F-35 in South Burlington

Duh.

2012-02-08T10:24:00.001-05:00

Kendall: Early F-35 Production ‘Acquisition Malpractice’

"The Pentagon’s top weapons buyer denounced a previous U.S. Defense Department decision to start production of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter years before the tri-service jet’s first flight.
“Putting the F-35 into production years before the first test flight was acquisition malpractice,” said acting Pentagon procurement chief Frank Kendall, speaking at a Feb. 6 event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It should not have been done.”
Kendall said that the Pentagon had made “optimistic” predictions about the capabilities of design tools, simulations and modeling to build a fighter that would breeze through test flights without problems.
“Now we’re paying the price for being wrong,” Kendall said.
Problems are cropping up on all three variants of the F-35 that would typically be expected in any highly ambitious next-generation fighter program, he said.
“We didn’t model everything as precisely as we thought,” Kendall said.
Transitioning from development to production is traditionally been one of the most difficult challenges for any program. Kendall said there is a tendency to start production too early, adding that the F-35 is an “extreme example.”
Barry Watts, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C., agreed with Kendall’s assessment. “My understanding is the amount of concurrency on this program is as great as or greater than any past program,” he said. Watts, who has been to Lockheed’s Fort Worth, Texas, plant, described long lines of F-35s already being built. “Most of those, if they’re going to be operational airplanes eventually, are going to have to go back and have a bunch of changes made to them,” he said. “That drives up cost and delays things.”
Watts said that the Pentagon should have insisted on more flight tests before starting low rate initial production.
The F-35 is an extremely complicated engineering challenge with its many missions and three variants, Watts said. “I guess my feeling is that they bit off a little more than they could chew,” he said. Pentagon officials should have raised these concerns earlier, Watts added. But with then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates terminating the F-22 Raptor program, the Pentagon “has put all of its eggs in the JSF basket,” he said.
Kendall said the Pentagon is fully committed to the F-35 program and nothing precludes production at a reasonable rate. “Hopefully, we won’t see anymore serious problems emerge,” he said.
Lockheed Martin officials were unable to comment by press time.

F-35 Fighter Is Latest in Long Line of Wasteful Weapon Failures

2011-12-16T11:34:00.000-05:00

F-35 Fighter Is Latest in Long Line of Wasteful Weapon Failures by Dina Rasor

"First, it is too early to tell, second, it is too late to do anything about it." -Ernest Fitzgerald

There has been a flurry of articles in the defense press Tuesday about an internal Department of Defense (DoD) report on how the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Pentagon's newest attempt to buy a fighter jet, is skating toward potential mechanical and monetary disaster. The DoD top civilian weapons buyer put together a team to do a quick look at how the fighter was doing in its journey to become the next main fighter in the DoD arsenal. The report has the usual DoD hedge wording and qualifiers, but the answer is: not too good. There must be some panic and buzz in the Pentagon hallways since the last attempt of making a fighter, the F-22, was surprisingly canceled by the Obama administration and some brave members of Congress. Now, the newest fighter is falling under its own bloated procurement weight. Is the system, which has given us generation after generation of overpriced and technically dubious fighters, tanks, and other weapons finally succumbing to its own folly? This new report, which was leaked to the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) and some reporters, is now posted at POGO's web site. (Full disclosure: I founded POGO and still serve as treasurer and on the board of directors.)

Bill Sweetman, who writes the Ares blog for Aviation Week was not impressed with the F-35's progress:

When the Joint Strike Fighter team told Guy Norris about the jet's first run to its Mach 1.6 design speed, a couple of minor facts slipped their minds. Nobody remembered that the jet had landed (from either that sortie or another run to Mach 1.6) with "peeling and bubbling" of coatings on the horizontal tails and damage to engine thermal panels. Or that the entire test force was subsequently limited to Mach 1.0.

But selective amnesia is not even one of five "major consequence" problems that have already surfaced with the JSF and are disclosed by a top-level Pentagon review obtained by Ares. Those issues affect flight safety, the basic cockpit design, the carrier suitability of the F-35C and other aspects of the program have been identified and no fixes have been demonstrated yet. Three more "major consequence" problems are "likely" to emerge during tests, including high buffet loads and airframe fatigue.

To understand why this keeps happening to our weapons acquisitions and to try to change it, you have to know some history on how the system works and what has happened in the past. It is a sad tale of déjà vu all over again.

Ernest Fitzgerald, the well-known Pentagon whistleblower who fought the bureaucracy in hand-to-hand combat for better weapons and realistically priced weapons from the 1960s to 2006, came up with a simple law of why this sordid history keeps repeating itself. Fitzgerald's first law of weapons procurement is: "First it is too early to tell, second, it is too late to do anything about it." I have found that this is the way that the DoD, the military services and the defense contractors squeeze every last dime out of the procurement budget and then even more, while making sure that their weapon doesn't get so obviously gross as to go on the rare weapons' chopping block.

Fitzgerald blew the whistle on the C-5A cargo plane in the late 1960s because of technical problems of the plane and that it had overrun its budget by $2 billion - a huge sum at the time. Lockheed, the manufacturer of the C-5A, had made the plane too heavy to meet its specifications. They, with the tacit blessing of the Air Force, took weight out of the wings of the plane to meet the requirements. Everyone knew that this most likely would affect the service and life of the wings, but it was paramount that the C-5A got into the fleet before someone suggested that the C-5A production run could be lessened or cut. It was important for all sides who were interested in the money flow of this plane, including the Air Force, the DoD, Lockheed and the Congress, to keep it going for jobs, profits and future retirement jobs for the military and civilians who were overseeing this plane.

Besides, even though the laws of physics would tell you that taking weight and strength out of the wings of a big heavy cargo plane would lead to problems, wasn't it really "too early to tell"? Or, as the military called it, the unknown, unknowns or unk-unks. Many a career was made or saved by the mysterious unk-unks where bad things happened, but you couldn't get blamed because the unknowns were unknown.

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I came into this picture in 1979, when the Air Force "discovered" that cracks were developing in the C-5A wings, threatening the safety and life of the planes. Everyone acted surprised even though there were plenty of internal oversight reports warning that this might happen if weight was taken out of the wings in the production process. So, the Air Force told the Congress that there had to be a "wing modification," a nice word for wing fix, and it was going to cost $1.5 billion to fix the wings of the current fleet. In the non-Pentagon normal world, logic would tell you that Lockheed had the liability to pay for this "mistake" because they took the weight out of the wings and the engineers at Lockheed and in the government said, at the time, that the wings would begin to crack. But when I began to investigate this fix and uncover all the evidence of why the taxpayer should not have to pay for this, especially since the plane had already had the largest overrun at that time, the Air Force said that they were responsible to fix the problem because of all the unk-unks at the time. People in the DoD, the Congress and Lockheed all bobbed their heads in unison and insisted that it needed to be done and the government should pay for this mysterious problem because the planes had been bought, the system was counting on them and "it was too late to do anything about it."

This law became even more perfected when the DoD began to use "concurrency" as a regular way of procuring a weapon. Logic would tell you that you build a prototype for a weapon; do developmental testing on it to fix the technical bugs; start an initial, low rate of production after the fixes; and test this small production run with operational testing, using real troops in wartime type situations. Once you identified and fixed problems that showed up when you used the weapon as planned in a war and you made sure that the weapon was truly effective for the troops and not just a box of new gee-whiz technology for technology's sake, you would decide to go to full production with a set blueprint for the weapon. Of course, logic would also tell you that, in these stages toward full production, you may find that some of the technology would never work and if the weapon was only good because of these technologies or that the technologies could not realistically work in a war, it was far better for the troops and the taxpayers to cut the losses and cancel the weapon before sinking any more costs into the project.

However, concurrency blows this logic out of the water. The DoD has increasingly, over decades, blurred the logical lines of production that is used by most of the world. Instead, the bureaucracy finds a way to continue to push the weapon into large production while trying to fix the technical bugs and see if the weapon would truly work on the battlefield. This concurrency of development and production helps to make sure there is never a moment, not even a nanosecond, between "too early to tell" and "too late to do anything about it." This makes sure one is never vulnerable to having the weapon cut back or canceled, threatening one's career in the DoD, the defense company's profit, Congress's access to defense jobs in each district and state and one is more likely to find a nice retirement job because the weapon got through.

As you can imagine, this concurrency has caused weapons failures in the battlefields, technical and expensive nightmares in trying to maintain these weapons and costly fixes for these so-called unknown unknowns leading to astronomical overruns. There have been dozens and dozens of reports and testimony by government oversight agencies on how this is a bad idea and doesn't work, but the beat of the military procurement culture goes on. And as I mentioned in a past column on weapon costs, these overruns and fixes become the historical costs on which all new weapons are priced, so that the waste and disaster of concurrency goes on as high procurement costs and high maintenance costs for each generation of weapons.

In the late 1980s, I was investigating the technical problems of the radar systems on the B-1B bomber. The radar jamming system was jamming the B-1's own radar, rather than the radar on the enemy plane, along with several other problems. I came to a part in the DoD report where the author cheerfully predicted that, even though each radar built and put on production planes was different because of rolling modifications, the radar design would be finally set at the hundredth unit. It took me a minute to realize that we were only buying 100 B-1B bombers, thus, plaguing the fleet with planes where each one would have a unique radar to maintain. What would Henry Ford with his standardization of parts on the Model T think of us now? I wondered at the time.

The Air Force is now scrambling to make sure that it is too late to do anything about the F-35 production in this atmosphere of defense budget cuts. Top DoD officials have been arguing that maybe the costs and the effectiveness of the F-35 should lower the production rate of the plane, and senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee were trying to make sure that the next buy of the F-35 was not cost-plus as in the past, but fixed price where there would be a chance to try to control costs. Reuters reported:

Lawmakers inserted the fixed-price language into the bill after learning about Lot 5 contract [Pentagon had quickly approved it to be cost-plus], angered that the decision had been taken even as the Senate was debating whether or not to require the deal to be a fixed-cost contract.

Senator Carl Levin, Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he and the panel's top Republican, Senator John McCain, were upset that the Pentagon had acted even though it knew lawmakers were looking at the contract language.

McCain and Levin have expressed discontent with previous "cost-plus" contracts that paid Lockheed's costs for producing the aircraft plus a profit margin on top of that.

