In the absence of fiscal discipline, the Leviathan's cries of "feed me!" are met
Friday, July 14, 2006 at 5:36AM ARTICLE: "Late and Costly: Pentagon Still Pays; Spending More for Less is Frequent In Weapons Projects Since 9/11," by Leslie Wayne, New York Times, 11 July 2006, p. C1.
Chuck Spinney must be spinneying in his grave (actually, I have no idea if he's still around, I just couldn't resist). As I wrote in BFA, Spinney's brief in the 1980s on the spiralling costs of major programs of record explained the logic by which costs tended to run out of control over the life of any acquisition. It made him famous enough for the cover of Time.
This dynamic of spiralling costs is alive and well, as the F-22 Raptor projected in 1992 to cost $125m per copy is now weighing in at $361m per unit.
Yes, yes, Rummy promised streamlining designed to put some dents in those typical glidepaths, but 9/11 gave him as close to a blank check as one gets in this world, so with the lack of fiscal discipline from across the river (neither the White House nor Congress shows any restraint here), Rummy gets to love all his children, with no Sophie's choice in sight.
Like too many tough calls with this administration, it's being passed on to the next.
Naturally, the biggest money--and thus the bulk of the overruns--sits with new weapons systems. New ones will cost a good trillion and a half between now and just 2009, with $800 billion set to be spent in a grand flurry as this administration exits some 30 months from now.
As so many critics note, there are real needs, and then there are what the Pentagon wants, and that's where the mania on China is so damaging, setting us up to underfund the ground forces that should be seeing their budget shares grow dramatically in this Long War, but instead are being starved by the Leviathan's dreams.
I'm all for unfair fights, but this 12 Sigma approach is just too rich for our 4GW environment. It's strategically criminal waste, and letting it pass with so little effort to stem it is--in my mind--the great failure of Rumsfeld's reign. He's done plenty of good, but he hasn't dealt effectively with the bad, and that simply pushes the truly hard decisions to the next administration.
Reader Comments (2)
I think Porkbusters is gearing up to come to the rescue. The project wants basic fiscal sanity tools provided to the public and it's bipartisan. They're starting off with the easy "bridge to nowhere" stuff but eventually, I think they're going to tackle the big items and that includes defense procurement as well as entitlement spending.
Misallocating resources in these areas is holding this country back tremendously. We can fix it and we should. If we crack this code ahead of the EU, we're really going to zoom into a qualitatively new zone that may lead to a downgrade of the EU powers to 2nd world.
Right now all the 1st world powers have an albatross around their necks in terms of future government promises to spend that our economies can't possibly fund and these huge misallocations (mostly social entitlements in the EU and more evenly split defense and social entitlements here) are the major factor in all projections of our economies ending in unsustainable crisis an unpredictable few decades out.
Here's hoping that these efforts remain bipartisan and keep growing in strength.
Very hard, given the extreme cynicism of the Reagan-and-beyond Republicans, who routinely spend us to the brink of bankruptcy, then gleefully act in opposition to Dems when they try to clean it up. This lock-in strategy of "me spend and you cut" is very damaging to this country. Goldwater was not the father for any of this nonsense. He was a helluva lot smarter and more responsible than that. He had a sense of prudence and history. These guys have none.