Buy Before You Fly ... or ... How to Suck Money During the Politics of Austerity

The joint-service F-35 strike fighter is the Pentagon's largest program. In fact, it is the most expensive procurement program in the Pentagon's history.  It is also an unfolding disaster that is well documented, but of almost unimaginable proportions.  And yet, the F-35 is impervious to budget cutbacks in sequesterland.  Not surprisingly, among the cognoscenti of gold-plated boondoggles, the F-35 is not only a source of cynical humor, it is rapidly  becoming the mother of all case studies of the pathologies that fuel the Pentagon's budget crisis.  

Perhaps the most egregious of these pathologies is the practice of concurrent engineering and production, a practice from which all bad things flow.  

Concurrency refers to the practice of placing a complex hi-tech weapon system into production, before it is completely designed.   Known in the Pentagon as "buy before you fly." It is the opposite of commonsens engineering, yet concurrency has been business as usual in the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex for many years,  the problem-plagued F-111 and C-5  in the 60s, and more recently the V-22 tilt rotor and the F-22 fighter being cases in point.  

Why do we repeat a madness that both robs the taxpayer and puts defective weapons in the hands of soldiers year after year?  

Concurrency has one paramount saving grace: Although it increases the risks to the taxpayer and soldiers, it reduces the risk the faction that benefits from the program's continued life. By sucking a compliant Congress into the scam, the bureaucratic gamesters in the Pentagon and in the defense industry have figured out a strategy for unleashing the power of faction, in effect turning Madison's theory of using checks and balances to curb the power of faction (see Federalist 10) on its head. 

That is because the decision to enter concurrent engineering and manufacturing development authorizes contractors and subcontractors to build production facilities and hire workers in locations strategically placed in congressional districts distributed all over the country.  It also enables contractors to establish stable supply networks, thus augmenting the direct effect of plant placement.  In effect, the concurrency decision authorizes the construction of  a political safety net for a program by spreading dollars, jobs, and profits -- and political influence -- all over the country, or in the F-35's case, with its international co-production agreements, all over the world. 

This practice, which is ubiquitous in weapons development is known in the Pentagon as political engineering, and it has the effect of placing unstoppable constituent pressures on politicians to keep a program going even when it fails to meet its design specs.  The goal of political engineers is simple: lock open the money hose, and they have succeeded big time in the case of the F-35. 

To wit: the F-35, as my good friend Lee Gaillard  describes in excruciating detail in the important essay attached below, is a monstrously expensive program that is totally screwed up.  Performance shortfalls are causing specs to be adjusted downward -- a practice known in the trade as managing to a rubber baseline.  Costs are skyrocketing upward, out of control. The program is being slowed down and stretched out.  Yet such is the power of the F-35 faction that the money just keeps spewing out of the Pentagon into the coffers of the contractors as if nothing were amiss.  

To date, this money flow has been impervious to cutbacks, even in the era of the dreaded budget sequester -- a sequester, I might add, that is forcing the military services to lay up ships, to lay off civil service employees, to cut back on depot maintenance for tanks, ships, and airplanes, to cut back training tempos, and a whole host of other reductions in the activities that keep the military running and healthy. 

In effect, the political imperatives of protecting the voracious financial appetite of the F-35 faction, are causing the decision making system to trade away the welfare of the troops at the pointy end of the spear while hosing the taxpayer.  

Such is the nature of austerity in Versailles on the Potomac.  Now I urge you read Lee's excellent commentary.

Chuck Spinney

MARCH 04, 2013

‘Concurrent Production’ Exacerbates Multiple Problems

When Money is No Object: the Strange Saga of the F-35

by LEE GAILLARD, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/04/when-money-is-no-object-the-strange-saga-of-the-f-35/

On 14 January, very shortly after the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) released its 2012 annual report on progress in various Pentagon programs (including a 16-page section on the F-35), Turkey announced a one-year delay in the purchase of its first two Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. Why? ”High cost yield” and flight and combat capabilities that “are not at the desired level yet”. In short, the F-35 doesn’t work and it’s too expensive. (See GlobalFlight.)

That’s just the tip of the iceberg for what is the most expensive military procurement program in history. While some will argue that the key word in the Turkish statement is “yet”, one must ask whether Turkey or the United States and all other partner F-35 nations will ever get what they were initially promised.

Several sources (Aviation Week & Space Technology, FlightGlobal, et al.) have provided briefer summaries of the DOT&E’s F-35 annual report. But few examine the implications of what the DoD has published, or ask questions that should have been asked years ago.

*  *  *

For its competition against Boeing’s X-32, Lockheed Martin built two X-35 prototypes, the first of which flew on 24 October 2000; the first Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP) version flew about six years later, on 15 December 2006. Now, over 12 years since that first flight, roughly 65 F-35 airframes have been delivered—43 of them produced during 2011 and 2012; the 100^th aircraft is now on the assembly line.

Not one is combat capable. Even in training flights they face restrictions.

We are dealing with an aircraft that has been produced and tested in fits and starts, hobbled by a massively expensive and ineffective program of what is euphemistically called “concurrent production” where you build, fly, test, repair, redesign, retrofit, re-test—all at the same time, a process patented by R. Goldberg; money is no object.

Part of the problem is, of course, that Lockheed Martin presented us with two versions of what Detroit would call a ‘concept car’: a one-off only superficially representative design smaller and lighter than the actual fighter of which it was supposed to be a working prototype. The X-35A flew only 27 test flights in the one-month period before its test regimen ended on November 22; the X-35B (converted from the –A) flew 48.9 hours of tests in 66 flights during the roughly six weeks from June 23 to August 6, 2001. And the –C variant’s test regime lasted less than a month—from February 12 to March 10, 2001: 73 test flights totaling 58 hours (including 250 carrier-type landings on the runway at Patuxent River; no mention of how successful the arresting hook turned out to be). For the most part, then, test sequences of roughly one month with flights averaging less than an hour each.

Under those conditions, what kind of ‘wring-out’ testing could these two aircraft do that would reveal future problems with transonic buffet, wing roll off, and the other significant issues that appeared from the start during testing of LRIP aircraft? Thus, when the Pentagon signed on the dotted line for the first lot of LRIP F-35s, it was buying an untested, larger, heavier paper design that hugely increased risks in any ‘concurrent production’ program. We are now facing the consequences.  

For all F-35 versions, according to the DOT&E report, the pilot’s helmet-mounted display system doesn’t work; the F-35C is not yet carrier-qualified because the tail hook didn’t work, had to be redesigned, and only now is being re-tested; the ejection seat in all models would put pilots at serious risk in any non-level flight mode above 500 knots (i.e., most dogfight scenarios); since flight control software is itself still under development, the computerized flight control system lacks crucial intended capabilities; key structural components have cracked and require redesign. The list goes on. Yet Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth plant keeps churning out F-35s in all their defective glory. And those aircraft already produced now need retrofits of software and flight critical hardware.

Let’s take a closer look.

Structural Problems

In the recently released DOT&E report on 2012 F-35 testing and development, we observe that:

* High-speed high-altitude flight results in delamination and heat damage to the horizontal stabilizers and their stealth coatings (pages 30, 32, and 33 in the DOT&E report; all further numbers in parentheses refer to this report);

* A cracked wing carry-through bulkhead (36) halted durability testing for over a year until it could be analyzed and repaired;

* Weakness in the auxiliary air inlet doors on the -B version led to redesign and retesting and time lost (32);

* A crack was found in a forward rib of the F-35A’s right wing root—in addition to the similar crack reported on in the FY11 DOT&E Annual Report (36);

* A crack was found in the right engine thrust mount shear web (37);

* Multiple cracks appeared in the lower fuselage bulkhead flange (37), effectively halting F-35B testing;

* All this in addition to earlier cracks discovered in the –B’s right side fuselage support frame as well as under a wing where a pylon and its weapon get attached (37)—and yet another in an internal support structure.

All may require redesigning of parts and subsequent added weight (since strengthening weak parts often involves adding mass to the component as part of the redesign) when for two of the F-35 versions there is less than a one-percent weight gain margin left for the entire remaining development process, and only a one percent margin available to the F-35C. “Managing weight growth with such small margins will continue to be a significant program challenge” (32); that’s an understatement. Then there’s the issue of retrofit to aircraft already delivered and others on the production line. (There are, of course, other structural issues not listed here—such as the drive shaft for the lift fan (31), now undergoing its second redesign, plus damaged door attachments (31), etc., etc.) Trenchant DOT&E observation: “Results of findings from structural testing highlight the risks and costs of concurrent production with development” (37).

Some obvious questions:

* Why yet another ‘spiral development/concurrent production’ program when the same kinds of major problems and expenses had appeared years earlier with the V-22 Osprey during whose development 30 Marines were killed? (Not to mention our similar ‘concurrent development’ fiasco involving the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS): as Rear Adm. Tom Rowden wrote recently in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, “In the interest of quick delivery to the fleet, ship design began before requirements were finalized, and building started before designs were stable.” No wonder the  Navy has conceded that “LCS vessels are only rated for Combat 1+ levels—lower than a tanker” [as quoted by Mike Fabey in Aviation Week’s  January 28, 2013 Defense Technology Edition]. Pathetic. Reminiscent of the current barely Block 1 training capabilities of the F-35?