They believe the contracts have enabled the cost of the F-35 program, the Pentagon's most expensive procurement program, to balloon over the years.

"We take umbrage at the idea that they would proceed on Lot 5 while we are negotiating whether or not there should be a prohibition on a cost-plus contract on Lot 5. So what we did is we said no cost-plus starting on Lot 6," Levin said.

Maybe the F-35 has finally come to that magical moment between "too early to tell" and "too late to do anything about it." With the threat of large budget cutting, there has been more scrambling going on than business as usual with all the parties involved. Defense contractors are beginning to squeal that they are getting cut to the bone and Secretary of Defense Panetta, who has only had the job for six months, has been a disappointment for becoming part of the Pentagon's usual hallelujah chorus despite his past cost-cutting career. This most recent report, even though they hate to say it, is committing a lot of truth about the failures on this plane that are just now starting to come out. Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project, has been exposing this game longer than I have. He had some tough comments on the F-35 based on this newest report:

The new revelations are numerous and significant enough to call into question whether F-35 production should be suspended - if not terminated - even in the minds of today's senior managers in the Pentagon. The revelations include, but are not limited to "unsatisfactory progress and the likelihood of severe operational impacts for survivability, lethality, air vehicle performance and employment." Performance vis-à-vis so called "legacy" aircraft is seriously questioned and the individual deficiencies are sometimes so remarkable as to call into question the competence of the designers at Lockheed-Martin, to say nothing of the cost to repair the deficiencies. For example, the naval variant is now incapable of landing on carriers due to the inability of the arresting hook to capture an arresting cable on the carrier deck. And, there are more hard to conceive deficiencies, including airframe buffeting at different angles of attack. Moreover, as the report points out, these problems are appearing only after the easy phases of the test flights. The more exacting/demanding test flights are yet to even start. What unpleasant surprises do they hold?

The report frequently repeats the assertion that nothing so serious was found to "preclude further production." Read the report and decide for yourself if the report supports that conclusion, or actually the reverse. In fact, the oft repeated assurance that nothing too serious is uncovered was, in fact, added on by some in a rather pathetic attempt to convert this report into mush.

So, how can we retire Fitzgerald's law? It won't be easy, but the first place to start is to get rid of concurrency for everything other than the simplest of technologies. We have to go back to logic and not try to develop a weapon while also trying to use it at the same time. It would be crazy to do this in the automobile industry and it doubly more dangerous for our troops that rely on these weapons. Don't allow any full production until standards are set for manufacturing or we will be paying billions of dollars later to fix it. One of the best ways to retire Fitzgerald's law is to make the politically hard decision to cancel early weapons that can't realistically be fixed technically or won't work in real combat. There has to be a tolerance for failure and cancellation at the early stages of a weapon without fear of recrimination by the bureaucracy so that the weapons procurers and engineers can move on to a better and more realistic design instead of spending decades defending bad ideas at great cost to the taxpayer and the troops.

Internal Pentagon report finds major problems with F-35 performance and components

2011-12-13T16:57:00.006-05:00

Internal Pentagon report finds major problems with F-35 performance and components

Technical and performance problems with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter appear to be more numerous and more serious than anyone in the Department of Defense has been willing to concede publicly, according to a leaked Pentagon report obtained by the Star-Telegram.

The internal report marked "For Official Use Only" is written in carefully couched language, but clearly sounds alarms that some very large, troubling and costly to resolve technological and performance issues lie ahead for the already troubled and massively over budget F-35.

The Project on Government Oversight has posted a copy of the report on its web site.

In a prepared statement issued Tuesday, the company said: “The report is still currently under review by senior Department of Defense officials. We expect to work closely with the F-35 Joint Program Office and Defense Department to understand and address any concerns expressed in the report.”

The report prepared by a team of senior Pentagon technical, engineering and test experts found that “unsatisfactory progress” had been made in development and testing of the F-35 in nearly all of the air combat roles that it is designed to perform.

In ground attack roles the report cites concerns about “mission capability and survivability” and “certain classified survivability issues."

Although most of the really challenging flight testing of the F-35 in high speed, air combat regimes has yet to be performed, the Pentagon and military officials overseeing testing “expressed significant concerns with aircraft performance characteristics.”

The “Quick Look Review” report, 50-plus pages including numerous charts, illustrations and detailed projections, was prepared just since mid-October by a team headed by five senior Pentagon officials with expertise in weapons evaluation testing and engineering.

It was requested by Frank Kendall, acting undersecretary of defense for weapons acquisition and development. Kendall asked for the report to assess the state of F-35 development so defense officials could decide whether and how many planes they should agree to buy while development was still under way.

The report essentially concludes that highly sophisticated design and modeling technology has failed in predicting and preventing problems with the design, production and performance of the aircraft and its critical combat systems.

In no case does the report state that any of the problems cannot be overcome or that the F-35 will be unable fulfill its intended missions, but it does strongly suggest the worst of the problems may not yet be known and that the fixes will take years and vast new sums of money.

The report authors say as a result of the combined issues the Pentagon should go very slowly in buying more jets.

"The combined impact of these issues results in a lack of confidence in the design stability...this lack of confidence, in conjunction with the concurrency driven consequences of the required fixes, supports serious reconsideration of procurement and production planning...The QLR team recommends that further decisions about F-35 concurrent production be event-driven."

Vice Admiral David Venlet discussed some of the report's conclusions about the problems created by concurrent development and production in a recent interview published by AOL Defense but did not hint at some of the detailed performance problems and the severity. Bloomberg first obtained a copy of the report and reported some of the issues.

Major areas of concern include:

* Worse than predicted buffeting of the aircraft in high speed and maneuvering modes with the most stringent testing in combat-like situations yet to be done. The result is already seen and predicted further accelerated wear and tear on the aircraft, cracks in the structural frame.

* The high tech helmet-mounted-display that is supposed to allow the pilot to be aware of potential threats and attack targets at night or in bad weather performs badly and its night vision capability is far less than existing systems used by pilots in existing aircraft. The buffeting of the aircraft in flight makes the helmet-mounted-display problems worse.

* The integrated power package that provides backup electrical power, controls much of the aircraft's avionics and the primary oxygen supply and cockpit pressurization has proven horribly unreliable.

* The tailhook arrester on the F-35C for carrier landings failed in every test to catch the arresting cables that yank jets to a halt. A new tailhook design is beign readied for testing early next year but the report suggests that the problem may lie with the basic design of the aircraft itself and fixing it could require a major redesign of the F-35C structure.

- Bob Cox

Concerns About JSF's Lethality, Survivability Triggered 'Concurrency Risk' Review

2011-12-13T16:53:00.001-05:00

Posted on InsideDefense.com: December 13, 2011

An internal Defense Department report detailing major, unresolved design problems with the Joint Strike Fighter, which recommends that DOD reconsider its F-35 procurement and production plans, was triggered by U.S. and British operational testers who, the report states, had "significant concerns" about the F-35's lethality, survivability and air performance characteristics.

The testers' October 20, 2011 findings, "Operational Assessment OT-IIE," prompted the Pentagon's acting acquisition executive, Frank Kendall, to commission an independent assessment of the risks associated with the F-35 program's plan to simultaneously produce new aircraft while still refining the aircraft's design.

Some findings of the Kendall-directed assessment -- "F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Concurrency Quick Look Review," dated November 29 -- were reported by Bloomberg on December 6. The chief aim of the effort was to size up the "concurrency risk" of the JSF program, which the report defines as the potential for significant design changes to the F-35 "in order to assess the risk associated with modification to aircraft being produced while the design is still being tested and changed."

The report, prepared by five senior officials from across the Pentagon's acquisition directorate, determined that "no fundamental design risks" were identified to warrant halting production.

Still, the assessment details five engineering challenges "where major consequence issues have been identified, but root cause, corrective action or fix are still in development." These include problems with the Helmet Mounted Display System, the fuel dump subsystem, the integrated power package and the arresting hook system on the variant designed for aircraft carrier launches and landings.

These engineering difficulties came to the attention of Pentagon leaders in part because of a broader set of concerns with the F-35 program raised by commanders of the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center, the Navy Operational Test and Evaluation Force and the Untied Kingdom's Royal Air Force Air Warfare Center in their report this fall.

The "quick-look review" described the findings of the three operational testers.

Following a year-long assessment that aimed to size up the F-35's progress toward operational effectiveness suitability -- as well as mission capability -- the operational testers concluded that the Joint Strike Fighter program was "not making sufficient progress toward meeting operational effectiveness criteria" across a range of areas, according to the Pentagon's November 29 report.

The testers' assessment, dubbed OA OT-IIE for short, "cited unsatisfactory progress towards meeting performance requirements for the air-to-surface (A/S) attack mission capability and survivability." Among the main concerns were the aircraft's night-vision capability, unresolved problems with the helmet-mounted display and unnamed classified "survivability" issues.

Testers also reported "significant concerns" with "aircraft performance characteristics, particularly transonic roll-off and buffet, as well as maneuvering performance," according to the Pentagon's characterization of their report.

In addition, the testers -- concerned in part by air-vehicle performance and questions about the ability to launch air-to-air missiles -- raised numerous questions about the F-35's ability to prevail in a contest against enemy aircraft or air-defense systems.

"The operational testers cited unsatisfactory progress and the likelihood of severe operational impacts for survivability, lethality, air vehicle performance, and employment," according to the Pentagon report.

The JSF's electronic warfare capabilities were also questioned by the testers. In particular, they expressed concern over the stealthy fighter's ability to suppress and defeat enemy air defenses, according to the Pentagon's report, which cites "classified lethality and survivability issues" as well.

In addition, concerns about operational and sustainment issues were raised by the U.S. and U.K. testing officials.

The OA OT-IIE "concluded with an assessment of the F-35 system's readiness to forward base, deploy, and retrograde; to generate missions in the intended operating environment; to train pilots and personnel; and support flight operations," according to the Pentagon summary of the tester's report. "Chief among their concerns were the readiness of the [Autonomic Logistics Information System] and its multiplicity of configurations; the thermal management system; the integrated power package (IPP); the overall logistics footprint and systems interoperability; progress on the HMD; and low observable (LO) maintenance."

