The Bunker: Back to the past

STATUS QUO ANTE BELLUM

Back where we started?

Following the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, we have ended up with status quo ante bellum — Latin for “the state existing before the war.” Or perhaps we should term it status trump ante bellum — STAB, as in between the shoulder blades — given that it:

• Befuddled U.S. allies who Trump didn’t consult before going to war, and who he bizarrely berated for not supporting it after he launched it.
• A pusillanimous Congress, which has only drawn attention to its increasing irrelevance by lacking the courage to rein in a wayward commander-in-chief.
• A confused U.S. public, who awoke the morning of February 28 to learn their president had launched a surprise attack on a long-time foe that, nonetheless, posed no imminent threat to their nation.
• Israel, which thought Trump had its back in its wholehearted effort to destroy Iran. In reality, he only half-heartedly attacked, unilaterally pulling back as the war began dragging down his political fortunes. In so doing, he gave up whatever leverage the U.S. military might have given him, which has led to the vacuous 14-point peace plan signed June 17 between Washington and Tehran.
• Clarity, which is all but absent in that peace deal. “In my 52 years in the foreign policy world,” the CIA’s former top lawyer said, “I have never seen such a poorly drafted document.”
• Victory, which is decidedly MIA. Instead of the “unconditional surrender” demanded by Trump, Iran (as of now) keeps its nukes, ballistic missiles, terrorist proxies, and regime. As battered as they all may be, Tehran’s pledges to rein them in are belied by history. “This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) says.
• The 13 U.S. troops who, under orders from their commander-in-chief without the backing of U.S. allies, the U.S. Congress, or the U.S. public, died honorable deaths in a poorly planned war.

Reams have been written, with much more to come, about the costs and benefits of this conflict. But make no mistake about it: Its fleeting tactical triumphs, as worthy and hard-earned as they may have been, pale alongside its long-term strategic shortcomings.

CARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY

Teaming up to supply the Pentagon

Lockheed Martin, the country’s biggest defense contractor, is joining forces with General Motors, the nation’s biggest car manufacturer, to provide the Pentagon with more weapons. “What does a THAAD air defense interceptor have in common with Corvette?” Lockheed’s operations chief Frank St. John asked last week. “Well, both of them are highly engineered, both of them are precision manufactured, both of them have broad and diverse supply chains, and both of them are produced at rate.”

The Iran war has punctured the myth that a few costly weapons can prevail over lots of cheap ones. The Pentagon is alarmed. President Donald Trump has invoked the Defense Production Act to urge arms makers to churn out more weaponry. “I hereby find that conditions exist which may pose a direct threat to the national defense or its preparedness programs,” Trump wrote Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the June 11 memo (PDF). He cited “limited production capacity, fragile supply chains, long-lead dependencies, and related production bottlenecks.”

Funny how the Lockheed chief mentioned the Chevrolet Corvette, among GM’s most costly models — up to $218,000 — in this current partnership. They accounted for a modest 25,835 of the 4,547,918 vehicles — 0.6% — GM built last year. And while it’s admittedly an “exquisite” automobile, that’s precisely the kind of weaponry the Pentagon can’t afford to buy in the quantities needed. Alas, it seems the initial Lockheed-GM effort is dedicated to buying more such silver bullets.

The Bunker has an interest in this marriage made in carnage, having driven products made by both Lockheed and GM. As a rookie reporter more than 45 years ago, he took a swell spin in an F-16, impressed by its power, agility, and the immense human pyramid it takes to keep such a plane flying.

But he was decidedly less impressed with the GM product sitting back home in his driveway at the time. Thankfully, St. John didn’t cite that Pontiac Sunbird as an exemplar of excellence. The Bunker bought a 1979 Sunbird for $3,500 because of fond memories of Dad’s 1957 Pontiac. “For someone primed to love the Pontiac brand, the Sunbird was a disheartening experience,” The Bunker wrote of its first brand-new car, following Pontiac’s demise in 2009. “It was a lemon, a cut-rate and an ill-aimed stab at beating the Japanese competition in the growing market for smaller cars spawned by rising fuel prices.”

Granted, that was a long time ago. JD Power’s latest dependability ratings show that GM’s brands — Buick, Chevy, and Cadillac — rank higher than nameplates from Audi, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Land Rover, Mercedes, Porche, Toyota, Volvo, and Volkswagen.

Now that’s an impressive victory.

TANKER CANKER

Gassing up up there is still tough

It’s challenging for us civilians to assess military hardware, given its complexity. That’s why we pay special attention to simpler stuff, like the Air Force’s 25-year quest to replace its ancient aerial tanker fleet with Boeing’s new KC-46. Such planes are vital in combat, topping off tanks of thirsty fighters and bombers via hoses protruding from the tankers’ tails. How hard can it be to build a flying gas station?

Plenty, it turns out. According to a June 10 report from the Government Accountability Office, the Air Force missed its tanker targets from 2019 to 2025, in large part because of its troubled KC-46. The plane’s remote camera-to-screen refueling boom, a video-game-like contrivance controlled by an operator in the cockpit far away from the boom itself, continues to be plagued with problems. It is a considerably more complicated system than the physical eyeballs peering through a window that refueling-boom operators at the rear of older tankers use to guide the refueling probe. In fact, the last time the service released its mission-capable rates (for 2024), the Eisenhower-era KC-135 tankers were ready 68% of the time, compared to the new KC-46’s 62% (the service wouldn’t let GAO publish the planes’ current readiness rates). The Air Force has bought 183 of the roughly $235 million planes, and it wants 75 more (at $334 million apiece.)

The GAO said that KC-46 operators “expressed concerns about Boeing’s quality control procedures and described a variety of issues that they observed with the new aircraft, including frequently failing electrical components on the boom, sensors that do not perform accurately, airframe cracks, and other structural issues.”

Two days after the GAO report, the Air Force released an investigation (PDF) into a 2025 accident that sent a $10 million KC-46 refueling boom plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean. The mishap occurred during a failed midair effort to refuel an F-22 fighter. No one was hurt. The inquiry blamed both the boom operator and F-22 pilot for failing to coordinate their fuel handoff. The resulting “nozzle binding” — where the tanker’s gas supply line gets stuck inside the receiving aircraft’s fuel inlet — stressed, then snapped, the 2,500-pound boom.

But veteran refuelers suggest another cause. They insist such problems rarely happen aboard the older, non-video refueling systems. This latest stuck-nozzle case is the fourth involving the KC-46 since 2022. Flinging such hardware amid flowing aviation fuel and two airplanes flying within 35 feet of each other at 25,000 feet is dangerous work. The KC-135 “had the boom op[erator] staring out a physical window and the boom’s controls were more manual,” one former refueler posted in response to a Task & Purpose article on the mishap. “This new system uses an electronic joystick on the flightdeck with the boom [operator] wearing VR [Virtual Reality] goggles fed through stereoscopic cameras to give it a 3D sensation. The manual feedback has been removed.”

An ex-fighter pilot agreed. “Funny, in almost 2,000 hours of fighter time with hundreds of refuelings, I have never experienced nor heard of such incidents on any other tanker,” he wrote. “Maybe they should examine the boom’s engineering.”

Turns out, the Pentagon inspector general did that five years ago. It resulted in a damning report (PDF). It seems that when it comes to military hardware, complicated and costly beats cheap and conventional every time. Here’s hoping that the Air Force’s luck holds out in its continuing game of refuelers’ Russian roulette.

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