Carrier Strike Group Deployment Cancelled

The official statement from the DoD on delaying the Carrier Strike Group deployment to the CENTCOM Area of Responsibility reads:

Statement from Pentagon Press Secretary George Little on U.S. Carrier Strike Group Presence in the CENTCOM Area of Responsibility

“The secretary of defense has delayed the deployment of the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75), Norfolk, Va., and the USS Gettysburg (CG-64), Mayport, Fla., which were scheduled to depart later this week for the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) area of responsibility.

“Facing budget uncertainty -- including a continuing resolution and the looming potential for across-the-board sequestration cuts -- the U.S. Navy made this request to the secretary and he approved. This prudent decision enables the U.S. Navy to maintain these ships to deploy on short notice in the event they are needed to respond to national security contingencies.

“The United States will continue to maintain a robust military presence in the CENTCOM region, including the current carrier presence and a mix of other assets, to fulfill enduring commitments to our partners. The U.S. military continues to stand ready to respond to any contingency and to confront any threat in the region.”

By: Brant

Empty Promises on Canadian Defense Investments?

The Economist has a bleak outlook on plans vs reality in Canadian defense spending.

One of the main ways Stephen Harper, Canada’s Conservative prime minister, has sought to distinguish himself from his Liberal predecessors is by building a modern army ready to fight, rather than merely for peacekeeping. In the 2011 election campaign he promised to fulfil a C$15 billion ($15 billion) contract for 65 F-35 fighter aircraft despite a tough economy. In October he announced Canada’s biggest-ever arms order, for naval and coastguard ships costing C$35 billion. The structure of the procurement was widely praised for avoiding political interference.

But the glow has not lasted. In April Canada’s auditor-general found that the government had misled Parliament, deliberately underestimating the price of the F-35s by almost C$10 billion, by excluding replacement aircraft, upgrades and training and maintenance costs. On July 4th Mr Harper named a new junior minister at the defence department as the deal’s spokesman. But procurement remains awkwardly split between the defence and public-works ministries. One result was that last year the military forfeited C$600m allocated for equipment but not spent.

Last month Walter Natynczyk, the outgoing chief of the defence staff, criticised a delay in signing detailed contracts for the shipbuilding scheme. The navy fears it will fall victim to a C$3.5 billion cut in defence spending over the next seven years. On July 11th the armed forces were given new cause to worry, when the army scrapped bidding on a C$800m lorry contract for lack of funds, minutes before the deadline.

By: Brant

GD Up To Their Roadwheels in Deep Doo-Doo

There's an IG report on General Dynamics "wasting" a metric assload of money on the Stryker program, and apparently never tried not to...

The Army is weighing changes in General Dynamics Corp.’s contract to maintain Stryker armored combat vehicles after the Pentagon’s inspector general found the terms led to excess spending of as much as $336 million, or 23 percent.

The no-bid contract resulted in “little, if any, cost risk for the contractor or incentive to control costs,” the inspector general said in an audit. The Army responded by starting a “business case analysis” of potential changes, according to Ashley Givens, spokeswoman for the service’s Ground Combat Systems.

Under contracts that began in 2002 and were awarded without competition, General Dynamics is paid to perform maintenance and to buy, store and issue spare parts for the Army’s 2,576 Stryker vehicles, which were built by the company.

The 19-ton, eight-wheeled vehicles have driven an estimated 40 million miles (64 million kilometers) during the Iraq and Afghan wars. Seventy-seven Strykers have been destroyed in battle since 2002, and 435 were damaged.

Since the first contract in May 2002, Army officials “have made no progress in converting the high-risk cost-reimbursable contract or portions to a preferred lower risk, firm-fixed contract,” the audit, dated June 18, found. “As a result, the Stryker contract was at a higher risk of misuse, waste and inadequate accountability.”

By: Brant

DoD Shifting Dollars Around - What're They For?

