Franklin C. Spinney: Skullduggery in the Pentagon's Budget
[Franklin C. Spinney is a former Pentagon analyst and whistleblower. His writing on defense issues can be found on the invaluable Defense in the National Interest http://www.d-n-i.net website.]
A recent report in "Aviation Week" (Sept 25, 2006) leads by saying,
"The U.S. Air Force is planning to reduce funding for pilot training and construction around the globe, although Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley says he hopes to keep procurement and research accounts intact as the Pentagon builds its Fiscal 2008 budget".
This is one of the recent spate of reports documenting shortfalls in the Department of Defense's $500+ billion budget. Predictably, the courtiers of Versailles on the Potomac are preparing for the silly season as they form their battle lines with Congress.
Assuming the Aviation Week report is correct (as it usually is on matters relating to future cash flows to the defense industry), Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael Moseley is either stupid or incredibly ignorant ... or, more likely, supremely cynical, because he is making exactly the same dysfunctional decision his predecessors made in the early to mid 1970s, which inevitably created the readiness horrors of the "hollow military" that hosed President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.
Back to the Future.
The milcrats in the Pentagon are busily preparing to Carterize Bush and Rumsfeld by blaming them for the Pentagon's budgetary mess (partly justified of course). At the same time, Moseley's priorities show how they are moving resolutely to insure the current budget crunch worsens over time. This will set the stage for a crisis, the resolution of which, will require an increase in future budgets. In the simplest terms, they will do this by robbing the readiness accounts to protect the high cost cold-war turkeys in the modernization pipeline. The fact that the Pentagon's accounting system can not pass the simple annual audits required by law (Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 as amended) will make it easier to hide the details of the flim flam operation.
What is truly amazing is that this kind of budgetary skullduggery is happening once again:
(1) after so much documentation describing its disastrous effects to the soldiers and to the American taxpayer ... and
(2) that it is happening when much higher budgets funding are paying for much smaller military forces.
One thing is certain, however, Moseley's gambit illustrates the post-cold-war staying power of the Military--Industrial--Congressional Complex (MICC) in the hall of mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac.
Carterization of an incumbent Administration is a recurring theme in the political-economy of Versailles. One could argue that Kennedy pioneered it when he accused Eisenhower underfunding defense and thereby permitting the emergence the (phoney) missile gap as well as the evisceration of our conventional forces. But the post-Vietnam era to the present is by far the easiest to document.
Many readers will recall the political furor over the emergence of the "hollow military" in the late 1970s. At that time I had just taken a job in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where my boss, Thomas Christie, hired me to figure out the underlying causes of the readiness problems that were creating a budgetary crisis in the Pentagon. With the help of others, including two especially talented patriots, Frank McDonald (of my office) and Charlie Murphy (who worked on Capital Hill for Congressman Jack Edwards R-Ala) we worked on this problem for three years and determined the fundamental cause of the problem was the self inflicted wound of robbing the readiness accounts to "modernize" with ever more expensive and complex weapons. This decision making bias toward overly complex, often unworkable technology resulted in a phenomenon that I called the "rising costs of low readiness." These costs included:
(1) constantly shrinking inventories of weapons and combat units over the long term, despite policies which said we were trying to increase force size,
(2) aging inventories of increasingly complex and unreliable weapons despite budget priorities that emphasized modernization, and
(3) continuing pressures to reduce readiness accounts (training and purchases of spare parts and ammunition, etc), despite policies that said readiness was our top priority, in order to free up money to pay for the higher cost weapons that were creating the first two problems.
As we learned later, all this was lubricated by a corrupt accounting/information system that made understanding the pattern of decision making almost impossible. The self-inflicted nature of the causes and evolution of these decision making pathologies were first described in my report Defense Facts of Life, a secret report written in the late 1970s, which was declassified by the Pentagon and released to the public in 1980 after Senator Sam Nunn, the former Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, made an issue of it at Casper Weinberger's confirmation hearing to be Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Defense. It was eventually published together with its follow-on report, The Plans Reality Mismatch, by Westview Press in 1986. Both reports were subjects of many congressional hearings. The Pentagon never rebutted either report in a formal written rebuttal....