While the Pentagon's "quick-look report" validated these concerns as a source of concurrency risk in the F-35 program, that study also found that issues raised by testers about the development of other planned F-35 capabilities -- close-air support, combat search and rescue and reconnaissance -- were not sources of concurrency risk.

-- Jason Sherman

JSF: What's Really Happening

2011-12-13T16:50:00.001-05:00

JSF: What's Really Happening

"When the Joint Strike Fighter team told Guy Norris about the jet's first run to its Mach 1.6 design speed, a couple of minor facts slipped their minds. Nobody remembered that the jet had landed (from either that sortie or another run to Mach 1.6) with "peeling and bubbling" of coatings on the horizontal tails and damage to engine thermal panels. Or that the entire test force was subsequently limited to Mach 1.0.

But selective amnesia is not even one of five "major consequence" problems that have already surfaced with the JSF and are disclosed by a top-level Pentagon review obtained by Ares. Those issues affect flight safety, the basic cockpit design, the carrier suitability of the F-35C and other aspects of the program have been identified, and no fixes have been demonstrated yet. Three more "major consequence" problems are "likely" to emerge during tests, including high buffet loads and airframe fatigue.

Update: POGO has the full report here.

Experience from flight testing has eviscerated the argument that the F-35 program architects used to support high concurrency, with fat production contracts early in the test program: that modeling and simulation had advanced to the point where problems would be designed out of the hardware. In fact, the F-35 is having just as many problems as earlier programs, which means that there is no reason to expect that it will not continue to do so.

The "quick look review" (QLR) panel was chartered by acting Pentagon acquisition boss Frank Kendall on Oct. 28, eight days after top U.S. Air Force, Navy and U.K. Royal Air Force operational test force commanders jointly expressed their concern that the F-35 would not be ready to start initial operational testing in 2015, as envisaged in the delayed test program adopted in January.

Kendall was looking for an assessment of test progress, as well as a look at "concurrency risk" - the concern that problems discovered in testing will result in expensive modifications to aircraft that are produced before the fixes can be designed, tested and implemented in production.

The QLR was submitted on Nov. 29, before Navy Vice Adm. Dave Venlet, the JSF program director, disclosed some of the fatigue issues in interviews with AOLDefense. Its existence and some of its findings were reported by Bloomberg's Tony Capaccio early last week.

The most positive thing that the QLR has to say about the program is that the team "identified no fundamental design risks sufficient to preclude further production." That is, they don't say that the program should be terminated, or that production should be halted until problems are fixed. But the team concludes:

"The combined impact of these issues results in a lack of confidence in the design stability...this lack of confidence, in conjunction with the concurrency driven consequences of the required fixes, supports serious reconsideration of procurement and production planning...The QLR team recommends that further decisions about F-35 concurrent production be event-driven."

Since flight testing started to pick up speed in June 2010, 725 engineering change requests have been initiated, of which 148 are ready to incorporate. On average, it takes 18-24 months between the identification of a change and its implementation in production. JSF production orders started three to four years earlier than other fighters, and even under the current plan, close to 200 aircraft will be on order by the halfway point in flight testing.

Many of the issues described by the QLR have been reported, but not in detail. Others have been played down by the program. The following are four of the "big five" issues that have already surfaced. (The fifth is classified, but dollars to doughnuts it has something to do with stealth.)

We knew that the helmet-mounted display was in trouble. A simpler alternate HMD was ordered from BAE Systems in September, but it does not meet the requirement for "through the airplane" zero-light visibility provided by the electro-optical distributed aperture system. (Yes, that EO-DAS, that makes maneuvering irrelevant.)

Today, the killer problem with EO-DAS is latency: the image in the helmet lags 130 milliseconds behind sightline movement where the spec is under 40 ms. (So the video is where the pilot's head was pointed an eighth of a second ago.) That can't be fixed without changing the JSF's integrated core processor - the jet's central brain - and the EO-DAS sensors. Even the backup helmet faces buffet and latency issues, simply for symbology.

The underwing fuel dump system on the JSF doesn't get fuel clear of the aircraft surfaces, so that fuel accumulates in the flaperon and may get into the integrated power package (IPP) exhaust. That creates a fire hazard, particularly on a ship deck after landing. Fuel dumping has been banned except in an emergency. Two unsuccessful modifications have been tried on the F-35B.

The IPP - the cause of a grounding this summer, after a "catastrophic failure" caused IPP parts to puncture a fuel tank - is turning out to be unreliable. It's supposed to last 2,200 hours, but so far in the flight test program, 16 IPPs have been removed and replaced - a process that takes two days of 24-hour work.

The arrester hook issue has been reported. In the first round of tests, the hook failed to catch the wire once. The QLR notes that tests of a minimal modification - a reprofiled hook with different damper settings - set for April "represent only the initial stages leading into full carrier suitability demonstrations."

Studies are already underway of changing the hook's location - the basic problem is that the designers put the hook closer behind the main landing gear than that of any current or recent Navy aircraft, even the tailless X-47B - but that will have "major, direct primary and secondary structural impacts".

The QLR report predicts more problems, based on experience so far, historical data, and the collapse of the "test is validation" orthodoxy.

F-35 flight tests have not gone beyond 20 degrees angle of attack, and higher-than-predicted buffet loads have been experienced. So far, severity has been similar to current aircraft but it is experienced over a large part of the envelope. Exploration of the high-AoA envelope does not start until the fall of 2012 and full results will not be available until 2014. Excess buffet can accelerate airframe fatigue, and induces jitter in the HMD.

One editorial observation, not from the report: aerodynamic issues are a challenge on a stealth aircraft because some of the standard fixes - fences, strakes and vortex trippers, for instance - can't be used.

Other risks are individually less severe but cumulatively could result in substantial modifications. They include thermal issues - like the current speed restriction - and an untested lightning protection system, which at least until late 2012 means that the aircraft is not allowed within 25 nm of predicted lightning. (That is expected to cancel 25-50% of training events at Eglin AFB.) Weight margins for all versions are paper-thin.

The full QLR is densely packed and makes fascinating reading. Personal view? What keeps going through my mind is Gus McCrae from Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, after one of the Hat Creek outfit has ridden into a nest of water moccasins:

"Eight sets of bites, not countin' the legs. Ain't no point in countin' the legs."

Flying Blind by Winslow Wheeler

2011-09-22T10:18:00.000-04:00

While the costs to acquire (to develop and procure) US Air Force (USAF) aircraft have always been controversial, they have also been routinely reported and debated. That is not the case for the costs to operate and support USAF aircraft after they are deployed. Operating and support (O&S) costs are only rarely reported to the public, to Congress or even inside the Pentagon.

The few reports that are available are incomplete, inconsistent and misleading. The data that are reported indicate that O&S costs for USAF aircraft are twice or more the cost to acquire them. Two-thirds of total aircraft costs are imperfectly known, if they are known at all.

SPECIFICALLY

The data that are available show that newer aircraft are much more expensive to operate than the aircraft they replace, even when the latter are decades old and require extraordinary measures to keep them in service.

Despite promises that they would be cheaper to operate than the antiques they replace, the costs to operate and support modern stealth aircraft are remarkably high. In 2010, the cost per flying hour for the F-22 and B-2 stealth aircraft were over $55,000 and $135,000, respectively—tens of thousands, sometimes almost twice, the cost per flying hour of the aircraft they replace.

DOD’s current estimates to operate and support the F-35 are not credible; actual costs can only be far more than currently estimated.

The costs to operate and support drones are badly understated; most of their integral ground operations, their extremely high loss/crash rates and potentially other major costs are not calibrated in the available data.

CONCLUSIONS

Congress has kept itself in the dark about these costs; even inside the Pentagon, many seem to be very poorly informed—or to be misinforming—about O&S costs.

The costs to operate and support aircraft after deployment need to be routinely reported both inside the Pentagon and to Congress, but before any Pentagon reports on this subject are to be believed, they must be audited and then made complete and accurate by an independent, competent authority such as the Government Accountability Office.

To read the full report, please go to: http://goo.gl/kGgRU

the debt deal took a hostage that no one wants to shoot.

2011-09-16T09:34:00.000-04:00

Why Pentagon bloat will kill real deficit cutting

Touted as the "supercommittee" by pundits, the Joint Deficit Reduction Committee -- created by the Aug. 2 debt deal between President Barack Obama and the congressional Republicans -- has turned out to be not so super. The real super-committees of Congress, the appropriations committees, are reasserting their control, and they are doing it with the defense budget, keeping it quite flush with money and unraveling a second round of debt reduction...

...the supercommittee is bound to fail; it will reach no meaningful budget agreement...when the committee fails, the defense cuts envisioned by the supposedly automatic trigger mechanism will not occur. That will be for the simple reason that almost no one wants that to happen. While they are quite mistaken about the consequences, almost everyone on Capitol Hill (and in the Pentagon) thinks that those defense reductions will be "devastating," "disastrous," "doomsday" and any other apocalyptic term you can think of.

In short, the debt deal took a hostage that no one wants to shoot...

Consisting mostly of second-stringers on budget issues and leadership errand boys (and girl) from their party caucuses, (The Super Committee) will find a $1.2 trillion budget solution sometime after pigs fly and shrimps whistle.

...While the precise budget obligation on the Pentagon in this first phase has not been entirely clear, most are now interpreting it to mean...that the Pentagon budget would be effectively frozen at its current, fiscal year 2011 level...

Even at the 2011 level, the bill is extremely generous. The amount -- about $529 billion after separate military construction and some other pieces are added -- will be almost as much "base" spending as the Pentagon has seen in any single year for decades.

If you add the separate funding for the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere ($118 billion), the amount is quite close to the Pentagon's highest level since the end of World War II -- and it is well above previous secondary peaks attained in the Korean and Vietnamese Wars and Ronald Reagan's fleeting zenith in 1985.

That "frozen" 2011 level will be more than twice the combined defense budgets of China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba and Somalia. It will be more than $80 billion more than we spent, on average, during the Cold War when we faced a threatening and heavily armed Soviet Union and a hostile, dogmatically communist China. In the absence of these two huge threats, we are now being told we need to spend more....

Also, as the details trickle out next week, we will find the usual ruses, including cuts for "revised economic assumptions," "unobligated balances" and other phony games to pretend the committee is reducing money (rather than deferring it) and making good government decisions (rather than taking capricious cuts in military readiness while protecting procurement -- and contractors). (For more on these tricks, see here.)

