Defense Snouts Out of the Trough

There has been reason to doubt that the military should be spending the amounts it does for as long as I've been aware of public events, and of course the late President Eisenhower made it absolutely certain in his farewell address. Yesterday's statements of cutting programs, by Defense Secretary Gates, had a great deal reassuring about them.

His cuts of Pentagon programs are one of the most sane decisions we've seen in some time for military procurement.

"We will end production of the F-22 fighter," Gates announced matter-of-factly in the hushed Pentagon briefing room yesterday, dispatching Lockheed Martin's $140-million-a-pop aircraft without even a hint of regret. "For me," he added, "it was not a close call."

The soft-spoken Kansan delivered the news not from a lectern but from his preferred position, in a leather armchair set up behind a table, giving the impression he was on the set of Jim Lehrer's "NewsHour." But the understated delivery obscured the boldness of what Gates was attempting: Calmly and methodically, he posed a direct challenge to the military-industrial complex.

Boeing's Future Combat Systems fighting vehicles -- kaboom!

Lockheed's multiple-kill vehicle: killed.

Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics' DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer with Raytheon electronics? Gates sunk their battleship.

The Lockheed VH-71 presidential helicopter and Boeing's C-17 cargo plane? SecDef shot them down, too.

It was the opening shot in what is certain to be a long war. In many ways, Gates, in taking on the defense contractors and their many friends in Congress, has invited a fight with an opponent more potent than any he has faced in Iraq and Afghanistan as President Obama's -- and before that President George W. Bush's -- defense secretary.

Obama has already surprised Washington with his ambitious efforts to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy, overhaul health and energy policy, and take command of the auto industry. But when it comes to changing the way this town does business, Obama and Gates have attempted a whole new level of difficulty in challenging the combined might of Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics.

The contractors held fire yesterday -- Lockheed and Raytheon said they were "assessing" while Boeing announced it was "studying" -- and defense stocks rose, either because investors were expecting worse, or more likely, because they suspect Gates's proposal will never get through Congress. To that end, lawmakers' guns were already blazing yesterday, despite Easter recess. Just 24 minutes after Gates finished his announcement, a bipartisan group of senators including Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) fired off a letter to Obama saying Gates's proposed cuts in missile defense "could undermine our emerging missile defense capabilities to protect the United States against a growing threat."

Naturally, some congressional proponents of their area industries will fight for public funding of welfare for military industries. The fight will finally have representation in the fight for the public itself, though.

There was some anticipation of these measures from President Obama's appointments of responsible personnel for military oversight. Particularly the hearings on the nomination of Ashton Carter hailed him as a precursor of cuts to come.

If confirmed as expected, Carter would become under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. He said he would go program by program to "see if there isn't more to that iceberg" of budget overruns, schedule slips and performance shortfalls.

"We cannot change history," he added in reply to advance questions from the Armed Services Committee. "But it is important to assess whether programs that have already experienced cost growth are still out of control and whether they can still be afforded."

It's a refreshing change to have voices of reason in the administration. Quite a change has been recorded from eight years of treating the public trough as a private piggybank. With regard to military procurement, the public has been particularly ill served while no controls were exercised at all.

I really liked this morning's expression of such a dilemma by Professor Wombat, a much appreciated commenter at eschaton. Although he was talking about the medical profession at the time, his words struck me as apt when it came to the unsupervised military procurement system;
It's been two thousand years since the question was posed of who should watch the watchmen. If there's one thing that's abundantly clear, it's that a profession policing itself is a recipe for disaster, be it law, medicine, police forces, any.

Yet another example of the implications of self-reference, which I first came across with Epimenides the Cretan's pronouncement that all Cretans are liars, then with Russell's paradox and Godel, and, the longer I live and think about it, a consistent way people diverge from reality, or limit their assessment of it gratuitously, leading to error, instability and general poopy-headedness...
ProfWombat | 04.07.09 - 8:46 am | #

A sense of relief is growing from the number of instances that show public service returning to the executive branch. It bodes well, and it certainly helps the proverbial consumer confidence to see the end of poopy-headedness. Highway robbery has been so much a part of the wingnut regime just past that just ending that single crime, alone, would be a great service.

Next, can we please have the end to constantly misfiring Star Wars? Thank you.