the money flowing to contractors. The name of the game is to protect the money flowing to the contractors by sacrificing the A-10 as part of a larger strategy to save Procurement and R&D programs like the troubled F-35 or the more fanciful new long range bomber, which promises to make the F-35 look like an exercise in prudence.
Of course, as my friend Winslow Wheeler explains below, the pathologies implicit in the A-10 decision go well beyond sending very effective airplanes prematurely to the boneyard to cut personnel and O&M costs: the most serious loss will be a trained cadre of airmen who are dedicated to putting their lives at risk, if necessary, to supporting the soldiers doing the heavy lifting on the ground. Retiring the A-10 is therefore a big step down a slippery slope, because this loss will only be replaced at great cost in treasure and blood in some future war or a future budget speedup (e.g., like that during the Reagan Administration)
We saw how the slippery slope to a "hollow military” evolved insensibly out of seeming painless decisions in the early 1970s, and those, like Chairman Buck McKeon and Secretary Chuck Hagel, who ignore that history are condemned to repeat it. But they won’t be asked to pay the bill.
by Winslow T. Wheeler
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