The Bunker: Rhetorical Warfare

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“EXQUISITE” TIMING

The genesis of a heat-seeking wordhead

When it comes to the Pentagon, words can sometimes be brandished as well as weapons. Whether they can be as lethal remains to be seen. One increasingly prominent example is “exquisite,” weaponized by then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates 15 years ago when he proposed shifting hundreds of billions of dollars from costly legacy platforms “truly in the exquisite category” to cheaper and simpler ones.

Subordinates got the hint. “We have had a temptation to design and try to build the most exquisite systems,” then-Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz said following Gates’ criticism. “My observation is we went way over … on trying to build too many things on the same” weapon.

“Even as the world is experiencing a proliferation of smart, small, and inexpensive products in a widening range of fields, the Department of Defense continues to pursue a buying strategy of fewer but more exquisite systems,” Marine veteran and military scholar T. X. Hammes wrote in 2016. But building super weapons is a fool’s game, he said. The “rule of thumb,” he added, is that buying “the last 5% of capability adds 50%” to a weapon’s price tag. And the Pentagon yearns for that final 5%.

The U.S. military has always argued it requires the flashiest state-of-the-art hardware to defeat foes while reducing risk to U.S. troops. But the Pentagon, with its Replicator drone-building program, may finally be taking a tentative first step toward Gates’ goal. “America still benefits from platforms that are large, exquisite, expensive, and few,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said a year ago. “But Replicator will galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many.”

You know this debate is having an impact when defense contractors zing a competitor’s weapon for being too exquisite. That’s what happened last week when a Raytheon executive went after a super-secret Lockheed missile. Lockheed’s AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile (JATM) will provide “exquisite capability for the U.S. Air Force warfighters and the Navy warfighters,” Jon Norman, a Raytheon vice president, said. JATM will “address the advanced threat, all the countermeasures, the electronic countermeasures that the threats will employ against us. It has exquisite capability against that.” It is also going to be, he added redundantly, a “very expensive weapon.”

No kidding: the Air Force has sought $6.5 million to build a storage vault for the missile at Hill Air Force Base in Utah: “Because of the classified nature of this program,” the service says, “AIM 260A JATM assets cannot be housed in shared facilities with legacy munitions; and must be supported by a facility designed to meet specific operational requirements, and the stricter Special Access Program Facility security requirements.” The Pentagon has released no cost estimate for the missile itself.

Now granted, Norman was repeatedly citing the exquisiteness of Lockheed’s missile only as leverage to encourage the Pentagon to keep buying his company’s cheaper AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM).

But in the mad, mad world of Pentagon procurement, you’ve got to start somewhere.

SPEAKING OF EXQUISITE WEAPONS

Time to plan for the next war instead of the last?

It’s a myth that dinosaurs waded into ancient tar pits, got stuck, and died. But it’s a metaphor that works when it comes to the Defense Department and the future of warfare. The Pentagon “continues to rely on an outmoded and costly technical production system to buy tanks, ships and aircraft carriers that new generations of weapons — autonomous and hypersonic — can demonstrably kill,” two Pentagon veterans say. Raj M. Shah, an F-16 pilot, and Christopher Kirchhoff, who headed the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley office, grouse that too much money is being poured into big-ticket weapons instead of the autonomous systems they believe will rewrite the rules of war.

They cite the Pentagon’s crown jewel — the F-35 fighter — as an example of all that is wrong. “This $2 trillion program has fielded fighter airplanes with less processing power than many smartphones,” the pair wrote in a September 13 New York Times op-ed. “It’s the result of a technology production system bespoke to the military and separate from the consumer technology ecosystem. The F-35 design was largely frozen in 2001, the year the Pentagon awarded its contract to Lockheed Martin. By the time the first F-35 was rolling down the runway, technology’s state of the art had already flown far past it.”

It’s damn tough knowing how the next war will be fought. The Pentagon hedges its bets, embracing new technologies — so long as it can keep buying the old ones. The danger posed by advocating a new way of waging war is that instead of replacing the old way, U.S. taxpayers will end up buying both.

ALLIED ASSEMBLY LINES

A smarter way to build weapons?

Presidents, generals, and diplomats are forever saying we need allies to win wars. But they’ll rarely say we need allies to build the weapons we need to win those wars. “Despite the United States’ long history of fighting alongside allies in coalitions, the defense acquisition workforce often operates in isolation from these partners,” Dan Ward, of the Mitre Corp. says.

The Pentagon’s “program offices responsible for developing new systems generally do so in isolation from the very allies who would fight alongside American forces,” Ward, a former Air Force acquisition contrarian, writes in a September 12 paper (PDF). “‘Train the way we fight’ may be a guiding principle for military personnel, but ‘buy the way we fight’ is not an established principle for defense acquisitions. This must change.” Ward argues that more collaboration would yield more innovative weapons, better coordination when waging war, and cost savings. He proposes policy changes to encourage such teaming.

Mitre boasts on its website that it was founded in 1958 “as a not-for-profit company … that doesn’t compete with industry” and is “trusted to deliver data-driven results and recommendations without any conflicts of interest.”

Of course, U.S. defense contractors might deem Mitre’s non-profit status the biggest conflict of all.

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

→ War gamesmanship

The Pentagon recently conducted a war game in Florida that included a scenario pitting a fleet of U.S. Reaper drones against the Chinese military in the South China sea, Thomas Newdick reported September 13 at The War Zone.

→ $1,000,000,000,000

Brent M. Eastwood, a former U.S. Army officer, offers a grim tally on how the Pentagon has gotten to the verge of spending $1 trillion annually in the National Security Journal September 13.

→ “You want mayo on all those subs?”

The Navy has awarded the Texas non-profit BlueForge Alliance a $951 million contract to boost submarine production, atop the $1.3 billion it already has received, Sam LaGrone reported September 10 on the U.S. Naval Institute’s website.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Thompson has been covering the Pentagon for more than 45 years.