The Bunker: Bye-bye, Baghdad…

This week in The Bunker: Lots to catch up on after two weeks away, including the inglorious end to the U.S. military campaign in Iraq; Hegseth’s general decapitation strategy; different ways to buy warplanes; the Pentagon doesn’t want to share its Iran war-fighting ledger; and more. Oh, and a Happy Fiscal New Year to you and yours!

AND SO THIS IS HOW IT ENDS

“Shock and awe” curdles into “Aw, shucks”

The U.S. ended its military campaign in Iraq on September 30, as the final American combat troops based there left the country. Their departure ended 23 years of fitful fighting. They found no weapons of mass destruction, which was the battering ram President George W. Bush and his combative coterie used to scaremonger the U.S to invade in 2003. We captured Saddam Hussein, and the Iraqis hanged him in 2006. We toppled his Ba’athist regime, only to see it replaced with a government that today is riven with next-door Iran’s influence.

It’s important to remember how this war looks from the other end of the telescope. Two weeks before it began, The Bunker asked Air Force General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, how the Pentagon’s ballyhooed “shock and awe” campaign would unfold. “If asked to go into conflict in Iraq, what you’d like to do is have it be a short conflict,” he responded. “The best way to do that would be to have such a shock on the system that the Iraqi regime would have to assume early on the end was inevitable.”

Well, you know what they say about assume. In fact, a fellow Air Force officer, Colonel Clarence Lollar, spelled it out in 1964, 39 years before Myers used the word to explain why the Iraq war would be short:

"Mister, when you have an important job to do, never assume. When you look at the word, you can see it is made up of three parts — 'ass,' 'u,' and 'me.' When you rely on assumptions, sooner or later it will make an ass of both of us."

Turns out toppling Saddam was only the beginning of a generation-long campaign that cost 4,418 U.S. troops their lives. It will end up costing U.S. taxpayers an estimated $2.9 trillion through 2050, including veterans’ care yet unbilled.

The Bunker spent years reporting on the war, and its spasmodic successes like toppling Baghdad, hunting down Saddam in his “spider hole,” and the jittery calm wrought by “the surge” of U.S. troops into Iraq in 2007. But he also told the stories of those killed, as well as those who killed themselves (and their family). He wrote about the more than 30,000 physically wounded, as well as the roughly 15% of the 1.5 million U.S. troops who served in Iraq who came home mentally maimed. He covered the military’s inadequate, and sometimes fatal, efforts to render aid, even among those trying to deliver it. He reported on the war’s deadly impact on recruiters back home. He wrote about those captured, dead or alive, as they used to say in the Westerns. Not to mention the 3,600 contractors, and perhaps 200,000 Iraqi civilians, killed in the war.

The stories were tough to report, tough to write, and they remain tough to read.

But in the hurly-burly of today’s world, the heroes at the heart of these stories must never be forgotten.

We must remember and honor their sacrifice, even as we ponder its wisdom, given its paltry prize.

Otherwise, it might happen again.

GENERAL SLASHING AND BURNING

Long overdue, but it must be done right

The same day the U.S. military pulled out of Iraq, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pledged to continue his campaign to shrink the Pentagon’s nearly 1,000-strong corps of generals and admirals by 20% (he’s currently about halfway there). “The media calls that a purge,” he said. “I call it accountability, and long overdue.”

Accountability, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. We here at the Project On Government Oversight have long fought to cut the U.S. military’s senior ranks. “We have more officers than we need — and we're running the risk of creating a military force of bureaucrats rather than warriors,” Executive Director Danielle Brian said … in 1998. The numbers don’t lie: The ranks of generals and admirals, as their share of the entire U.S. military, has grown by 40% since Vietnam.

But the cutting has to be smart. Based on the results of the Iran war — so far — it’s plain that neither Hegseth nor his military high command knows how to wage war smartly. Promoting the right military personnel is just as challenging. Bazookaing brass that displease the boss doesn’t automatically lead to a lighter and, to coin a phrase, lethaler fighting force. Based on Hegseth’s track record, his thinning of the herd is likely to be more about politics and partisanship than proficiency and prowess.

