This Thursday, March 11, Congress will hold two separate hearings at the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate. In the morning, the Senate committee will hear the Pentagon's Under Secretary for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Ashton Carter, and another Pentagon official talk about the hugely problematic F-35 "Joint Strike Fighter." In the afternoon, Carter and other top officials will testify to the House committee on how they are managing the Pentagon's thoroughly broken weapons acquisition system. If these hearings go anything like they usually do, the committees will hear stale bathwater from Under Secretary Carter at both hearings. Everything, he will say, is under control; he's fixing a few minor problems on the F-35 and he is the cutting edge of reform of the Pentagon's weapons buying system.
What rubbish this will be. There are fundamental and widespread problems in the design and acquisition of the F-35 that remain unaddressed by Carter's sloppily applied band-aids, and the Pentagon's acquisition system continues to hurtle down the road of ruin at ever increasing cost. Both of these problems are only a part of the malaise in our decaying armed forces -- a deterioration that is especially pronounced in our combat air forces.
The advocates of phony reform in Congress and the Pentagon would rush to point out how the new acquisition reform act, enacted last year, will do away with most, no all, of that. However, a quick tour through the gigantic loopholes of the act -- already exploited by Carter to avert the cost growth and schedule delays found by the JET for the F-35 -- informs any but the most clueless that the cost the Air Force and Navy predict today to shrink and age their own air forces is woefully understated.
This aviation plan will also likely start off a new round of bureaucratic infighting between the Air Force and Navy. The plan effects a Navy scheme against the Air Force: with just 30 percent of aviation forces, the Navy ends up with 50 percent of the procurement funding and actually gets more in the early -- more likely to occur -- part of the plan. We have not heard the last of this; budget-share is the most prized jewel in the Pentagon's bureaucratic rivalries. The Air Force and its leadership surely intend for this Navy raid on their family jewels to not stand.
The one category in all of this mess to see real increases in numbers is for pilotless drones, or as the authors of the plan like to call them "Unmanned Multirole, Surveillance and Strike Aircraft." These will grow from 72 vehicles today to 476, a more than 600 percent increase. The money will grow (commensurately, they optimistically predict) from just over $1 billion today to almost $7 billion in 2020 -- just under a 700 percent increase.
Even more remarkable than the assumption that future drones will be built without the geometric increase in cost we have witnessed in manned aircraft is the bureaucratic warfare yet to be fought out over drones. All the planned spending increase will be in the Navy budget; Air Force drone spending would actually decline. In reality, the total spending will be far, far higher, and the Air Force will never permit itself to fall so far behind.
Literally beyond belief is the schedule and performance that technology-fantasists in the Navy think they will get for their money. No sprightly, little model airplane, the envisioned X-47B now in development is a 15 ton, 62 foot wingspan, tail-less, and ultra-stealthy (of course) replacement for manned aircraft on the Navy's carriers. Rushing to catch up with and surpass the Air Force, the Navy envisions testing this beast on a carrier in just two years and deploying it in five. No mere vehicle for cameras, radars, and infrared gizmos to go out and search, the X-47B will not just pretend to find all the targets on a theoretically fogless battlefield but attack them as well with two tons of guided bombs.
Notice how well we are doing just that with first generation Air Force and CIA drones (using very much the same sensor technologies the X-47B will have) in Afghanistan, Yemen and especially Pakistan today. Attempting to decapitate al Qaeda and the Taliban, Predator and Reaper drones have been more successful at killing civilians (and at least one US citizen, the CIA boasts), infuriating the previously uncommitted population in favor of our enemies, and deluding Americans to think we can conduct remote control-warfare on other peoples' homeland with nothing but their obeisance as a consequence. The renewed attacks against America from al Qaeda and its growing, not exactly decapitated, infrastructure would tell us otherwise.
Secretary Gates' and Under Secretary Carter's aviation plan is a prescription for a foolish, unaffordable vision that embraces bureaucratic conflict and real decay in our military forces. Listen closely on Thursday as Carter testifies to Congress. Will he address any of these issues -- the decay in our aviation forces and the plan to make it all worse -- in either the specific F-35 forum at the Senate Armed Services Committee, or the more general acquisition reform forum in the afternoon at the House Armed Services Committee? If Carter initiates a discussion about any of this, you'll be able to knock me over with a feather. If any of his questioners bring any of it up, I will also be astonished: at both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, they rarely, if ever, probe into the darker recesses of our fundamental defense problems.
Watch. Tell me I got it wrong.