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Published Aerospace Power Journal- Winter 1999

OF WISHES, HORSES, AND HIGH-TECH WEAPONRY

Dr. Grant T. Hammond*

*Dr. Hammond is professor of international relations and director of the Center for Strategy and Technology at the Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. He was the first civilian chair of the Department of National Security Studies at the Air War College and the first holder of a rotating Chair of National Security Strategy.

COL JOHN WARDEN, USAF, Retired, has given us an insightful and at times compelling set of arguments for "The New American Security Force" (Airpower Journal, Fall 1999). It is an expansive vision and one that has much to commend it in many ways. Unfortunately, it is also impossible to accomplish in the manner he suggests. Although the criticisms he renders are valid, the solutions are not. His vision is a seductive one and hardly novel. It is a consistent theme in Western civilization. John Milton spoke eloquently of it in Paradise Lost: 

  The hope is that by keeping a technological edge, we may ensure continued superiority. Qualitative ascendancy will therefore enhance deterrence and preserve dominance. Unfortunately, what Colonel Warden wants is simply not attainable in the timescale, at the cost, or with the ease with which he imagines. Both individually and collectively, many of his criticisms are accurate and need to be addressed. Alas, the way in which Colonel Warden thinks these can be overcome is an overly simplistic and unrealistic approach to a set of very serious problems. He is right in his identification of the problems. He is wrong in his recommendations about how to go about fixing things.

Colonel Warden’s chief concern is the time it takes to develop advanced weaponry. He would have us scale back the research and development (R&D) for complex weapons by a factor of three or more, from more than a decade to three years. As proof of our ability to do this, he cites numerous recent examples and claims that we can follow the same process in other technologies and weapons systems in order to produce a new generation of weapons systems every decade—not every 20 to 30 years. If this were possible, it would be wonderful. But it is not, for a variety of reasons. Colonel Warden makes the following assertions. With the exception of the first, which is correct, all the others are flawed at best, if not outright wrong.

On this, Colonel Warden is absolutely correct. The world we confront is largely unknown and in many ways unknowable in terms of future threats to our security. There are as many threats as there are would-be miscreants or defense contractors to conjure them up. Trying to prepare for all contingencies is impossible and may not increase our security. We can and should prepare to accomplish our objectives. These are within the span of our control, and to the extent we are focused on them, we are likely to be better off than worrying about a dizzying array of threats produced by contractors with a virtually limitless supply of possible scenarios. The hard part is to prepare as best we can for the relevant probabilities and to be adaptive to the contingencies that arise. We must be prepared for the wars of necessity. We can say no to those of choice.

This would be nice, but as the system costs grow and the unit costs within them, particularly if small numbers are acquired, our ability to have multiple systems for the same tasks is likely to become sharply curtailed by cost factors alone. Indeed, given the low expenditure on defense as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), we are in a position of having to choose to develop one multipurpose system rather than develop multiple systems dedicated to the same roles and missions, as we have been able to do in the past. To illustrate what has happened, at the time we were developing the U-2 in 1965, the Department of Defense’s (DOD) share of the federal dollar amounted to 25.2 percent of net public spending and 38.8 percent of all federal outlays. In fiscal year 2000, the figures are 9.1 percent and 14.8 percent, respectively.¹ That is, the relative level of effort exerted in spending on defense was two and one-half times greater in 1965 than it now is. Unless the DOD budget expands dramatically, we have a problem.

The military programs Colonel Warden most often refers to were covert (“black”) and developed outside the normal procurement channels. Making all weapons systems black programs is simply not possible. Those that he most often refers to (the U-2, SR-71, 777, and the F-117) were not all developed in his three-year standard. The Boeing 777, a civilian transport, was six years in full-scale development (from June 1989 to April 1995), and the F-117 took five years from test design and prototype through full-scale development (November 1978 to October 1983).² The F-117 was virtually hand built using stealthy composites, and a great deal of the learning that occurred was in the production of the aircraft itself—not the design and development of it. Most systems now in use took eight to 13 years to develop³ and an additional two to five years to reach initial operational capability.

Beyond these considerations, this sort of timetable for weapons-system development is simply not possible without a major change in the international security environment in which we find ourselves and in the domestic consensus regarding defense. As Harry Truman is reported to have said upon receiving NSC[National Security Council]-68 (“United States Objectives and Programs for National Security”), “I’d have to scare hell out of the American people to do this.” Luckily, Kim Il Sung obliged by invading North Korea. Without such a major threat to US interests, we will not invest in “eight to 10 new major weapons platforms . . . and a greater number of new weapons.”

