Good question...

Back in February we talked about the possibility that the Department of Defense might get a massive infusion of taxpayer bucks under the GOP, although said Department had neither requested such largesse nor seemed to know exactly what to spend it on.

One day after our post went up here a U.S. Army major laid out the most important problem with this war-fattened budget:

"In fact, money is not the solution — it may actually be contributing to our problems. Enormous budgets and unclear strategy allow us to ignore hard choices. Since the advent of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF), America has skipped the “guns vs. butter” argument entirely. Instead of hard choices, America used debt to outsource its wars to a small cadre of competent, capable, but increasingly distant professionals. Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates once remarked that we spend more on military bands than diplomacy. Too much money has allowed the military to dominate what should be whole-of-government decision making."

Many of our bar staff here have hammered on this point - I'd give Ranger Jim the Employee of the Month award for constantly reminding us - that tactics aren't strategy and warfighting isn't policy.

It is abundantly clear that Trump hasn't a clue here; he says himself that he gets his military information mostly from television shows (largely Hogan's Heroes and F Troop, from the look of it...) so if there's going to be an actual strategy guiding all this spending it won't come from the Oval Office. And, as we discussed here a little while ago, it appears that the grown-ups like McMaster and Mattis aren't getting listened to; it's All-Bannon all the way down, whispering in Trump's orange ear like a dyspeptic-looking Grima Wormtongue.

At this point is there a chance that all this extra cash for things that blow up won't be used to keep pointlessly blowing things up? And, if so, how? What could possibly break the "Washington Rules" and end the seemingly unending search for monsters to destroy?

I don't see anything, but I'm a pessimistic old sergeant. Anyone out there see a glimmer of hope?

Possibly the Trumpiest thing yet.

His Fraudulency wants to throw money at the Pentagon by hoovering out the bank accounts at State, the EPA, and other non-kinetic federal agencies.

And when I say "throw" I mean THROW; this projected budget is almost 10% higher than the final Obama Defense budget. We had an increase that big in the early Reagan years, and I might remind you that there was this thing called the "Cold War" back then and we needed to protect ourselves from the bear in the woods, as the kidz say nowadays. The most recent big DoD hikes were back in the early Bush era, when Dubya and Dick wanted new guns to overawe the heathen Afghans and Iraqis and, again, in their last year when they needed to spend some of that money they saved by not rescuing black people in New Orleans or something.

But setting aside OTHER numbnuts Republicans...that's a big sweet slug for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex.

Setting aside the ridiculous notion that what the U.S. really needs now is a bigger armed force the really Trumpy piece of this that that the proposed increase - about 50 billion - has no ground in actual delineated military need. There's no "plan" here outside "let's throw cash at the DoD" and we all know how well that works...

Let me throw something near to my heart out as an example.

The field artillery branch of the U.S. Army currently employs two primary 155mm gun systems; the M109 "Paladin" series self-propelled howitzer and the M777 towed howitzer. The M777 is a relatively recent design, but the M109 is on the last of a series of upgrades of a system that was designed in the 1960's. While neither is an exceptional design (and by that I mean neither exceptionally good nor bad; they're both fairly middle-of-the-road FA systems) it's worth noting this statistic:

M109A7 maximum range - conventional projo 18km, RAP (rocket-assisted) projo 30km
M777 maximum range - conventional projo 24km, base-bleed projo 30km, "Excalibur" (guided/enhanced range) projo 40km
G5 (South Africa towed cannon system) maximum range - conventional projo 30km, base-bleed projo 39km, V-LAP projo 50km
G6 (SA - SP cannon) maximum range - conventional projo 30km, Base bleed 39km, V-LAP: 52.5km, M9703A1: 67km

The G5 and G6 gun systems were designed in the Seventies...but they still outrange the most recent U.S. FA systems in all categories of projectiles.

This is not to say that the Army FA is some sort of Third World shitshow. But...the mech and armored divisions have been waiting for a new SP system since the Crusader (XM2001) was cancelled in the early Oughts. So if you wanted to throw some money at the Army the notion that the U.S. might spend some money on upgrading the SP FA system to at least the ability to shoot out as far as an almost-fifty-year-old South African system seems like a not-unreasonable idea.

But...will that happen?

Who the fuck knows?