* What was missing from wind tunnel tests and 3D computer modeling studies of flow, weight, and stress that permitted the cracking found in that wing carry-through bulkhead and other basic structural weaknesses to get through?

* Why weren’t two representative pre-production aircraft put through the wringer with several months of test flights to find these areas of stress and their causes before completion of final design and authorization of Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP)?

Performance Shortfall

Performance—where the chickens come home to roost. The intended performance envelope for the F-35 is, roughly speaking: altitude capability of 50,000 feet; 700 kts./Mach 1.6 airspeed; maximum g rating of 9.0 (-A), 7.0 (-B), 7.5 (-C) ;  turn performance of 5.3 sustained g’s (-A), 5.0 sustained g’s (-B), and 5.1 sustained g’s (-C); acceleration from Mach O.8 to Mach 1.2 intended to be within 65 seconds (See Aviation Week.); angle of attack (AoA) capability to 50 degrees.

At the moment, however, this all seems wishful thinking. Undeveloped software, combined with disappointing results in real-world flight tests (“results of air vehicle performance and flying qualities evaluations” (30) ) have triggered flight restrictions and rolled back overly optimistic Key Performance Parameters (KPPs). For these and a variety of conditions that should not be occurring, flights are limited to top speeds of 550 (not 700) kts. (38) and altitudes of 39,000 feet (38) rather than 50,000 feet; AoA to be no greater than 18 degrees (vs. 50 degrees)…as well as the imposition of other “aircraft operating limitations that are not suitable for combat” (38). KPPs for sustained g’s in a turn have been weakened—by 20 percent for the –A (5.3 down to 4.6)(30), by 10 percent for the –B (5.0 down to 4.5) (32), and by 2 percent for the –C (5.1 down to 5.0) (33). Transonic acceleration from Mach 0.8 to M. 1.2 suffers significantly: with the –A version, it takes 8 seconds longer; 16 seconds longer with the –B; and a worrisome 43 seconds longer with the –C…an increase of about two thirds. Although the F-35 is essentially a strike aircraft, acceleration capability could be critical in combat.

Transonic roll-off (where one wing loses lift sooner than the other when a shock wave forms at the top of the wing as the airflow reaches the local speed of sound) and buffet (or shaking of the entire aircraft) as more surfaces form shock waves and boundary layer flow becomes turbulent—both were more serious than expected in the –B and –C versions, especially with the latter, whose wingspan is greater than that of the other variants: another possible problem in a combat situation.

Some fighter pilots offered their comments on FlightGlobal: ” ‘What an embarrassment, and there will be obvious tactical implications,’ another highly experienced fighter pilot says. ‘[It's] certainly not anywhere near the performance of most fourth and fifth-generation aircraft.

‘At higher altitudes, the reduced performance will directly impact survivability against advanced Russian-designed “double-digit” surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems such as the Almaz-Antey S-300PMU2 (also called the SA-20 Gargoyle by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), the pilot says. At lower altitudes, where fighters might operate in the close air support or forward air control role, the reduced airframe performance will place pilots at increased risk against shorter-range SAMs and anti-aircraft artillery” ( See GlobalFlight).

A few questions:

Why didn’t earlier wind tunnel tests and computational fluid dynamic modeling predict problems involved in maintaining intended sustained g’s in a turn?

Why was not poor F-35 transonic acceleration also predicted—especially for the F-35C, whose eight feet greater wingspan contributes to the significantly larger Mach Cone (the zone of disturbed air behind the shock wave system generated by an aircraft at supersonic speed) that must be dragged during the transonic regime?

Why was there not greater fuselage application of area rule (that pinched waist so visible on the ubiquitous T-38 supersonic trainer), that brilliant 1950s design breakthrough by aerodynamicist Richard Whitcomb specifically to minimize transonic drag?

For the –B model, the lift fan may have prevented such a waist pinch. But why have this tail wag the dog, mandating that commonality be based on the least aerodynamic of the three variants when fuselage area rule could well have been applied to the –A and –C versions, establishing a common baseline design of improved transonic efficiency and performance across the 2243 aircraft intended (in current projections) for the Air Force and the Navy—plus all international customers not intending to order the specialized STOVL version that will be produced in the smallest numbers? Pinched-waist commonality would seem to make sense for the vast portion of the fleet numbering more than four times the 540 –B variants tentatively listed for the Marine Corps and the Royal Navy. As it is, given unique differences in wingspan and arresting gear requirements and STOVL mechanical provisions, each version already differs from the other two versions. Commonality? But applying area rule to 75 per cent of F-35s produced would have added commonality where it is most needed, cutting transonic acceleration time while improving combat efficiency, range, and speed.

Weapons and Guidance Glitches

Most weapons tested for compatibility and safe release have worked so far, but under 1-g conditions in level flight. Have possible wind tunnel-based concerns about post-release unstable airflow around wing and fuselage attachment locations prevented more combat-realistic testing under higher g’s and in banking or diving modes?

Then there’s the high-tech computer-linked helmet-mounted display system that will control these weapons (already in use with other aircraft and in other air forces)—classified as “deficient”. Doesn’t work. Why? “Expected capabilities that were not delivered” (35) include latency problems with the distributed aperture system (DAS) in the helmet-mounted video display. Latency—some call it ‘transport time’—is the time between aircraft sensors’ signal acquisition and its transmission and projection in readable format on the pilot’s helmet video display. Currently at .133 seconds, that time delay of over an eighth of a second then has to be added to the pilot’s additional physical response time of about .15 seconds if he or she is to react to the data displayed and launch a weapon. In dogfights with closing speeds of over 1000 knots, this cumulative delay of more than a quarter of a second can be potentially fatal, and the latency-derived .133 second margin of error in initial aim point stands as an unacceptable contributor to this dangerous combat deficiency. Then add in deficient “night vision acuity,” excessive jitter that degrades data and images, inconsistent bore sight alignment, distracting “green glow” seepage from other avionics, imagery and data unable to be recorded (35). So—those high-tech air-to-air missiles and guided bombs cannot even be launched.

And the 25mm four-barrel rotating cannon with its 180 shells? Intended only for the Air Force F-35A version; -B and -C versions have no cannon, but will require external gun pods mounted by ground crews. Why did F-35 designers intentionally ignore the F-4 dogfighting débacle in Vietnam? The F-4—with no internal cannon and radar-guided Sparrow missiles that did not work at short range—could not shoot down the MiG-17s and MiG-21s thrown against them. Gun pods then provided a poor interim solution before the F-4E was redesigned to carry an internal 20mm cannon.

Now we have the F-35—“F” for its “Fighter” role, although it seems primarily an expensive attempt to replace early model F/A-18s and the Marines’ subsonic AV-8B Harrier II STOVL aircraft in their ground attack roles. (Ironically, what Hussein’s tank crews feared most was the A-10 Warthog with its GAU-8/A Avenger seven-barrel 30mm cannon, which tore them to bits from above, where their armor was thinnest.)

Why, then, in the DOT&E report are there no results listed from airborne firing tests of the F-35A’s cannon? If there have not yet been such tests, has a qualifying 25mm shell even been chosen? (We remember what inappropriate propellant selection did to M-16 rifle performance in Vietnam…) Such testing early on will be crucial in determining the effect of recoil shock on the aircraft’s structure and engine operation. Not to mention effects of the muzzle blast and combustion gasses on adjacent stealth coatings given that heat from air friction and radiational heating from the afterburner seemed to do such a job on the skin and coatings of the horizontal stabilizers.

No discussion. So—cannon not tested and other external and internally carried weapons for all practical purposes unlaunchable because of “deficient” sighting system available to pilots, thus rendering all F-35s produced so far as little more than expensive aerial targets for their adversaries.

Vulnerability Increased, Combat Survivability Jeopardized

* In the live fire test and evaluation, “None of the F-35 variants met the operational requirement for the HEI threat” posed by fragments and damage from a 30mm high explosive incendiary (HEI) shell (41). The Mirage 2000, MiG-29, and the Su-27 and its derivatives (these in service with a number of countries)—and the T-50/PAK-FA shaped for stealth and now in development—all carry 30mm cannon and could be considered potential adversaries for the F-35.
* But, given the F-35’s basic design, it’s not just 30mm shells that pose a threat: any 20mm, 7.62mm, 5.56mm round from the ground or fragments from the smallest of shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles penetrating the F-35’s skin could trigger catastrophic loss of aircraft. The –A and –C variants have massive volumes of fuel surrounding the engine inlets, and the 270-volt electrical system provides ample charge for a fatal spark in the air/fuel mixture. Since the fuel is also being used as a heat sink to cool avionics and other systems (and has considerable trouble doing so on hot summer days), it is already at an elevated temperature. Furthermore, this pre-heated and volatile fuel is being used as the operating liquid in the –B’s “fueldraulic system” that swivels the extremely hot engine exhaust nozzle during STOVL mode. (Eaton supplies the VDRP fueldraulic boost pump and the 4000 psi hydraulic power generation system.) What happens when a stray rifle bullet nicks a fueldraulic line and raw fuel sprays at 4000 psi into the broiling engine bay next to the 1500-1700 degree exhaust nozzle?
* All F-35 models rely on a highly computerized fly-by-wire flight control system, with primary avionics bays nested in the lower forward fuselage—where they are most susceptible to ground fire. With even one hit to that flight control computer, the pilot immediately loses control of the aircraft and must eject.