The current defense bill is not a tough-minded but moderate action to impose restraint on the Pentagon; it is an effort to protect Pentagon spending as much as possible. With Robert Gates taking the lead and Leon Panetta bobble-heading in agreement, the Pentagon has resolved itself to that first phase of $350 billion in cuts over 10 years. They are not happy about it, but they will live with it in order to fend off further reductions. The Senate Appropriations Committee leadership is in deep sympathy with that sentiment.

Filled with bunkum to make it seem as if it's cutting at least moderately but is actually rescuing the unaffordable, underperforming F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the bill from the Senate Appropriations Committee is a rear-guard budget protection action...

The debt deal will be rewritten. The defense budget will be "saved," and the next budget crisis will be made both inevitable and worse. We have a lot more dysfunction in Congress and the White House yet to observe.

How Fragile We Are

2011-09-14T18:14:00.000-04:00

Manufacturers lobby against deeper defense cuts

With talk of defense cuts burning the tender ears of the nation's largest corporate welfare recipients, the usual suspects have sent a whole stampeding herd of lobbyist to the capital to talk folks out of said “cuts”. Here are some really precious quotes:

"American leadership in aerospace and defense is being threatened by forces in Congress and the administration...The security of our troops, our technological future and our economic stability are all at risk. We must preserve jobs across the nation that keep our nation strong."

Ha! "Forces In Congress", how scaaaaary, how sinister, how underhanded of these democratically elected representatives of we people to be imperiling their profits! And I always love when the military yells about jobs. They totally SUCK at making jobs and the wars that they have made such a devastatingly handsome profit from are one of the main reasons our economy is totally FUBAR right now. Ladies and Gentleman, we are in a scruple free zone.

"Defense spending has nearly doubled since the Sept. 11 terror attacks to more than $500 billion. That spending is separate from the more than $1 trillion that has covered the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade. The association, on its website, said U.S. aerospace sales in 2010 were $214.5 billion, another record year. "This was the seventh straight year of increasing sales, the last few of which were achieved in a very challenging economic environment."

Now this is where some people would realize that they should shut the fuck up but not these guys! They go on to use the other side of their mouth to say that they've been "cut to the bone” and are "fragile". Honey, if you are 'fragile' after the XXX Caligulan pork fest of past 10 years then you richly deserve to go out of business. To add insult to kicking themselves in the balls, they insinuate that they can’t protect us from 87.5 dusty Al Qaeda operatives with the largest military budget we’ve ever had, more than they got to fight the god damn Cold War.

“The Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to meet…to finalize a $513 billion defense spending bill that freezes spending at current levels.”

Yes, you read that right. These aren’t even cuts as most speakers of the English language understand them. In their continuing war on meaning (y’know to go with all the other wars) the MIC is framing congresses intention to NOT RAISE spending as a CUT in spending. These guys are yelling “the sky is falling. I want my mommy” because spending is being maintained at current astronomical levels not even including extra spending for the wars that isn’t included in the plan. Not so dramatic when you put it that way. That’s why they don’t put it that way. Bastards.

From the "why the hell didn't I think of this" file

2011-09-12T12:41:00.000-04:00

The Death Star: A Pentagon Purchasing Nightmare

"A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, another military superpower spent way too much money on massive planet-busting weapons that didn’t work well. Maybe the Defense Department could learn something from this before it finds an X-wing crammed up its thermal-exhaust port.

Meet the biggest cautionary tale in the world of defense procurement: the Death Star. Thanks to the Pentagon’s in-house acquisition journal, Defense AT&L Magazine — not usually a venue for fan fic — we have a detailed explanation as to why. Air Force Lt. Col. Dan Ward provides a nerdy-but-accurate examination of the Empire’s acquisition flaws in building the moon-sized death ray:

In the Star Wars universe, robots are self-aware, every ship has its own gravity, Jedi Knights use the Force, tiny green Muppets are formidable warriors and a piece of junk like the Millennium Falcon can make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. But even the florid imagination of George Lucas could not envision a project like the Death Star coming in on time, on budget.

The Empire’s answer to Ash Carter should have seen it coming. It’s embarrassing enough that the galaxy’s supposedly most fearsome weapon was felled by crappy duct work.

But it was entirely predictable. A project so big and complex, Ward writes, will invariably stretch the oversight capabilities of acquisition staff. In this case, it led to manufacturing delays and prevented the Empire from realizing that one of its thermal-exhaust ports was a de facto self-destruct button.

Moreover, for all the expense poured into it – $15.6 septillion and 94 cents, to be precise — the Death Star is destroyed twice, and in its two iterations only ever manages to get off a few shots.

Star Wars holds lessons about what to buy as well as what not to. Ward contends that the humble droid mechs represent a better acquisition path than Death Stars. They’re sturdy, battle-tested systems that are affordable and live up to their billing.

R2D2’s better at flight maintenance than taking out planets, but at 4,245 Republic Credits, he’s undeniably a bargain. By contrast, the Empire didn’t end up getting much use out of the Death Star, for all it spent on it.

Anyone who’s paid attention to the Defense Department’s acquisitions woes will get Ward’s point. Really expensive weapons that we haven’t gotten much use out of? Check.

Gigantic laser beam faced with delays and overspending? Take a look at the Flying Lightsaber.

Hopelessly complex and expensive systems? Try Future Combat Systems.

Ward’s analysis of Imperial weapons-buying flubs can be read as a reiteration of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ approach to acquisition. Buy the weapons that work. Buy the weapons that are relevant to the threats at hand, and the most likely ones of the near future. Big isn’t always beautiful. Practical is.

Admittedly, the Rebel Alliance is looking for the knockout blow against the Empire. But that’s not typically how insurgencies win: They win by compelling empires into counterproductive overspending.

If the rumors of another round of Star Wars sequels are true, maybe we can look forward to watching the Empire go bankrupt after convincing itself to buy two Death Stars, on the theory that different models will drive down costs.

The Military Assault on Global Climate by: H. Patricia Hynes

2011-09-09T08:42:00.000-04:00

By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy ... Yet, the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements ... Any talk of climate change which does not include the military is nothing but hot air, according to Sara Flounders.

It's a loophole [in the Kyoto Convention on Climate Change] big enough to drive a tank through, according to the report " A Climate of War."

In 1940, the US military consumed one percent of the country's total energy usage; by the end of World War II, the military's share rose to 29 percent. Oil is indispensable for war.

Correspondingly, militarism is the most oil-exhaustive activity on the planet, growing more so with faster, bigger, more fuel-guzzling planes, tanks and naval vessels employed in more intensive air and ground wars. At the outset of the Iraq war in March 2003, the Army estimated it would need more than 40 million gallons of gasoline for three weeks of combat, exceeding the total quantity used by all Allied forces in the four years of World War 1. Among the Army's armamentarium were 2,000 staunch M-1 Abrams tanks fired up for the war and burning 250 gallons of fuel per hour.

The US Air Force (USAF) is the single largest consumer of jet fuel in the world. Fathom, if you can, the astronomical fuel usage of USAF fighter planes: the F-4 Phantom Fighter burns more than 1,600 gallons of jet fuel per hour and peaks at 14,400 gallons per hour at supersonic speeds. The B-52 Stratocruiser, with eight jet engines, guzzles 500 gallons per minute; ten minutes of flight uses as much fuel as the average driver does in one year of driving! A quarter of the world's jet fuel feeds the USAF fleet of flying killing machines; in 2006, they consumed as much fuel as US planes did during the Second World War (1941-1945) - an astounding 2.6 billion gallons.

Barry Sanders observes with a load of tragic irony that, while many of us assiduously reduce our carbon footprint through simpler living, eating locally, recycling and reusing, energy conservation, taking public transportation, installing solar panels, and so on, the single largest institutional polluter and contributor to global warming - the US military - is immune to climate change concerns. The military reports no climate change emissions to any national or international body, thanks to US arm-twisting during the 1997 negotiations of the first international accord to limit global warming emissions, the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. To protect the military from any curbs on their activities, the United States demanded and won exemption from emission limits on "bunker" fuels (dense, heavy fuel oil for naval vessels) and all greenhouse gas emissions from military operations worldwide, including wars. Adding insult to injury, George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol as one of the first acts of his presidency, alleging it would straitjacket the US economy with too costly greenhouse emissions controls. Next, the White House began a neo-Luddite campaign against the science of climate change. In researching "The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism," Sanders found that getting war casualty statistics out of the Department of Defense (DoD) is easier than getting fuel usage data.

Only recently has the momentous issue of military fuel use and its massive, yet concealed role in global climate change come to the foreground, thanks to a handful of perspicacious researchers. Liska and Perrin contend that, in addition to tailpipe emissions, immense "hidden" greenhouse gas pollution stems from our use of gasoline. This impact on climate change should be calculated into the full lifecycle analysis of gasoline. When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) compares gasoline and biofuels for their respective atmospheric pollution, the greenhouse gas emissions calculated for gasoline should include the military activities related to securing foreign crude oil, from which gasoline is derived. (But they do not, thanks to the Kyoto Accords military exemption.) Oil security comprises both military protection against sabotage to pipelines and tankers and also US-led wars in oil-rich regions to assure long-term access. Nearly 1,000 US military bases trace an arc from the Andes to North Africa across the Middle East to Indonesia, the Philippines and North Korea, sweeping over all major oil resources - all related, in part, to projecting force for the sake of energy security. Further, the "upstream emissions" of greenhouse gases from the manufacture of military equipment, infrastructure, vehicles and munitions used in oil supply protection and oil-driven wars should also be included in the overall environmental impact of using gasoline. Adding these factors into their calculations, the authors conclude that about "20 percent of the conventional DoD budget ... is attributable to the objective of oil security."

A corresponding analysis by researchers at Oil Change International quantifies the greenhouse gas emissions of the Iraq war and the opportunity costs involved in fighting the war, rather than investing in clean technology, during the years 2003-2007. Their key findings are unambiguous about the vast climate pollution of war and the lockstep bipartisan policy of forfeiting future global health for present day militarism.