After all...this is Trump. The guy seems to make decisions based on who licks him the most like a triple-scoop of butter-brickle. IMO it's entirely likely that some conman shrewder than he is will slip in and sell him on some Ronco potato-gun contraption that works about as well as the infamous "Sergeant York" antiaircraft system...

So it's not just a question of "do we really need to throw more money at guns?" although that's really a good question. The problem with THIS throw-money-at-guns gimmick is that it's no more well-thought-out than the goofy Muslim ban. It seems designed after the way the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq usta threw money at stuff; just fly in pallets of dollars and start spreading 'em around.

After all; what could go wrong?

And, worse...to pull this cash from State? Hell, Trump's own SecDef explained the arithmetic of that little transaction to the Congresscritters thusly:

"When Mattis was a four-star Marine general in charge of U.S. Central Command, he told a congressional committee, “If you cut the State Department’s budget, then you need to buy me more bullets.”

Sigh.

More and more it seems like every time these gomers do something it seems like - assuming that they've put any thought into it at all - they've studied the issue and cudgeled their brains as hard as possible to find the answer to the question "How would I do this if I were a fucking moron?"

WASF.

Eating Something With a Sieve

Robert Farley has a new article up at World Politics Review about his thoughts on the coming Department of Defense budget circus:

"Perhaps the most important takeaway from the white paper is the official recognition that the size of the defense budget itself represents a threat to U.S. national security."

says Farley,

"In theory, this should not be such a remarkable insight; one common narrative explaining the end of the Cold War is that the United States drove the Soviet Union to economic ruin by forcing it to maintain an unsustainable military budget. As Bernard Finel suggests, the United States has now committed itself to a degree of dominance over potential rivals that may be unsustainable in the long run, and that in and of itself poses risks."

Well enough. But I don't know if he has thought this through far enough.

Specifically:

First, I think he's giving the flacks too much credit - simply saying this will happen is far from a guarantee that it WILL happen. Military overstretch is nearly universal in the decline phase of imperia; almost the first symptom of post-vitality in a large or imperial polity is an excessive amount of revenue devoted into military forces and a decreasing return from that "investment".

That is; as empires first grow they often find that war "pays for itself". Imperial troops extend the borders, bringing home slaves and tribute, incorporating rich lands and peoples into the empire. This wealth then translates into more, better-equipped forces, which are more effective against the barbarians, bringing more people and more wealth into the empire. Wash, rinse, repeat.

But over time the combination of imperial social and political arteriosclerosis, bloated elites devoted to their own interests at the expense of the common good, and the vicious effects - on both imperials and colonials - of ruling the subject populations reduces the gains and expands the costs. Subsequent rulers desperately try and find ways to reduce these costs, only to find that in armies, in in every organization, what begins as a relatively lean, cost-effective organization over time becomes overstuffed with useless dunnage that contributes little, if anything, to the actual business of warfighting.

But, second, it is difficult or even impossible to reverse this without immense outlays of political prestige and will. I cannot think of a historical example of an empire that voluntarily restructured its armed forces, in a short time, as the result of a deliberate serious analysis of its geopolitical interests. The Marian Reforms? Except they were more-or-less purely organizational. The conversion of the U.S. to a global superpower in 1945? Helped that just at the moment we had the world's largest army, navy, air force, and a nuke or three lying around.

I'm not sating it can't be done - just that it's damn deadly difficult and the successful examples are so few I can't think of any, And throw in the toxic political environment of the 201s United States? It seems beyond unlikely; it is likely to be absolutely impossible.

Overall I tend to agree wholeheartedly with his conclusion:

"Defense budget politics has increasingly become a field of narrow contestation between experts, elites and interested actors, rather than a field in which different visions of the political good engage with one another. This has resulted in a prioritization of bureaucratic interest and parochial concern, both of which are enemies of real grand strategy."

...but tend to see this not as a bug but as a feature. In my opinion throughout MOST of U.S. history our military budgets have been decided this way.

For most of U.S. history that's been fine. We didn't need much in the way of geopolitical strategy to lick the natives of North America; some smallpox and a railroad or two would work just swell. Ad-hoc assemblies of forces would do to swat the Mexicans, Spanish, and Filipinos. You can sum up our geopolitical plans during the period 1918-1940 as "have a big Navy and don't fight anyone worth shit".

WW2? I'll give you that - well done, FDR, George Marshall. and Congresscritters all.