*And that poses a further problem: the Air Force found the early LRIP pilot escape system to be a “serious risk” since “interactions between the pilot, the ejection seat, and the canopy during the ejection sequence …are not well understood” (38). So—don’t get into a dogfight with MiG-29s or Mirage 2000s or Su-27s or PAK-FAs or any other fighter armed with 30mm cannon, and don’t bail out if you survive their cannon fire?  (We are reminded of equivalent survivability issues with the MV-22 Osprey, which cannot autotrotate to a safe landing if both engines fail, nor has it ever been tested in a power-out dead-stick landing: its glide ratio is abysmal, its fuselage is brittle (composites), and it has no crew ejection seats; yet it’s been in full production for the Marines and the Air Force for several years.)

F-35B: STOVL Missions Raise Risks

That the F-35B’s lift fan system remains untested against live fire while in operation (when its rotating blades would be most failure prone) is probably irrelevant since AV-8B Harrier II-type vertical landings on unprepared surfaces just behind front lines will be problematic at best and even downright dangerous for the F-35B. Despite best USMC intentions regarding close air support and the F-35B’s specialized STOVL capabilities, discussions had already begun three years ago on ways to “limit heat damage to carrier decks and other surfaces,” very possibly leading to “severe F-35 operating restrictions and or costly facility upgrades, repairs or both” (http://www.dodbuzz.com/2010/07/19/jsf-heat-woes-being-fixed-trautman/). Indeed, Bill Sweetman (in his Ares blog for Aviation Week) quotes from a Navy report issued in January of 2010 which “outlines what base-construction engineers need to do to ensure that the F-35B’s exhaust does not turn the surface it lands on into an area-denial weapon. And it’s not trivial. Vertical-landing ‘pads will be exposed to 1700 deg. F and high velocity (Mach 1) exhaust,’ the report says. The exhaust will melt asphalt and ‘is likely to spall the surface of standard airfield concrete pavements on the first VL.’ (The report leaves to the imagination what jagged chunks of spalled concrete will do in a supersonic blast field.)”  Heat-resistant reinforced concrete, special sealants…the list goes on. And what about that unprepared field, where debris thrown up and sucked into the intakes as the F-35B touches down causes incapacitating foreign object damage (FOD) to the aircraft’s engine? And what would be long-term effects on carrier decks? Not a pleasant scenario. Discussion of these problems—and their solutions—do not appear in the 2012 DOT&E report.

F-35C: Carrier Capabilities in Jeopardy

Carrier capability is currently nonexistent: the F-35C is therefore unable to perform carrier-based missions for which it was designed.

* Arresting hook: not operational—could not catch the cable and had to be entirely redesigned. A basic design issue is that the distance between the F-35C’s main landing gear (MLG) and the tail hook is too short, providing insufficient time after passage of the main wheels over the wire for it to bounce up and be snagged by the hook. The new hook, with a sharper point, is now being tested on an arresting cable-equipped runway simulating a carrier deck. Unfortunately, these tests have been less than fully successful. In addition, the situation has now morphed into a systems engineering issue in that a recent study shows “higher than predicted loads” (39) being passed from the hook to the airframe. Will further cracking soon occur in key support frames to which the hook system is attached, requiring additional redesign of basic structure and adding yet more weight?

* Significant carrier landing approach problems: when “30 degrees of flaps are required to meet the KPP for maximum approach speed of 145 knots at required carrier landing weight” (33), poor handling qualities result; a 15-degree flap setting improves handling (33) but raises approach speed above the KPP limit. (And higher touch-down speed will further degrade arresting cable bounce time needed for the arresting hook even as it further increases stress on the aircraft’s tail hook mounting points.)

* The need for 43 additional seconds to accelerate from Mach .8 to Mach 1.2 (33), along with more severe transonic buffeting and wing roll off than in the other two variants, suggests that the –C has become essentially a subsonic aircraft in both air-intercept and ground-attack modes.

* Tactical data transfer: doesn’t work—pilot cannot transfer video data or crucial recorded mission data to the carrier’s intelligence system, and the carrier cannot receive Link 16 datalink imagery transmissions (39).

* Maintenance Repair & Overhaul (MRO) datalink: inoperable—“design of the JSF Prognostic Health Maintenance downlink is incomplete” (39)—as are so many other software-reliant systems. (How do you deliver an aircraft—or more than 65 of them—when basic parts or systems have not yet even been designed?!) Result? An efficient pre-landing prognostic maintenance transmission becomes a lengthy and inefficient post-mission diagnostic analysis. And, as in so many other time-consuming cases with the F-35, once design is complete, more time will have to be wasted in regression testing of the revised system for all versions of this aircraft (see below for further examples).

In short, it would seem that the Navy has a 5^th-generation ‘supersonic’ carrier-based strike fighter that struggles in the transonic regime, has significant speed or handling problems during landing approach, is currently equipped with a tail hook that does not work, and—once on board—cannot download crucial mission data or essential maintenance requirements.

* Mission Availability, Reliability, and Maintenance With this Prognostic Health Maintenance datalink inoperable, the degrading of efficient MRO operations has an obvious impact on subsequent aircraft reliability. Meanwhile, concurrent development has forced the incorporation of other unproven and immature subsystems into the overall JSF systems package with predictable results on reliability. Mean flight hours between flight critical failure were 40 percent below expectations for the F-35A, 30 percent below for the F-35B, and 16 percent below for the F-35C (41).

* Corrective measures related to these critical failures? The F-35A’s mean corrective maintenance time is 2 to 3 times the period allotted. For the –B, it’s 78 percent more than time allowed, and 65 percent over for the –C (42). Massive immaturity of the Joint Technical Data (JTD) maintenance program and the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) require multiple workarounds (42) by the maintenance crew and further compromise aircraft availability, causing frustrating additional operational delays. Indeed, regarding those USMC F-35Bs deployed to Yuma, AZ: “Without a certified and functional ALIS system, the aircraft are essentially inoperable” (http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/senior-f-35-official-warns-on-software-breakdowns-relationship-crisis-376590/).

It’s little surprise that the Air Force’s Operational Utility Evaluation (OUE) that ran for two months from September through November, 2012, “included no combat capabilities” (27) because the overall system itself was still under development and so immature that “little can be learned about operating and sustaining the F-35 in combat operations from this evaluation” (27). But they did discover the disconcerting impact of the critical failures and maintenance problems listed above:

* Mission availability rate for the F-35A consequently averaged less than 35 percent, “meaning three of nine aircraft were available on average at any given time” (38);

* And for those ‘available’ aircraft, reports from the field at Eglin indicate that pre-flight prep for the F-35 requires roughly 44-50 maintenance man-hours, close to double the total maintenance man-hours per flight hour for the F-16.

* Despite that extended pre-flight prep, cumulative air abort rates for both the –A and –B variants averaged roughly five aborts per 100 flight hours—despite the “goal of 1.0 air abort per 100 flight hours as a threshold to start an evaluation of the system’s readiness for training” (author emphasis; 38). Readiness for combat? Not mentioned.

Software: The Noose That’s Strangling the F-35

In a nutshell, the software just isn’t ready. We’re no longer climbing into P-51s. Since at least the F-16, software has been absolutely essential for onboard computer systems that maintain stability of fly-by-wire aircraft whose design intentionally places them on the thin edge of instability to permit almost instantaneous change in flight path—crucial in a high-speed dogfight or in avoiding a SAM. Without such computers and software, pilots cannot control the aircraft.

Now take the F-35 and all its automated functions—from helmet-cued weapon sighting to datalink sensor transmissions to other aircraft and…the list goes on. It is said that the F-22 Raptor, the F-35’s older brother, has 2.2 million lines of computer code; a recent estimate for the F-35’s Block 3 (combat capable) mission systems software postulates that the aircraft’s own computers will harbor approximately 8.6 million lines of software code—not counting even higher requirements in related ground systems. Yet “Block 3i software, required for delivery of Lot 6 aircraft and hosted on an upgraded processor, has lagged in integration and laboratory testing” (34). Block 2B software is what is required for only the most basic “initial, limited combat capability for selected internal weapons (AIM-120C, GBU-32/31, and GBU-12)” (34), yet DOT&E admits that “the program made virtually no progress in the development, integration, and laboratory testing of any software beyond 2B” (author emphasis; 34)—i.e., no tangible progress toward anything resembling real combat capability. In the wishful thinking department, full combat System Design and Development capability is tentatively scheduled for Block 3F software to be installed starting with production Lot 9 (34), which means on airframe number 214 at the earliest…possibly sometime in 2017. As for that Block 3i software, those Lot 6 aircraft are already on the assembly line (starting with airframe number 96); while delivery may begin in 2014, don’t hold your breath: given program history to date, this mission software may well not be ready and Lot 6 aircraft will be in danger of being undeployable—not much better than ‘hangar queens’ so often grounded for other glitches. (Will Turkey have waited long enough?)

