The Bunker: Cutting corners

This week in The Bunker: Going to war and spending billions on weapons are critical decisions requiring more buy-in than they’re currently getting from both the American people and their representatives on Capitol Hill; drones are driving the Defense Department to double down on defense; the Navy’s smart submarine switch; and more.

Heads up!

The Bunker’s headed out of town for two weeks on a couple of top-secret missions. Assuming we safely return from these demanding domestic deployments, we’ll be back October 7.

WRECKONCILIATION

With an emphasis on the “reckon”

You shouldn’t go to war without the backing of the U.S. Congress. President Donald Trump is learning that the hard way, as his — not our — six-month-and-counting “little excursion” and “small potatoes” Iranian quagmire drags on. And you don’t build weapons for tomorrow’s wars — especially the ones you say are critical to future victories (remember them?) — using the parliamentary peek-a-boo prestidigitation known as reconciliation. In both instances, Trump is seeking big changes in U.S. national security as unilaterally as possible, with minimal congressional backing.

Reconciliation is a controversial process to fund programs. It doesn’t have to follow the standard congressional appropriation rules. Most critically, reconciliation bills aren’t subject to a Senate filibuster. That means they can pass the so-called upper house with a simple majority vote, instead of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Predictably, that too often leads to rickety resourcing and reversed reckonings when the other political party takes over.

“Unfortunately, reconciliation is becoming a hallmark of the slow but steady degradation of Congress,” Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, Director of Advocacy here at the Project On Government Oversight, says. “It has also become a tantalizing tool for the Pentagon in its never-ending quest to throw good money after bad, to the tune of hundreds of billions above and beyond what a complicit Congress already showers them with each year.”

And while you can begin a war with a surprise attack, you can’t build weapons that way. Yet Trump is trying to employ this reconciliation rigmarole in his proposed 2027 defense budget for arguably his two top military priorities — his “Golden Dome” aerial shield, and his wholesale push to develop sky-darkening fleets of drones:

• The Pentagon is seeking $17.9 billion for Golden Dome next year, but only $400 million (2.2%) is in its official budget request.
• The Pentagon’s drone-centric Defense Autonomous Working Group (DAWG) is asking for $54.6 billion in 2027, but only $1 billion (1.8%) is in the Defense Department’s official base budget request.

While it looks like Congress will eventually approve Trump’s bloatacious $1.1 trillion defense budget, the separate $350 billion reconciliation proposal appears to be going down in flames (the combined $1.45 trillion top line represents an incredible 44% boost over this year’s budget). Yet it’s that threat to the $350 billion that’s got the generals in charge of those two programs sounding the alarm. “If they don’t figure it out, there is no Golden Dome because there is no funding,” Space Force General Michael Guetlein, chief of the space-shield effort, said flatly last month.

Army Lieutenant General Steven Marks (PDF) told a defense-industry confab September 9 that his DAWG drone programs will lose their “momentum” if they don’t get at least some of the $53.6 billion plus-up requested. Marks warned that potential U.S. foes “can take a $100,000 drone and conduct an attack against a $2 billion vessel,” but declined to elaborate on potential funding cuts. “Unfortunately, all of our systems are all classified,” he said, “and so I will not be talking in detail about those.”

Well, here’s a safe bet that’s not secret. The Pentagon will not get much, if any, of its $350 billion reconciliation bonus. That will force it to cut key operations and maintenance accounts, assuming it wants to keep Golden Dome and its drone programs humming. And those cuts in O&M — training, fuel, parts, and all the other humdrum items that hone a force’s fighting edge — will dull the readiness of the U.S. military.

Bottom line: U.S. national security needs to be built on solid bipartisan bedrock, and not the ever-shifting sands of fleeting political advantage.

BUNKERING DOWN

Playing defense is becoming a bigger business

It’s kind of funny that the Department of Defense putatively changed its name to the Department of War just when it’s becoming more of a department of defense than ever. The exploding use of drones around the world has forced the U.S. military back on its heels. The offensive edge that the U.S. has arguably held since World War II is being eclipsed by swarms of flying autonomous AI-guided weapons that can cheaply elude the Pentagon’s costly defenses. All of a sudden, they have made defending what the U.S. military has just as vital as what the U.S. military attacks. Impressive U.S. military assets — aircraft carriers, bombers, armored divisions — that once ruled the seas, skies, and battlefields, are now targets. And the U.S. military is scrambling to protect them:

