The Bunker: Still seeking answers

MIA: Missing Is Accountability

The fog of no information

It took the U.S. military 47 days in 1988 to explain why the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290. In 1994, it took 91 days for the Defense Department to reveal how two U.S. F-15 fighters blasted a pair of U.S. UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters from the skies over Iraq, killing 26. In 1999, the Pentagon needed three days to come clean about the screwup that led a U.S. B-2 to mistakenly bomb China’s embassy in Belgrade, killing 3. In 2021, it took 19 days for the U.S. military to explain why a U.S. Hellfire missile mistakenly killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children.

Yet we have gone more than 125 days with no official explanation from the U.S. government for three critical events that happened in the Iran war’s opening hours:

• On February 28, an apparent U.S. Navy Tomahawk missile strike killed about 175 people, most of them schoolchildren, in southern Iran. The school kids deserve better.
  
• On March 1, a low-cost Iranian drone killed six U.S. Army troops in an inadequately defended command post. Their families deserve answers.
  
• On March 2, a Kuwaiti F-18 fighter pilot shot down three U.S. Air Force F-15E fighters costing about $100 million. All six crew members survived. The taxpayers deserve an accounting.

The fog of war always rolls in following such snafus. President Donald Trump was quick to blame Iran for the school attack. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the six troops killed were in a “fortified” position obliterated by a “powerful” weapon. Trump initially said U.S.-provided Kuwaiti Patriot missiles shot down the F-15s.

None dare call it balderdash.

While much of this initial self-serving spin would soon be countered by truthier accounts, that’s largely been due to outside reporting. But that’s getting tougher to do. The Defense Department has booted nearly all legitimate, independent reporters from the Pentagon. It has all but shut down regular press briefings where reporters could demand and exert pressure for official accounts when things go haywire in combat, as they invariably do. Such exchanges are a vital piece of democracy, where young Americans are being ordered to kill, and be killed, in our name. So far, such briefings have largely been replaced by one-way screeds from Hegseth and his civilian megaphonies.

What’s striking is the contrast between how quickly the administration put out assertions designed to shirk responsibility — and how long it is taking for them to own up to what actually happened. Assuming they ever do.

During decades covering the Pentagon, The Bunker recalls squirming silently in his press-room seat as senior U.S. military officials promptly stepped up to the plate to assume responsibility for war gone wrong. While painful all around, this public scrubbing acted as a cathartic cleansing agent. It was refreshing to realize that the U.S. military — and its civilian commanders — demanded no less.

These days, not so much.

SPEND MORE, TEST LESS

The Defense Department has it backwards

The Pentagon has always loved zany math. While its proposed $1.5 trillion budget for 2027 is a 42% hike over this year’s spending, it’s also cut its cadre of weapons-testing overseers by more than 75%. That’s the fiscal foolishness of Hegseth’s edict (PDF) last year to slash the Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation. DOT&E is the Pentagon shop charged with making sure that the military services are properly testing their new weapons before sending them into battle.

Those still working at DOT&E told (PDF) the Government Accountability Office in a June 30 report that their thinned ranks “increase the risk of weapon systems being delivered to the warfighters with undocumented shortfalls related to effectiveness, suitability, survivability, or lethality.” Granted, these bureaucratic survivors are hardly the most disinterested observers of the wholesale firing of their colleagues. But their assessment also is common sense.

The DOT&E staff has been cut from an authorized staff of 126 to 30 (PDF), the GAO said. Warplane-testing overseers dived from 14 to 6; ship testers sank from 15 to 8; tank testers tanked from 19 to 5.

The Pentagon’s latest budget documents show funding for the office is slated to be cut from $336.1 million this year to $112.4 million in 2027 — a two-thirds reduction. Proposed funding for live-fire testing — a critical measure of a weapon’s chances of battlefield survival — drops from $108.1 million this year to $11 million in 2027, according to Tony Bertuca at Inside Defense. That’s an eyewatering 90% cut.

Congress created DOT&E in 1983 to help lawmakers judge the war-worthiness of new weapons, aided by the office’s handy-dandy annual guides. While hardly perfect, its work is valuable because it is one of the few independent observers of the arcane art of accountable arms assembly.

The GAO report hardly comes as news here at the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight. “Pentagon cuts to DOT&E could endanger troops,” CDI Director Greg Williams cautioned 10 months ago. Hegseth counters by saying his cuts will save at least $300 million (PDF) a year. That’s the very definition of penny-wise and pound foolish for an establishment spending $2.4 trillion — with a “T,” as in testing — on bombers, bullets, boats and other weapons.

SUNK COSTS

Today’s wars, tomorrow’s bills

The United States discounts the apparent costs of its military by shifting the dollars it spends on veterans from the Department of Defense to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Maintaining these two sets of books is a neat accounting gimmick that misleads the public. The Congressional Budget Office, in its latest Atlas of Military Compensation released June 24, tries to give a fuller picture.

VA benefits, if folded into the Pentagon budget, would boost the total compensation per service member by an average of $86,000 per year (PDF), the CBO says. That, plus their basic pay (paychecks and housing allowances) non-cash benefits (largely health care), and deferred compensation (mostly pensions) give the median enlisted person, age 22, $214,000 in total compensation annually. Only $80,000 of that sum is so-called “regular military compensation.” The median officer, age 28, has a compensation package worth $282,000 a year, including $136,000 in regular military compensation.

“Since 2000, the total budget for military compensation has risen steadily, even though the number of military personnel and veterans has declined,” CBO says. “Spending by VA has accounted for most of that increase, rising from a small fraction of total spending on military personnel to about 61 percent in the President's 2026 budget request. In that budget request, total military compensation is $718 billion. (Of that total, $277 billion is for DoD, and $441 billion is for VA.)”

In other words, for every dollar the nation spends paying today’s members of the military, it’s spending $1.59 for its veterans. Spending on vets — not including inflation — is 5.4 times more now than it was in 1999.

“Furthermore, the share of veterans receiving disability compensation who are combat veterans has decreased — even though the United States was engaged in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than 10 years,” CBO adds. “Because of policy changes, veterans who served after 9/11 (known as Gulf War II veterans) are more likely to receive medical and disability benefits whether or not they served in combat.”

How much we pay our well-serving troops, and how we compensate our well-deserving veterans, are important topics worthy of greater attention. Having accurate numbers is a good place to start.

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

On the cutting room floor…

The smart-spending hawks at POGO’s Center for Defense Information and Taxpayers for Common Sense detailed July 2 how next year’s $1.5 trillion proposed defense budget can be responsibly trimmed by one-third. Talk about inflation — The Bunker wrote “How to Save a Trillion Dollars” 15 years ago — but it covered 10 years of Pentagon spending.

$ame old $tory

Despite Pentagon rhetoric about embracing small and agile suppliers, the Defense Department’s $1.5 trillion 2027 budget proposal benefits the big defense contractors and their troubled programs, POGO’s Nick Schwellenbach and Neil Gordon reported July 2.

And you think you’re having a bad day…

An Air Force pilot learning to fly a new kind of $18 million special-ops plane crashed into an Oklahoma field last fall after mistakenly turning off its fuel supply, Greg Hadley of Air & Space Forces Magazine reported June 29.

Thanks for keeping your fuel line open to The Bunker this week. Forward this newsletter to friends and let them know they can subscribe here for Wednesday morning delivery.

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