The Bunker: If at First You Don’t Succeed…

The Bunker, delivered to our subscribers Wednesdays at 7 a.m., is a newsletter from the desk of National Security Analyst Mark Thompson. Sign up here to receive it first thing, or check back Wednesday afternoon for the online version.

This week in The Bunker: the Defense Department launches yet another scheme to change the way it buys weapons; an early holiday wish list for the Air Force; the Senate disgracefully wimps out when it comes to curbing presidential war-making; and more.

“AND WE REALLY MEAN IT THIS TIME!”

Pentagon poohbah proposes procurement `provements

It’s oh-so-fitting that during the longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history, Defense Secretary Pete “Hands-Off” Hegseth took to the podium November 7 at the National War College to demand his contractors shape up. The Pentagon, he warned an audience salted with defense suppliers, “will only do business with industry partners that share our priority of speed and volume above all else, and who are willing to surge American manufacturing at the speed of ingenuity to deliver rapidly and reliably for our war fighters.”

The “speed of ingenuity.”

Cute.

He mentioned the word “speed” more than 25 times, and it’s likely he wasn’t talking about amphetamines. (Tracking such word usage by this Pentagon has become vexing because it refuses to transcribe and post many of its leaders’ speeches, as has been Defense Department tradition since the dawn of the Internet. It is simply another slap in the faces of the taxpayers paying their salaries. Speaking of the speed of ingenuity, it simply posts Hegseth’s entire 75-minute speech online and calls it a day.)

Hegseth pledged to scuttle the current process for finalizing weapons blueprints to hasten arms deliveries. He urged the defense industry to invest more of its own money to develop new weapons, instead of relying on taxpayers. He promised “bigger, longer contracts” in exchange. Such shakeups could energize defense startups and give them an edge over the Pentagon’s Big 5, which collected a whopping $771 billion in Pentagon contracts between 2020 and 2024. Predictably, defense contractors hailed Hegseth’s scolding like they were innocent bystanders.

Go get ’em Pete!

The Bunker has witnessed dozens of these exercises over nearly half-a-century. He’s the first to wish Hegseth well, but isn’t holding his breath. After all, books (PDF) have been written about the Defense Department’s doomed procurement reform efforts since there was a Department of Defense. “Since the end of World War II, every Administration and virtually every Secretary of Defense has embarked on an acquisition reform effort,” the Congressional Research Service noted in 2014, estimating there had been more than 150 such attempts by then. “Yet despite these efforts, cost overruns, schedule delays, and performance shortfalls in acquisition programs persist.”

Veteran Pentagon weapons tester Tom Christie rattled off the Greatest Misses in 2006: “The 1970 Fitzhugh, or Blue Ribbon, Commission, was followed by the 1977 Steadman Review, the 1981 Carlucci Acquisition Initiatives, the 1986 Packard Commission and Goldwater/Nichols Act, the 1989 Defense Management Review, the 1990 Defense Science Board (DSB) Streamlining Study, another DSB Acquisition Streamlining Task Force in 1993-94, the Total System Performance Responsibility initiative of the late 1990s, and the early 2000s focus on Spiral Development and Capabilities-Based Acquisition.”

The Bunker recalls sitting down one-on-one with former deputy defense secretary David Packard in the West Wing of the White House in 1986 to hear him detail his wholesale remaking (PDF) of Pentagon procurement. But it, like all the others before and since, flopped. “The problem is that the Packard Commission decapitated the department’s innovation ecosystem,” John Hamre, another deputy defense secretary, wrote in 2016. “We desperately need to restore the innovation ecosystem that propelled the Defense Department through the Cold War.”

Plainly, nothing has changed in the decade since. And that highlights one of the most charming characteristics of the American character: its unbridled optimism about righting the future despite the wronging of history. The forlorn fact is that the Pentagon buys weapons the same way it wages wars. Remember the “shock and awe” campaign that was going to make Iraq a cakewalk? Or rid Vietnam of communism, or Afghanistan of terror-backing tribal warlords? Both kinds of endeavors too often begin with a bang and end with a whimper.

That doesn’t mean Hegseth shouldn’t try. It simply means that the rest of us should keep our expectations in check.

NEVER ENOUGH

World’s biggest air force must get bigger, Air Force says

Whenever Congress asks the military what it needs, it’s a safe bet the right answer is “more.” No one inside the Pentagon gets their hands on the levers of power if they say “less.” Absent a compelling reason, like a $38 trillion national debt (oops!) or key weapons that don’t perform as advertised (double oops!), lawmakers like to ladle, not lessen, the Pentagon’s loot. Why that happens has a lot to do with the symbiotic relationship between members of Congress and the military plants and bases back home, and a lot less to do with national security.