Read entire article at Counterpunch
A recent report in "Aviation Week" (Sept 25, 2006) leads by saying,
"The U.S. Air Force is planning to reduce funding for pilot training and construction around the globe, although Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley says he hopes to keep procurement and research accounts intact as the Pentagon builds its Fiscal 2008 budget".
This is one of the recent spate of reports documenting shortfalls in the Department of Defense's $500+ billion budget. Predictably, the courtiers of Versailles on the Potomac are preparing for the silly season as they form their battle lines with Congress.
Assuming the Aviation Week report is correct (as it usually is on matters relating to future cash flows to the defense industry), Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael Moseley is either stupid or incredibly ignorant ... or, more likely, supremely cynical, because he is making exactly the same dysfunctional decision his predecessors made in the early to mid 1970s, which inevitably created the readiness horrors of the "hollow military" that hosed President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.
Back to the Future.
The milcrats in the Pentagon are busily preparing to Carterize Bush and Rumsfeld by blaming them for the Pentagon's budgetary mess (partly justified of course). At the same time, Moseley's priorities show how they are moving resolutely to insure the current budget crunch worsens over time. This will set the stage for a crisis, the resolution of which, will require an increase in future budgets. In the simplest terms, they will do this by robbing the readiness accounts to protect the high cost cold-war turkeys in the modernization pipeline. The fact that the Pentagon's accounting system can not pass the simple annual audits required by law (Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 as amended) will make it easier to hide the details of the flim flam operation.
What is truly amazing is that this kind of budgetary skullduggery is happening once again:
(1) after so much documentation describing its disastrous effects to the soldiers and to the American taxpayer ... and
(2) that it is happening when much higher budgets funding are paying for much smaller military forces.
One thing is certain, however, Moseley's gambit illustrates the post-cold-war staying power of the Military--Industrial--Congressional Complex (MICC) in the hall of mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac.
Carterization of an incumbent Administration is a recurring theme in the political-economy of Versailles. One could argue that Kennedy pioneered it when he accused Eisenhower underfunding defense and thereby permitting the emergence the (phoney) missile gap as well as the evisceration of our conventional forces. But the post-Vietnam era to the present is by far the easiest to document.
Many readers will recall the political furor over the emergence of the "hollow military" in the late 1970s. At that time I had just taken a job in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where my boss, Thomas Christie, hired me to figure out the underlying causes of the readiness problems that were creating a budgetary crisis in the Pentagon. With the help of others, including two especially talented patriots, Frank McDonald (of my office) and Charlie Murphy (who worked on Capital Hill for Congressman Jack Edwards R-Ala) we worked on this problem for three years and determined the fundamental cause of the problem was the self inflicted wound of robbing the readiness accounts to "modernize" with ever more expensive and complex weapons. This decision making bias toward overly complex, often unworkable technology resulted in a phenomenon that I called the "rising costs of low readiness." These costs included:
(1) constantly shrinking inventories of weapons and combat units over the long term, despite policies which said we were trying to increase force size,
(2) aging inventories of increasingly complex and unreliable weapons despite budget priorities that emphasized modernization, and
(3) continuing pressures to reduce readiness accounts (training and purchases of spare parts and ammunition, etc), despite policies that said readiness was our top priority, in order to free up money to pay for the higher cost weapons that were creating the first two problems.
As we learned later, all this was lubricated by a corrupt accounting/information system that made understanding the pattern of decision making almost impossible. The self-inflicted nature of the causes and evolution of these decision making pathologies were first described in my report Defense Facts of Life, a secret report written in the late 1970s, which was declassified by the Pentagon and released to the public in 1980 after Senator Sam Nunn, the former Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, made an issue of it at Casper Weinberger's confirmation hearing to be Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Defense. It was eventually published together with its follow-on report, The Plans Reality Mismatch, by Westview Press in 1986. Both reports were subjects of many congressional hearings. The Pentagon never rebutted either report in a formal written rebuttal....