(The B-21’s secret? They learned how to limit bureaucracy)

Recent discussions over in the Labour Party suggest at least the start of a very different attitude towards military spending than what Labour has held for decades now.

Andrew Little even specifically said that “we do not live in a benign strategic environment”, which is direct repudiation of Helen Clark’s famous statement from 2001, and Little clearly deliberately chose that history to make a point of where we are now.

To be fair, I didn’t slam Clark as much as others did because at the time she said that it was not an unreasonable thing to say. It was less than a decade after the collapse of the USSR, its Eastern European satellites, the Warsaw Pact, and the end of the Cold War, and before the rise of China as geo-political and military power. It was also made just a few months before the 9/11 attacks, but although Jihadist terrorism was used to mock her statement it was never the existential threat to modern nations that a nation-state military is. Her stance also fitted with a boom decade of “peace dividends”, plus the whole End Of History thing, which had been pushed hard not by politicians but academics who should have known better in light of actual history, and they didn’t get as much criticism at the time.

The main criticism of all of this that should have been made was the simple one of pointing out that however “benign” an environment can appear to be it will change, can do so very fast, and that you need to be ready economically, diplomatically and militarily for when it does, rather than just wallowing around in ignorant bliss. When she said that, the question that should have been put to her was “How long do you expect it to remain benign and when it stops being so can we adapt quickly and effectively enough if we have to start from zero?”.

In any case, even Labour MP’s apparently understand that we no longer live in such a world. However, this is election year and talk is cheap. Also the fact is that even if Labour suddenly announced a rash of military projects and committed right now to boost defence spending to, say 2% of GDP, you’d have to wonder whether anything would be produced, given the utter incompetence Labour have shown with huge spending increases in every other area they’ve fucked up?

Aside from that we have a major nation-state war happening in Ukraine which has shown new technologies like drones and the Starlink satellite systems being used in ways that are going to affect the sort of ground, air and naval forces we implement in future, as well as demonstrating that old tech like AA-guns actually has a future because you can’t go shooting down cheap drones with expensive SAM’s

I supported the idea of replacing our aging Skyhawks with F-16’s back in 1999, even though I thought F-16’s would be little more use to our isolated nation than Skyhawks. My reasoning was that it was important to keep together an air combat unit of people and logistics that could transition to a post F-16 world when that turned up. That air-combat future might be an aircraft missile platform system – non-fighter planes that can unload scores of missiles, perhaps hypersonic ones or lower speed drones, against aircraft and ships. It would have been much easier to switch to something like that than start from scratch in building an air combat capability as we’ll now have to do. And we will need “air combat”: it likely won’t look like F-16’s or F-35’s but it has to be something that can shoot at air, land and sea targets rather than just surveilling them, and that also means people to support that capability, not just machines.

In the early 2000’s we threw away those people and their ability to hire and train more like themselves who could adapt to new combat worlds. That’s the short-sightedness.

Admittedly we’re not the only ones with military problems, and that’s despite others throwing gobs of money at it, starting with the good, old US of A, which has myriad problems.

The F-35 fighter program (now twenty years in):
One plane with three missions: US Air Force fighter & bomber, USN carrier plane, USMC VTOL fighter-bomber. What could go wrong?

The cost of the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons program has skyrocketed $183 billion above initial cost estimates as production hurdles mount, a government watchdog found in a Tuesday report. An engine cooling issue is the latest setback to the Pentagon’s $1.7 trillion F-35 Lighting II Joint Strike Fighter weapons program, which is now more than 10 years behind schedule and racked with multiple unexpected cost increases, the Government Accountability Office found in its annual report on the program.
…
“The cooling system is over-tasked, requiring the engine to operate beyond its design parameters. The extra heat is increasing the wear on the engine, reducing its life and adding $38 billion in maintenance costs,” GAO wrote.

The latest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford (CVN-78):

At one point, after its mismanaged and under-engineered development by the Navy and Newport News Shipbuilding, Congress once capped spending on Ford at $13 billion. Still, today, the final price tag might be more than $20 billion if you include $5 billion in research and development.
…
Ford was not only a drain on resources, but its wildly extended construction and sea trials further strained the rest of the carrier inventory. Consider that Ford was commissioned in 2017, four years after its original schedule, and she did not make its maiden voyage until 2022.

Losing control of explosives technology to China:

In 1987, U.S. Navy researchers invented a new explosive with fearsome capabilities. Named China Lake Compound No. 20 after the Southern California base where it was developed, it boasted up to 40% greater penetrating power and propellant range than the U.S. military’s mainstay explosives, which were first produced during World War II. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the Pentagon’s urgency evaporated. So did the expensive task of perfecting CL-20 and designing weapons to use it.