Every year, starting FYQ4 the DoD asks Congress to shift money around in their accounts. This year's "big shift" is to cover the costs of moving supplies to Afghanistan around Pakistan, who closed the border crossing. However, there are some other very interesting budget requests in the this year's document, as reported by DefenseNews.

The Army’s $1.7 billion in additional funding requests reflect operations in Africa, logistics in Afghanistan, and the highly touted Capability Set 13, which is being deployed to three brigade combat teams (BCTs) in October. Until now, there were no dollar figures available associated with the capability sets, which are part of the Army’s No. 1 priority to develop and field its new Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T) battlefield network.

The document also included:

• $18.2 million for USSOCOM logistical support in its mission “to disarm the Lord’s Resistance Army” in Central Africa.

• $140 million to field Capability Set 13 to three BCTs.

• $59.4 million to install structural upgrades to Humvees to integrate Capability Set 13 to the first three brigade combat teams scheduled for fielding in fiscal 2013. The Army had repeatedly said that Humvees would not be part of the networking plan.

• $28.7 million “to procure command and control components within the Tactical Operations Centers” for Capability Set 13.

• $51.3 million for Capability Set 13 integration onto five variants of MRAPs, Humvees and Strykers.

Conversely, the backbone of Capability Set 13, the WIN-T communications network, is losing $334.6 million due to efficiencies gained by including it in the Army’s Network Integration Evaluation program. The Army says that the reduction in funding will not affect its planned fielding of eight BCTs in fiscal 2013, and six more in 2014.

By: Brant

COA Analysis: Budgets Spiraling Out Of Control

As fiscal crises deepen - just because an economy recovers doesn't mean future budgetary commitments evaporate - what do you expect to see come of the budgets?
Here are 4 potential courses of action to discuss...

What do you think might happen?


By: Brant

US DoD Funding for Israel's Iron Dome?

The Pentagon wants to ship more money to Israel for the Iron Dome.

The Pentagon will press Congress for more money for Israel’s Iron Dome system designed to intercept short-range rockets and mortars, a boost for Israel as the Obama administration tries to dissuade the Mideast ally from launching a potential unilateral strike on Iran.

The announcement from the Pentagon on Tuesday also comes as Obama has faced election-year criticism from Republican presidential candidates and GOP lawmakers that administration support for a longtime friend has been inadequate.

“Supporting the security of the state of Israel is a top priority of President Obama and Secretary (Leon) Panetta,” Pentagon press secretary George Little said in a statement. “The Department of Defense has been in conversations with the government of Israel about U.S. support for the acquisition of additional Iron Dome systems and intends to request an appropriate level of funding from Congress to support such acquisitions based on Israeli requirements and production capacity.”

The Pentagon cited the effectiveness of the system, which in recent weeks intercepted more than 80 percent of the nearly 300 rockets and mortars fired by Palestinian militants from Gaza at southern Israel.

Here's the official DoD Statement by Pentagon Press Secretary George Little on Iron Dome


By: Brant

Defense Budget "Analysis"

This chart was posted over at Mother Jones today. Now yes, you need to consider the source, but it's based on data from the International Institute of Strategic Studies. The sourcing of the actual chart is only an issue if you follow the link and decide to read the comments.

Click to enlarge, at least a bit

In case it isn't approved by the site moderators, here are the comments I submitted to the article.

I'm curious about 2 things in the US figures, and wondering if they were included, and how (if at all) comparable expenditures are included in other nations' military budgets:

1. R&D. The US R&D budget for the military is pretty damn big compared to other countries. We tend to develop a lot of the technologies/hardware, then sell it to other people to help recoup the costs. We were better at this 30 years ago than today (F16 vs F35) but we still do a lot more R&D than say, Germany or Brazil.

2. Military family support. How much of the budget is covering things like military housing, family health care, on-post/overseas schools for military kids, etc? The US tends to do a lot more for their military families than other nations, in part because of the frontier tradition of larger, unified military bases where the entire community is self-contained (that was replicated in Europe in the Cold War). Other nations have their military folks at the "local" base far more integrated into the community with regards to housing, shopping, family activities, etc. Plus many of those nations have a completely different health care structure than the US does, which changes the calculus of providing health care to military families.