How bad is it? It’s all summarized in that Pentagon report: “Flight restrictions blocked accomplishment of a portion of the planned baseline test points until a new version of vehicle systems software became available” (33). And when it comes to internal weapons release and guidance, “basic mission systems capabilities, such as communications, navigation, and basic radar functions” (34), and more—fully coded software is essential. Yet aircraft are being delivered with major variances that defer testing and add “a bow wave of test points that will have to be completed in the future” (34), while such regressive testing of systems that should have been tested earlier but were forced to be deferred massively complicates any results-based linear (not concurrent) testing and development program. At the time of the report’s release, even the minimal capability of Block 1 software included in delivered aircraft was deficient by 20 percent (34). Block 2A software was delivered to flight test four months late and 50 percent deficient (34). Let the report speak for itself: “Testing needed for completion of the remaining 20 percent of Block 1 capabilities and 50 percent of Block 2A capabilities will have to be conducted while the program is introducing Block 2B software to flight test. Software integration tasks supporting Block 2B (and later increments) were delayed in 2012 as contractor software integration staff were needed to support Block 2A development, test, and anomaly resolution” (35). So much for any attempt to install mission and flight control software in any logical sequence where later and more complex versions can build on a foundation of previously installed systems. And that’s just a small sampling. Sounds like absolute chaos.

Who is the supervisor for software development? For software integration? Why haven’t they been replaced?

Better yet, why hasn’t software development and integration, at this point, been transferred to a different vendor?

These seem to be some basic questions that no one is asking.

Equally depressing news has appeared in previous Pentagon annual reports on the F-35, and surely these reports have been distributed to members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.

Why have they taken no action regarding the mismanagement of the most massive and expensive military procurement program in our history?

More important, when will they start to do so?

Lee Gaillard holds degrees from Yale University and Middlebury College. He served in the Marine Corps Reserve, worked in publishing for Time-Life International in New York, in industry as a senior product marketing specialist for the world’s largest manufacturer of semiconductor assembly equipment, and in secondary education as teacher, department head, and school administrator. In 2002, Gaillard attended the Royal Institute of International Affairs defense conference in London, U.K.: “Europe and America: A New Strategic Partnership,” subsequently writing two related articles that appeared in Defense News. After Airways Magazine (July 2005) published his examination of the National Transportation Safety Board’s flawed investigation of the American Airlines Flight 587 disaster, he served as a consultant to “Airline Cracks,” a documentary on load-bearing composite structures in commercial jetliners, telecast by ITV-West (Bristol, U.K.) on Oct. 4, 2005. In 2006, the Center for Defense Information published his monograph on the V-22 Osprey.

Gaillard has been writing about aviation and defense issues for over 25 years. His more than 100 articles and book reviews have appeared in newspapers, professional journals, and magazines around the country—on topics ranging from the role of luck in the Battle of Midway (Naval Institute PROCEEDINGS) to “Submarine Design: Aeroengineering Dimensions” (Submarine Review) and the V-22 Osprey’s readiness for combat (Jane’s Defence Weekly). He is listed in recent editions of Who’s Who in America and is a contributor to the Straus Military Reform Project.

Neo-Imperialism and the Arrogance of Ignorance

Africa and AFRICOM

This essay appeared in the March 1-3, 2012 edition of Counterpunch at this link. A shorter, earlier version of this essay appeared on the Time.com at this link.  

Most Americans do not realize the extent to which the U.S. is becoming involved militarily in the welter of conflicts throughout Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa (check out the chaos as mapped here).

Although recent reports have tended to focus on the French effort to kick Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) out of Mali — an effort that may now be devolving into a far more complex guerrilla war, that French operation is just one operation in what may be shaping up to be a 21st Century version of the 19th Century Scramble for the resources of Africa. It’s a policy that, from the U.S. point of view, may not be unrelated to the pivot to China,  given China‘s growing market and aid presence in Africa.  Together, the scramble and the pivot will be sufficient to offset the near term effect of an sequester in the Pentagon with a torrent of money flows in the future.

Last year, Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post provided a mosaic of glimpses into the widespread U.S. involvement in Africa.  He authored a series of excellent reports, including here, here and here.  The map below is my rendering of the basing information in Whitlock’s report (and others), as well as the relationship between that basing information to distribution of Muslim populations in central Africa. Consider the distances involved in this swath of bases loosely portrayed by the red dots: the distance between these bases along the axis from northwest to southwest on the African continent alone is greater that the distance from New York to Los Angeles.  Think of the ethnic and tribal differences between Burkina Faso and Kenya, not to mention the differences within those countries!  And remember, virtually all of North Africa, from Morocco to Egypt is over 90% Muslim.

`While the correlation between Muslim populations and our intervention activities in this variety of cultural mosaics will suggest a welter of differing messages to different audiences, one generalization is certain, given our recent history of intervention: Africom's continuing presence and involvement will further inflame our relationship with militant Islam and perhaps the far larger number of moderate Muslims.  

But think of the other possibilities for one's imagination to run wild.  For example: In view of the recent Libyan adventure, conspiratorially-minded North African Islamic radicals (and moderates?) with a penchant for seeing visions in cloud formations may well interpret the swath of Africom's bases structure in Sub-Saharan Africa as early bricks in the construction an anvil, against which, they will be smashed by a new generation of European neocolonialists, attacking from the north in obedience with the new "leading from behind" doctrine of President Obama.  Of course, given the distances involved and the porosity those distances imply, such divagations of the paranoid mind are silly from a military point of view.  But given the US's murderous track record of lies in Iraq, incompetence in Afghanistan, and our blatant disregard for the Palestinians by constructing a peace processes that facilitated the growth of settlements in a thirty-year land grab by Israel, that kind of characterization nevertheless will be grist for the propaganda mill as well as the fulminations of a paranoid mind.  And remember, just because you are paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't out to get you.

Another sense of the metastasizing nature of our involvement in Africa can be teased out of the leaden, terrorist-centric, albeit carefully-constructed verbiage in the prepared answers submitted by Army General David M. Rodriguez  to Senate Armed Services Committee in support of his 13 February 2013 confirmation to be the new commander of the  U. S. Africa Command or Africom. I urge readers to at least skim this very revealing document.

The terrorist “threats” in sub-Saharan Africa that are evidently so tempting to the neo-imperialists at Africom do not exist in isolation. They are intimately connected to the ethnic/tribal discontent in Africa, a subject alluded to but not really analyzed by Rodriquez or his senatorial questioners in their carefully choreographed Q&A.

Many of these tensions, for example, are in part a legacy of artificial borders created by the European interventionists of the 19th century. These interventionists deliberately designed borders to mix up tribal, ethnic, and religious groups to facilitate “divide and rule” colonial policies. The 19th Century colonialists often deliberately exacerbated local animosities by placing minorities in politically and economically advantageous positions, thereby creating incentives for seething discontent and payback in the future. Stalin, incidentally, used the same strategy in the 1920s and 1930s to control the Muslim soviet republics in what was formerly known as the Turkestan region of Central Asia. In the USSR, the positioning of the artificial borders among these new “Stans” were widely known as Stalin’s “poison pills.”

The hostage crisis at the gas plant in eastern Algeria last January illustrates some of the deeply-rooted cultural complexities at the heart of many of these conflicts. Akbar Ahmed recently argued this point in one of his fascinating series of essays published by Aljazeera.  This series, which I believe is very important, is based on his forthcoming book, The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a War on Tribal Islam, to be published in March by Brookings Institution Press.

Ambassador Akbar Ahmed is the former Pakistani high commissioner to the UK, and he now holds the the appropriately named Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, D.C.  Considered to be one of fathers of modern historiography and the social sciences, Ibn Khaldun is also one of history's most influential scholars of  spontaneous nature of tribalism and its role in establishing social cohesion.  The central thrust of Professor Ahmed's work is in that spirit.  He aims to explain why discontent is so widespread throughout the former colonial world and how it is partially rooted in a complex history of oppressions of ethnic groups and in tribal rivalries throughout the region. This has created a welter of tensions between the weak central governments of the ex-colonial countries and their peripheral minority groups and tribes. Ahmed argues that these tensions have been exacerbated by our militaristic response to 9/11. He explains why military interventions by the U.S. and former European colonial powers will worsen the growing tension between central governments and these oppressed groups.