The projected full costs of the Iraq war (estimated $3 trillion) would cover "all of the global investments in renewable power generation" needed between now and 2030 to reverse global warming trends.
Between 2003-2007, the war generated at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, more each year of the war than 139 of the world's countries release annually.Rebuilding Iraqi schools, homes, businesses, bridges, roads and hospitals pulverized by the war, and new security walls and barriers will require millions of tons of cement, one of the largest industrial sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
In 2006, the US spent more on the war in Iraq than the entire world spent on renewable energy investment.
By 2008, the Bush administration had spent 97 times more on military than on climate change. As a presidential candidate, President Obama pledged to spend $150 billion over ten years on green energy technology and infrastructure - less than the United States was spending in one year of the Iraq war.

Just how much petroleum the Pentagon consumes is one of the best-kept secrets in government. More likely, observes Barry Sanders, no one in DoD knows precisely. His unremitting effort to ferret out the numbers is one of the most thorough to date. Sanders begins with figures given by the Defense Energy Support Center for annual oil procurement for all branches of the military. He then combines three other non-reported military oil consumption factors: an estimate of "free oil" supplied overseas (of which Kuwait was the largest supplier for the 2003 Iraq war), an estimate of oil used by private military contractors and military-leased vehicles and an estimate of the amount of bunker fuel used by naval vessels. By his calculation, the US military consumes as much as one million barrels of oil per day and contributes 5 percent of current global warming emissions. Keep in mind that the military has 1.4 million active duty people, or .0002 percent of the world's population, generating 5 percent of climate pollution.

Yet, even this comparison understates the extreme military impact on climate change. Military fuel is more polluting because of the fuel type used for aviation. CO2 emissions from jet fuel are larger - possibly triple - per gallon than those from diesel and oil. Further, aircraft exhaust has unique polluting effects that result in greater warming effect by per unit of fuel used. Radiative effects from jet exhaust, including nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, soot and water vapor exacerbate the warming effect of the CO2 exhaust emissions.(6) Perversely, then, the US military consumes fossil fuel beyond compare to any other institutional and per capita consumption in order to preserve strategic access to oil - a lunacy instigated by a series of executive decisions.

Read the rest here

Winslow Wheeler and William Hartung: Military Spending A Poor Job Creator

2011-09-08T12:06:00.000-04:00

For years and years, advocates of big defense spending have argued there is a major economic benefit -- jobs. These claims are ever more strident now because of high unemployment and threats to further growth in the defense budget. Hearing the footsteps on the unaffordable, underperforming F-35, Lockheed, among others, touts the jobs they pretend the program creates.

The defense budget does create jobs, but it is highly inefficient at it. Large portions of the total defense budget are spent on things that have nothing to do with jobs in the US; even the procurement and R&D accounts (i.e. the portions that porkers in and out of Congress claim to be US-jobs-rich) are terrible investments for employment.

In 2007 the University of Massachusetts at Amherst published a study on the matter... William Hartung, the author of an excellent history of the Lockheed Corporation ("Prophets of War"), has written a concise summary for the Center for International Policy. That summary is below: more defense spending will actually result in a net loss of US jobs.

In Bill Hartung's summary, note the anecdotal data about the F-35: even according to Lockheed, 85% of the spending for the program is for overhead; according to the program's chief advocate in DOD, Ashton Carter, just 1.5% of program funding is for labor at the program's primary Forth-Worth, TX plant. These assertions -- revealing as they are -- come from the advocates and may be -- shall we say -- incomplete; they would make an excellent subject for an audit -- a jobs audit -- by an objective and competent authority, such as GAO.

That no such audit is available is just another bi-product of the bi-partisan nature of Congress' pork system: both Democrats and Republicans love to pretend they are bringing home the bacon in the form of jobs with local defense spending. Not necessarily so. In 1998, I asked GAO to study the economic impact of defense spending on the State of New Mexico (I worked for Senator Pete Domenici, R-NM, at the time). GAO found that the number of jobs that DOD contractors created in New Mexico from procurement and R&D spending there was absolutely puny....Unfortunately, however, knowing how weak DOD contractor spending was at creating jobs in New Mexico did nothing to slow down Senator Domenici's all consuming aggressiveness in chasing down every single morsel of DOD pork he could find.

The jobs argument is one of many that big DOD spenders in Congress, industry and think tanks will tout as they oppose reductions in the Pentagon budget this fall. In doing so, they will throw around impressive numbers -- conveniently provided by contractors, not by independent researchers. Contrary evidence, like the University of Massachusetts study and Hartung's summary will be studiously ignored, but that's a prime characteristic of a system, like Congress, where convenient myth is valued far more highly than awkward data.

-Winslow Wheeler

Military Spending: A Poor Job Creator

By William D. Hartung

Center for International Policy

September 2011

Plans for cutting the federal deficit have raised an important question: what impact would military spending reductions have on jobs? Contrary to the assertions of the arms industry, maintaining military spending at the expense of other forms of federal expenditures would actually result in a net loss of jobs. This is because military spending is less effective at creating jobs than virtually any other form of government activity.

The question is not whether military spending creates jobs - it is whether more jobs could be created by the same amount of money invested in other ways. The evidence on this point is clear. A billion dollars spent for military purposes creates 25% fewer jobs than a tax cut; one and one-half times fewer jobs than spending on clean energy production; and two and one-half times fewer jobs than spending on education. And though average overall compensation is higher for military jobs than the others, these other forms of expenditure create more decent-paying jobs (those paying $64,000 per year or more) than military spending does.

Part of the reason that military spending creates fewer jobs than other forms of expenditure is that a large share of that money is either spent overseas or spent on imported goods. By contrast, most of the money generated by spending in areas like education is spent in the United States. In addition, more of the military dollar goes to capital, as opposed to labor, than do the expenditures in the other job categories. For example, only 1.5% of the price of each F-35 Joint Strike Fighter pays for the labor costs involved in "manufacturing, fabrication, and assembly" work at the plane's main production facility in Fort Worth, Texas. A full 85% of the F-35s costs go for overhead, not for jobs actually fabricating and assembling the aircraft.

In a climate in which deficit reduction is the central focus of budget policy in Washington, a dollar spent in one area is likely to come from cuts in other areas. The more money we spend on unneeded weapons programs, the more layoffs there will be of police officers, firefighters, teachers and other workers whose jobs are funded directly or indirectly by federal spending.

"For the third time in less than a year "

2011-08-10T10:52:00.002-04:00

Problem with power system grounds all F-35s

"The system that failed this week, the integrated power package, was on the same plane whose electrical generator failed in March...The aircraft that had the problem Tuesday is an F-35A, the model that has conventional takeoff and landings and is destined to be used by the Air Force..."

This is particularly interesting news given that is was recently announced that the powers that be have decided to "adjust" the metrics that determine flight readiness for the F-35 in order to speed up its delivery.

As much as I hate to quote John Kerry, in the spirit of "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?", how do you ask an air force pilot to be the first to die in this fatally flawed plane?

Dangerous ideas let loose in Forbes Magazine

2011-05-04T14:35:00.003-04:00

Bursting The Defense Bubble: End The Entitlement Mentality
"Defense becomes an entitlement

Barron’s notes that “A 2000-level budget would still be much larger than the highest estimates for the combined current military spending of any country or group that realistically could be America’s enemy, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and al Qaeda. Even that calculation assumes that all these forces would be united against America in a future conflict.

A curious feature of the military’s efforts to defend the high levels of expenditure is that they are based not on any rational case of actual or imagined enemies that the US would have to fight, but rather on entitlement.

Admiral Mike MullenChairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2007 called four percent of GDP an “absolute floor”. On this reasoning, if the US GDP goes up by 20%, defense spending would go up by a minimum of 20%, even if the actual threats represented by real enemies declines. In other words, defense spending has nothing to do with actual defense. It has become an entitlement.

An equally weird argument comes from Republican historian, Robert Kagan, has argued that defense spending must be maintained to convince our allies that America is not in decline. “The announcement of a defense cutback would be taken by the world as evidence that the American retreat has begun.” Again, the argument to maintain levels of spending has nothing to do with actual defense against actual enemies: it’s essentially an elaborate public relations exercise.

In other words, we don’t have a Department of Defense. We have a Department of “Defense”.

A parade ground military

Yet the Barron’s proposal only deals with Base Military Spending which amounts to $550 billion and doesn’t include allocations for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What do we get for $550 billion? Apparently, only a parade ground military. As analyst Werther notes:

”$550 billion, give or take, is what is required simply to sustain it in garrison and have the Blue Angels perform the requisite number of air shows during a year. Should we ask it to do anything, even merely adjust its normal deployment schedules to sail down to Haiti and deliver supplies, that costs a billion or two extra. Actual wars, needless to say, cost hundreds of billions extra. Imagine a fire department that charges residents a premium every time its fire engines leave the station house, and you have understood the U.S. military."

A garrison atmosphere

In a recent radio interview, the British historian Timothy Garton Ash stated that Washington, D.C., he said, reminded him of

“Moscow in the former Soviet Union. …Washington is remarkably like late-Brezhnev era Moscow in the sense of being very visibly the capital of a garrison state. With its billboard adverts for fighter aircraft in local Metro stations, radio spots recruiting for “the National Clandestine Service,” its ubiquitous Jersey Wall checkpoints, and its electronic freeway signs admonishing motorists to report suspicious activity (whatever that may be), the District of Columbia quite accurately simulates the paranoid atmosphere of a cold war era capital of Eastern Europe, say, East Berlin or Bucharest, albeit at two orders of magnitude greater cost."

Few benefits go to front line troops

Few would begrudge all this largesse if it were bestowed on the courageous fighting men and women who are risking their lives on the front lines. The reality is that most of benefits are used to prop up the profits of defense contractors far from any front lines, often working on systems that will never be completed or built, let alone ever deployed.

In other words, the “Defense” budget is a giant subsidy or bubble benefiting firms that don’t have to worry too much about global competition. If by accident a foreign firm wins a major contract, politicians can be mobilized to reverse the decision and bring home the bacon, as when Chicago-based Boeing bested European Airbus to build a fleet of 179 aerial refueling tankers at a cost of $35 billion.