The Cold War was sort of a no-brainer, too. The Soviets were big so we had to be big, and we were already big. They had a blue-water navy and so did we. They had ICBMs and intercontinental bombers and so did we, or we developed them. It wasn't as big a no-brainer as giving smallpox-blankets to the Sioux, but, still...

So we're down to this particular time in history; post-Cold-War, 1991-2012.

And here's where our historical traditions; lack-of-planning, empire-in-a-fit-of-absence-of-mind, foreign-policy-as-an-outgrowth-of-domestic-policy are biting us on the ass. We are suddenly faced with a non-binary choice and an undefined future, a cloud of potential problems rather than a simple "threat". Teasing sense out of the chaotic multipolar world of the 21st Century and translating that sense into some sort of intelligent military policy is the sort of things that asks for a Talleyrand, or a George Marshall.

And instead we're awash with Rick Santorums.

So it occurs to me is that if reducing the U.S. defense budget growth in a sensible, strategically-planned, geopolitically coherent way relies on the sorts of gentlefolk of the sort much found in the U.S. Congress or in charge of the various executive agencies today making some sort of rational choices based on national interests and the cold calculation of economic and political realities we would be better off hoping for a pink magical pony to appear in a cloud of pixie dust, soar overhead and crap out lemon-verbena-scented golden nuggets of budgetary savings.

Whisper of the Axe?

SecDef Gates announced today that he is going to take an axe to his own budget.

Not that the Defense budget is going to be CUT, exactly. Next year's budget request (FY13), estimated at about $530 billion, is still (adjusted for inflation) the largest since 1945. It will still be more than the combined military expenditures of every single nation on Earth. It will still - regardless of the global strategic situation or the geopolitical aims and interests of the United States - be divided within a percentage point of 33% into equal thirds for each of the three major services.

But Gates' proposal reduces the DoD growth to 3% this year and to inflation level (about 1-2%) for FY14 and FY15. He proposes to reduce the flag officer billets by roughly 100, and senior DoD civilian positions by as many as 200.

Included on the chopping block are the Marine's EFV, the Army's FCS (pretty much already dead at this point, but this is the official death certificate), and delays for the USAF's F-35 JSF. Several other programs are also scheduled to be taken out behind the Pentagon and given two in the back of the head.

What I will be intrigued to watch now is the reaction from Congress.

Not so much the Republicans, the (insert hysterical laughter here) "Daddy Party", the "Party of Fiscal Responsibility". Smaller government interests the GOP only if the government that is getting smaller gives money to brown people instead of kills them. No, the GOP will go batshit, because...well, because the GOP is batshit. Where military spending is concerned they are like a fourteen-year-old huffing glue and playing "Gears of War" nonstop for two days; they have not a lick of sense in them. Whatever useless knick-knack some overage-in-grade bull colonel says he wants they will want to give him, regardless of whatever dry-humping they have doing to their fiscal responsibility girlfriend in the meantime. We all know that regardless of what they say, they just want the feeling of that sweet, sweet, drone controller in their hands, a Paki Talib in their sights, and their heads ringing with the heady combination of Testor's and 4-Loko.

No, it's the Democrats I'll be watching. Here's their opportunity to make a principled stand, to act like statesmen instead of your tweaker uncle who shows up near the end of the month to mooch a couple of twenties and a half-rack of Natty Light off you to hold him over until the eagle shits. There will be quite a few of these guys, mostly in the House (which is the New Home of Batshit Crazy anyway), whose districts are going to take an economic hiding when they lose some of these defense contracts.

Supposedly Dwight Eisenhower chose to avoid the term "military-industrial-congressional complex" during his famous 1961 address to make nicety with the boys on Capitol Hill. It's too bad; in my experience among the worst offenders in the U.S. in terms of making poor choices about spending tax money on war toys are the ones lolling about the Congress, and that comes from someone who had the M792 GAMA Goat on his DA 348.

I'd like to get my hands on the sonofabitch who got that piece of used food through the acquisitions process...

So it will be interesting to see what happens now. Will this signal some real changes in the way the Pentagon does business? Or is this just another serving of cherry jello at the Five-Sided Funny Farm?