Among other things, Ahmed, perhaps inadvertently, has laid out a devastating critique of US failure to abide by the criteria of a sensible grand strategy in its reaction to 9/11. By confusing a horrendous crime with an act of war, declaring an open ended global war on terror, and then conducting that war according to a classically flawed grand strategy that assumed “You are either with us or against us,” the US has not only created enemies faster than it can kill them, but in so doing, it has mindlessly exacerbated highly-volatile, incredibly-complex, deeply-rooted local conflicts and thereby helped to destabilize huge swathes of Asia and Africa.

Mindless? Consider please the following: Most readers of this essay will have heard of AQIM and probably the the Tuaregs as well. But how many of you have heard of the Kabyle Berbers and their history in Algeria? (I had not.)  Yet according to Professor Ahmed, a Kabyle Berber founded AQIM, and that founding is deeply-rooted in their historical grievances. So, there is more to AQIM than that of simply being an al Qaeda copycat. You will not learn about any of this from Rodriquez’s answers, notwithstanding his repeated references to AQIM and Algeria; nor will you learn anything about this issue from the senators’ questions.

You can prove this to yourself.

Do a word search of General Rodriquez’s Q&A package for any hint of an appreciation of the kind of complex history described by Ahmed in his Aljazeera essay, The Kabyle Berbers, AQIM, and the search for peace in Algeria. (You could try using search words like these, for example: AQIM, Kabyle, Berber, history, Tuareg, tribe, tribal conflict, culture, etc — or use your imagination). In addition to noting what is not discussed, note also how Rodriquez’s threat-centric context surrounding the words always pops up. Compare the sterility his construction to the richness of Ahmed’s analysis, and draw your own conclusions.  Bear in mind AQIM is just one entry in Africom’s threat portfolio. What do we not know about the other entries?

As Robert Asprey showed in his classic 2000 year history of guerrilla wars, War in the Shadows, the most common error made by outside interveners in a guerrilla war is succumbing to the temptation to allow their “arrogance of ignorance” to shape their military and political efforts.

Notwithstanding the arrogance of ignorance being reaffirmed in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, it is beginning to look like Asprey’s timeless conclusion will be reaffirmed Africa.

The Mali Trap

Attached is a very important report written by one the finest reporters now covering the instabilities in the Islamic world from Afghanistan to Morocco.

JANUARY 21, 2013

The Tuareg Insurgency

The Mali Trap

by PATRICK COCKBURN, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/21/the-mali-trap/

It was always probable that French military intervention in Mali would have explosive consequences in other parts of the region. Even so, it is surprising that a splinter group from al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) should have been able to react so quickly by seizing hostages at the gas field facility at In Amenas in south-east Algeria.

The speed of the jihadi retaliation has led to doubts that the two events are connected, but the likelihood must be that French action in Mali precipitated a pre-planned assault on this target. It is a typical al-Qa’ida operation, in the tradition of 9/11, geared to attract maximum worldwide attention by a suicidal act of extreme violence.

Foreign leaders were swift to back the French action and pledge to pursue the perpetrators of the hostage-taking to the ends of the earth. This is the sort of reaction al-Qa’ida intends to provoke, whereby a small group of gunmen is presented as a threat to the rest of the world. Recruits and money flow in.

Local disputes – in this case between the Tuareg of northern Mali and the government in the capital, Bamako – become internationalised. Foreign military intervention may restore order and even be welcomed by the local population in the short term. But the presence of a great power can be destabilising.

This was one of the many lessons of the US takeover of Iraq and Afghanistan. Most Iraqis and Afghans were glad to see the departure of the previous regimes. Iraqis wanted an end to Saddam Hussein’s rule, but this did not mean that they welcomed foreign occupation. Similarly, in Afghanistan, foreign forces were initially popular and the Taliban discredited. But in both cases foreign forces soon behaved like colonial occupiers, and were resented as such.

Will this now happen in Mali? There is plenty of evidence that the jihadi fighters of AQIM, Ansar al-Din, and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa are feared and hated in south Mali where most of the 14.5 million population live. They are not much more popular in the north where they have imposed sharia.

The Americans might well have got away with military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan if they had then got out quickly. The same is true of the French in Mali. The danger for them is that they will stay too long, become entangled in ethnic rivalries, and keep in power a dysfunctional and corrupt Malian government.

The political earthquake zones of the world have tended to be in countries where there are deep ethnic or religious differences. The list includes Afghanistan, Iraq, Bahrain, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, the former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. Mali fits all too well into this pattern. The north of the country has had a simmering Tuareg rebellion from at least 1963. The latest crisis has its origin in a nationalist uprising by the Tuareg in 2012. The opportunistic takeover of the rebellion by the jihadi groups came a few months later after a military coup in Bamako.

In Syria and Iraq, internal crises are exacerbated by interference from neighbours, with their own interests and local proxies. Here, again, there is a strong parallel with Mali. Algeria, Libya, Niger and Burkina Faso all have impoverished and restive Tuareg minorities. Their governments pretend their main concern is the threat of Islamic fundamentalism because this presses the right buttons in Washington, London, Paris and Moscow. But the recent history of the region shows that their real concern is Tuareg separatism. The threat is all the more serious for them because, poor though the Tuareg may be, they are often living on top of great reserves of oil, gas, uranium and valuable minerals.

Tuareg nationalist insurgency, not radical Islam, is at the heart of the crisis in Mali. What, for instance, are AQIM doing in northern Mali, which has never in the past been a bastion for fundamentalists? AQIM is in origin an Algerian movement that emerged from the civil war of the 1990s. Formed in 1998, its members moved to northern Mali in 2003, where the government saw it as a counterbalance to Tuareg separatists. For all the French rhetoric about AQIM being a threat to Europe, the group made no attacks there over the past decade, being more interested in raising money through hostage-taking and smuggling cigarettes and cocaine.

Algeria’s links to AQIM are cloudy, but not so the movement’s past connection with the Malian government. The strange truth is that it was the Malian government which, over the last 10 years, tolerated AQIM in northern Mali and allowed it to operate, taking a share in the profits of its kidnapping and drug-running operations. International military aid for use against al-Qa’ida was diverted for use against the Tuareg.

There are few eyewitnesses able to give convincing accounts of developments in northern Mali, but one is May Ying Welsh, a journalist working for al-Jazeera. She writes after a recent visit that “for years, Malian Tuaregs have been complaining that their government was in bed with al-Qa’ida, but their cries fell on deaf ears”. She quotes a Malian army commander, Colonel Habi al-Salat, who defected to the Tuareg rebels in 2011, as saying, “Mali facilitated al-Qa’ida, providing them with complete freedom of movement, because they believed the presence of this group would impact the Tuareg struggle against the governing regime.”

The latest Tuareg uprising of 2012 was precipitated by the fall of Gaddafi in Libya a few months earlier. He had long kept a sort of order in the states in and around the Sahara. His defeat also meant the region was awash with modern weapons. Tuareg in the Libyan security forces, who knew how to use them, were coming home. The Tuareg rebellion was led by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, which was then pushed aside by Ansar al-Din and its jihadi allies.

The French may calculate that they can use their air force to destroy Islamist units. This worked well for Nato in Libya. But against guerrillas in a desolate country with a ferocious climate, this may not be so effective. Air power works best against fixed positions or vehicles, but kidnap victims in Mali report the Islamists have hidden fuel, water and food across the country and have hacked hideouts into the sides of cliffs. They will be a difficult enemy to defeat.

The China Threat: The MICC Pivots Obama Back to the Future

The report, US model for a future war fans tensions with China and inside the Pentagon, by Greg Jaffe in the Washington Post is an excellent case study of how inside-the-beltway networking by the players in the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex (MICC).  Jaffe builds a consensus to keep defense spending high when wars end and the terrifying peace dividend threatens to break out. At the center of Jaffee's report is an influence peddling network orchestrated by an ancient artifact of the Pentagon, a futurist named Andrew Marshall, nicknamed Yoda.  

Most of the ideas surrounding the all seeing - all knowing - deep-strike precision guided attack systems portrayed in Andy Marshall's so-called Revolution of Military Affairs (its most recent incarnation is the Air-Sea Battle described by Jaffe below) have been around in various forms for a very long time, dating at least from McNamara's electronic line the Viet Nam war, but some of these ideas have conceptual roots in World War II (e.g., the wide area surveillance and close control command architecture of the British air defense system as well as the "precision" weapons programs developed by the US and Germany during WWII).  In fact, readers with a sense of military history will quickly realize that Marshall's ideas are basically a rehash of America's traditional mechanical conception of attrition warfare, especially those ideas underpinning the critical-node theories of strategic bombardment (begun in the 1930s at the Army Air Corps Tactical School), albeit papered over with new fancy sounding acronyms. 