The “Defense” budget is also held in place because contractors have deliberately placed their facilities in multiple states and congressional districts, so that if there is any risk of the “Defense” budget being cut, the relevant representatives in Congress rise up in protest to cuts in spending in their district, regardless of the spending’s relevance to actual defense. Once again, we are dealing with “Defense” spending, not spending to protect the nation’s actual defense.

The need for a systemic solutions

“[T]here is a path,” write Wheeler and his colleagues, “that meets the goals of deficit reduction and strengthens real national defense.” Following their suggestions would, writes Barron’s, put the country on that path.

But getting on that path is not enough. As my colleague and commentator, Fernando J. Grijalva, has noted, these kinds of problems are systemic problems

“composed of multiple systems of interacting problems and they are very difficult to solve/dissolve. In order to understand these problems, one needs to apply theory of systems to improve understanding of their purpose, components, interactions, environment, stakeholders, constraints, boundaries, etc…Albert Einstein’s advice is valuable in this context. ‘The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.”

Spending on “Defense” is held in place by a set of attitudes and practices of the military, the politicians and the defense contractors. It is virtually impervious to any possible questioning. While not being very efficient in defending against actual enemies, it is very effective in defending its own funding. We are faced with a bubble of self-perpetuating hierarchical bureaucracy.

Therefore no single measure or action will change the current situation. Instead, there needs to be a radical change in the way we think, speak and act about defense. We must set aside the assumption that anything labeled as defense necessarily has anything to do with actual defense, as opposed to “Defense”. We must begin the hard work of radically rethinking: who are enemies are, what kind of threats do we really face and what kind of actions are necessary to defend against them."

Pabulum and lies

2011-05-04T14:10:00.004-04:00

Essex Junction trustees to seek public comment on Guard jets

Let us re-consider several of the autonomically regurgitated falsities from this Burlington Free Press article.

“the state legislature passes all kinds of resolutions without checking with constituents.”

This is a true statement. Particularly when you realize the State legislature passed a resolution supporting the beddown of the F-35 with no debate, no fact finding and no public hearings.This vote occurred in an information vacuum with the only perspective offered being that of the biased to the point of irrelevance VTANG. That the legislature acts recklessly and in ignorance and without seeking public input on an issue which not only gravely impacts the most densely populated area of the state but in relation to a program which gravely impacts the entire country, is appalling. It is not something to be emulated at the city level, especially given that forums and debate are so much more easily accomplished at this scale. Shame on you, Mr. Kerin.

“Crawford said in particular South Burlington, which has been the home for the Green Mountain Boys since 1946, has concerns about noise in neighborhoods.”

South Burlington has had many forums on the F-35 issue, all of them have been very well attended and the vast majority of attendees have been extremely critical of the basing. The South Burlington City Council recently rejected the City of Burlington’s plan for airport expansion based on commercial traffic noise concerns. More specifically, concern that the airport’s plan didn’t address noise mitigation for the surrounding neighborhoods at all. These neighborhoods are being bought (with FAA funds) and destroyed to create a resident free buffer zone around the airport. This endeavor has left the remaining homes completely exposed to the percussive noise the old houses used to block. Yet these homeowners are unable to seek any form of relief because the airport won’t pay for a noise study which might show that these other homes are now experiencing noise levels comparable to those that made homes eligible for the FAA buy-out. “Noise concerns” doesn’t quite capture it. We are concerned about increased risk of cancer, heart attacks and lowered educational performance, about decreased home values and the pursuant decreased tax revenues, reduced tourism and reduced stock of the affordable family homes which make South Burlington such an attractive place for the non-rich to live and raise a family.

“Trustee John Lajza…said the planes would wake him up taking off during the night training, but he was glad the Guard was in Vermont."They are reassuring," he said.”

The assertion that Vermont and/or the coastal United States as a whole exists in a terrible vortex of imminent attack from the air is completely ludicrous. It is more and more becoming a mainstream opinion among military analysts that 1. airborn warfare as we know it is a thing of the past given that China and Russia (our only peers in terms of capability) are both nuclear powers and therefore will not bother with dog fights and 2. that the USAF will soon be disbanded and melded to the other services given the lack of demand for/necessity of their services and the National Guard returned to state-scale endeavors. That they have provided faithful and honorable service in the past does nothing to color the reality of their future. Except, that is, to bolster a policy of extend and pretend to the detriment of preparedness for real existing and future threats. This is a fear tactic being used by the military to protect their turf. Speaking of turf, drone warfare is the future of air warfare and that cannot be exercised from BIA. It could certainly be exercised from other locations in VT and for the price of just one F-35, we could build a base for this endeavor (for whatever incarnation of the service that would perform it) in an appropriately uninhabited area of the state.

“The trustees acknowledged the Guard's presence is an economic benefit for the area. Crawford said Vermont is in a battle for the F-35 and it would be a win for the state should the Guard obtain them”

Relying upon past experience to determine future utility is a fool’s errand. The F-35 is not just louder. It is at least twice as loud. In fact, the F-35 is currently too loud to function within the health and safety parameters of the aircraft carriers it is flown from even given the new advanced ear protection it requires. And let’s not make the mistake of considering this basing idea in a vacuum. BIA is crossing it’s fingers and toes and clenching it's butt cheeks hoping, not only to get the F-35 and thus keep the guard there providing free fire suppression and emergency services (they have to make sure their cash cow has money left to illegally float Burlington Telecom, after all) but hoping to double air and car traffic into BIA in the next 20 years. From that perspective; one where air and noise pollution in South Burlington is ultimately made intolerable; perhaps the purported but never substantiated economic benefit of the VTANG can be questioned. And since we are now talking about money, perhaps the Trustees should consider how wantonly chasing down a monstrously dysfunctional, poorly performing, over-budget, pure pork project like the F-35 reflects on them as responsible national citizens. Finally, VT is not battling for anything at this point. We are one of the only places with clean enough air to absorb the horrific pollution this jet with rain down on us. “Non-attainment” is why VTANG is still under consideration for this plane.

Well, that’s one big reason. The other is having elected officials who, drunk on blind patriotism and driven by greed, disrespect their constituents and fail to balk when they are fed pabulum and lies by the military.

Rebranding war

2011-05-03T11:58:00.000-04:00

Afghanistan is about jobs not national defense

"When you hear that the mission of keeping troops in Afghanistan is important, the reason isn’t for national defense. The reason is jobs.

When $2-$3 billion per week is spent for Operation: USELESS DIRT, that is a lot of contractors both in theatre and back in the U.S. that have a vested interest in this war not ending. It is now an industry dependent on a continuous stream of U.S. tax dollars.

The Afghanistan “mission” is now nothing more than a large government jobs program. This pales in comparison to depression jobs created by President Roosevelt. Imagine the tens of thousands of people that would be out of work if we came home from Afghanistan.

We don’t have an exit strategy for World War II, the Korean War, or the Cold War. We still have troops in those locations. Losing the Vietnam War actually saved us money because you can bet we would still be there had we won.

Maybe budget cutters will figure this out. My bet is that they won’t. Defense contractors for logistics and security companies contribute election campaign funds. In turn, we hear politicians say to stay the course."

1. The military sucks at job creation. From infrastructure to education to home weatherization, almost ay government agency can create more jobs with less money than the military can.
2. Even if you did chose to focus on the jobs it does manage to create and holler out an "America, fuck yeah!", keep in mind that the job in question is killing people (mostly innocent people) and blowing up their country to protect the interests of rich investors. More like "America! WTF?"

Honey badger don't care

2011-04-26T12:32:00.003-04:00

Pentagon kills F-35 engine project that would benefit Vermont

"The Pentagon has notified the maker of an alternative engine, which has Vermont ties, for the next-generation F-35 fighter plane that its contract has been terminated.
The F136 engine would have used parts from a GE Aviation plant in Rutland. One of the program's leading supporters is Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who said Monday the fight to have the engine built is not yet over. Work on the engine was stopped a month ago, saving $1 million a day on a project that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called wasteful. Proponents, including Leahy, say competition brought about by the alternative engine program ultimately would have kept expenses in check. "Competition will be the only way to control skyrocketing costs for the primary engine and the overall F-35 program,"...In his statement, Leahy said the alternative engine program continues to have the support of "some of the most senior and knowledgeable lawmakers in both the Senate and the House," and he encouraged GE and Rolls Royce to continue the effort. "Despite this setback I am hopeful that GE and Rolls Royce may believe there is a business case for keeping the program alive on their own, through the end of this fiscal year," Leahy said. "Despite the Pentagon's actions, this debate is not over, and I intend to continue supporting competition, cost control and an operationally superior engine as long as GE and Rolls Royce decide that it makes good business sense to continue the program."

Leahy better be careful. He could fall and bust a hip chasing pork this aggressively. My favorite line is "Competition will be the only way to control skyrocketing costs for the primary engine and the overall F-35 program". Not only has that cost control horse left the barn, jumped on a plane and is currently enjoying tropical drinks in the Caribbean, Senator, but there are other really freakin' obvious ways to control costs in DOD procurement. Requiring some semblance of book keeping for instance. The DOD's books are so bad the agency is un-auditable. They've been operating in violation of the Chief Financial Officers Act (which requires audit readiness from all federal agencies and departments) for 27 years running. Or, be still my heart, the legislature could evaluate the actual usefulness and efficacy of weapons programs instead of rushing in like cobra crazed honey badgers every time the military industrial complex dangles a tasty production contract in front of them. And I mean YOU, Senator Leahy. As Winslow Wheeler puts it so well in "The Pentagon Labyrinth"

"The Senators are abysmally informed, don't react when they are fed pablum, use the hearing(s) as an opportunity to posture on an issue rather than understand it, and seek out the approbation of the senior military witnesses to show their good standing as pro-defense politicians and frequently, to ensure DOD's cooperation with the member's pork requests"

This man should be embarrassed and out of job.

Not an Onion headline

2011-04-23T15:50:00.000-04:00

F-35 Sustainability Initiatives Lower Life Cycle Costs Along With Environmental Impact

I can barely respond to this horseshit. This is a mega-polluting machine designed to kill and destroy and we are supposed to get excited because they used non-toxic paint on it? The military exists to protect the assets of multinational corporations involved in the resource rape and environmental degradation of the entire planet. It uses depleted uranium munitions, white phosphorus and cluster bombs to do it. NOTHING it does is "green". The term "green" is now officially meaningless and can take it's place next to word-corpses of "democrat" and "liberalism".

