May 4, 2009--The Procurers

One of the good things about living out of a suitcase while on the road is that outside your door most mornings you find USA Today.

It’s hardly the paper of record, but from it you do get a quick look at what’s on America’s collective mind, including coverage of sports teams way beyond your zip code. Up here in New York, for example, it’s rare to read anything much about the Los Angeles Dodgers other than an occasional note about how former Yankee manager Joe Torre is faring or if Manny is still being Manny. And it’s good to see as much detail about weather systems in Iowa as in nearby New Jersey. There’s a sort of big tent equality in these kinds of equivalencies.

So you can imagine my surprise the other day, when waking up in Waycross, Georgia, to find at the bottom of the front page an insightful, hard-hitting, and succinct article about Robert Gates attempt to cut some bloated and ineffective weapons systems from the Pentagon’s budget.

You would think that if he and the president wanted to eliminate these from the budget, as Commander in Chief and Secretary of Defense that could be done with the stroke of a pen.

Think again. All they can do is submit a proposed budget to Congress with the items zeroed out and wait to see what comes back after the authorization process is completed and the appropriators decide how and where to spend the money. Or rather, increase the deficit. And this is not a Republican or Democratic thing—both parties are equally corrupt when it comes to military pork.

Gates and Obama may eliminate the further development of the EFV (the acronym for the ridiculously named Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle) but Congress in its wisdom, or rather because key members are owned by defense contractors, are likely to put it back in to the approved budget. Will the president then veto the entire bill and send it back or, more likely, swallow hard, and sign it because it includes other of his priorities? I'll give you one guess.

USA Today, in blessed brevity, tells us all we need to know about the EFVs and MARPs (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles) and the Marine Corps’ new amphibious landing craft.

The EFV, Republican Gates contends, will not adequately protect troops chauffeured around in them from improvised explosive devices because they have flat bottoms which make them not only vulnerable to attack but turn the presumably-armored troop carriers tragically into deathtraps for soldiers fighting in these new kinds of asymmetrical situations. The types we are confronting in Iraq and increasingly in Afghanistan. We keep building these flat-bottomed rolling tombs (more than half the deaths in Iraq are from soldiers who were killed by roadside bombs) but can’t seem to get enough safer troop carriers with V-shaped hulls to the men and women our leaders continually refer to, misty-eyed, as heroes.

But we have already spent $14 billion in research and development costs (that’s billion with a “b”) on the EFV as it is currently designed, and it has a constituency in Congress among members who are heavily supported by the defense industry with plants to develop and build them back in their home districts. Representatives and senators who voted against Obama’s stimulus bill, saying it was too expensive and that the government should not be in the business of creating jobs—that it's up to private industry to do so in a capitalistic society—do not appear to have a problem with stimulating the economy in their home states with questionable government-funded military spending.

And Gates and Obama are also having problems with plans to phase out the development of the equally-billion dollar EFV, the amphibious landing craft the Marines are building for their forces when they are called upon to storm the beaches as they were in Sicily and France and the Pacific during World War II or in Korea at Inchon. Or as Ronald Reagan ordered when he, with a swagger, called upon our troops to make an amphibious landing on the tiny island of Grenada to literally liberate a medical school in which a few dozen Americans were enrolled. (He had obviously seen or starred in too many war movies.)

As Gates wryly put it, “It’s not clear how often forces these days will need to storm beaches.” He also said that by continuing to build flat-bottomed MRAPs and landing craft there have been “no lessons learned” during the last few decades from the wars in which we have chosen to participate. No lessons were gathered from Vietnam where, in effect, we found ourselves in the midst of an insurgency; no lessons were learned from years in Iraq where many of the “enemies” are women with bombs strapped to their bodies; or for that matter no lessons were taken from Afghanistan—either from our own experience or from the Russians' when they were defeated there in the 1980s.

As it is often noted, army generals are notorious for their tendency to “fight the last war” by using the strategies, tactics, and equipment from the past to achieve victory in the present. Remember World War II-style “shock and awe,” the massive bombing raids we carried out when we invaded Iraq? Yes, it helped to topple Saddam, but it just as much contributed to the insurgents’ tactics when they subsequently figuring out how to humble us and defeat our vaunted and expensive equipment with cheap, homemade and lethally effective weapons.

Finally, President Obama is having equal difficulty with another piece of military equipment. One closer to his new home, the White House, where Marine One, the presidential helicopter, is used for short hops to Andrews Air Force base or to Camp David on weekends. Why they can’t drive there is another matter. The one that interests me here is the development of a fleet of new multi-multi-billion dollar choppers.

From the New York Times story linked below, you can get the details—how we have already spent $3 billion on the ultimately $13 billion-and-counting program and how Obama says he’s happy with the helicopters he already has. Who wouldn’t be?

But you can also see that the new one will have capabilities the current one lacks—the ability to dodge enemy missiles and the capacity to shield the president from the effects of radiation that would result from nuclear weapons dropped on Washington.

I’m not making this up—read the article.

Ordering up these kinds of military systems, in the unintentionally ironic parlance of the Department of Defense (which in a time of offensive, preemptive war is itself self-mocking) is called “procurement.” I know this is not a totally inappropriate word for this kind of corrupt overspending; but back in my old neighborhood to “procure” meant something very, very different. But then again, maybe it’s not such a bad word for what our military boys (and boys they remain) have been up to for eons.