• After Iranian drones and missiles battered U.S. bases in the Middle East, the Air Force announced September 3 that it wants to buy “a Ground-Based, Medium-Caliber Gun Weapon System that fires affordable munitions, enables defense against air and missile threats with an initial focus on subsonic cruise missiles and Unmanned Aircraft Systems to provide persistent defense in support of United States Air Force assets.”
• The Air Force’s top general says the wide use of drones and missiles in Iran and Ukraine have convinced the service that “we have to create a new career field and have experts in the ability to defend your airfield from all of these threats.”
• Early in the Iran war — 22 days after six U.S. troops were killed by an Iranian drone — the Air Force issued a call for “prefabricated, transportable, hardened shelter systems designed to protect personnel from blast and fragmentation threats” that could be shipped to Jordan.
• Two days later, the Pentagon sought contractors to “plan and design a hardened, underground, secure, Combat Center Building and squadron operations buildings supporting a variety of airframe and missions to include, but not limited to, bombers, fighters, and unmanned aircraft systems for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance” at the key U.S. base in Qatar. Iran knocked out that command post at Al Udeid, which had run U.S. air campaigns in the region for more than two decades, in the war’s opening weeks. The Pentagon has yet to detail the damage.
• Iran also severely damaged the Navy’s key base in the Persian Gulf, home of its 5th Fleet, early in the conflict. “They blew the hell out of Bahrain,” acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao recently said, adding that the service is “looking” at what to do with it, without elaboration. The service is “not getting back in [the base in Bahrain] anytime soon,” Admiral Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, said August 31. The Pentagon has yet to detail the damage.
• In August, the Pentagon’s Mobile Land-Based Sensors Projects Office said it is looking to develop “highly mobile, rapidly deployable” Forward-Based Mode Radar Next systems “capable of providing enhanced early warning, tracking, and discrimination of emerging missile threats” under its Nimble Options for Buying Layered Effects — NOBLE — contracting authority (thank God at least one of those terms was deemed acronym-worthy).
• The Air Force wants to convert cargo planes into “adaptive, force-multiplying launch platforms” that provide “a rapidly deployable swarm [of drones] for base security.”
• Last month, the Marines began buying counter-drone vehicles “capable of detecting, tracking, and defeating unmanned aerial threats while maintaining the flexibility to reposition as mission requirements evolve.” The $1.9 million buggies are outfitted with Hellfire missiles originally designed for the Army’s AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships.

All this is fine and dandy. We need to defend our forces. The trouble is that offense is much cheaper than defense. Given that financial advantage, the attacker can overwhelm the defender. Basically, the attacker has to succeed only once, while the defender must succeed 24/7/365. That’s why building moats, the Great Wall of China, and the Maginot Line — not to mention Golden Dome (grandchild of Safeguard, and child of the Strategic Defense Initiative) — is ultimately a losing game.

A SMARTER DEAL

Retooling subs for a bigger, cheaper, punch

Last month, the Navy changed the designation for 19 of its future Virginia-class submarines from SSN — naval shorthand for a fast-attack submarine — to SSGN, meaning a guided-missile submarine. But the new nomenclature goes far, ahem, deeper than a single letter.

The service is stretching the original design of the 377-foot Virginia-class boats by 84 feet so the number of Tomahawk cruise missiles it can carry grows from “about 37 to about 65,” according to long-time Navy expert Ronald O’Rourke at the Congressional Research Service. The change shifts the new subs’ primary mission from attacking enemy subs to striking land targets up to 1,000 miles away from beneath the waves. The goal is to replace the firepower of the four bigger Tomahawk-carrying Ohio-class subs which are reaching the end of their service life.

The new expanded subs will cost about $4 billion each. That’s a lot of money, but it’s cheaper than designing and building a new class of submarines. And that’s refreshing, given the Pentagon’s current gimme-more mindset. The hardware tweak is a timely reminder that it is possible to do more with less. “It illustrates that innovation in the military is not always about inventing a new technology,” Joshua VerGow and Abigail Rudolph wrote recently for the Atlantic Council. The U.S. military, they add, “should make building from scratch the exception rather than the default.”

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

Speaking of gratitude, thanks for stopping by The Bunker this week. Once again, we’re taking a couple of weeks off, returning October 7. Meanwhile, consider forwarding this on to friends and foes so they can subscribe here.