Trump Inherits a Defense Budget Time Bomb

Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams interview Chuck Spinney on the budget time bomb that has been planted in the five year defense year plan that President Obama is bequeathing to President Elect Donald Trump.

Readers interested in learning more about the interconnected problems creating the time bomb summarized in this video and their deep bureaucratic roots will find some of the author’s contemporaneous analyses of them on the Blaster website at these links:

• Defense Power Games (1991) — explains how front loading, political engineering, and the bow wave interact with each other.

• June 4 Statement to Congress - also at this link or this link (2002) — placed front loading and political engineering power games in the context of the Plans/Reality/Mismatch and the Pentagon’s auditing shambles. For current update reports on the Pentagon’s auditing shambles, see Senator Charles Grassley’s most recent speeches on the Senate Floor on 7 July 2016 and  8 December 2016.
• Defense Budget Time Bomb (1996) — A case study of the tactical fighter/attack forces in the Air Force that (1) predicted the current meltdown and its consequences that President Elect Trump is inheriting and (2) described a notional escape option that could have corrected the current force structure aging crisis in the Air Force fighters.
• JSF- One More Card in the House.pdf (2000) -- An op-ed I published in the Proceeding of the Naval Institute that summarizes the bureaucratic power games leading up to the F-35 and predicted the types of problems that are now plaguing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
• F22: ATF Memo.pdf --  Three Reasons Why the ATF Should Not Be Approved for Engineering and Manufacturing Development (July, 1991) — An internal staff study laying out three reason why DoD and Air Force should not  front-load of ATF or F-22 into the Future Years Defense Plan as the Cold War was ending. 
• Defense Death Spiral — lays out the relations between the defense power games, cost growth, and the Pentagon’s chronic modernization  and readiness and problems, and places these problems the context of the Pentagon’s Plans/Realty Mismatch and its auditing problems.  Described in more detail in the briefing slides at this link.