This doesn't mean there's not room for improvement in the defense budget, but when you're comparing US numbers to everyone else, you have to include deployment costs (discussed ad nauseum), as well as these other considerations, before you just scream about how out of whack the US budget seems. The US Navy is all over the world, in large part ensuring global trade lanes are reasonably open. If the US pulled back to home ports, would other nations pick up the slack? Impossible to know, but probably a factor in the numbers discussed here.

By: Brant

Looming US Naval Cuts

As the Army tries to figure out how to reduce their footprint, the Navy is also making plans to scale back their force.

...Navy leaders claimed the reduction will not degrade the sailing branch’s ability to influence world events and deter rivals. At roughly 3 million tons displacement combined, today’s Navy is by far the largest in the world, exceeding the tonnage of the next dozen navies, combined. The Navy maintains around 2/3 of its forces in the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions.

Adm. Mark Ferguson, the Navy’s second-ranking officer, signaled a possible shift away from the 313-ship plan in a recent speech. He said a new shipbuilding plan could take three years to finalize.

Following up on Ferguson’s comments, Navy Undersecretary Robert Work said that even a slightly smaller fleet would still contain a preponderance of large, sophisticated warships capable of worldwide operations. “We [will] span the globe,” Work said, according to AOL Defense reporter Carlo Munoz.

By: Brant

Panetta: US Forces Smaller, More Agile

Per this article from Defense.gov Secretary Panetta says the military will be smaller and more deployable.

To accomplish the new mission sets for the 21st century, the United States needs a smaller, quicker, more agile military, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said today.
That is the basis behind the recently released strategy review that will set the stage for the fiscal 2013 Defense Department budget request.
“Our budget is, basically, designed to reinforce the new missions we are talking about and that agile, deployable and ready force that has to move quickly,” Panetta said during an interview on his way to Fort Bliss, Texas.
Force structure will come down in the years to come, the secretary said, but the military will continue to be able to engage in the full range of conflicts even with spending $487 billion less over the next 10 years. The Army will get smaller, but the reduction will be slow and balanced as recommended by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, Panetta said.
The way the force will be used will change under the strategy, the secretary said. While there will remain forces in Asia and the Middle East – two areas of particular focus for the United States – other areas will not be uncovered. Rotational forces – the way Army Special Forces currently deploy – will expand to conventional forces. The rotational deployments mean the military “will be in a position to cover not only the area that will be a primary focus … but we will be able to cover the world,” he said.
The new air-sea battle doctrine will allow the military to handle more than one conflict at a time. “The example I’ve used is if we are in a land war in Korea and Iran does something in the Strait of Hormuz – to go after that and to deal with that threat is largely going to be the responsibility of the Air Force and Navy,” Panetta said. “Same if we are in Afghanistan and something breaks out in the Taiwan Straits or the South China Sea, … confronting that would largely be a naval and air capability.”
The secretary is adamant that the budget will not be reduced on the backs of service members. He specified there will be no changes to military retirement for those serving today.
“We are going to design the requirements for any commission that looks at retirement,” he said. “One of the requirements is that those already serving are fully grandfathered.”

Yep, lipstick on a pig...

By: Brant

Defense Cuts in Historical Perspective

What does post-war shrinkage look like? And will post-GWOT shrinkage be any worse than historical post-war shrinkages? The CFR notes...

Last summer, defense spending was slashed by $487 billion over 10 years. Then, right before Thanksgiving, a special committee of Congress failed to agree on $1.2 trillion in alternative cuts, which opened the way to another $500 billion or so in defense cuts. Hundreds of billions more in so-called emergency funding will be gone as we wind down operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In all, the defense budget could shrink by 31% over the next decade, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. That compares with cuts of 53% after the Korean War, 26% after the Vietnam War and 34% after the Cold War.

That doesn't sound too far off-line for recent history, but let's go back further...

