The Bunker: Doing Less, Doing it Better

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: (for your sanity, a special no-election edition): the Pentagon could learn something from Boeing; China’s nuclear stockpile grows… to 10% of the U.S.’s; the Navy smartly spending half its ship-building budget on submarines; and more.

A MODEST PROSAL

The Pentagon should follow Boeing’s lead

Boeing, the Pentagon’s #4 contractor, was once an icon of American ingenuity and industrial prowess. But it has never recovered from the tailspin following its 1997 merger with bottom-line-obsessed McDonnell Douglas. Its new Air Force Ones and aerial tankers have hit heavy turbulence. Two of its 737 MAX airliners crashed. A fuselage panel blew off one of its jets. Safety concerns about its Starliner space capsule have left two astronauts stranded in space. Its biggest union remains on strike.

Last week, Boeing decided to pull its head out of its afterburner. The decision came as the company confirmed it had lost $2 billion on defense work over the prior three months. “I think that we're better off doing less, and doing it better, than doing more and not doing it well,” brand-new Boeing boss Kelly Ortberg said October 23. To right its flailing business, Boeing plans to shed pieces of the company, likely including some of its space programs.

The U.S. and its Department of Defense should take a lesson from Ortberg. After all, embarrassments like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with flubbed programs like the F-35 fighter, the Zumwalt-class destroyer, and the Army’s repeated failure to replace its Bradley Fighting Vehicles rate right up there with Boeing’s blunders.

The U.S. was the global colossus following World War II. While it accounted for 40% of the world’s economic output in 1960, that share has fallen to 26% today. Yet Washington still sees itself as the world cop, spending close to $1 trillion annually on its military, more than the next 10 countries combined. It has more than 170,000 troops based in 178 countries around the world and sold a record $238 billion in weapons to many of them last year.

The U.S. national-security state and U.S. national-security think tanks churn out reports every year warning that the Pentagon is underfunded and that defeat is just around the corner. They all flow from official documents from the White House (PDF) and Pentagon that insist the U.S. must be ready to defend pretty much anything everywhere at any time.

The United States is the only country in the world that designs its military to be able to depart one hemisphere, cross broad expanses of ocean and air space, and then conduct sustained, large-scale military operations upon arrival in another hemisphere,” the Congressional Research Service said in an Oct. 2 assessment (PDF) exploring the size and cost of the U.S. military. “That U.S. policymakers for the past several decades have chosen to pursue, as a key element of U.S. national strategy, a goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia does not necessarily mean this goal was a correct one for the United States to pursue, or that it would be a correct one for the United States to pursue in the future.”

Boeing’s decision to trim its flaps is rooted in humility that can mature into wisdom. The U.S. should follow suit.

BE A-FRAID

The bigger-bang theory

Speaking of official documents, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency issued a report (PDF) October 23 tallying up the nuclear arsenals of potential foes. Those would be the Quartet of Evil — China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, with Beijing now seen as the frontrunner. The DIA warned in 2020 that China had about 200 atomic warheads and would at least double that by 2030. But four years later, the Pentagon’s spy shop estimates China already has 500. By 2030 the DIA projects it will have more than 1,000, “most of which will be fielded on systems capable of ranging [mil-speak for ‘hitting’] the continental United States.”

Once a nation has hundreds of nuclear weapons, the debate boils down to how high the rubble will bounce following a nuclear exchange. Talk about deterrence and counter-strikes only fuels building more atomic weapons and craftier ways to deliver them. “The threats from more advanced cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles, and other novel delivery systems, coupled with growing nuclear arsenals, are threatening U.S. military advantages,” the DIA warned (PDF).

Of course, any single additional weapon in the hands of a possible foe threatens U.S. military advantages. It’s the kind of verbal ju-jitsu the Pentagon deploys when arguing for more. The U.S., which is leveraging China’s nuclear threat to spend $1.7 trillion rebuilding its own nuclear arsenal, has roughly 10 times as many nuclear weapons as China. Yet any nuclear showdown — over Ukraine, Taiwan, or a nation to be named later — won’t be averted by building more and better atomic arms. To believe otherwise is to embrace nuclear con-fusion.

THE ORIGINAL STEALTH WEAPON

Submarines are half the Navy’s ship-building budget

If push comes to shove on the high seas, the U.S. Navy’s warships will be sitting ducks thanks to ubiquitous satellites. So it was heartening to see the Navy plans to spend a lot on submarines. “Under its 2025 plan, the Navy would spend $190 billion on shipbuilding over the next five years,” Eric J. Labs of the Congressional Budget Office reported October 22. “Half of that amount would go to submarines.”

Submarines cost about twice as much as surface warships, but their stealthiness makes them worth it. For far too long, critics maintain, the Navy’s post-World War II aircraft-carrier hangover has kept the U.S. churning out massive targets ill-suited for a world increasing filled with small, cheap, and long-range weapons. The Navy is getting a taste of this in the Red Sea, where it is downing $2,000 Houthi drones with $2 million missiles.

The same math applies in the Pacific, where China could attack a $15 billion U.S. aircraft carrier with any of the more than 1,200 missiles it could build for the same price. “If China does invade Taiwan, most of our military forces will not be able to come to that island nation’s defense,” retired Navy Captain Jerry Hendrix says. “But American submarines can.”

Unfortunately, the U.S. can’t even produce submarines at the less-than-optimum rate they’re being ordered today. It’s another example of the U.S. military preparing to fight the last war.

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

→ Lessons yet unlearned

An anonymous senior non-commissioned U.S. Army officer, who witnessed the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, said the “the American citizenry deserve an accounting” of the 20-year fiasco October 25 on West Point’s Modern War Institute website, of all places.

→ Fungi fiasco

Rampant mold plagues U.S. military housing, René Kladzyk of the Project On Government Oversight reported October 24, with lax standards leaving thousands of military families “trapped” amid spore storms.

→ Bomb cart away (PDF)

A runaway bomb cart ran into an unoccupied Air Force F-16 fighter at an undisclosed base in the Middle East last fall, doing $30 million in damage, the service said in a recent report.

Thanks for running into The Bunker this week. Consider forwarding this on to pals so they can subscribe here.