The Bunker: Summer’s hardware headaches

After a couple of weeks away enjoying the Rhode Island shore and amazing grandchildren, it’s depressing to see upon returning to the nation’s capital that not much has changed in The Bunker’s absence. The U.S. continues to flail in its war with Iran, and there’s a new wave of defense-procurement problems, which remain the grift that keeps on grifting…

ENCUMBRANCES

War has always been wider than weapons

When you run out of munitions, start launching threats. That’s obviously President Donald Trump’s latest strategy (to misuse the word) as his promised short war against Iran drags into its sixth month. It’s The Bunker’s grim mission to note where the U.S. military is falling short. Much of that is due to the military itself, but just as large a share is the responsibility of the institutional factors that fund it, enable it, and order it into action. Bottom line: Focusing on fixing an airplane in hopes that it can fly right won’t work if you only tinker with those ailerons trailing off its wings, while ignoring the fuselage, engines, and crew.

And that’s the fundamental pickle the U.S. now finds itself confronting. It’s become so dire that U.S. commanders are seeking “new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” a peculiar position for the globe’s most powerful fighting force (The Bunker’s copy of that email apparently ended up in the spam folder). It’s also hard to square with the administration’s repeated claims that it has won the war.

To mangle another metaphor, the U.S. national-security state now sees itself as a punch-drunk chef whose only response to culinary mediocrity is more salt. At the Pentagon, of course, that translates into more money. The soaring defense budget — Trump wants a bloated $1.5 trillion next year, a porcinely wasteful 42% boost — would make sense if might made right. But it doesn’t.

American power, writ large, is a three-legged stool. The most critical leg is the will of the U.S. citizenry. That was ignored when Trump launched his war against Iran. The second is the nation’s willingness to nurture good relations with allies. With the exception of Israel, that too was disregarded in Trump’s February 28 surprise attack on Iran. The third — and arguably the least important in the overall scheme of things, given the U.S. military’s overwhelming strength — are the U.S. armed forces themselves.

When one leg of a stool gets too long — spending $1.5 trillion on the military, for example — while the other two are neglected, geostrategic geometry happens. The stool — like the U.S. role in the world — begins teetering and increasingly is in danger of toppling over.

This is where the nation now finds itself. The U.S. public doesn’t want this war. The rest of the world doesn’t want this war. Yet you can bet every taxpayer’s bottom dollar that the futility of the Iranian stalemate will be leveraged by the Trump administration, and its allies, as proof that the U.S. military needs more money.

AIRPOWER

Procurement problems proliferate on high

There’s news on the Air Force’s B-52 bomber, its push to build better engines for its fighter fleet, and its efforts to build a new non-Qatari Air Force One for the commander in chief:

-- Upgrades designed to keep B-52s airborne are facing a number of cost and scheduling challenges, according to a July 31 Government Accountability Office report. Amazingly, the Air Force plans to spend $21 billion on 13 modifications, including troubled efforts to replace its engines (each B-52 has eight!) and radars. Mind you, these efforts are dedicated to keeping the Eisenhower-era B-52s flying until 2050. Heck, The Bunker is older than the B-52, which first flew in 1954. In fact, The Bunker would give his right-wing bomb bay door to be 52.

-- The Air Force isn’t happy with the quality of its jet-fighter engines, and it’s seeking new suppliers. “The current industrial base has demonstrated significant challenges, including production delays, quality control issues, and critical obsolescence,” the service said in its August 3 cry for help. (It doesn’t name names, but the Pentagon buys most of its jet fighter engines from GE Aerospace and Pratt & Whitney.) Such powerplants don’t come cheap. A 2023 cost report (PDF) on the F-35’s Pratt & Whitney engine, apparently the most recently published, put its cost at $34 million. Each.

-- A Pentagon report (PDF) released August 3 said the new pair of Air Force Ones designed to transport the president are plagued with interior design issues delaying their delivery. Boeing plans to deliver the first new Air Force One in mid-2028, and the second the following year. Unfortunately, the communications gear now being installed aboard the new planes “is not viable” beyond 2028 “due to cybersecurity and obsolescence issues,” the program manager said. “Unmitigated risk will drive an inability for Authority to Connect and Operate on vital National Security Systems required for Presidential communications.”