After the American Revolution, the military plummeted from 35,000 men in 1778 to 10,000 by 1800. As a result, the nascent republic had to scramble to put down the Whiskey Rebellion, fight a quasi-war with France, repress the Barbary pirates and, most spectacularly, defend the new national capital from British attack in the War of 1812. The burning of the White House stands as melancholy testimony to our military unpreparedness.

Yet we made the same mistake after the Civil War. The armed forces fell from more than 1 million men in 1865 to merely 50,000 in 1870. Luckily we did not face a foreign attack in the postwar decades. But we did face the challenge of Reconstruction. Its failure was made inevitable by Washington's inability (or unwillingness) to station enough federal troops in the South to repress the Ku Klux Klan. By 1876, all federal troops were withdrawn and the era of Jim Crow had begun.

In fact, the raw numbers, as summarized by The Economist, look like this:

Revolutionary war: 71%
Civil war: 95%
First world war: 91%
Second world war: 88%
Korean war: 31%
Vietnam war: 43%
Cold war: 38%

So let's face it, comparatively, 31% might not be the worst thing to happen to US defense...

What do you guys think? Is 31% too much? Too little? How does 31% track with strategic requirements?

By: Brant

Pentagon Announces New Strategy, Follow-Up I

Worried about the intel budget? Don't be.

"We will protect, and in some cases increase our investments in special operations forces, in new technologies like (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), and unmanned systems, in space and particularly in cyberspace capabilities, and also capacity to quickly mobilize," Panetta told reporters at the Pentagon.

And the Congressional reactions are starting to pour in. You won't find any surprises.

“The current and emerging global threats to our national security are more complex than at any time that I can recall,” said Republican Sen. John McCain, ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Therefore, I will closely, carefully and thoroughly review the defense strategy that the president announced today and examine whether it meets our national security objectives.”

His counterpart in the House, Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, did not hesitate to criticize the new strategy.

While the Pentagon press conference was still underway, McKeon tweeted, “New defense strategy is a lead from behind for a left-behind America.”

In a statement issued soon afterward, he said, “The President has packaged our retreat from the world in the guise of a new strategy to mask his divestment of our military and national defense.”

By: Brant

Boeing Keeps Missile Defense Work

Hey, for $3.48 billion, you'd want the contract, too.

Boeing Co beat out Lockheed Martin to retain its position as the prime contractor for the U.S. long-range missile shield, the Pentagon said on Friday.
The U.S. Defense Department said it was awarding Boeing a $3.48 billion, seven-year contract to develop, test, engineer and manufacture missile defense systems.
A team led by Lockheed Martin Corp and Raytheon Co had vied with Boeing to expand and maintain the Ground-based Midcourse Defense, or GMD, hub of layered antimissile protection.
Boeing partnered with Northrop Grumman Corp to retain the work.

By: Brant

Budget Axe Shooting Down Blue Angels?

Will the military's demonstration teams, like the Navy Blue Angels, take the hit for the inability of Congress to get a budget deal done?

The Navy's Blue Angels have been thrilling audiences for more than six decades with their acrobatic flying in fighter planes, but a new era of federal budget worries and proposed deficit cutting has some inside and outside the military raising questions about the millions it costs to produce their shows.
Some want the popular shows grounded and some readers of the Air Force Times newspaper — most of them active or retired service members — recently listed eliminating the Blue Angels and similar programs as one way to cut defense spending.
The Pentagon spends $37 million for the Blue Angels, whose mission is to enhance recruiting for the Navy and Marines and to be their public goodwill ambassador. That's a fraction of the Pentagon's $926 billion annual budget, but that's not the point, critics say. They argue that lots of smaller programs will have to be eliminated to meet required spending reductions.
Automatic cuts triggered by the collapse of the debt supercommittee in Washington this week combined with spending reductions previously hammered out by President Barack Obama and Congress mean that the Pentagon would be looking at nearly $1 trillion in cuts to projected spending over 10 years.
The Air Force's Thunderbirds and the Army's Golden Knights paratroopers also perform big public shows.