Brown Water Navy

The idea for this post came up as I was discussing the Ignatius article cited in the preceding post with seydlitz. The exchange there went something like this:

seydlitz: (quoting Ignatius) "I come back to Shen, the Chinese analyst. He says that he's grateful that the United States is willing to spend so many billions of dollars to protect the sea lanes on which China depends for its global commerce. But instead of competing to build ships and tanks, he says, China will focus on the weapons that can cripple them. Somehow, we need to stop being the suckers when it comes to defense."

Seydlitz then continues, asking:

"Obviously lots of military spending is the answer as well as "protecting the sea lanes" from . . . from whom exactly? Do you get the feeling that the Chinese are playing us like we played the Sovs back in the 1980s? Of course the Sovs were - in spite of being far too focused on their deteriorating, but still highly vaunted military power - smart enough to see through a lot of it, but were in such an economic mess as to be unable to use this realization to any advantage . . . The notion of American Exceptionalism will be our undoing."

To which I replied,

"The U.S. is currently a global maritime power. While at times I think our commitment to global blue water hegemony is antiquated - our merchant fleet is, what, four RORO ships and an old surplus fleet oiler? - its a mission we've chosen to take on. We have also chosen to act as a power-projecting imperial nation (in the sense that we engage in conflicts not directly related to defending our own territory) and that requires a blue-water navy. As always, the "what" determines the "how", and blue-water navies include large surface vessels; "conventional fleets and bases around the world". You can argue whether we have too many fleet carrier decks, but not that a power-projecting, global blue water hegemony naval power doesn't need conventional fleets and bases.

China, OTOH, is today what it has always been; an Asian continental power. Its maritime power projection is limited to its immediate "near abroad", places like the Spratley Islands in the South China Sea. It doesn't need or want large conventional naval forces for that. Instead, it needs just what Chen says it needs; the ability to disable or deter a global navy from encroaching on those littoral areas.

Ignatius makes this sound like some nefarious yellow Red plot, when it's a simple A and not-A situation. The U.S. has certain maritime strategic needs and those needs dictate a certain naval force structure. China has very different needs, and can accomplish those with a very different force structure.

I don't think the Chinese are playing us. They're stating the simple reality of naval strategy; we don't care about the fucking Molucca Strait or the Somali pirates. We want the oil in the South China Sea, and all we need to defend that is enough patrol boats and submarines to sink one of your fleet carriers to make it unprofitable enough to deter you from challenging us."

But as I was writing that I was thinking over this article over at Danger Room, discussing the USN's purchase of the so-called "Littoral Combat Ship" or LCS.In the post David Axe discusses the many commentators, both inside and outside the Navy, who have problems with this vessel. It is built to commercial rather than naval standards, meaning that it is much less survivable when damaged. It has a exceptionally high top-rated speed; 50 knots, but at a huge cost in fuel. It is relatively underarmed, mounting a single 57mm cannon and carrying most of its offensive power in its deployable subunits such as aerial, sea-surface, and submarine drones. Its crew is listed at around 40-50, which many critics are saying is too small to fight the ship and perform damage-control duties, much less repel boarders(!).

Axe notes that at only about $500 million the LCS is a relatively low-cost platform, and observes that

"...(t)he Navy already has more than enough high-end, military-grade warships for any potential future showdown with, say, China. This force includes approximately 90 cruisers, destroyers and soon-to-debut stealth battleships. It’s the most powerful surface fleet in the history of the world, by far, and one that’s massive overkill in anything short of World War III. But, after retiring many of its minesweepers, patrol boats and frigates, what the Navy doesn’t have is enough low-end warships for all the mundane work of a busy, globally-deployed military. The LCS can help correct that imbalance."

So there's the pros and the cons.

My question would be: what is the mission we need to perform that needs this vessel?

I agree that if we're going to continue to be a global maritime power - and while there are legitimate arguments that the U.S. does not really need to patrol the South China Sea, or the Indian Ocean, and risk potential engagements with the regional powers there the bicoastal location of the U.S. makes it perforce a maritime power of some sort - then it needs the capability to work, and, if needed, fight close inshore. Navies have fought over the littoral since Agrippa's day and are unlikely to stop now.

Historically the blue-water navies, including ours, have operated to within miles of the beach. Old-school hulls, from destroyers and frigates up to capital ships, have operated within sight of land. So the creation of a new class of warship for that purpose - especially one that cannot be turned to other blue-water missions - seems superfluous.