These new weapons—if they were affordable, if they could be developed in the time frame he envisions, and if they were deployed in sufficient quantity to have significant impact—would be desirable. But we won’t have them by 2008–10. The modernization “wish list” for the services has outstripped planned procurement by nearly $400 billion.⁴ And those programs are in competition with increased concern about training and readiness, contingency operations, recruitment and retention, and retirement and health care as well as pay and quality-of-life issues for the US military.

The notion of building small numbers of advanced systems is enticing but erroneous. First, the great bulk of the costs is in the R&D and production capabilities to produce the first one, regardless of the size of the buy. Second, the greater the unit costs, the smaller the number acquired. Witness the B-2, which costs $2.2 billion per copy for 21 instead of the originally forecast $437 million per copy for a buy of 133.⁵ Even worse, there is a “break-even point” for operations and maintenance (O&M) costs in terms of spare parts, technical training, and so forth, that is greater than the small numbers Colonel Warden envisions. We have 21 B-2s—not the 133 originally requested and far fewer than the 66 touted as the break-even O&M point. A smaller number of aircraft means that the O&M costs themselves escalate each year, thus adding even more to the life-cycle costs of the system and competing against other modernization for the future in terms of readiness for existing systems.

Would that it were so. This assertion cannot be proven in advance of the actual development of the “paper airplanes” to compare with actual ones now in the inventory. Virtually every new fighter has been sold on the basis of vastly increased technological capability and quality compared to existing inventory. Furthermore, contractors and senior Air Force officers have assured us that because of the advanced technology, the new system would have lower maintenance costs, resulting in a savings that would help offset the increased costs of acquiring it. If experience is a guide, such savings are illusory. In reality, succeeding systems, since they are more complex, tend to cost more, not less, to maintain than their predecessors. And procuring small numbers of them means that individual spare parts and the maintenance structure to support them would be vastly more expensive than on larger buys.

Undoubtedly, the acquisition and procurement systems are broken. A variety of presidential commissions, task forces, and review panels have been telling us as much for 30 years or more. We are, as Colonel Warden correctly points out, in need of a cultural change in how we go about designing and procuring weaponry. But the force he envisions cannot be developed without a massive change in the strategic landscape, a sea change in domestic politics, and a better way of procuring affordable weapons that are good enough, not perfect. Furthermore, the constant effort to achieve not state of the art but “state of the art of the technology after next” in the development cycle may be both unaffordable and foolish. If there is a strategic pause at the moment with no major threat, we have the option—if not the necessity—to choose a Mark II or Mark III version of a capability. We need not rush headlong to procure the latest gleam of technology to come down the pike, as we did in the throes of the cold war.

Despite my misgivings about the specific remedies envisioned by Colonel Warden, I am in sympathy with the general direction of his suggestions. We need to streamline the acquisition process. But as long as it is a political football, more sensitive to the concern for federal jobs and dollars in the districts of a “Defense Committee” of 535 members of Congress than to the national security strategy and national military strategy, streamlining will be difficult, if not impossible. But we could reform the Pentagon’s accounting systems—all 122 of them—and make audits of individual programs possible through the use of double-entry bookkeeping. We can rationalize a system in which war games and doctrine battles are stalking horses for budget share and procurement dollars. Surely we can keep better books. And we need to think more intelligently about the capabilities we require to accomplish our objectives rather than merely focus on the threats that may—or may not—come to pass. We need a New American Security Force. But we cannot afford, do not need at the moment, and ought not to pursue the one recommended by Colonel Warden. We do, however, need to pay attention to the general thrust of both his criticisms and his vision. Business as usual will no longer suffice.

Maxwell AFB, Alabama

Notes

1. Office of the Undersecretary of Defense (Comptroller) FY 2000 Budget Materials, table 7-7, “DOD’s Slice of the Dollar,” 12 March 1999; on-line, Internet, 8 September 1999, available from "http://www.dtic.mil/comptroller/%20FY2000budget/GREEN2000.pdf" .

2. See the excellent study done by Mark A. Lorell and Hugh P. Levaux, The Cutting Edge: A Half Century of Fighter Aircraft R&D, Project Air Force (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1998), particularly the data in appendix B, 170–200.

3. Ibid.

4. See Ernest Blazar, “Off the Rails,” in his column “Inside the Ring,” Washington Times, 6 July 1998, 7.

5. The current unit cost of the B-2 is more than five times the original projected cost. See Kathryn Schultz, “Escalating Costs of the B-2,” in “The B-2 ‘Spirit’ Bomber,” 1 May 1996; on-line, Internet, 8 September 1999, available from "http://www.cdi.org/issues/aviation/b296.html" .

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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