Here We Go Again - 2021 Edition

Fifty years ago, the United States Airforce had a problem: its premiere fighter, the F-4 Phantom II, while exceptionally fast and capable, was also big, heavy, and expensive. For the new generation of aircraft, the service requested a high-performance air-superiority fighter to replace the Phantom in that role, and a simple, light-weight, and relatively inexpensive aircraft capable of flying both air-to-air and air-to-ground missions. The results were the F-15 Eagle, arguably the best pure fighter of its generation, and the F-16 Fighting Falcon, one of the most capable and widely-used fighter-bomber types ever built. Critics complained that the F-16 was still too expensive, and crammed with too much equipment, but it is hard to deny that the plane was very successful, given its combat record…

Thirty years later the United States was looking for a new generation of aircraft to replace the F-15 and F-16 – not unreasonably, considering the technological development during those years. Consider, for example, that in 1971 some of the most capable computers in the world still required most of a small room and were less powerful than the phone in your pocket. The new F-22 Raptor fulfills the air-superiority requirement quite well, and both the manufacturer and the Department of Defense insist that it has never lost an air-to-air combat to a peer competitor. The problem came when the Air Force decided to buy the F-35 Lightning II to replace the now 44 year-old F-16. Intended to be lightweight, inexpensive, and reliable, the F-35 has proven to be none of the above – and now it seems as though even the top brass are admitting that…

An article on the Forbes website this week discusses the request from the Chief of the Air Force for a new lightweight and inexpensive multi-role aircraft to supplement the F-35. The general compares the F-35 to a Ferrari, explaining that you don’t drive your Ferrari to and from work every day; you drive it on Sundays and special occasions. This is true, of course – exotic sports cars generally have a lifespan of 25,000 miles or less, and you’d have to be out of your mind to drive one every day – but it doesn’t speak well for the F-35, which was intended to be a replacement for the F-16 but has instead suffered from massive cost overruns, lengthy teething problems, and the installation of far too much exotic, temperamental, and heavy equipment…

I’ve written in this space before about the problems with government budgets in general, and the Air Force’s problems with vehicles that are insufficiently sleek, thrilling, and pointy to suit their image in particular. In this case, no one doubts that the USAF needs a multi-role fighter, or that it would be possible to develop a more advanced and capable aircraft for this purpose than the venerable F-16. The problem is that with the Air Force’s perennial battle to get a bigger share of the defense budget than the other services, and the U.S. Congress’ tendency to allocate funding based on getting its members re-elected (as opposed to spending money on things we actually need), there is a very real chance that any future attempts to acquire a light, cheap, and reliable multi-role warplane will end up exactly the way the F-35 did…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that anything about this situation is simple, or easily solved. All kidding aside, it really does take years to develop a new airplane, and getting the balance between offensive capability, defensive capability, and maneuverability just right in any piece of military equipment is a challenge that predates both the airplane and the United States of America. But unless we want to continue throwing money down a rat hole (or a pork barrel), somebody needs to sort out this situation before the next piece of light, cheap, and reliable war gear turns into a gold-plated waste of time – and the whole thing starts all over again…

Pork in Space! Rides Again

I’ve written in this space any number of times about “pork-barrel” spending by the Federal government; mostly stories about expenditures of tax dollars that make no sense from any operational standpoint but are good for companies that donate money to the politicians who vote for those expenditures. It’s important to note that this behavior is not limited to any one political party, geographic region, or level of government; the projects vary a bit depending on who is controlling the budget at the time, but whether the government is spending money on airplanes that the military is sending directly to the Boneyard or entitlement programs that don’t help anyone, the principle is the same. That said, the current Administration’s new “Space Force” initiative is a particularly silly example of the process…

If you missed it, back in March the President announced that he had just come up with the idea of a new (sixth) branch of the U.S. military, which he called the “Space Force.” This isn’t really a new idea, of course; several previous attempts have been made to establish a permanent armed service in space, most recently in 2016 with the ill-fated “Space Corps” proposal. These have generally failed, either because there was no clear mission for the space service to perform, the proposed technology was either unavailable or economically unfeasible, or because the proposed installations contravened the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 (which prohibits the placement of weapons of mass destruction in orbit, on the Moon, or on any other celestial body). None of this has kept various administrations from shoveling money into those projects, however…

What is remarkable about the current incarnation of the program is how little effort the government is making to convince anyone that it isn’t just a giant boondoggle, almost exactly the same concept as the 2016 “Space Corps” proposal only with additional pork-barrel funding for satellites, launch vehicles, and gold-plated bonuses for the extremely wealthy people who own the aerospace companies. It would be nice to think that this had anything to do with forward-thinking defense or security planning, or at the very least, that it was an intelligent effort to stimulate economic growth in a high-tech sector in which the U.S. still has a fairly strong position relative to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, it appears to be the result of significant lobbying efforts by the aerospace industry – and the extraordinary receptiveness of the current administration to anything that gives away public money to its political backers…