"Only about 4 percent of JSF capabilities have been completely verified"

2011-04-08T09:32:00.003-04:00

The next time you hear someone blathering on about what a superior plane this is remind them that as of today, 96% of the plane's functionality is still a fantasy.

U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) releases their annual report on F-35 program health

"The U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) has released their annual report on F-35 program health... Here are a few highlights but I will go into this more at a later time.

Total development funding is now $56.4 billion to complete in 2018, a 26 percent increase in cost and a 5-year slip in schedule compared to the current baseline which was done in 2007...

"After more than 9 years in development and 4 in production, the JSF program has not fully demonstrated that the aircraft design is stable, manufacturing processes are mature, and the system is reliable.”

You cannot have a production “learning curve” that is based on sound production methods with an aircraft design that is unstable.

“Engineering drawings are still being released to the manufacturing floor and design changes continue at higher rates than desired. More changes are expected as testing accelerates. Test and production aircraft cost more and are taking longer to deliver than expected. Manufacturers are improving operations and implemented 8 of 20 recommendations from an expert panel, but have not yet demonstrated a capacity to efficiently produce at higher production rates.”...

“Development testing is still early in demonstrating that aircraft will work as intended and meet warfighter requirements. Only about 4 percent of JSF capabilities have been completely verified by flight tests, lab results, or both. Only 3 of the extensive network of 32 ground test labs and simulation models are fully accredited to ensure the fidelity of results. Software development–essential for achieving about 80 percent of the JSF functionality–is significantly behind schedule as it enters its most challenging phase.”

Here are a few engineering concerns (not all of them)-

JSF Lift System Development and Integration. Essential to STOVL operations, the lift fan continues to be a prime risk area. The program is working to mature lift fan and drive shaft technologies and a required redesign expected in spring 2011.

Fatigue Cracks in STOVL Test Article. During a recent durability ground test, fatigue cracks were discovered in a major bulkhead of the STOVL test article. Cracks were discovered after 1,500 hours of durability testing, less than one-tenth of the hours planned for fatigue tests to certify that the STOVL airframe meets its design life requirement. Officials reported that stress data had been under-estimated during initial design. Inspections of aircraft and other test articles did not identify cracks at the same site. Decisions about potential redesign and re-manufacture are still to be determined.

Wing Tip Vortex. Prime contractor officials identified wing tip vortices as a potential risk to the program. Wing tip vortices are tubes of circulating air which are left behind the aircraft’s wing as it generates lift. The cores of the vortices are sometimes visible because of water condensation. If these are visible during daytime flights they could negatively impact the aircraft’s stealth capabilities.

Outer Mold Lines. Defense Contract Management Agency officials noted difficulties in manufacturing outer mold lines, resulting from tight tolerance specifications and multiple manufacturing methodologies among the different JSF parts suppliers. The manufacturing processes are new and different from legacy practices. Inability to meet the outer mold line requirements could have major impacts on cost as well as stealth requirements and capabilities. This problem is not expected to be resolved until the June 2015 time frame after which a large number of aircraft will have been built and would need to be retrofitted for any design changes...

The F-35 program has not demonstrated much value, yet Congress keeps throwing money into it. Money that could be better spent on more useful weapons systems. This problem will get fixed either proactively or as a manner of weapons system and procurement death-spiral Darwinism. One way can be painful. The other can lead to extinction."

Lies, damned lies and statistics

2011-04-05T12:38:00.001-04:00

This is one of the most frustrating aspects of dealing with the marketing arm of the defense industry; they can turn absolutely anything into a positive and the media will just gobble it up and spit it back out like it's gospel. In this instance it's this article: F-35 Crushes Goals For Early 2011 Test Flights.

First off, the article fails to mention that the F-35 is short fully 1,000 training flights for 2010 (based on the original schedule from 2007). This article could just as easily (and more truthfully) been titled: F-35 Still 990 flights Behind Schedule". Secondly, could this title rely more pathetically upon qualifiers? It's a measly 10 flights ahead of schedule and it's just 4 months into the year. This writer couldn't keep it in in his pants until an actually meaningful number was available, like say, at the end of the year.

A friend told me story the other day about how his workplace had a sign that always read "Days Without An Accident = 0" because there are always accidents.What did management do to address the constant accidents? They changed the sign to say "Days without a SERIOUS accident".

(Hat tip to Eric Palmer: I guess you could put it that way if you were an F-35 cheerleader)

"Nunn McCurdy is being mis-used as a statutory means of codifying misfeasance and fraud"

2011-03-30T13:45:00.002-04:00

GAO Audits Pentagon Program Cost Growths

"Despite widely recognized moves by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, starting in 2009, to reign in program mismanagement and spending largesse, 80% of major defense acquisition programs (MDAPs) have experienced increased unit costs from initial estimates, further cutting the Defense Department’s buying ability, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said Tuesday in an annual assessment of MDAPs.

According to GAO, the majority of cost growth materialized after programs entered production, meaning they continued to experience significant changes well after the programs and their costs should have stabilized. More than half of the portfolio’s total cost growth has been driven by 10 of the largest programs, all in production, starting with the Lockheed Martin Joint Strike Fighter, which accounts for $34 billion in cost growth.

Incidentally, the latest MDAP report was issued the same day as a Senate subcommittee investigated defense cost growth, and received another new GAO report on trends in related Nunn-McCurdy cost breaches. The auditors found that, based on Pentagon data, there have been 74 Nunn-McCurdy breaches since 1997, involving 47 MDAPs. The Air Force was the worst violator by armed service, with nearly as many Nunn-McCurdy breaches (29) as MDAPs in development between 1997 and 2009 (36). By type, aircraft, satellites and helicopters across the Defense Department made up the predominant offenders.

Three years ago the GAO famously said total cost growth in MDAPs had increased exponentially over the last decade - and the latest update was no less grim. GAO said growth has now risen to $402 billion through fiscal 2010, which includes $70 billion in new weapon system cost overruns in just two years.

"These trends in Nunn-McCurdy breaches tell us that too many of our weapon systems have costs that are spiraling out of control," declared Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate federal financial management subcommittee."

The defense department, which has been privy to a greatly expanded budget over the past 10 years, still managed to go $35 billion over budget each year for the past 2 years. And we are fighting about $10 million for NPR. Pardon my language, but give me a fucking break.

"we're spending more on this plane than Australia's entire GDP"

2011-03-20T08:49:00.000-04:00

The F-35: A Weapon That Costs More Than Australia

"In a rational world, U.S. military expenditure would focus on the likely threats that the United States faces today and in the future. And at a time of mounting national debt, the Tea Party would be knocking down the Pentagon's door to cut waste.

But the only tea party in sight is the one overseen by the Mad Hatter, as we head down the rabbit hole into the military industrial wonderland.

The F-35 is designed to be the core tactical fighter aircraft for the U.S. military, with three versions for the Air Force, Navy, and the Marine Corps. Each plane clocks in at around $90 million.

In a decade's time, the United States plans to have 15 times as many modern fighters as China, and 20 times as many as Russia. So, how many F-35s do we need? 100? 500? Washington intends to buy 2,443, at a price tag of $382 billion.Add in the $650 billion that the Government Accountability Office estimates is needed to operate and maintain the aircraft, and the total cost reaches a staggering $1 trillion.

In other words, we're spending more on this plane than Australia's entire GDP ($924 billion).

The F-35 is the most expensive defense program in history, and reveals massive cost overruns, a lack of clear strategic thought, and a culture in Washington that encourages incredible waste.

Money is pouring into the F-35 vortex. In 2010, Pentagon officials found that the cost of each plane had soared by over 50 percent above the original projections. The program has fallen years behind schedule, causing billions of dollars of additional expense, and won't be ready until 2016. An internal Pentagon report concluded that: "affordability is no longer embraced as a core pillar."

In January 2011, even Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a champion of the aircraft, voiced his frustration: "The culture of endless money that has taken hold must be replaced by a culture of restraint."

The F-35 is meant to be the future of U.S. tactical airpower, but the program harks back to the Cold War, when we faced an aggressive great power rival.

The world has changed. The odds of great power war have declined dramatically. We still need a deterrent capacity against China and Russia, but how much is enough? In a decade's time, the United States plans to have 15 times as many modern fighters as China, and 20 times as many as Russia.

Meanwhile, new challenges and threats have emerged. We should be focusing our military spending on the types of campaigns that we're actually likely to face: complex asymmetric wars against weaker opponents, where manpower and intelligence are critical.

And it's hard to square the military largesse with our rampant debt. Republicans want to slash billions from programs like early education, in Representative Jeb Hensarling's words, to "save our children from bankruptcy."

So where is the outrage at the F-35's outlandish cost?

Some just don't seem to care. When it comes to defense, Republicans are the champions of big government and massive expenditure. The F-35 is too big to fail.

At the same time, many Democrats keep quiet for fear of looking weak on defense--unless, like Senator Bernie Sanders, they're from Vermont.

Other politicians are bought off with pork. Defense suppliers are spread throughout dozens of states, giving everyone a reason to look the other way.

Any serious effort to balance the federal budget will require significant cuts in defense spending. And the F-35 is a prime target.

The 2010 bipartisan Bowles-Simpson Commission on deficit reduction suggested canceling the Marine Corps's version of the F-35, and halving the number of F-35s for the Air Force and Navy--replacing them with current generation F-16s, which cost one-third as much. This would save close to $30 billion from 2011 to 2015. The plan went nowhere.

We used to be content to outspend Australia on aircraft. Now we literally spend Australia on aircraft."

Quote of the Day

2011-03-18T08:58:00.000-04:00

"If ever there was a reason to break the USAF and fold it into the Army this (The F-35) could be it. When the USAF becomes more of a threat to the American taxpayer than any enemy, what is left to do?"-Eric Palmer

William Hartung, author of "Prophets of War" discussing the MIC on Democracy Now

2011-03-17T13:20:00.002-04:00

F-35B is toast

2011-03-15T08:17:00.000-04:00

USMC F-35B STOVL program faces defeat

"The Marines have signed up to get with the Navy variant of the F-35 known as the F-35C...interesting though that it is the wrong jet for the USMC...If the USMC defines progress as signing on to the F-35C program, then we might as well get rid of USMC fast jets. This would save money for the U.S. Defense Department.

