The Bunker: Is Real Change Coming to the Pentagon?
This week in The Bunker: How much fundamental reform could the Trump administration bring to a bloated Department of Defense; the Navy pushes for a new nuclear-tipped cruise missile that another president threw overboard more than 30 years ago; the U.S. provides military aircraft to the same communist government it fought 50+ years ago in Vietnam; and more.
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: How much fundamental reform could the Trump administration bring to a bloated Department of Defense; the Navy pushes for a new nuclear-tipped cruise missile that another president threw overboard more than 30 years ago; the U.S. provides military aircraft to the same communist government it fought 50+ years ago in Vietnam; and more.
CHANGES AHEAD…
Low-hanging fruit, or real reform?
There’s a distant rumbling on the horizon that changes are coming to the U.S. military. There’s been a one-two punch: the nation’s colossal failure in Afghanistan, and Donald Trump’s election. It’s clear that the U.S. is not getting its money’s worth when it comes to the Pentagon, and that the President-elect and his team of national-security rabble-rousers could be in a good position to change how the nation defends itself — and just what constitutes national defense. But whether that far off rumbling is a fleeting thunderstorm, or a sustained artillery barrage capable of knocking down today’s U.S. military, and rebuilding it into something better, remains to be seen.
The Bunker hopes for real reform. But so far, Trump & Co. seem more like a dermatologist removing surface blemishes than a surgeon ready for amputations and reconstructive surgery. “We will secure PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH,” Trump said November 27. Pete Hegseth, his defense secretary nominee, said he wants to “make America lethal again.” For those with short memories, “peace through strength” is a phrase — and “lethal” a word — that tends to be brandished by those eager to spend more on the U.S. military.
Trump and his team appear preoccupied with cashiering generals pushing diversity efforts, or who played a role in the shambolic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Yet those officers were implementing “woke” policies imposed on them by civilian Pentagon leaders, and carrying out an Afghan withdrawal ordered by their civilian superiors — including Trump — as best they could. Neither is at the heart of what ails the U.S. armed forces. They are distractions from the required retooling of the U.S. military.
Even Elon Musk’s disdain for the F-35 is less than it seems. “The F-35 design was broken at the requirements level, because it was required to be too many things to too many people,” Musk recently tweeted. “This made it an expensive & complex jack of all trades, master of none.” Tapped by Trump to run an advisory “Department of Government Efficiency,” Musk linked to a critical internal Pentagon report (PDF) the Project On Government Oversight provided to Bloomberg News. “Manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway,” Musk added. The Bunker could hardly agree more, and that’s why POGO’s Center for Defense Information has been a persistent F-35 critic.
But even if Musk pushes to kill the F-35 — and gets Trump and Congress to go along — the Pentagon has already bought 36% of the F-35s it wants (at least 881 of 2,456). That’s not a bad batting average when compared to the 25% of F-22s (187 of 750), and 16% of B-2s (21 of 132), the Pentagon actually ended up buying compared to the number it wanted. If Musk is serious about remaking the U.S. military, he should try to aim his fire at the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance fighter (PDF), its new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, or the Navy’s increasingly vulnerable fleet of aircraft carriers.
Real change will only come when the nation decides that the size and structure of the post-World War II U.S. military has outlived its usefulness. “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,” Ronald O’Rourke argued (PDF) in a November 20 update of his regular assessment of the U.S. military for the Congressional Research Service. But that “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.”
ONE STEP FORWARD, ONE STEP BACK
Resurrecting a sub-launched cruise missile
A welcome breath of fresh air blew through the stale atmosphere of nuclear arms control 33 years ago, when President George H.W. Bush unveiled unilateral cuts in deployed U.S. nuclear weapons. “The United States will withdraw all tactical nuclear weapons from its surface ships and attack submarines,” he told the nation on September 27, 1991. “This means removing all nuclear Tomahawk cruise missiles from U.S. ships and submarines.”
Never mind.
On November 15, the Navy said it wants a new kind of nuclear cruise missile to replace those Bush scrapped. The Nuclear-Armed Sea-Launched Cruise Missile (PDF) program “has been established to provide a theater nuclear system capable of providing a proportional response, be survivable, and fielded on regionally-present platforms,” the service said.
This should come as no surprise. The first Trump administration, in its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, said (PDF) it wanted such a missile “to provide additional diversity in platforms, range, and survivability,” (apparently, Trump supports some kinds of diversity). The Biden administration proposed killing the missile in its 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, but Congress ordered it to steam ahead. The Navy admiral responsible for its development says the missile would require “an entirely new industrial base” to build it.
Basically, returning to such nuclear cruise missiles with smaller warheads would give the U.S. the ability to:
-- Deter a nuclear war, by showing foes armed with similar weapons that the U.S. can match them, mini-nuke for mini-nuke.
-- Encourage a nuclear war, by lowering the threshold for their use.
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered drills with such tactical nuclear weapons earlier this year. On November 19, he lowered the threshold for Moscow’s use of nuclear weapons in response to Ukraine’s deep strikes inside Russia with U.S.-supplied conventional missiles.
Such actions could trigger “wars of assured self-destruction,” William Langewiesche warned in the New York Times December 2. “…the use of small nuclear weapons again seems possible, deterrence is weakening and fools dream of managing nuclear escalation in the midst of battle.”
HO CHI WING
Vietnam gets U.S. military trainer aircraft
The U.S. delivered five T-6 Texan aircraft to Vietnam November 20. It’s the first U.S. aircraft delivered to the still-communist Vietnam since the U.S. backed the losing anti-communist South Vietnamese side during the Vietnam War, at a cost of 58,220 U.S. troop lives.
Will the Taliban be next?
WHAT WE’RE READING
Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently
Tensions over China are forcing the Navy to figure out how to shorten the months it now takes to reload cruise missiles onto its warships, the Wall Street Journal reported December 2.
The Navy needs $3.5 billion more because of cost overruns on three of its newest submarines, Bloomberg News reported November 25.
The number of serious Navy accidents at sea reached a 10-year high in fiscal 2024, nearly double the recent annual average, the U.S. Naval Institute said November 22.
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Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Thompson has been covering the Pentagon for more than 45 years.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Thompson, a national security analyst for the Center for Defense Information at POGO, has been covering the Pentagon for more than 45 years.