You can check out the excellent story about all of this from the Los Angeles Times if you’d like more details on the political aspects. On the business side, the question isn’t so much why our government wants to spend more money on flying pork (every U.S. administration wants to spend more money on every kind of pork), but why this proposal includes a massive duplication of personnel (particularly management levels), headquarters facilities, equipment, and spacecraft, when the Air Force, Army and Navy all have space-oriented units currently operating. One might quite reasonably suggest that an increased focus on (non-nuclear) space-based weapons could be important to national security, given the equivalent programs appearing in both the Russian and the Chinese militaries. What baffles me is why anyone, even aerospace industry lobbyists, would want to do so in the least financially responsible way possible…

Defense Spending Follow-up

Some years ago I brought you the curious case of a low-cost close-support aircraft that the Textron Company was developing for use by the Air Force. What make the story, and the airplane it describes, so unique was that no one in any of the Armed Services or either house of Congress had asked for such a thing. Given the enormous cost of designing and flying even the prototype for a new military aircraft, it has become increasingly uncommon for anyone to risk developing one on spec. Even more peculiar, though, was the fact that the next Textron product, now tentatively called the Scorpion, isn’t fast, sleek or pointy, and does not introduce any brand-new gee-whiz wonder technology – setting apart from everything the Department of Defense (DoD) has been interested in for the past few decades. But then, that’s kind of the point…

According to the story this week on the Business Insider website, the Air Force has finally agreed to run some tests with the Scorpion prototype and see it they can find a role for it in their upcoming doctrine. There’s no indication that they intend to give up any existing aircraft or support units, but it seems like the idea of having something in inventory that can perform some of these basic, low-prestige missions at less than a quarter of the cost per flight-hour is starting to catch on. How much of that policy shift is the direct result of the development and teething issues with the F-35 program is not mentioned in the article, and may not be clear even to General Goldfein, the Air Force Chief of Staff, who is apparently now in favor of the trials for this airplane…

The possible change in policy appears to be at least partly the responsibility of Senator John McCain, who recently released a policy statement about future defense spending. That the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee would be in favor of increased defense spending should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, but McCain’s new policy statement contains a surprising amount of support for low-intensity and non-traditional systems, such as unmanned vehicles and low-cost combat support units like the Scorpion. This is encouraging, in the sense that it isn’t more of the same warmed-over thinking we’ve been seeing from the DoD since the 1960s. The problem is that it’s an increase, not a reallocation, and that would mean spending more money we don’t have…

In his policy paper, Mr. McCain makes the point that the outgoing administration lowered discretionary spending for each of the past eight years, which greatly curtailed the amount of funding available for the Department of Defense to spend on untried weapon systems. It also left some of our more Hawkish lawmakers and their uniformed allies in the unenviable position of having to fight for funding to maintain aircraft that can’t fly in the rain, can’t fly in the dark, can’t fly above or below certain temperatures, can’t fly at all, or in extreme cases, that asphyxiate their pilots during their flights. Even granting that we need programs like the F-35, the F-22 and the Osprey, and we might, there remains the issue that the United States is only staying out of bankruptcy by borrowing money every year, some of which is coming from countries that aren’t particularly friendly…

Regular readers of this space (assuming there are any) will recall that I have been in favor of increased defense spending in the past, provided that the new acquisitions offer greater value for the money than existing systems. This is why, for example, I have objected to aspects of the F-35 program, and the development of supersonic aircraft into ground-attack platforms while trying to get rid of the highly-effective A-10 Thunderbolt II attack plane. In this particular case, I do believe in the Scorpion program, for its capabilities as much as for its lower operating costs. I’m also in favor of the program in job-creation terms, assuming that Textron is willing to keep most of the airplane’s production units in the U.S. But in a time when this country’s infrastructure, healthcare, education, and human services needs are all dramatically underfunded, I’m not convinced that maintaining all of our current pork-barrel spending while purchasing cost-efficient new systems is the right answer…

The Cost of Space

There was an interesting article on the Vox website a week or so ago about the relative costs of exploring and colonizing space relative to the amounts our government spends on other things. It’s no secret that I have been in favor of space exploration for as long as anyone can remember, going back to early childhood when I watched Neil Armstrong step out onto the surface of the Moon for the first time and “helped” (to the extent that a six-year-old can help) my father build a plastic model of the Apollo spacecraft. But over the years since Apollo space travel has lost a lot of its popular support and interest, and increasingly people seem convinced that moving beyond Low Earth Orbit is prohibitively expensive under any conditions short of a full-blown Cold War pissing contest. It turns out that this isn’t exactly the case…

For example, the cost of building and deploying the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, everybody’s favorite high-tech boondoggle, is running about $29 billion per year (projected) over the course of its 50 year service life. The cost of a manned mission to Mars is estimated at about $5 billion per year over 20 years – about $100 billion compared to $1.5 trillion, if you prefer. Granted that no one has ever built the equipment to go to Mars, the price differential might not be quite as high as it appears; my point here is that a Mars project could run 100% over budget and still leave $19 billion a year over for F-35 units…