“This is just a less personal version of the purge he’s already been executing since taking office,” Virginia Burger, a Marine veteran now here at POGO’s Center for Defense Information, says. “By announcing he’s cutting the generals by 20%, he has justification for refusing to promote scores of officers without even having to pull their names from [promotion] lists. This just lets him continue to remove senior leaders who are in the strongest positions to oppose him and his actions.”

A TALE OF TWO PLANES

Air Force 1, Navy 0

The Bunker is leery of drawing bottom-line conclusions from complicated issues. But every once in a while two things happen simultaneously in the national-security space that support such simplicity. While we were away, the Navy awarded Boeing a $20 billion contract to develop a sixth-generation fighter for its aircraft carriers. (Fighter “generations” share technological innovations; sixth-gen fighters will fly further and more stealthily than their predecessors and be able to command drones from their cockpits.)

But this F/A-XX Strike Fighter represents a doubling-down on yesterday’s technology. Bluntly speaking, it means putting planes flown by humans aboard huge sitting ducks that will be prime targets for any future U.S. foe (whether those planes will be launched by steam or electromagnetic catapults, a separate war now underway between the U.S. Navy and the U.S. president, is irrelevant, albeit amusing).

Meanwhile, seven companies are seeking to build a cheaper MQ-9 Reaper. That’s the Air Force drone its top officer calls the “most valuable player” in the U.S. war against Iran. Unfortunately, the service has lost about 25% of its Reapers in the fight. You probably didn’t know that because drones don’t carry pilots and therefore no U.S. troops died in the drones’ destruction. One of the companies wants to produce Reaper replacements for about one-third the cost of the $30 million Reaper.

This striking contrast needs to be kept in perspective. After all, the Navy is buying drones, and the Air Force is buying its own fleet of sixth-generation fighters. In fact, it’s buying them from Boeing. Letting Boeing build the Navy’s newest fighter, as well as the Air Force’s F-47 (its designation honoring you-know-who, if not strictly speaking, in a “Let’s go, Brandon” kind of way) gives some military-aviation geeks the heebie-jeebies. “Incredulity was the main public reaction, for understandable reasons,” veteran defense-aerospace scribe Bill Sweetman noted. That’s because it means “most unattractively, putting all the Pentagon’s fighter-development eggs in one basket.” Others fear the Navy contract award gives Boeing a “monopoly” and “stranglehold” on U.S. fighter development and production for the next generation, or more.

That lack of competition should make taxpayers nervous. After all, Lockheed is the only company producing the troubled fifth-generation F-35 for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines.

But for the moment, let’s simply cheer the Air Force’s fledgling push to fly and fight more cheaply.

ACCOUNTABILITY 000

Pentagon mum on Iran war’s cost

The Congressional Budget Office is a nonpartisan bean-counting shop that has spent more than a half-century double-checking the sometimes dubious arithmetic of the Executive Branch. It works, as its name makes clear, for Congress. Congress, in turn, works for us — the American people who pay taxes to fund this government. So it’s beyond disconcerting that the Pentagon recently stiff-armed the CBO after the agency asked the U.S. military about the cost of the war in Iran (the CBO estimated that the war cost U.S. taxpayers $38 billion through August 1).

“To estimate DoD's costs, CBO relied on government databases and public reports because DoD did not respond to CBO's requests for information,” the CBO said in a September 15 report. “As a result, CBO's estimates are subject to considerable uncertainty.”

Gobsmacking.

Here we have a war unilaterally launched by President Donald Trump and waged by a Pentagon that has rarely briefed what’s left of the Defense Department press corps on its progress. Now they’re declining to tell the CBO how much they’re spending on it.

Back in the good ol’ days MIA meant “missing in action.” In the current environment it means “mission isn’t auditable.”

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

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