Readers with a sense of history will also recall that Obama's pivot to China is hardly a new idea.  It was first floated in the early 90s and promoted  by Senator McCain, among others, in the early maneuvering to keep defense spending high despite the collapse of the Soviet Union. (That maneuvering succeeded, because as the chart below shows, the post-cold war budgets never dropped low the levels of the Eisenhower Administration during the height of the Cold War.)  McCain's maneuvering also led to the law mandating the Quadrennial Defense Review, which to date has produced a series of totally useless reports (for reasons explained here and here) but nevertheless provided rhetorical justifications for continuing Cold War boondoggles like missile defense, the Virginia class nuclear attack submarine, the Army's future combat system, and that turkey of turkeys, the Joint Strike Fighter.  

McCain's China gambit did not take root in the early-to-mid 1990s, but fortuitously the civil wars in Yugoslavia, together with Madeline Albright closely-related theory of the U.S. being the world's indispensable power, intervened to help keep the defense budget from plummeting in 1990s.  This was followed by the wars on terror in the first decade of this century, which, triggered by 9-11, provided cover for continuing cold war business as usual in the Pentagon's base budget (remember, the war itself was funded off line via 'emergency' supplemental appropriations).  But now, with the emotive power of Iraq and Afghan distractions winding down, the China threat is rising again, like a Phoenix, to fill the vacuum, thanks in part to the networking skills of Marshall and his proteges, as detailed by Jaffe.  

The China pivot is crucial to the MICC's plan to turn Mr. Obama into the biggest base-budget spender since Ronald Reagan, as shown in the figure below (the effects of inflation have been removed):

Source: Pentagon Comptroller

In contrast to Viet Nam and Korea, the so-called war on terror has been funded by supplemental appropriations (added to the base (i.e., non-war) budget. These supplementals are depicted by the lightly shaded areas above the solid bars, which represent based budget totals).  In terms of base budgets only, this chart shows that Obama's four past base budgets plus the next four years of his planned base budgets would exceed those of any president, including George W. Bush (who to be fair, paved the way for the Obama cornucopia), with the sole exception of President Reagan.  

Justifying far higher budgets than those averaged the Cold War is the central function of the China pivot. 

Jaffe's report provides a good window into how a network of inside-the-beltway interests among players in the Pentagon, Congress, and so-called think tanks that have already convinced the ever malleable Mr. Obama into falling for the China Pivot. The next steps will be hype the politics of fear to sell it to the American people by inflating the China threat to convince them to  pay for the Revolution in Military Affairs by sacrificing a big part of their social safety net, because many the same people are telling us that uncontrolled federal spending is also threatening to destroy the United States.  

A Letter from an Afghan Patriot Raises a Question for the Next Secretary of Defense:

Why Do Domestic Politics Trump Foreign Policy?

Note: A version of this essay appeared in the Counterpunch (Weekend Edition 11-13 January 2013) and in Time (Battleland, 14 January 2013)


Introduction and Background

I have an Afghan friend, Hashim, who lives in Europe.  We correspond frequently on the situation in Afghanistan.  He comes from an old distinguished Pashtun family; he has multiple degrees from the UK’s finest universities, knows Afghan (and world) history; and he admires the United States immensely, having lived here for a number of years as a young man.  

Hashim is an Afghan patriot, and while he is a realist, he understandably tends to see things in a hopeful light for his beloved country.  This is especially true with regard to his hope that President Obama will correct the gross errors of his predecessor.  Hashim recently sent me an email (see below) describing his reactions to  two closely related wire service reports issued on 9 January¹, in which U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes revealed that the White House was considering an option for a total withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end 2014.  

Rhodes said the White House was considering the so-called ‘zero option’  in addition to the more widely reported options for maintaining a limited troop presence 3,000 and 9,000 troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014.  In contrast, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, is lobbying for an enduring presence 6,000 to 15,000. There are currently about 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.  With one year to go, it is therefore clear that big changes are coming.

Rhodes made clear that Obama’s final decision will not be made for several months, and he emphasized will be based on the twin U.S. security objectives of (1) denying the so-called counterterrorism strategy of denying a safe haven to al Qaeda (read: a continuing targeted assassination strategy by special forces and drones) and (2) ensuring that Afghan forces are trained and equipped to maintain internal security (read: ensuring that Afghan forces can neutralize the Taliban). 

Rhodes’s words, predictably (perhaps deliberately), created a firestorm of reaction among the neocons and advocates of empire in the U.S. as well as among those in Afghanistan who have benefitted from the U.S. presence. Members of the Afghan government, in harmony with the despairing cries of the neocon armchair warriors in the U.S., predicted that the zero option would be equivalent to a U.S. admission of defeat; that it would precipitate another a civil war, like that of the 1990s; and that it would leave the 350,000 man ill-trained Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) unable to provide internal security. While the Taliban had no comment, a spokesman reiterated its 5 January call for the immediate removal of all foreign forces from Afghanistan.

Hashim’s Take on the Zero Option

My Afghan friend did not think much of these reactions.  On 10 Jan 2013, he wrote:

“This [i.e. Rhodes’ zero option] is more to do with negotiating with the insurgency leaders than it is about ensuring the future survival of the despised Karzai criminal clique — a smart strategy, and an appropriate answer to thugs who say, ‘You need U.S. more than we need you.’”

“The foundations of normal U.S.-Afghan relations are finally being laid by people concerned with the U.S.’s national interests, rather than by dubious. armchair warriors, rabid ideologues, and self-serving vested interests – long may it continue!”
“The cries of fear and despair, from the less than 1% of Afghans who’ve grown obscenely rich, courtesy of the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, are to be expected – they are the supporters of the thugs who thought that the U.S. could be blackmailed into expending blood and treasure ad infinitum, no matter what these gangsters said or did, because of their ‘you need U.S. more than we need you’ mantra.”

“The statements will be welcomed by the young village-based insurgent commanders inside the country, but will leave the ‘old’ Taliban leaders who still have  political ambitions in a quandary: No one will accept their leadership if they agree to join the Karzai criminal cooperative, nor will they continue the fight until the ‘Islamic Emirate’ is re-installed in Kabul.  What the majority of the insurgents want is an end to the ‘occupation,' and a truly representative government of competent ‘good Muslims’ in Kabul.”

“Similarly, Karzai and his gang have been put on notice, that they’re not the ‘indispensable’ puppets they had assumed themselves to be. Moreover, the U.S. statements will cause the ranks of their supporters to diminish dramatically, and decrease their ability to act as rejectionists or spoilers of any agreement reached with the Taliban insurgency.”

“Doubtless, matters will come into better focus in coming weeks. So, my comments are really ‘hazarded guesses.’”
Hashim

While Hashim’s analysis makes sense and suggests a realistic sense of foresight on the part of the U.S. government, it triggered uncertainties in my mind about what other political factors might be driving our foreign policy in Afghanistan. 

Here is My Response

Dear Hashim ... I hope  you are right, and as usual, you certainly raise insightful issues.  But that said, I think there are several very powerful domestic political factors also in play, and these factors may well be taking precedence in the decisions shaping our Afghan policy. Consider please the following:

In the U.S., as in most countries, the exigencies of domestic politics almost always trump the logical needs of foreign policy. This is particularly the case when a government is changing policy direction, as is the case of Afghanistan today.  A good, if somewhat dated, general introduction to the history of how the exigencies of domestic politics influence  American foreign policy can be found in Robert Dallek’s, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs. 

Here is what I think is now happening -- to be sure what follows is speculation, but it is based over thirty years of experience of closely observing the pathological machinations of the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex, hereafter referred to as the MICC:

1. It is pretty clear Obama wants out of Afghanistan.  My own suspicion is that Mr. Obama understands he was railroaded into approving the fatally flawed surge by the MICC and cabal of neocons in 2009. Whether or not this is indeed the case, and it is not clear whether Generals Petraeus and McChrystal “played” Obama or Obama was a willing part of the game; one thing is clear: Mr. Obama set himself up to become enmeshed in the Afghan quagmire via opportunistic political maneuvering during the 2008 election campaign to contrast Afghanistan as a “good war” as opposed to the “bad war” in Iraq.  His obvious intent was the usual Democratic effort to protect his right flank from being attacked by Republicans as being soft on defense.  So, consciously or not, Obama entrapped himself in a quagmire by succumbing to the exigencies of domestic politics in a foreign policy question of supreme importance.  Now, like all politicians, he does not want to look like a fool as he walks along the exit tightrope from the Afghan debacle.  Score 1 for domestic politics trumping foreign policy.

2. More importantly, Obama’s opportunistic behavior is a symptom of  deeper problems created by more powerful domestic political exigencies:  It is now clear the MICC also wants out of Afghanistan, but the MICC’s players also must walk a tightrope: Its players must extricate themselves from the Afghan quagmire without jeopardizing their future budget prospects.  