By: Brant

How Deep Will the Cuts Go?

Secretary Panetta is coming out swinging.

The number of U.S. ground forces would drop to levels not seen since 1940, the Navy would drop to the smallest number of ships since 1915 and the Air Force would be the smallest ever, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in warning Congress of the dire implications of deeper defense cuts.
The Pentagon chief on Monday offered a litany of drastic steps triggered by the automatic, across-the-board cuts if Congress' supercommittee fails to come up with a $1.2 trillion deficit-cutting plan by Nov. 23. If the panel stumbles, the Pentagon faces some $500 billion in reductions in projected spending over 10 years — on top of the $450 billion already under way.

By: Brant

What's All That Intel Costing Us?

The DoD has released the "Military Intelligence Program Appropriated Top Line Budget for Fiscal 2011", AKA, the "classified stuff."

The Department of Defense released today the MIP appropriated top line budget for fiscal 2011.
The total request, which includes both the base budget and Overseas Contingency Operations appropriations, is $24 billion.

The department determined that releasing this top line figure does not jeopardize any classified activities within the MIP. No other MIP budget figures or program details will be released, as they remain classified for national security reasons.

$24 billion buys a lot of black ops...
Oh yeah, and this is just the DoD budget. This doesn't include the CIA, NGA, NSA or any of the other TLAs that aren't part of the DoD.

By: Brant

Keynesian Economics and Military Spending

So there's a study out there that tries to show that military spending has a signficant economic effect beyond the raw dollars committed.

... it turns out that military spending is actually a singularly good proxy for measuring just how big the multiplier for government spending is. A new paper by Jón Steinsson and Emi Nakamura, assistant economics professors at Columbia, looks at boosts in military spending over the past half-century and separates their impacts in states with lots of military contractors and personnel, and those with relatively few—specifically, California and Illinois. The difference allows them to run a regression to see how much the extra military spending boosted the economy.

One reason that military spending was easy to analyze in depth, as the article points out, is that military spending is archived in meticulous - and usually public-accessible - detail.


By: Brant

Europe Continually Awaiting US to Ride to Their Rescue

The Economist ran this column a whole back, but it's still worth discussing that Europe has been more than happy to let the US lead with their military and their wallet, and that in the long-term, that's unsustainable.

...if the European taxpayers do not want to pay to preserve their own security, why should Americans shoulder the burden? Only five of the 28 NATO allies meet NATO’s recommendation that countries should spend at least 2% of GDP on defence: America, Britain, France, Greece and Albania. Today America’s key security interests are in the Middle East and in Asia. Europe will be the obvious place for America to cut expensive overseas commitments.

Europe has more soldiers than America, but can deploy far fewer of them on overseas operations. This is partly the result of history: in the cold war European armies were built to hold the line in Europe, while awaiting reinforcement by American forces which, by definition, had to be designed for expeditionary warfare. Another is that “Europe” is not a sovereign state, but a collection of small- and medium-sized countries. Its considerable defence spending is hoplessly fragmented among a multitude of armies, air forces and navies.

Specialisation, pooling and sharing equipment is the obvious way forward. Defence experts across Europe have known this for a long time and, here and there, countries have embarked on some important experiments. A recent paper by the Centre for European Reform, and think-tank in London, makes some sensible recommendations (PDF). But what is rational in terms of defence accounting too often falls foul of political and operational reality. Many smaller countries have little interest in international commitments. And the bigger states that still retain some kind of global vision, like Britain and France, do not want to be dependent on smaller states for their military capability.

