The Bunker: Keys to the Kingdom

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: New Navy chief stunned over cost of new barracks compared to the luxury Hawaiian hotel his company built; White House’s mixed messages when it comes to retooling the Pentagon; land mines return; and more.

THE NAVY’S GOLDEN KEYS

From barracks to battleships, cost control is MIA

John Phelan, freshly-minted as secretary of the Navy on March 25, has no experience building ships. Or, for that matter, in the military. So when he recently tried to figure out how smartly the sea service buys stuff, he turned to something he does know: real estate. “I see numbers on things that are eye-opening to me. … I see a barracks that costs $2.5 million a key [per room],” he said April 9, after two weeks on the job. “My old firm, we built the finest hotel in Hawaii … for $800,000 a key, and that has some pretty nice marble and some pretty nice things in it, and I’m trying to understand how we can get to those numbers.” His audience of Navy officials and contractors tittered nervously.

Well, they should be nervous. Navy shipbuilding has been rotting for years, with sailors and taxpayers footing the bill:

• The USS Gerald R. Ford carrier was delivered incomplete and 32 months late in 2017. The second Ford-class carrier, the USS John F. Kennedy, is facing “critical challenges” that will likely delay its planned July delivery date. The next in line, the USS Enterprise, will be 28 months behind schedule if delivered as planned in 2030. And prices aren’t falling: The JFK is now projected to cost $12.9 billion, the Enterprise $13.5 billion, and the Doris Miller, the fourth carrier in the class slated for delivery in 2032, $14 billion (planes not included).

• The lead boat in the Columbia class of nuclear-armed submarines, the most critical leg of the nation’s nuclear triad, is facing a delivery delay of up to 18 months.
• Only 10% of the lead frigate in the new Constellation class is finished, almost five years after the Navy awarded the contract for its construction. It is based on a European warship. The Navy hoped its version would share 85% of that vessel’s design. But it now has only 15%. Delivery of the first ship has slipped from 2026 to 2029, and its cost has ballooned from $1 billion to $1.4 billion.

Phelan said the Navy’s “gold-plated requirements” and other procurement pathologies fuel such fiascos. “I understand the Navy has its own ways of doing things, steeped in tradition and often inflexible,” he said. “Those ways, when they are dysfunctional, must be confronted daily and relentlessly in order to change.”

Only one thing missing, Lauren C. Williams at Defense One noted: “Phelan didn’t say how he would curb shipbuilding cost overruns and delays.”

You can bet top Navy officers will surely sound “Battle stations!” over Phelan’s offensive against how they do business. But whether they end up as his allies or his adversaries remains an unknown “bogey” on the Navy’s institutional radar screen.

EXECUTIVE DISORDER

World’s costliest chopping block

On April 9, the White House gave the Pentagon 90 days to come up with a list of weapons programs that are at least 15% over budget or behind schedule for potential termination. You know, because we’re getting too little bang for our bucks. That came two days after President Trump said his administration has approved a $1 trillion defense budget for 2026, which represents a 18% boost over its current $850 billion level. “We are very cost conscious,” he said, “but the military is something that we have to build and we have to be strong because you have a lot of bad forces out there now.”

That’s kind of like telling your kids to tighten their belts while you’re boosting their allowance. Needless to say, this isn’t how human nature — in the Defense Department, or anywhere else — actually works. But when you’ve a bureaucracy as hidebound and lethargic as the Pentagon, maybe you have to force-feed and starve it at the same time.

A White House fact sheet accompanying the order cited nine — nine! — Navy ship-building programs and the Air Force’s new Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile as poor performers. There are dozens of other programs that also qualify for the ax.

The Bunker, like others, cheers Trump’s push to buy weapons better. But while we’ve covered a lot of wars, we’ve covered even more Pentagon and presidential pushes for smarter procurement. Unfortunately, his marching order basically reads like he wants to spend more, on more of the same things, more quickly. “Given all the money we spend on the Pentagon,” Trump said, “it’s unacceptable that we would ever run out of ammunition or be unable to quickly produce the weapons needed.”

Aha! Now that gets to the heart of the matter. Until the nation demands simpler and cheaper ammo and weapons, it will never have enough of either.

THEY’RE BACK…

Antipersonnel landmines return

Bad things come in threes. So if nuclear proliferation is on the rise, and the U.S. is pushing to deploy weapons in space, it should come as no surprise that antipersonnel landmines are making a comeback. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine is leading front-line NATO states Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland to abandon a 1997 convention banning them.

Moscow has seeded millions of landmines inside Ukraine, making it the world’s most-mined nation. Such weapons, designed to kill troops, too often shred innocent civilians during conflicts and long after those conflicts are over. While 164 nations have signed the treaty, Russia — like China, India, Pakistan, and the U.S. — has not. The Trump administration is weakening demining operations by cutting foreign aid. Nonetheless, the pact has eliminated more than 40 million stockpiled antipersonnel mines and sharply reduced their production and use.

Even so, the treaty withdrawals do present ominous opportunities. A Finnish company has said it is ready to resume mine production to help defend Finland’s 830-mile border with Russia. And it no doubt will mean more work for Ronin and his fellow African giant pouched rats. Guinness World Records declared Cambodian-based Ronin the most successful rat mine-finder of all time on April 4 — International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action, as well as World Rat Day.

Rah-rah Ronin the Rodent!

In these grim times, we’ll take our good news wherever we can find it.

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

→ The Republicans and the Russians

Jonathan Mahler ponders in the April 12 New York Times Magazine why Trump’s White House fell for Putin’s Kremlin. Hint: It’s been a long time coming.

→ Plane speaking…

Ex-Air Force boss Frank Kendall questions the Pentagon’s recent decision to make the Boeing F-47 the nation’s first sixth-generation fighter in Defense News April 9.

→ Is this supposed to be a good thing?

The Army now has robots that “think, talk, understand like soldiers,” Kapil Kajal reported April 10 in Interesting Engineering.

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