Drone

“Can’t be helped, Winston. Myers is a grocery clerk masquerading as a commander in chief. It’s the times we live in.” Diele took a sip of his Seagram’s 7 and 7. “It’s all about the pennies with this woman. She fails to see the big picture. That’s what you get when you elect a businesswoman to the White House instead of a strategic thinker. And I can’t muster enough senators on either side of the aisle to filibuster her sweet ass. It’s the damn Tea Party tyranny. Do you know, we’ve lost six thousand defense-related jobs in just the last month because of her? It’s insane. Defense work is the best kind of manufacturing job there is these days. It’s good, solid, middle-class work, whether you’re blue collar or white collar.” Diele cut another slice of beef.

The two men chewed in silence. There was no doubt that the defense budget was being ground down, though technically it was only frozen to last year’s record level. But rising health care costs, automatic salary increases, and mandatory retirement payouts were consuming a larger share of the Pentagon budget every year. A defense budget freeze actually cut deeply into new weapons acquisition.

What neither man acknowledged was that the Pentagon’s weapons acquisition programs were badly flawed and ill suited for the challenges of the twenty-first century. The F-22 Raptor fighter jets cost over $140 million apiece and still suffered a mysterious malfunction in the oxygen system. The problem was so bad that some air force pilots reportedly refused to fly the plane.

The F-35 series was the next fighter behind the F-22 that was designed to give America air combat superiority. Ironically, the F-35 was going to be sold to several nations, including Japan and Turkey, thus technically eliminating “American” air superiority. But the partnerships were considered necessary to help offset the astronomical expense of development and production, and yet it still cost American taxpayers over $300 million per plane. But the F-35 program continued to experience significant setbacks in production problems, cost overruns, and testing, including losing one computer-simulated combat scenario against fourth-generation Russian fighters.

The ultimate irony, of course, was that the United States hadn’t fought a single air-to-air combat engagement since the first Gulf War twenty years ago. Seemingly, the U.S. was building fighters for future air battles it wasn’t going to fight anytime soon. Defense analysts outside of the Pentagon had reached similar conclusions for other weapons systems in other service areas. Not only do generals and admirals prepare to fight the last war, they procure the weapons systems needed to fight them.

Of course, Americans weren’t the only ones guilty of this. In the period between the world wars, few generals or admirals anywhere realized the potential for tanks, airplanes, submarines, or aircraft carriers as revolutionary weapons technologies. European and American defense budgets were squandered on outmoded technologies like giant battleships, the Maginot Line, and other weapons systems perfectly designed to fight and win World War I. Unfortunately, the Germans and Japanese had prepared for World War II and nearly won it.

But these history lessons were lost on much of the current Pentagon establishment. That was partly due to the culture. The very highest air force and navy ranks were only achieved by the men and women who wore pilots’ wings or who had captained warships or submarines. Naturally, they favored the most advanced weapons systems and promoted the warriors who mastered them.

Unfortunately, history taught still another lesson the Pentagon hadn’t learned.

The only wars America had lost since World War II were those fought against technologically inferior opponents. America’s famous B-2 stealth bombers cost over $2 billion each, counting the entire cost of development and production, but the Afghanistan countryside was dominated by illiterate Muslim peasants carrying $200 AK-47s a decade after the invasion.

“I’m afraid for this country, Winston. I thank God every day for men and women like you who are standing guard over us. I just want to put the right tools in your hands so that you can do your job,” Diele said. What Diele didn’t say was that he wanted to hand him the weapons systems the big lobbyists wanted purchased, sometimes even over the protests of the generals and admirals. Congress was famous for buying unrequested weapons because they brought a direct material benefit to their home districts and states, and virtually every congressional district had at least one DoD contract of one sort or another in any given ten-year period.

Nearly all of the current pilots of the venerable B-52, first introduced in 1955, were younger than the airplanes they flew. B-52s were scheduled to remain in service until 2040. That meant, theoretically, a B-52 pilot in 2040 could be flying a plane his grandfather flew in.