China, however, saw the potential.
…
[Also]…the U.S. depends on China as the single source for about half-dozen chemical ingredients in explosives and propellants, and other countries of concern for another dozen.
…
Nearly all U.S. explosives are produced at a single Army-owned plant in Holston, Tennessee, that dates back to World War II and is run by U.K.-based defense contractor BAE Systems (2022 revenue: $25.5 billion). The production processes generally are as old, Kavetsky said, with explosives prepared in 400-gallon vats that resemble cake mixers. Many advanced energetic materials can’t be made that way, including CL-20, which he said is synthesized in smaller amounts in chemical reactors.

Great. You cannot commission new chemical plants overnight. And the upshot of all this was recently revealed by the Vegetable in Chief having his usual brainfart:

“The Ukrainians are running out of ammunition…. The ammunition, that they used to call them 155-millimeter weapons. This is a war relating to munitions, and they are running out of that ammunition and we’re low on it.”

Great going Brandon: the US is running out of ammunition and you let the world know that. China and Russia say thank you. But moves are afoot to crank things up, at least according to the NSC spokesman, John Kirby:

The defense industry obviously wants to make sure that if they’re going to increase production, that production rate is going to stay elevated for a period of time. Because that means hiring more workers, it means retooling and adding capacity in their factories and manufacturing capabilities.”

Obviously. But a Center for Strategic and International Studies report found replacing inventories for ammunitions such as 155 mm shells could take between four and seven years. Replacing Javelins could take up to eight years and Stingers up to as many as 18 years. I’m confident that US manufacturing can do it all a lot faster than that, but when you consider that Defence is getting about $800 billion per year things should never have been allowed to get to this point. Is there any surprise that the Pentagon has now failed five consecutive audits?

Last week, the Department of Defense revealed that it had failed its fifth consecutive audit… The Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets…The news came as no surprise to Pentagon watchers. After all, the U.S. military has the distinction of being the only U.S. government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit.

Perhaps this is nothing new. I was rather astounded to discover this bit of history:

Three quarters of the U.S. Polaris A1 model submarine-launched nuclear warheads probably would not have worked in the mid-1960s because of a mechanical defect, Department of Energy officials disclosed yesterday. In November 1966, scientists who discovered the extent of the problem described it as “truly catastrophic,” officials said. The Cold War US Military Industrial Complex had a “Come to Jesus moment” on this and other major systems engineering failures in its nuclear delivery systems and spat forth MIL-STD-499A MILITARY STANDARD: SYSTEM ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT (USAF), dated 1 May 1974 to fix this.

In the 1990”s President Clinton cancelled the MIL-STD-499A standard as a sop to defence contractors, which partly explains the F-35 and Ford problems.

So is there anything the US military does do right? Of course, but it has to be done outside the usual channels, as with the new B-21 bomber:

Following a dramatic unveiling of the B-21 bomber in California on Dec. 2, 2022, former Air Force leaders are holding a muted celebration. By moving from contract award to public rollout in seven years, they said in interviews with Defense News that they proved their acquisition strategy — despite McCain’s criticism — worked.

Better yet, they said, their unexpected approach might provide best practices for other major programs and serve as an antidote to the beleaguered development of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in the 1990s and 2000s.

Their secret? They learned how to limit bureaucracy.

This is my shocked face.

“There were fewer checkers checking the checkers,” James said. “Don’t ever underestimate the ability of the Pentagon bureaucracy and these many, many reviews to slow the doggone thing down.” Most notably, officials point to the unusual move to put the Rapid Capabilities Office in charge of the B-21′s development. That office had a narrowly focused team of skilled, experienced engineers and program managers, a board of directors to hash out key decisions and reviews, and an ability to cut through red tape, James said.

The author who quotes that also points out that this is not new: “the Super Hornet program was a great success, but that was only because NAVAIR tricked everyone in to thinking that it was just an update to the Hornet…which it was absolutely not.” But clearly it has to happen more often with other programs. Perhaps it did as the US Army has another success story with their new M10 Booker combat vehicle, which is not a tank:

“It’s been a tremendously successful program… on schedule, on budget, and performing well in testing,” according to Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, the program executive officer for ground combat systems. The first tanks… er, combat vehicles, should be delivered to the Army later this year.

Of course the USA’s rivals also have their own military problems:

Russia’s missile defence system is supposed to be able to detect a football-sized object from 8,000 km away. However, corruption is said to have left it “full of holes” and the head of Russia’s Space Forces may now face prosecution, as a scandal at the Russian MOD deepens

The Replacement of the RNZN Anzac Frigates.
An RNZAF Air Combat Capability Redux – Part 1
An RNZAF Air Combat Capability Redux – Part 2
‘To Raise, Train and Sustain’ the Army / Navy / Air Force