The Bunker: Latest Herd of Hardware Headaches

The Bunker, delivered to our subscribers Wednesdays at 7 a.m., is a newsletter from the desk of National Security Analyst Mark Thompson. Sign up here to receive it first thing, or check back Wednesday afternoon for the online version.

This week in The Bunker: the loony $12 billion battle over who gets to make sure the new ICBM fleet works; Star Wars’ new interceptor, along with prototypically poor Pentagon procurement practices, has a nearly $1 billion price tag; guess who pays if Mother Nature picks on parked F-35s; and more.

ICBMADNESS

Contractors duke out new nuke missile deal

So much of what drives Pentagon spending is hidden from those of us on the outside. That’s because so much defense spending isn’t for the big weapons that grab all the headlines, but for the undergirding scaffolding that supports them. Take the yet-to-be-built $141 billion LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, for example. It’s one leg, along with Navy missile-firing submarines and Air Force bombers, of the Cold War-era nuclear triad. On July 8 the Pentagon announced, apparently with a straight face, that the new ICBM is vital and must be bought despite its cost skyrocketing (sorry) by 81% since 2020.

The latest ICBM contract dispute is too complicated for The Bunker’s feeble mind, but basically it boils down to this: Two companies have been fighting a battle royale for years for a $12 billion (yes, you read that right) contract to make sure all the parts of the nation’s newest ICBMs can play well together when the button is pushed.

Since 2013, BAE Systems has held the “Integration Support Contract” for the current Minuteman III ICBM force. In 2022, it beat out Guidehouse to continue doing the same work on the Sentinel, now delayed to be fingers-crossedly fielded in the early 2030s. Guidehouse protested the award to the Government Accountability Office, whose job it is (among other things) to ensure federal contracts are awarded fairly (PDF). The GAO ruled the award was sketchy, and recommended (PDF) the Air Force re-evaluate the competing bids. Upon so doing, the Air Force flipped in February, awarding the contract to Guidehouse.

BAE — surprise! — protested. The company complained about the Air Force’s “evaluation of professional employee compensation plans, cost realism, and the resulting award decision,” the GAO said in its June 18 decision, siding with BAE this time around. “We recommend,” it concluded (PDF), “that the agency, at a minimum, re-evaluate offerors’ entire proposals, consistent with the solicitation, and make a new source selection decision.”

Reading the full decision (PDF) reveals how stultifyingly stupid government procurement has become. It has led to armadas of attorneys clashing with legions of lawyers (check out the decision’s first page). It’s another reason to scrap the most dangerous leg of the nation’s nuclear triad.

Guidehouse, meet Bleak House.

BILLION-DOLLAR BULLETS

Pentagon’s Stars Wars shoppe is off-target

We hear it about warplanes, we hear it about warships, and we hear it about armor. So why should we think that the Pentagon’s development of its latest Star Wars bullet should be any different? Once again, exaggerated threats are leading to prematurely building a super weapon that cannot be built on time or on budget.

In a June 26 report, the Government Accountability Office said the Next Generation Interceptor “is planning to overlap design and production activities to accelerate flight testing.” The program’s schedule “is already optimistic when compared to development timeframes of similar weapon systems.” Plus, it’s relying too much on simulations “that do not fully represent how the warfighter intends to use the system.”

The NGI will replace existing warhead-killers in the 44 silos in Alaska and California that are the Pentagon’s Ground-Based Midcourse defense system. Unlike the older version, the NGI is designed to thwart enemy missiles with multiple warheads and/or decoys. It marks the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency’s second try to build a better warhead-killer to defend the nation from a limited (official Defense Department code for “North Korea”) missile attack. It scrapped the Redesigned Kill Vehicle program in 2019 after it ran into a brick wall of problems and saw its developmental price tag triple. But that $1.2 billion was peanuts for the Missile Defense Agency, which spends (PDF) about $10 billion annually. So don’t expect Lockheed’s NGI to be a bargain. Pentagon accountants estimate the first batch of 20 will cost more than $17 billion to buy and operate, close to $1 billion a bullet.

F-35 STORM DAMAGE?

Guess who would be footing the bill

Deep in the heart of Texas, Lockheed’s Fort Worth plant pumps out about nine F-35s a month. But only those paying close attention to the trials and tribulations of the costliest weapon system in this planet’s history know that the U.S. government has refused to take delivery of them for the past year. That’s because they’re lacking the latest upgrades required by the U.S. government.

So, these shiny new warbirds are piling up somewhere in Texas, although details about their location and total number (approaching 100, worth an estimated $10 billion) are being kept secret so bad guys can’t blow them up. At least that was The Bunker’s initial suspicion.

Those pesky green eyeshades at the Government Accountability Office warned in May that this tarmac traffic jam is risky. “It is unique for so many critical DOD aircraft to be waiting for DOD acceptance, instead of stored at lower densities across many military locations throughout the world,” the GAO said (PDF). “This creates unique financial and schedule risks to DOD.”

But it may be tornados — not terrorists — that pose the biggest threat to those undelivered F-35s. And that, along with hail and wind, could be a bigger problem as summer’s heat fries their fuselages (assuming they’re parked outside, which neither the Pentagon nor Lockheed will say, citing — of course — security concerns).

Turns out that Pentagon regs limit Lockheed’s liability for such damage to a measly $100,000 per $100 million plane. That’s according to a July 5 article by Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg, the Pentagon Press Corps Chief Investigative Ferret (pronounced “PEEK-sif” inside the building). It’s funny how that works: While there’s plenty of both buyer-and-builder-blame to go around for the F-35 fiasco, innocent bystanders (aka “taxpayers”) always seem to bear the bulk of the burden for such blunders.

WHAT WE’RE READING

Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently

→ “Now hear this!”

The U.S. could be in deep trouble in its next war because of the Defense Department’s “oligopolistic production of expensive weapons” and the “ossified Pentagon procurement process” Marine veteran Bing West wrote July 1 for the hawkish Hoover Institution.

→ NATO readies for Trump

The world’s most successful military alliance, chary of ex-president Donald Trump, readies for his possible return to the Oval Office, Paul McLeary & Co. reported in Politico July 5.

→ Wary eye…

Under a six-year-old law, the Treasury Department wants to boost from 171 to 227 the number of U.S. military sites where it can review nearby land sales to ensure dubious foreign interests are not involved, Fatima Hussein of the Associated Press reported July 8.

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