If that is too speculative – and I can see how it might be, given the currently unknown issues involved in interplanetary travel – how about something more down to Earth? Ask anyone you like which the US spends more money on, NASA or the Post Office, and see what they say. Most people would tell you that the USPS is supposed to make money, or at least break even; there are years where it loses money, but not that much. According to the USPS and NASA websites, however, our government lost $5.5 billion on the Post Office last year, while NASA’s Planetary Science program (that’s everything they’re working on that relates to the planets, moons and asteroids) received just $1.35 billion. To be fair, the whole of NASA’s budget is bigger than what we lost on the Post Office – it’s about $16 billion according to the agency’s own 2015 projections. But we should also note that this is still only a third of what we lost on Medicare fraud according to the GAO – not what we spent on actually providing Medicare benefits to the people who qualify for them, but what the Federal government lost on overpayments, benefits sent in error, and outright fraud…

If that’s not crazy enough for you, consider that according to the GAO, in 2013 the Federal government’s Office of Personnel Management spent just under $85 million on payments to Federal retirees who were, at that time, already dead. Again, that’s not counting death benefits or payments made to spouses or dependents; that’s the money literally thrown away. By contrast, the New Horizons spacecraft, which is due to reach Pluto later this year, costs about $78 million per year. And that’s not even counting silly things, like the fact that the U.S. Mint loses $105 million per year on pennies and nickels – pennies cost more than 1 cent to make, and nickels cost more than 5 cents to produce…

Why does he tell us this? I hear some of you asking. After all, it’s not as though I can tell you what we stand to make on our investment; I can’t even tell you for certain what the benefits of commercial utilization of space are likely to be. My point here is that the income from things as simple as communications satellites, memory foam, advances in electronics and the so-called “space metals” is already incredible, and all of the commercial space flight thus far is just barely scratching the surface of that potential waiting a few thousand miles overhead. There may be good reasons why we should not go to space; there may be more important or more immediate uses for the necessary resources here on Earth. I’m just saying that whatever those arguments might be, cost isn’t one of them…

Your Tax Dollars At Work!

The other day I was reading a story online about some of the agencies that have been receiving surplus equipment from the US military through the U.S. Department of Defense’s Excess Property Program. If you haven’t heard of this, it’s the same program through which the police force in Ferguson got all of the armored vehicles, assault rifles, tactical body armor, black uniforms and helmets, and other gear that made them look less like law enforcement officers and more like motorized infantry. In theory, this will allow local governments to obtain the equipment they would need in order to deal with major threats to the community, like terrorist attacks or natural disasters, without draining more money from their budget than they could possibly afford. In practice, however, there seem to be a few problems with this idea…

To begin with, any law enforcement agency that routinely makes use of this gear during non-disaster, non-catastrophe conditions is going to have an image problem. The sight of a wave of officers dressed in black tactical gear and body armor with military-grade rifles, grenade launchers, and armored vehicles is enough to convince anyone seeing it that the people running that agency have gone power-mad and are reacting with excessive force just so they can play with their exciting new toys. The sight of that kind of firepower being aimed at unarmed civilians staging a protest against unjustified use of deadly force is going to make an already tense situation worse, and the fact that such equipment (and the people using it) frequently are being used in inappropriate situations does not help…

Every time a police department deploys a SWAT team, complete with assault rifles and armored vehicles, in order to search for suspects who have never actually lived at the address being invaded, everyone in this country is a little less free than they had been, and all of the traditional animosity and distrust between underserved and disenfranchised communities and their local authorities become that much worse. But some of these scenes are enough to convince even social conservatives that things have gone too far. For example, last week the San Diego Unified School District acquired its own armored vehicle under this program, a mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle or MRAP, of the kind used for army patrols in Afghanistan…

You can catch the story from the local public radio station’s home page if you’d like; there are some really great pictures included (even if one of them has been digitally altered) that give you an idea of the size of the vehicle involved. The school district is insisting that they will only use the MRAP as a rescue vehicle, to knock down walls or transport children to safety in the event of an “active shooter” situation or a fire or earthquake. No one has explained, as yet, what is going to happen if they accidentally knock down a wall on top of some unsuspecting class, or how they appear to have managed to get through the last century-plus of operations without owning a vehicle whose armor can stop small-arms fire and IDE explosions, if this need is so critical. But nearly as bad, at least in my opinion, is the inherent squandering of government funds involved here – because that’s our money they’re throwing away…

Since the despicable attacks of 13 years ago today there have been exactly zero armed incursions on American soil, and exactly that many occasions when local law enforcement would have had occasion to use military-grade weapons to repel one. The world is a more dangerous place than it was decades ago, but nearly all of the threats to our nation and our way of life are made up of covert attacks and shadow warfare carried out at levels that local police forces will never encounter. The only possible benefit of this military surplus give-away is to require the armed forces to buy new gear, which funnels more public funds into the companies that make it. The whole thing is a mass of the worst possible kind of pork-barrel spending, covered with a two-faced mock-patriotic flag-waving justification stinking to high heaven of both social and financial inequity…

And I object to it, in the strongest possible terms, because the funds we are giving away consist entirely of money we are borrowing from other nations – some of which aren’t all that friendly…