It can sweep mines - but not as well as a minesweeper. It can hunt submarines - but not as well as an ASW platform. This vessel seems like an odd Swiss-Army-ship replacement for a helicopter carrier and a menage of small patrol craft. It cannot really operate with the fleet but is not as adaptable as the helicopter-and-PBR combination for inshore operations.The other realm of naval warfare has taken place inshore of the strand line. This "brown water" naval force has usually been composed of a swarm of very light vessels backed by a handful of larger hulls. The USN has a great tradition of this sort of riverine warfare, beginning with the monitors and gunboats of the Civil War through the gunboats and monitors of the 20th Century Asiatic Squadron and the PBRs and Swift boats of the Vietnam "Brown Water Navy"

But the LCS is much too heavy for this sort of instream work. Too big to get right into the mouths of rivers chasing pirate skiffs, but too small, light and frail to take on a Chinese frigate or a swarm of Iranian patrol boats by itself. And if it's going to be backed up by carrier aircraft...what can it do that the carrier's aircraft combined with its escorts cannot? It seems to lack (at least, the articles I've found suggest that it lacks) the capability to act as a tender for a small flotilla of modern PCF/PBR patrol craft. It is fast...but why? Its own helicopters are faster, and accompanied by a cloud of Zodiacs or small speedboats would seem to do the advertised job better without the need for the voracious fuel-devouring speed.In a sense, this thing is a sort of large Coast Guard cutter. But if then...why not just make it a Coast Guard cutter and give its drug interdiction and border patrol mission to the Coasties?

I keep coming back to the question; what is this vessel for that is HAS to be this vessel and none other? What can this platform do that existing vessels can't, and - more importantly - is that thing, or those things, really important to the national defense of the United States?

I don't have the answers.

But I think that now that we're on the verge of ordering 20-some of these vessels, it might be a good time for we the People to start asking some more questions. Because even at half a billion a hull, ten billion ain't no pocket change.

(One important part of the thinking that produced this post is Rob Farley's post over at LG&M, in which he says "I believe that, right now, progressives have evacuated the field on questions of military doctrine and technology (with a couple of important exceptions, as noted below), leaving the conversation to conservatives and “centrists”. I think that we are approaching a political reality in which real cuts to defense spending will become possible, and that staking out genuinely progressive positions on issues of military doctrine and technology actually have a chance of affecting the composition of US military forces." I agree, and so got to thinking about the conjunction between the Ignatius article and the non-debate-debate about the LCS. So, tip o' the hat to LG&M)

Listen to Mama Odie

My little girl has a passionate affair with the Disney cartoon "The Princess and the Frog."

And one of the characters she likes best is the oddball voodoo queen, Mama Odie. Now little Miss is four, so what she likes about the character is her oddities and the way she whacks things with her pet snake.

They're easily amused at four.

But Mama Odie's big musical number (this IS a Disney cartoon, after all; we're still stuck in the 1957 time-warp) is all about the title characters' having to figure out not what they want but what they need.

Now Jason over at Armchair Generalist has a nice post up emphasizing the same thing, only to our own Frog Prince, SecDef Gates. Jason says:

"There are two ways to build a national military strategy. You can start with an open-ended set of defense goals without considering resource caps, list everything you want to do, and then count up the cost of all the missions and programs, submit it to the White House OMB and send it to Congress, see what you get. Then when you get the bill, start cutting from the bottom of the list for what you didn't get funds, and then go to Congress and ask for more money.
Or you can acknowledge that you have a resource cap before developing that strategy, and you deliberately set one's defense goals for modernization, operations, and personnel costs to fit the proposed budget, submit that to the White House OMB and tell Congress that you're going to do less than what you used to do. Then go to Congress when there's an unplanned need for funds based on an emergency situation. Basically, you develop a military posture that you can afford, one that is in scale to domestic priorities, but that's difficult to do when you have a strategy that's based on global international involvement."

That's a choice even a four-year-old can figure out. There's things you want. And there's things you can afford. And if you chase the former past the boundaries of the latter you will end up a very, very sorry child indeed.

However Jason notes that there is one teensy, weensy little problem with a sensible, sane, feasable, fiscally reasonably national security budget: "Of course, the Republicans won't allow this."

Which is why almost all of the GOP - and a large portion of the people across the aisle, I should add - would lose on "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader".

Because they're not even smarter than a four-year-old.

WASF