So when Congress asked the Air Force last December how many fighters it needs, the service recently responded that its current fleet of 1,271 combat-ready fighters has to grow to 1,558 over the next decade. That’s a 23% increase. The fighter fleet must “grow to minimize risk,” the service said, brandishing a conveniently elastic yardstick that could be used to justify pretty much any Pentagon purchase.

“The Department of the Air Force (DAF) is focused on modernizing current fifth-generation and legacy-capability fighter aircraft fleets, expanding exquisite warfighting capabilities, and acquiring new advanced fighter capability,” the report said.

“Exquisite”?

This has got to be a parody of Pentagon profligacy.

Raise your hand if you remember when buying “exquisite” weapons was decidedly uncool. “An End to Exquisite Weapons” retired Marine colonel T.X. Hammes wrote presciently back in 2020. That was two years before Russia invaded Ukraine, triggering Kyiv’s non-exquisite defense that has scrambled everyone’s future war plans. “As we saw in Ukraine, battlefield innovation can make stockpiles of exquisite weapons irrelevant in an instant,” a pair of ex-Pentagon techno-nerds wrote last December.

So let’s buy more of them!

“The trend to produce ever more sophisticated weapons and munitions, with exquisite capabilities our adversaries would not be able to match, has led to the current situation where the Pentagon can afford to buy only limited numbers of those systems,” Andrew A. Michta of the Atlantic Council said last fall.

Bingo!

And that, of course, is the stealthy bottom line hiding in plane sight in all such reports. “While the document does not explicitly ask Congress for additional funds, its outlining of how more dollars could be used to boost fighter production, combined with its unclassified nature, are likely intended to encourage lawmakers to consider providing greater resources to the service,” Breaking Defense reports.

At the Pentagon, enough is never enough. After all, the U.S. Air Force is first in the world when it comes to military airpower. That’s according to the independent World Directory of Modern Military Aircraft, which counts warplanes — as well as their capabilities — to rank the world’s most powerful air forces. The Russian air force comes in at #3, the Indian air force at #6, and the Chinese air force at #7. Rounding out the Top 10 are Japan (8th), Israel (9th), and France (10th).

Not so fast, the always-astute readers of The Bunker aver. What about the rest of the Top 5?

Glad you asked. They include the U.S. Navy (#2), the U.S. Army (#4), and the U.S. Marine Corps (#5).

WAR PLANNING

The Senate stiff-arms the public

When it comes to debating war and peace, the U.S. Senate seems to want to make the commander-in-chief the dictator-in-chief. That’s the only conclusion one can draw following its 51-49 vote November 6 to not even vote on a bipartisan measure that sought to block President Trump from launching a unilateral attack on Venezuela.

That’s particularly striking in light of a survey released the same day showing that nearly three-quarters of Americans oppose presidential use of military force abroad without congressional approval. “Nearly all Democrats oppose this type of unilateral action (94%), as do most independents (79%),” said the survey, conducted by the nonprofit Institute for Global Affairs. “Republicans are evenly divided (50%).”

That split between the Senate vote and the public’s wishes suggests how warped U.S. foreign policy has become. After all, 44% of U.S. adults describe themselves as independents, 27% say they’re Democrats, and 28% labeled themselves as Republicans.

Trump has been banging the war drums against corrupt Venezuelan despot Nicolás Maduro for months, and ordered a series of attacks on Venezuelan-linked boats alleged to be smuggling drugs that have killed at least 76. Such a prolonged campaign means Congress has had plenty of time to debate the wisdom of a military campaign against Venezuela. But it has chosen, yet again, to duck responsibility.

The poll’s polarized political support for unilateral presidential action is a fragile foundation upon which to build a war. That’s reflected in recent reporting that suggests Trump is shying away from attacking Venezuela.

At least for today.

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

→ F-35 pressure point

Activists have formed a cabal to derail production of the F-35 fighter by pinching its global supply chain, Stu Smith wrote October 21 in City Journal.

→ Jam their satellites!

The U.S. military will soon field two new weapons designed to temporarily disable Chinese and Russian intel, surveillance, and reconnaissance satellites, Tony Capaccio reported November 4 at Bloomberg News.

→ Armor our satellites!

Nations like China and Russia are threatening U.S. satellites with cyber attacks, which is why our satellites need to be armored against such intrusions, Rebecca Grant warned November 5 at RealClear Defense.

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