The MICC’s players — in the Pentagon, in industry, and in the Congress —  are terrified of a so-called “peace dividend,” and the potential for cutbacks is looming, either in the form of a loss of $80 billion annually in supplemental budgets to cover projected war spending, or the loss of $50 billion through a budget sequester or some kind of fiscal deal, or some combination of both. The brass hats in the military also know they are losing the Afghan war, and they probably fear that sooner or later their defeat will become understood by the voters and create a PR problems that could adversely affect their future budgets for an extended period.  To date, the military has dodged that bullet, but how long will that last?  The generals and defense industrialists must therefore understand that time is not on their side. 

The generals and politicians also know that a larger majority of Americans now oppose the Afghan war than opposed the Vietnam war.  To be sure, it is now clear ending the draft and “professionalizing” the military has successfully has muted popular opposition to the war.  Ending the draft successfully prepared the ground for a mercenary U.S. military and the entire MICC to engage in constant war so long as its intensity does not breach certain thresholds.  But how long will the public indifference to the pain of war last, particularly if, as is now likely, there are cut backs in spending for social safety net programs during a sluggish recovery and/or the austerity economics trigger another recession?  

The bottom line is that the political economy of the MICC is beginning to gag on Afghanistan.  In its structural and logical aspects, this has created a political situation not unlike that faced by President Nixon in 1969, although political emotions are still far more muted today.

Now, with this background in mind, consider the White House’s so-called exit strategy.  It is based on the reported personnel options ranging from complete withdrawal (the zero option) to keeping 15,000 troops in Afghanistan, with their responsibilities divided up between a counter-terrorist operations (read targeted assassination with drones and special forces and all that implies) and the self-evidently absurd idea that there is still enough time remaining for a tiny cohort of U.S. trainers to solve the intractable training problem posed by the ineffectiveness of the hugely corrupt 350,000 man Afghan army.  Nixon’s Vietnamization policy was far more substantial than that being proposed by the White House, but it is the same game: Afghanizing the war is more designed for domestic consumption in the U.S., in the hope that the President can preserve his credibility by spinning what is really retreat and defeat into an achievement of objectives.  The real aim, of course, is to protect business as usual in the MICC and stave off the domestic opponents of empire  in both parties.  Score 2 for domestic politics trumping foreign policy.

3.  Consider how the ‘porkbarrelling’ stage is being set to ease the pain of any budgetary reductions accompanying the Afghan exit strategy.  Obama is easing the pain to defense contractors by unleashing foreign military sales (FMS) of U.S. first line weapons to third world nations rich enough to pay for them.  This is exactly what President Nixon did when he announced the so-called Nixon Doctrine in summer of 1969 as being at center of his Vietnam exit strategy. Obama has already played his first big card in this game by sharply ramping up FMS to record levels of at least $68 billion² in Fiscal Year 2012 (which began in October 2011) -- that is, in the year leading up to his re-election in November 2012.  Score 3 for the exigencies of domestic politics trumping the rational needs of a foreign policy.

4. There are some differences in the Nixon comparison, but they are also revealing: In 1969, President Nixon did have one “exigency” advantage over Mr. Obama in the domestic politics of catering to the MICC: the Cold War.  Nixon and his successors could refocus the defense budget on the Soviet threat in Europe and the nuclear threat to the United States and hype these threats to pump up the long-term budgetary prospects for the MICC.  

So, while Nixon was reducing the defense budget as he exited Vietnam in the early 1970s, he augmented the political buyoffs of the Nixon Doctrine by planting the seed money to start a large number  of R&D programs (e.g., F-14, F-15, B-1, AV-8B, AWACs, SSN-688 submarine, M-1 tank, etc) for a new generation of even higher cost weapons to be bought in the late 1970s and the 1980s  Like an insurance policy, these R&D programs, coupled with increased FMS, protected and pacified the MICC’s constituencies while building a huge head of programmatic steam.  In the Pentagon the mushrooming costs of all these new programs became known as the "bow wave.”  The bow wave prepared the political ground for the emergence of ‘requirements’ for far larger procurement budgets and the eventual growing of defense budgets in late 1970s and culminated in the explosion of defense budgets under Ronald Reagon.  In retrospect, it is quite clear that the Reagan spending spree was actually launched during the Carter Administration by seeds planted in the Nixon Administration.  A similar bow wave was planted in the aftermath of the Cold War during the last years of the first Bush Administration and the first term of the Clinton Administration — as I explained in my 1996 paper Defense Budget Time Bomb, the budget explosion after 1998 was inevitable.  As well be seen below, Osama bin Laden merely iced the budgetary cake.

President Carter was a prisoner of the bow wave of new programs created by his predecessors’ cynical decisions.³  But Obama may be end up being far more culpable that Carter, because whether Obama knows it or not, he is not repeating Nixon's strategy of refocusing on an existing, if exaggerated, superpower “threat.” Obama is taking the scam one step further: He is laying the seeds for a new and entirely unnecessary Cold War by approving the MICC’s  the reckless plan to "pivot" to a grossly exaggerated, non-superpower threat posed by China.  The China "pivot" will placate the MICC by providing the needed justification to maintain high defense budgets far into the future, backed up, of course, by the budget requirements of Obama’s never ending war on terror.  Score game, set, and match for the exigencies of domestic politics trumping the rationale needs of a foreign policy.

MICC Über Alles

The long-term budget implications of Obama’s “China pivot” are stunningly clear in the following figure: Despite the fact that the United States is exiting Afghanistan and the fact that President has called for cutbacks in so-called entitlement programs while protecting most of Bush’s ill conceived tax give aways in the middle of a so-call fiscal crisis, President Obama is also calling for huge defense budgets into the future as far as the eye can see. The audacity of this hope is mind boggling.

The figure below depicts the Defense Department’s budget authority in terms of the four year totals of each presidential administration, beginning with that of Harry Truman in 1949-1952.  DoD Budget Authority is the new money Congress appropriates each year to fill up the Pentagon’s annual checkbook. The four year totals appropriated during Democratic administrations are portrayed in blue and those for Republican administrations are portrayed in red.  Note that the effects of inflation have been removed from the data portrayed below. 

If Mr. Obama’s plan unfolds as predicted, his eight years of defense spending (i.e., in the non-war base budget) will exceed any comparable eight year period (including the wars) of his predecessors except for that of Ronald Reagan.  The chart also makes it clear that, notwithstanding Secretary Panetta’s claims of deep, savage, and arbitrary cuts to the defense budget, the new five year budget totals in the White House’s and Pentagon’s  budget computers project totals out to 2017 that would be much higher-than-average cold war budgets, and would, in effect, outspend President Bush’s FY 2001-08 “base budget” spending spree. And remember, unlike previous wars in Vietnam and Korea, the war on terror has been funded on a pay-as-you-go, add-on basis via the legislative scam of appropriating supplemental budgets. This policy is equivalent to that of a fire department telling the mayor that its annual budget will support its equipment, but it will need extra money if it has to put out fires.  Be careful to note how the figure separates the war budgets since 2001 from the non-war related base budget.  My comparisons do not include the war budgets which are portrayed by lighter shaded boxes on top of the columns 

Note also how this chart depicts the four year total for the future defense budgets Mr. Obama approved for his second term (labeled Obama2 highlighted in yellow) for last February.  This plan has been slightly reduced over the last year, and while the new budget total will not be available until the long range plan is released by Obama in about six weeks, my sources tell me that the much ballyhooed cuts in the new plan will reduce the inflation adjusted four-year budget total only to the level indicated by the point of the yellow arrow on the right. Bear in mind, the chart unrealistically assumes supplementals for the war on terror will cease to exist as of FY 14, which certainly will not the case.

Several other points implicit in the chart are worth pointing out: (1) A level of $1.6-1.7 trillion over 4 years appears  to be a floor to which budgets used to drop, when they declined during the Eisenhower, Ford/Carter, and Clinton periods. This “floor” — which appears quaintly low today — was the level that caused President Eisenhower to warn the nation about the excessive influence of military-industrial complex in the halls of government (note: he actually included “congressional” in his first draft of the speech, but the reference was subsequently dropped). (2) The size of the military combat force supported by these budgets has shrunk sharply over time, but even with today’s high budgets, old equipment is being replaced by new equipment at decreasing rates, and consequently, the average age of our weapons is always increasing, creating a perpetual modernization crisis (as I explained in the Defense Budget Time Bomb paper referenced above). (3) Even if his detailed spending plans unfold perfectly, Obama’s new budget plan projects even more force shrinkage and equipment aging as we move into the future.  The shrinking/aging trends will once again create the conditions for domestic political pressures to shovel more money to the MICC. (4) The Pentagon’s accounting systems are a shambles, making it impossible to sort out where the money is going, much less where it should be going.  Put bluntly, feeding the MICC monster increases its voracity.

