The Bunker: Still crazy after 250 years

HAPPY QUARTER-MILLENNIUM, ‘MERICA!

Congratulations to U.S. for making it this far…

Happy 250th! You know you’re creeping up there when you realize you’ve been reporting on the U.S. military for about 20% of the nation’s life. In fact, The Bunker fondly recalls toasting the country’s 200th birthday as a young reporter at a weekly Rhode Island newspaper. Although the nation had just extricated itself from the twin morasses of Vietnam and Watergate, optimism suffused the air. The mood for this 250th celebration, alas, is more melancholy than celebratory. Perhaps that’s due to age. Or sage, leavened with rage.

It is an honor to report on, and salute, the uniformed men and women in the U.S. military. They are the ones, after all, charged with carrying out the sometimes ditzy orders (cf., Iran) of their often uninformed civilian superiors (we’re using that word in a flow-chart sense, not in a common-sense sense). Last week seemed more zany than normal, almost as if the national-security state wanted to commemorate this significant national milestone in style:

“NO-RADAR ALERT!”

The poster child for poor Pentagon procurement

One reason the Defense Department’s $196 million F-35 jet fighter costs so much is its complex network of shapes, coatings, and electronics designed to elude radar. But such stealthiness is the least of the problems of the F-35s now being delivered to the U.S. military: They’re missing their nearly $9 million-a-copy radars, critical to fighting and winning in combat. It’s the equivalent of carbines without bullets, tanks without armor, ships without oceans, nuclear weapons without atoms, missile defense without hype.

Basically, Northrop Grumman hasn’t been able to build the F-35’s new-and-improved AN/APG-85 radar fast enough to get it into the upgraded Lockheed planes now rolling off the assembly line. And the existing radar won’t fit into the new-and-improved F-35. So far, six Marine F-35s have been delivered without radars. An unspecified number of future Air Force and Navy F-35s will be radarless, as well. The new radars won’t be delivered until at least 2028.

The problem is emblematic of the entire F-35 program. The $2 trillion Frankenfighter is plagued with readiness woes because the Pentagon didn’t buy enough spare parts to keep its fleet flying.

What’s especially rich about the missing radars is that it marks the second time that exaggerated threats have led to procurement snafus. The initial rush — putting the F-35 into production while its blueprints kept changing — was “acquisition malpractice,” Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer said in 2012, a decade after the program began.

This time around, the Pentagon says it “deliberately undertook” a risky “highly concurrent development and production program” to improve the F-35 so it can “project air superiority against future threats.” Stated simply, “highly concurrent” means manufacturing stuff before its design is finished. And that’s led to the MIA radars and is precisely what Kendall denounced 14 years ago.

There are some lessons the Defense Department will never learn. Apparently, inflating threats deflates the Pentagon’s collective IQ.

That’s not to say these radar-less F-35s will be sitting on the tarmac until their new electronic guts are ready. The Pentagon now owns a growing fleet of the world’s most costly jet trainers. Assuming they have the spare parts needed to take off.

MISSILES ‘R’ US

Doubling down on costly munitions

The Pentagon awarded Lockheed a potential $35 billion contract June 24 to quadruple production of a costly high-tech interceptor missile. Even so, the deal only calls for boosting production of the company’s Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile to a relatively paltry 400 a year.

But as the war in Iran has made clear, lots of cheap drones can overwhelm smaller arsenals of so-called “exquisite” weapons like these $15.5 million THAAD missiles craved by the Pentagon. “Defense contractors promised that these systems are capable of defending against ‘the full spectrum’ of threats and complex raid attacks,” colleague Virginia Burger here at the Center for Defense Information, notes. “And yet, in the actual moment when they needed to succeed, the enemy was able to exploit their known weaknesses with cheap drones.” Bottom line: The Pentagon can’t spend its way out of this challenge with these kinds of costly solutions.

But the care and feeding of one’s political masters may ease such concerns. Lockheed is constructing a new Alabama factory to boost THAAD production. The company is calling it “Building 47,” apparently a bow to the current commander-in-chief, the nation’s 47th president. And it’s donating $5 million to build a helipad at the White House so its new VH-92 Marine One presidential chopper can land on the South Lawn without burning the grass. That was originally a requirement (PDF). Perhaps Lockheed could do the same for F-35 shortfalls.

The Defense Department and Lockheed inked that THAAD contract as the Senate pushed for cheaper munitions. And while you’re at it, the upper chamber said, come up with a better name than “THAAD.” The Senate wants (PDF) the Pentagon to change the names of what it calls “critical munitions” to something more Madison Avenue-y. If a weapon is now known by “an acronym or alphanumeric code,” the military should change it to “a conventional name in the English language that is memorable and suitable for clear operational communication and training.”

“In the English language”? Nice touch. Good to see Congress focusing on the important stuff. Debating a declaration of war, not so much.

SKY’S THE LIMIT

Advocates push U.S. to own the heavens

If you’ve ever been to one of those all-you-can-eat smorgasbords, you know how folks tend to pile their plates with too much food for their waistline. Well, now that the Defense Department plans on serving a $1.5 trillion buffet in 2027, the military-industrial complex finds itself more ravenous than usual, and eager to contribute to its expanding wasteline.

Would-be space warriors are fighting for their slice of this ever-growing pie. China and Russia, the Mitchell Institute Spacepower Advantage Center of Excellence warns, are sharpening their satellites and readying for war up there. “Space Force,” Defense One’s headline reads, “must prepare for all-out warfare, think tank says.” Back in May, this Air and Space Force booster group urged basing U.S. troops on the moon to keep China from getting there first.

The report lists a roster of scenarios. They included U.S. foes cycling through “an escalation of hostility, employing non-kinetic means, including cyber, jamming, and lasing, and then moved to kinetic attacks, direct ascent ASATs [anti-satellite weapons], increased jamming that resulted in loss of life due to mid-air collisions, and missile attacks against fielded forces and U.S. bases,” the report warns (PDF). “Finally, teams were confronted with attacks in space that coincided with terrestrial actions.” There was even a mysterious nuclear blast in low earth orbit that “disabled hundreds of satellites” (PDF).

Luckily, the space-war backers say, the Pentagon is beginning to grapple with these threats by boosting the proposed budget for the U.S. Space Force from this year’s $31.6 billion to $71.1 billion in 2027 — a 124% increase.

The day before the report’s release, Nobel laureate Robert J. Shiller warned that the growing public fear of artificial intelligence is largely unfounded. “This Doommaxxing Has Got to Stop,” the headline above the Yale professor’s New York Times column read.

So does this moondoommaxxing.

BIRTHDAY BONANZA!

And we didn’t have room for…

…the reimposition of a vaccine mandate for recruits two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth abolished it, his continued unexplained cashiering of senior U.S. military officers, the purported rot in the Pentagon’s research arm, just how angry the rest of the world is with the U.S., Trump’s malodorous acceptance of a new Air Force One from Qatar, and, well, you get The Bunker’s drift…

Can’t wait for the next 250 years!

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