By: Brant

Save the Infantry! Looking Ahead at Budget Cuts

An impassioned plea that we "Don’t Forget the Infantry" from Jim Lacey at National Review Online

Even as American soldiers and marines remain locked in mortal combat, debates rage over how deeply to cut the military. Cuts ranging from $400 billion to $1 trillion over five to ten years are on the table. As none of these discussions appear grounded in any determination of what our strategic needs might be in an uncertain future, I may be wasting my words in pointing out that this appears to be a particularly bad time to think about reducing our military capabilities. Rather, I wish to rail against the one thing that almost always happens when the country undertakes an ill-thought-out reduction of its military might: the senseless elimination of land forces.
After the Soviet Union’s demise, the U.S. Army’s 18 combat divisions were cut to ten. And before 9/11 Secretary Rumsfeld was proposing to cut that force to eight. Let’s put that in perspective. The combat troops within a division (infantry, artillery, armor) are only a fraction of the division’s total strength; the rest serve in crucial logistics and other support roles. If one took all the “trigger pullers” in the nation’s ten Army and two Marine divisions, there would be barely enough to fill half a college football stadium. This lack of manpower was so detrimental to our war efforts that during the peak of the fighting in Iraq serious consideration was given to adding two more combat divisions to the Army. It never happened. And now that our commitment in Iraq is winding down, the Army is once again bracing itself for the possibility of losing two of its ten divisions.

Now, as much as I like his article and the excellent points it makes, I do have to quibble with one thing: post Cold-War, when we consolidated from 18 combat divisions to 10, one of the changes we made was that every division was given a full complement of 3 line brigades. During the 80s, many of those 18 divisions had 'roundout' brigades from the National Guard. Those relationships were punted after Gulf I and the drawdown when we closed VII Corps. Several of the active duty separate brigades (like the 197th at Ft Benning) were tied into existing divisions to replace their associated National Guard units.
Additionally, no one has ever really answered this question: where were we supposed to put VII Corps if we brought them home? Seriously. You're talking about 2 infantry divisions, 2 artillery brigades, plus an ACR, and MI, MP, AVN, SIG, and ADA brigades. That's a lot of stuff to park somewhere at a time when most bases were pretty strained for capacity and the Russians had just rolled over and called "Uncle!"

By: Brant

$2.7 Billion of... What, Exactly?

So the reviews on DCGS-A are somewhat less than positive...

The U.S. Army's $2.7 billion dollar cloud based computer supposed to be helping troops in Afghanistan and Iraq doesn't work and may be doing more harm than good.
Several analysts told Politico that the system "...has hurt, rather than helped, efforts to fight insurgents because it doesn’t work properly"
The system known as DCGS-A is designed by Northrop Grumman to relay real-time intelligence to commanders from multiple sources to aid in their search for insurgents.
Instead, analysts say the system is unable to perform "simple analytical tasks," has trouble finding reports, and the mapping software is incompatible with the search software.
According to a former Army intelligence officer, "You couldn't share the data." And sharing data is what the computer was designed to do.
The system is also known for going off-line and frequently crashing.
The analysts, who asked their names not be used say it couldn't be any worse.
“Almost any commercial solution out there would be better,” the first said. And the second added: “It doesn’t work. It’s not providing the capabilities that they need.”
If intelligence analysts and commanders had a system that worked, he said, “I can’t comprehend the amount of success that would have happened here or could have happened here.”

h/t Guardian, who couldn't be bothered to post this himself, but will no doubt offer an extended screed on it in the comments :)

By: Brant

Troop Cuts to Bring Aid Cuts?

With the looming pullout in Afghanistan, will aid dollars follow the troops home?

President Barack Obama's Afghanistan troop withdrawal is likely to be accompanied by cuts in billions of dollars of civilian aid, bringing a precipitous shift of control many fear could tip the country into further corruption and chaos.
Parallel with Obama's draw-down of combat troops by 2014, the United States plans to pull back hundreds of civilian advisers involved in helping govern Afghanistan, whether helping organize the annual budget or FBI agents setting up crime units.
The aim is to wean Afghanistan off foreign aid to form a sustainable state, allowing the West to exit without being accused of abandonment -- an image that has haunted the international community since the Soviet exit in 1989 ended in civil war.
The strategy risks leaving fewer resources for one of the world's poorest countries. Giving what is left to President Hamid Karzai's government -- widely criticized for endemic corruption -- may just end in unchecked graft and political interference in civil projects.

By: Brant