The Bunker: The Bunker’s back!

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: Well, after a long summer’s nap, it’s great to clamber back down into The Bunker and check out the Navy’s missing carriers; the Marines’ overdue presidential chopper; Space Force’s absent-minded commander; and more.

STRETCHED AND VULNERABLE

Righting the Navy’s reliance on huge carriers

There are 139 million square miles of ocean out there, and the U.S. Navy has only 11 aircraft carriers to cover them all. Because of Iranian mischief in the Middle East, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered two carriers into the region. That leaves exactly, um, none in the 65 million square miles that is the Pacific Ocean, whose waves break on Chinese shores, the focus of growing U.S. military concern in recent years. What’s a superpower to do?

It’s a simple choice: choose between the nation’s reliance on big-deck carriers, or the nation’s thinking about how much ocean it needs to prowl. If you’re determined to try to status-quo steam everywhere, you can’t build your Navy out of gold $20 billion behemoths. You need a bigger fleet of smaller, gold-plated drone carriers.

Big carriers loom as targets for China or any other potential foes armed with increasingly accurate missiles. It’s peculiar how the U.S. military can demand redundancy when it comes to the nuclear triad of bombers, subs, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. The contention is that even if a crafty enemy could knock out one or two legs of the triad, it would still face devastating retaliation from the surviving leg. Yet the Pentagon steadfastly maintains it has to put all of its naval-aviation eggs in these 11 big baskets.

This has been a long-standing debate, and there’s never been a better time to have it. As the Chinese threat grows, U.S. aircraft carriers should shrink, allowing the Navy to buy more of them. Outfitting them with drones and missiles could give such vessels more punch than piloted aircraft. There’s been talk, but too little action, along these lines.

Predictably (it’s always predictable, pre-disaster) the Pentagon plays down the Pacific carrier gap. “We have a significant amount of capability there, to include a large naval presence,” Air Force Major General Pat Ryder insisted August 27. “The bottom line is we can walk and chew gum at the same time.” Just be sure to take any Air Force officer’s comments on naval strategy — especially one who majored in advertising in college — with a big grain of sea salt.

WHIRLYBIRD-BRAINED

New White House chopper fleet finally complete

The nation’s oldest president finally got to ride on his newest helicopter August 19. When the Defense Department formally launched its effort (PDF) to buy a new fleet of Marine Ones — pint-size Air Force Ones — Joe Biden was a sprightly 62. In November, he’ll turn 82. Why it took 20 years to buy a new presidential chopper fleet highlights much of what is wrong with Pentagon procurement.

The new Sikorsky VH-92 Patriots replace helicopters dating back to 1975 (PDF). The big push — just like for a lot of Pentagon spending over the past two decades — came following 9/11. “DOD officials argued at the time that in light of security issued raised by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, replacing the existing presidential helicopter was an urgent matter,” a 2009 Congressional Research Service report noted (PDF).

At the Pentagon, “urgent” = expensive. That’s why the first effort to buy the president a new helo turned a $60 million civilian machine into a $480 million boondoggle. As The Bunker reported 15 years ago:

“The post-9/11 need for security led to secret requirements for onboard jammers to thwart radars and missiles. Then there was the required shielding to help protect the choppers’ electronic guts from being fried by electromagnetic pulses generated by nuclear blasts (as well as separate systems to protect against biological and chemical weapons). … Then, of course, there was the kitchen and bathroom for the 14 passengers (the new choppers can fly 300 miles, triple the range of the current Marines Ones, making such facilities desirable). The Navy, which buys all Marine aircraft, and its contractors simply saluted and passed on the escalating costs to the taxpayers.”

But under political pressure, the Pentagon killed that first attempt to build a new presidential helicopter in 2009. That was the Lockheed VH-71 Kestrel, scrapped after the Pentagon spent $4.4 billion on it. But all was not lost: the nine VH-71s already in production were sold to Canada for…$164 million (in less-valuable Canadian dollars, no less).

Five years later (so much for urgency), the Pentagon announced that Sikorsky had won the contract to try again. It has built 23 VH-92s for $4.9 billion (PDF), just over $200 million a copy. Sikorsky delivered the last one on August 14. Five days later, Biden became the first president to fly on one.

One more point worth mentioning: Lockheed fumbled that first deal to build the new helicopter. But it bought Sikorsky, the winner of the second contract, from United Technologies in 2015 for $9 billion. So even though it lost, it won. As a chopper pilot might confide to taxpayers: “Heads-up display, I win; tail-rotor, you lose.”

SPACE RACE

#1 with the bullet

General B. Chance Saltzman, the second commander of the U.S. Space Force, recently cited China’s 2007 destruction of one of its own worn-out satellites as justification for his new service. “A country has demonstrated the ability and an intent to destructively take out a satellite, and you can only draw certain conclusions once that happens,” Saltzman told Bostonia, the alumni magazine of his alma mater, Boston University. “There’s no peaceful need for that. The only reason you’re doing that is because you want to take out another country’s satellites to try to achieve a military advantage. That’s the only conclusion you can draw. And we just hadn’t seen that activity before.”

For the record, the U.S. was the first nation to blast one of its own satellites out of the heavens, in 1985, 22 years before China.

WHAT WE’RE READING

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

→ That other kind of inflation

Doug Bandow wrote about the exaggerated threats that fuel Pentagon spending in The American Conservative August 8.

→ Satisfaction not guaranteed

The Air Force lacks the guidance needed to force contractors to pay it back for lousy spare parts, leaving it with millions of dollars’ worth of broken gear and sometimes even paying more to fix it, David Rosa reported August 30 in Air & Space Forces Magazine.

→ A bad day at the office…

Here’s the cause of a 2023 Air Force V-22 crash landing that did $2 million in damage to the tilt-rotor, the Air Force Safety Center reported August 29: “A flight engineer unintentionally and unknowingly shut down the right engine when their night vision goggles battery cable looped over the knob of the right engine control lever and moved it from the FLY to OFF position while attempting to sit down.”

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