Will Chuck Hegel be able to control the domestic political exigencies posed by the MICC and realign its efforts to match the logical requirements of a salutary foreign policy?  Personally, I doubt it.  Superficially, Hegel appears to be a reformer.  He has made some skeptical statements about our stupid foreign policy over the years since 2001.  But as a senator, did he vote in accordance with his vocal skepticism?  Not against Iraq, not against Afghanistan, not against Israel, although to his credit, he did vote against some sanctions in Iran.  Even worse, to my thinking, he called for a ground invasion of Kosovo in 1999, which was exceedingly reckless, because the Serbian Army was little damaged  by the NATO bombing campaign, and was spoiling for a fight, and a ground war was opposed by our own military.   Moreover Hegel's record of supporting  unnecessary and bloated cold-war pork programs like ballistic missile defense suggests he will support the ‘pivot’ and what it  implies for high-tech boondoggles. Also, you must bear in mind the way Washington works: politicians must be "for" something -- and a hyped Chinese threat, like the nonexistent bomber and missile gaps of the Cold War, fills that bill perfectly. 

So, the stage is being set for defense to remain off the budget negotiating table while Obama cuts back on social programs and protects the Bush era tax cuts to the wealthy.

In conclusion, I think domestic politics is poised to trump the entirely reasonable foreign policy hopes raised in your email.  I am afraid we are about to sweep Afghanistan under the rug like we did in Iraq and Vietnam. 

While I see this as yet another immoral evasion of responsibility, given the extent to which we contributed to Afghanistan's misery since the Brzezinski caper in the summer of 1979 (also confirmed in Robert Gates memoir, here) that provoked the Soviets to invade six months later, in December of 1979, it is unfortunately the way American politics has worked ever since Vietnam. 

American politics continues to repeat the practice of buying domestic power by inflicting misery and destruction on third world nations.  In my view, Obama’s own contribution to statecraft in this regard has been his ability to lobotomize almost the entire Democratic base. The same people who were screaming about Bush’s illegal wars, unconstitutional surveillance, lack of due process, etc., are now silent or singing Obama’s greatness. 

Even when Democrats can see how Mr. Obama has disappointed them, the insanity of Republican politicians provides the Democrats a ready rationale to excuse Obama. (By the way, does anyone notice that if Hagel is confirmed it means two of Obama’s three SecDefs will have been Republicans?)  

The Republican party, with a few exceptions, is so visibly crazy that they have become an indispensable foil that permits Obama to govern as he does.  The conventional wisdom of liberals is that Obama’s heart is in the right place, but he is conflict averse and therefore must govern as a centrist (really a center-rightist), because the GOP is crazy and intransigent. But in reality, Obama actually is a center-rightist who uses his image as a diffident compromiser as a cloak to hide his pro-corporatocracy given aways.  And because most people prefer center-right governance to out-and-out fascism, the GOP plays an essential role as a “bad cop” to the center-right “good cop,” which is why Democrats went along with  Obama’s plan to enshrine the Bush tax cuts for the bottom 99.3%, and a huge giveaway on the estate tax, in perpetuity. My fear is that, in the same way, Democrats will go along with Obama’s inflated defense budgets and his permanent conflict foreign policy. 

Anyway, that is the view of one clapped out retiree from the cheap seats in Versailles on the Potomac.

Chuck

--------------------------

¹ “Afghans say total U.S. pullout would trigger disaster” (Reuters) and “Obama administration considers leaving no US troops in Afghanistan after combat ends in 2014” (AP)

² The $68 billion understates the size of the foreign market because the FMS category does not include all sales; for example, it does not include the money received in partnering agreements for the development and production of new equipment, like the Joint Strike Fighter.

³ While it would be unfair to blame Jerry Ford for these decisions, he did nothing to undo the pressures created during the Nixon Administration.

No Guts, No Glory

The Real Challenges Facing the Next Secretary of Defense

FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY,
This essay appeared in Counterpunch (31 Dec 2012) and Time's Battleland (3 Jan 2013)

One of the most pressing problems facing the incoming Secretary of Defense is posed by our denouement in Afghanistan.  For reasons explained by Paul Sperry in an excellent 30 December op-ed in the New York Post, extricating ourselves from this quagmire is now taking on dangerous overtones, and the need to leave may be approaching at warp speed.  The implications for the nature of the American withdrawal may be ominous, but they should not be unexpected.  It is now virtually certain that managing a coherent withdrawal will present a major challenge for the incoming defense secretary.

President Obama’s 2009 surge strategy for what he and Democrats liked to portray as the “good war” in Afghanistan was premised upon the assumption that the US could quickly build up and train large Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), including army and police forces.  Obama and the Pentagon sold this counterinsurgency strategy to the American people by promising a surge in American forces would quickly weaken the Taliban.  The emasculation of the Taliban would permit a rapid expansion of the Afghan security zones controlled by the Kabul government, while the rapid build up of the ANSF would stabilize and grow these zones even further, and thereby set the stage for a quick exit of US combat forces beginning eighteen months from the date of the surge.

Despite its central premise of quickly building up an effective ANSF, the surge-based counterinsurgency plan produced by the Afghan theater commander General Stanley McChrystal did not provide a realistic analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing Afghan army and police forces.  Yet these forces were the foundation for the both the expansion and the promised sequence of developments that would enable our quick withdrawal.

McChrystal’s grotesque oversight became obvious well before the plan’s approval, when his plan was leaked in the early fall of 2009 (as I explained here).    The limitations of this plan were again brought dramatically to the President’s attention by Ambassador Eikenberry in cables that were leaked immediately before the plan’s approval in January 2010 (summarized here).  Nevertheless, the President pressed on and approved the fatally flawed plan after an agonizing public debate during the fall and winter of 2009-10.

General McChrystal’s omission was both logically and empirically unforgivable, especially given (1) the contemporaneously emerging awareness of the counterproductive strategic effects of President Bush’s surge in Iraq, (2) the Soviet’s clear failure to build up an effective Afghan army in the 1980s as part of its exit strategy and (3) our own spectacular failure to build up an effective South Vietnamese army (i.e., Vietnamization), which was a central premise of President Nixon’s Vietnam exit strategy.

While hardly unique in its content, Sperry’s op-ed piece provides an excellent summary of how the easily foreseeable consequences of McChrystal’s oversight are now rapidly coming to a head. The problem is not just a strategic one of extracting our forces with dignity; nor is it a political one of fingering who is to blame, although there is plenty of blame to go around. It stems from deep institutional roots that reveal a need for reform in our military bureaucracies and particularly our leadership selection policies.

That is because the next Secretary of Defense must deal with the consequences of a strategic oversight that was made by and approved at the highest professional levels of the American military establishment — a plan which it then imposed on its weak and insecure political leaders.  This suggests a question: Will the new defense secretary succumb to business as usual by sweeping the dysfunctional institutional causes of the Afghan debacle under the rug or have the courage and wisdom to use this sorry affair as a reason to clean out the Pentagon’s Augean Stables?

If past is prologue, the former is far more probable than the latter.  The Vietnam catastrophe resulted cosmetic reforms, the most lasting of which dealt with improving the military’s capacity to manipulate press coverage to preserve its institutional prerogatives — a capability that became apparent in the First Iraq War, Kosovo, the Second Iraq War, and initially in Afghanistan, and the press’s fawning coverage of these wars.

But managing the Afghan denouement  is not even the largest challenge facing the new defense secretary.

A far more significant challenge will be posed by the need to sort out the programmatic chaos in the Pentagon’s hugely bloated defense budget, which, while not unrelated to the Afghan debacle, is caused primarily by out-of-control institutional prerogatives and bureaucratic game playing.  Notwithstanding its bloat, the current defense budget plan cannot modernize the  military’s weapons inventories on a timely basis; nor can it insure our shrinking, aging equipment will be maintained in a state of combat readiness, while providing sufficient funds for training troops.  Most importantly, the Pentagon’s accounting systems are a shambles.  The Pentagon’s budget and program planning books can not even pass the most basic constitutional requirements for accountability, much less provide the management information needed to fix the aforementioned modernization, force structure, and readiness problems.

As I explained here and here, these dysfunctional problems are connected and have deep behavioral roots.  Fixing these problems will require harmonizing and reining in the disparate factions making up the dysfunctional political-economy of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex — a heretofore intractable problem President Eisenhower first warned America about in his farewell address in January 1961 (note: the reference to Congress was included in the first draft of his speech but subsequently dropped).

What I find depressing is that not one of these pressing issues has been the subject of speculations about the choice of a new defense secretary.  Au contraire, the press has been obsessed with the lobbying concerns of the discredited neocons on the right who helped to create Afghan and Iraqi messes, proponents of continuing American empire in the middle (who are now promoting our intervention in Syria and the budget busting pivot to the Pacific), and gender balancers on the left.

Perhaps such divagations of the public mind are a necessary diversion. After all, reining in the out of control defense program has been declared a non problem by placing it off limits in the hypocritical fiscal cliff negotiations, where the President has chosen put social security payments on the block, even though social security is fully funded by its own earmarked payroll deduction tax (President Obama proposed cutting payments by adopting the chained consumer price index to lower the future inflation adjustments to these payments).

The bottom line, Mr./Ms. Incoming Secretary: SNAFU in Versailles on the Potomac raises the question: Do you want to be part of the problem … or part of a solution?