And that is supposed to be a problem?

The good news? The service plans to develop a new hypersonic bomber that doesn’t require runways to bomb the bejesus out of China. “Major U.S. air bases in Guam and Japan sit within range of Chinese ballistic missiles,” Interesting Engineering reported July 31. “In a high-intensity conflict, those bases could be disabled in the opening phase. An aircraft that takes off vertically, flies at hypersonic speed, and lands vertically removes runway infrastructure from the target list entirely. It can operate from a road section, a clearing, or any dispersed forward position.”

Aviation Week reported the service could award a contract to develop a prototype next month. But it noted a lengthy list of technical challenges: “advanced liquid rocket propulsion, autonomous flight control, thrust-vector control, aerodynamic control surfaces, cryogenic propellant management and high-temperature structural materials to demonstrate stable flight, controlled transition between flight regimes and reliable system performance.”

Why fret today about tomorrow’s imperfect weapons when you can be dreaming up the day-after-tomorrow’s?

SEAPOWER

Navy keeps running into rough seas

“Shipshape” means neat, tidy, and well-organized. Unfortunately, those have been attributes missing from the U.S. Navy’s ship-shaping programs for decades. A couple of fresh examples recently surfaced while The Bunker was enjoying chowder and clam cakes up north:

-- The estimated cost of Trump’s battleship program has jumped by at least 50% over earlier estimates, the Congressional Budget Office reported August 5. The first vessel is projected to cost $23.4 billion, $8 billion more than the Navy’s original guess. The entire fleet of 15 warships will cost $275 billion, or $18.3 billion per hull. That’s nearly double the expected $10 billion per-copy cost of the new Columbia-class nuclear-missile-firing submarines, the world’s most deadly — and hidden — war-fighting machine.

These numbers are incredible, as in (checking dictionary) literally unbelievable. They constitute the latest evidence that Trump’s Nutso Armed Vanity Yacht (NAVY) is sheer fantasy. These bogus barges also are an embarrassment to the admirals advocating their acquisition, whose common sense has gone AWOL.

-- Installing hypersonic missiles aboard the long-troubled Zumwalt-class of destroyers has fallen two years behind schedule, the Government Accountability Office reported July 17. Five years ago, in a desperate effort to give the tiny three-destroyer fleet a mission, the Navy decided to outfit them with the Pentagon’s Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles. These weapons — each one costs nearly $50 million — are designed “to enable the U.S. to strike valuable, heavily defended targets from a distance with a non-nuclear payload,” the GAO said. Turns out these missiles are just as troubled as the destroyers getting them.

Pentagon officials said CPS contractor Lockheed is experiencing a raft of problems producing the missile, limiting its production. “The work instructions used to build the missile are too complex for the average worker to follow,” they told the GAO. “The work instructions are largely written as engineering specifications, which the contractor provides to workers who have recently graduated from high school or vocational school.” A 2023 Navy audit of the factory where the missile is built “noted various issues relating to lack of adequate parts inspection; multiple instances of untagged expired materials, such as adhesives; and numerous instances of quality assurance steps not being followed,” the GAO said.

Nothing to see here, Lockheed insisted to Defense Scoop following the report’s release. “We are enhancing production and manufacturing processes to deliver for the Arsenal of Freedom faster,” the Pentagon’s largest contractor told the defense-industry news outlet.

And don’t worry about the delay. After all, on July 9 the Navy launched a new fast-track competition to develop the “Next Generation Hypersonics for the Department of War” (yep, that’s the program’s official name). “The goal of this prototype initiative is to mature and demonstrate integrated prototype capabilities supporting future operational applications,” the service said. And on August 7 the Pentagon announced an effort to begin work on “Next Generation Hypersonic Cruise Missiles.”

Who knows? The way the Iran campaign is going, these next-gen hype-weapons could end up in action there before the war’s end.

Sigh. This steady stream of dire reports about multi-billion-dollar U.S. military programs can be depressing. In response, the Pentagon’s amen corners (remember, they have five) only counters with their constant cacophony: “Be afraid, be very afraid.” To which The Bunker, reflecting on history, can only say: “Be aware, be very aware.”

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