[Brought to you by the same people who think Social Security is bankrupting the country]
http://www.slate.com/id/2218407
Thursday, May 14, 2009, at 6:30 PM ET Slate.com
War stories: Military analysis.
Gates vs. Congress: Why do senators want to bust the budget for missile defense that doesn't work and a fighter plane we don't need?
By Fred Kaplan
Watching Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrangle about the Pentagon
budget with the House and Senate armed services committees this week
was a surreal experience. I've been covering these sorts of hearings
for 30 years, off and on, but never have the witness and his
interrogators--or at least some of them--seemed so jarringly out of
whack.
Gates was presenting what he called a "reform budget," reflecting the
lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, emphasizing the needs of today
over the dubious musings of what might be needed 20 years from now, and
recognizing that money is far from limitless.
The legislators, especially some Republicans (and Joe Lieberman), were
wringing their hands as if Gates' budget--more than a half-trillion
dollars, not counting another $130 billion to sustain the two wars
we're fighting--amounted to a pittance and as if even slight cuts in
marginal weapons systems would plunge America into serious danger.
Take the secretary's exchange with Sen. Jeff Sessions, Republican of
Alabama. Sessions was worked up over cuts in the missile defense
program. Gates was cutting back the number of Alaska-based interceptors
from 44 to 30; he was canceling the multiple-kill vehicle and the
airborne laser. What, Sessions asked, is going on here?
Gates replied that he's supported missile defense ever since President
Reagan started the program back in 1983 but that the Pentagon had to
consider practicalities. The Alaska interceptors are good for one
thing--shooting down missiles launched from North Korea--and 30
interceptors are more than enough to deal with that (still
hypothetical) threat. The multiple-kill vehicle was designed during the
Cold War to ward off a huge attack by the Soviet Union. The policy for
the past eight years has been to counter small attacks by rogue nations
or terrorists, so a weapon designed to shoot down lots of missiles at
once isn't needed, even if it were to work (which, though he didn't say
so, is extremely unlikely). The airborne laser--a 747 airplane fitted
with a laser beam that would destroy enemy missiles as they blasted out
of their silos, before they entered outer space--has a basic conceptual
problem. First, we would have to buy 28 planes just to keep enough of
them in the air at one time. Second, to get within range of the enemy
missile bases, they'd have to loiter inside the airspace of, say, Iran
and North Korea--and that just isn't going to happen.
Finally, Gates was recommending a mere 10 percent cut in the
missile-defense program, from $10 billion to $9 billion. This was
hardly a slash job.
Sessions, clearly outgunned, grumbled that he was still "concerned"
about "the size" of the cut. (Lieberman and John McCain had expressed
the same concern during their question periods.)
Leave aside the issue of whether missile defense makes any sense or has
any hope of working. (I have serious doubts and think that, in any
case, the program could have been cut by a few billion more with no
harm done.) The salient fact is that Gates had scrutinized the program
and taken out elements that were plainly unnecessary or absurd.
Sessions was looking at the program as an abstraction and its
budget-figure as a symbolic show of strength. If this were anything
other than the defense budget, Sessions would be derided as a paragon
of senseless waste.
As Gates put it, a lot of the cuts he'd imposed were "kind of
no-brainers ... poster children for an acquisition program gone wrong."
The other contentious debate was over the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter
plane, which, to Gates and President Obama, is a textbook case of a
Cold War weapon that has no place in the 21^st-century arsenal. It is
telling that not a single F-22 has flown a combat mission in any of the
wars the United States has fought since the plane entered the fleet. It
might be useful in some future war, but Gates and others have
calculated 187 would be enough--especially since the smaller, cheaper
F-35 stealth plane is about to enter production, and Gates has in fact
boosted its budget.
Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., went to bat for the F-22. The plane might
not be needed now or against such foes as Iraqi and Afghan insurgents.
But Russia and China are developing advanced fighter planes and
surface-to-air missiles. U.S. Air Force generals have determined that
there is a "requirement" for 243 F-22s to maintain air superiority in
the coming decades. They could get by with 187 planes, but only at
"high risk."
Gates responded that these calculations might be true if the Air Force
had nothing but F-22s, but it will also have F-35s and probably still
some F-15s. The Navy will also have F-35s and F-18E/Fs, and both
services will have a large number of unmanned aerial vehicles--like the
Predator drones, which have proved very effective. Adm. Mike Mullen,
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who testified alongside
Gates, went further: The F-35, he said, might well be the last manned
fighter plane. "We're in a time of transition in the future of
aviation," Mullen said. Just because the Air Force (or any other single
service) says it has a "requirement" does not mean that the overall
Defense Department has the same requirement.
The "requirements" game is an old one. When James Schlesinger was
defense secretary in the mid-1970s, he ordered the chief of naval
operations to calculate how many aircraft carriers the Navy would need
if it abandoned the mission of defending the Indian Ocean. At the time,
the Navy had 13 carriers, two of which were assigned to the Indian
Ocean. The chief put his staff to work. The answer they came up with:
13 carriers.
The point was clear. The Navy's fleet was, and is, built around
aircraft carriers. If you cut the carriers, you also had to cut a
proportionate number of destroyers, frigates, cruisers, the whole
works. So no matter how drastically the secretary of defense might
alter the Navy's mission, they would come up with some way to justify a
"requirement" of 13 carriers.
The same is true today of the Air Force--which is dominated by fighter
pilots--and its generals' desire for 243 F-22s. Any fewer F-22s than
that, and there's a danger that the centerpiece of the Air Force's
mission--the rationale for the size of its fleet--might shift to
something other than fighter planes. (Adm. Mullen's remark--that in the
near future there might be no more manned aircraft--only accentuates
their worry.)
In the coming weeks, the debate over the defense budget is bound to
intensify. Passions will flare. The fight may seem surreal, but that's
because it is unusually primordial; it's stripped down to basic
institutional interests. The battle, waged behind the scenes in the
Pentagon, is fiercer still in Congress, because there, it's conjoined
with the struggle for contracts and jobs. (It is no coincidence that
pieces of the F-22 are manufactured in 46 states; for more than a
half-century, the services have been subcontracting out their most
cherished weapons to as many congressional districts as possible in
order to maximize political support.)
<end excerpt>
Michael