If the USMC really needed fast jets for Mr. Gates obsession with the “wars we fight today” (even if Operation: USELESS DIRT provides no valid security for the U.S.), the only solution for the Marines is the two-seat Block II Super Hornet. It is superior for CAS (always leaves the deck with a gun), can tank, has two engines, and two crew members. Today’s sign-up by the USMC for F-35Cs shows that they will bring no value at all with this new Navy flying club. It is a sign of defeat.

The coffin lid is closing on the F-35B STOVL as we realize it is too expensive; too gold-plated; and just too poorly designed to be worth saving. We do not have the money for this kind of grand fool’s errand...

But what about advanced threats? No F-35 will be able to take on advanced threats growing in the Pacific Rim and elsewhere. The F-35 is a non-answer to any wars we will fight.

...There is a gathering on the Hill. What they discuss will be most interesting. Given the progress of the F-35 program to date (consuming DOD funds at an alarming rate is its biggest metric); there are only two results that matter. The truth and misleading statements. Part of the truth is that our corrupt leadership has no problem funding hundreds of low-rate initial production “mistake-jets” before testing reaches maturity and they will lie as much as possible to keep the illusion of F-35 worth going. That alone—given the sorry state of the federal budget—is a crime."

Let's hope the rest of the program follows suit.

From waaaay back in 96'

2011-03-14T10:18:00.007-04:00

Jet Makers Preparing Bids For a Rich Pentagon Prize

I'm just going to comment on a few of the gems from this historical document:

"It's the Super Bowl...It's winner takes all...It's the huge plum...It's the airplane program of the century...If you don't win this program, you're a has-been in tactical aircraft...This is the only game in town."
Sooooo, you are saying it's important?

"The first of the planes is scheduled to roll off the production line in 2005."
Well, it's 2011 and we have four. Three of which can fly.

"As a pilot, I can tell you that I'd love to fly any of them," said Admiral Steidle..."We have found that we have not had to compromise anything away."
WOW! You told the contractors what you wanted from them in order to secure this trillion dollar cash cow and they have SHOCKINGLY told you that you can have it all and a bag of chips! And Admiral Steidle would also love to ride a flying horse, but who wouldn't?

"Admiral Steidle said that a decision on awarding the contract would come down mostly to cost -- the cost of building the planes and maintaining them over decades. "It's affordability," he said. "We've got to break the cycle of ever-increasing weapons costs."
Unless it ends up costing more in which case...

"Pentagon officials say that their unwritten assumption is that if the fighters do not come close to their budgeted price -- about $30 million a plane -- the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines may be forced to shrink the size of their overall fleets. They might even be forced to scrap the program and rely instead on enhanced versions of existing fighters."

OK, enough fun, back to work I go.

"They don’t just ignore the facts, they torture them"

2011-03-11T11:33:00.000-05:00

The defense budget: Ignorance is not bliss

"Polling from Pew and Gallup reveals major public misconceptions about the defense budget. Fifty-eight percent of Americans know that Pentagon spending is larger than any other nation, but almost none know it is up to seven times that of China. Most had no idea the defense budget is larger than federal spending for education, Medicare or interest on the debt.

 The scurrilous in Washington promote the misimpression of an under-funded Pentagon. They imply it is smaller than during the Cold War by saying it was at 8 percent of gross domestic product in the late 1960s, but only 4 percent of GDP now. Therefore, it’s gone down and is now low, right?

 Some use hyperventilated rhetoric to pressure for more defense dollars. Sadly, this category now must include Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who termed “catastrophic” the recommendations of the Obama deficit commission to merely maintain defense spending at its post-WWII high, and who deemed a “crisis” the idea of a 1 percent — $5 billion — reduction in the 2011 defense budget compared to 2010.

 Some on Capitol Hill, such as the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), blanch at the idea of restraining defense spending, claiming it would be “dangerous” to do anything but grow the defense budget while the nation is “at war.”

They don’t just ignore the facts, they torture them — but that’s nothing new in politics.
What is different, however, is that the aggressive ignorance about the defense budget is beginning to shrivel, revealing a new paradigm: the defense budget is outrageously bloated.

 The new conventional wisdom is that we now spend more on the Pentagon than at any time since WWII, and that President Obama will exceed George W. Bush’s defense spending. Some even appreciate that he will also exceed Ronald Reagan’s. Others understand defense spending does not just exceed a few other functions in presidents’ budgets, it exceeds them all, except one — Social Security. In most cases, DOD doesn’t just exceed the others; it is multiples of them.

 During the Cold War, we averaged $450 billion annual Pentagon budgets. Today, with no massive conventional threat and a much-diminished nuclear one, we operate at spending levels more than $200 billion higher, if you include funding for the wars — almost $100 billion higher if you do not.

 The distortion of a lesser threat compelling more spending is propelling the paradigm shift.

 Moreover, the wars we have been fighting are against poorly trained and equipped irregulars. It is not to diminish the sacrifice the national leadership extracts from the men and women who serve in Afghanistan and, previously, Iraq, but today’s conflicts are — materially — minor events compared to the wars in Korea and Vietnam, when we deployed hundreds of thousands more and faced more than 200 Soviet and Warsaw Pact divisions in Europe.

 While we have spent more than $1.3 trillion for Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 (in inflation-adjusted 2011 dollars), we also added another trillion dollars to the parts of the defense budget that the Pentagon tells us is not for the wars — the so-called “base” budget.

 Just before 9/11 we were operating at an annual level of spending for the Pentagon at $400 billion. Today, in the same inflation-adjusted dollars, we are operating at a “base” budget level well above $500 billion. It is in that context that we are told by Gates and McKeon that a 1 percent reduction in a single year constitutes a “crisis” or something “dangerous.”

 The real crisis is what has been happening to our forces. With a $300 billion increase in funding, the Navy’s “battleforce” shrank from 318 ships in 2000 to 287 in 2010. With more than $300 billion added to its budget, the Air Force shrank from 146 combat squadrons to 72. The Army burned another $300 billion to increase brigade combat team equivalents from 44 to just 46. According to data from the Congressional Budget Office, this includes not a smaller, newer equipment inventory, but an older one.

 Worse, the Pentagon can’t track its own inventory, financial transactions, or even what it has paid out to contractors and received in return. Despite the accountability clause of the Constitution, the General Accounting Act of 1921, and the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990, the Pentagon has maintained itself in a state where it cannot be audited.

 But then, if I were presiding over this mess, I would want not you to know the facts either.  "

Circling the wagons

2011-03-10T14:20:00.000-05:00

Mayor's office puts pressure on No Lockheed citizens group

"Burlington VT's Mayor Bob Kiss is putting pressure on the citizen's group No Lockheed, whose mission is to stop any partnership between the city of Burlington and Lockheed Martin.
It's rare to be disappointed after reading the Peace and Justice Center email newsletter. But after reading about Mayor Kiss using his staff to pressure a non-profit organization to change the wording in a letter to the editor in its newsletter, it seems like a clear over-reach of government's role.
For the Mayor to ignore months of community organizing, letter writing, leafleting and 100 Burlintonians speaking out unanimously in City Council is bad enough. To ignore this democratic outpouring while seizing upon individual words in a letter to the editor is unbelievable.
No matter how you feel about Lockheed, these sort of bruising tactics have no place in our democracy. I hope you'll join us in emailing or calling his office and ask him to stop the intimidation of Burlingtonians.

This is from the newsletter of The Peace & Justice Center:

"Mayor Kiss' office takes issue with the wording of the letter to the editor that the PJC ran in the last e-News. Specifically, the Mayor's Assistant disagrees that the City Council "censured" the mayor with the resolution that passed 10-4 on February 7th, calling for increased transparency, public comment, and community standards when choosing partners for the city.The resolution did not directly rebuke the letter of cooperation, but clearly pointed out that we should be seeking other partnerships that don't violate established policies and common values, as the partnership with Lockheed Martin would.

This issue has threatened to become one of political contention. To be clear, this issue isn’t about the Progressive Party. It is certainly ironic that a progressive mayor would move forward with this type of deal givenProgressive Party principles, but this is about Burlington citizens (regardless of political persuasion) organizing against a deal that they deem potentially detrimental to the future of Burlington.

Progressives and non-progressives alike are mobilizing against the proposed partnership between Burlington and Lockheed Martin. Momentum is building quickly, and organizing is getting stronger. This issue is about corporate power, domination, influence, greenwashing, and misplaced priorities at the expense of Burlington's hard-won reputation for and progress in sustainability initiatives. In many instances we're powerless against it. But this is a special case - all we need to do is have our mayor tear up that letter of cooperation. Mayor Kiss has been elected to serve citizens of Burlington, to reflect their values through his representation of them, and to make decisions for the public good based on those values. Now we're saying loud and clear, with a stronger voice than ever, please NO LOCKHEED!"

Hit the comments section, it's worth reading : )

Yoo Hoo, Burlington International Airport!

2011-03-09T10:38:00.000-05:00

United scraps expansion plans because of oil

"United Continental Holdings Inc. is scrapping plans to add flights this year, and says it will drop unprofitable routes because of rising fuel prices. The announcement from the world's largest airline company on Monday is the latest example of airlines shifting plans because of the run-up in oil prices. Southwest Airlines matched an industry-wide fare hike, and the smaller Frontier Airlines said it would reduce growth plans. United Continental now plans to do about the same amount of flying this year as it did last year."

It is not comforting to be a neighbor to an institution which actively practices cognitive dissonance. The airline industry sputters at $100 a barrel and is DOA at $140. As the demand for fuel now exceeds the supply, as time goes on fuel prices will rise and fall but they will do so along a steep upward slope and that slope will be ripe with demand destruction. Commercial flight, as we know it, won't survive 10 years. WINNING!

Shadow Economy

2011-03-09T09:42:00.003-05:00

Prisoners Help Build Patriot Missiles

"This spring, the United Arab Emirates is expected to close a deal for $7 billion dollars’ worth of American arms. Nearly half of the cash will be spent on Patriot missiles, which cost as much as $5.9 million apiece.
But what makes those eye-popping sums even more shocking is that some of the workers manufacturing parts for those Patriot missiles are prisoners, earning as little as 23 cents an hour.

The work is done by Unicor, previously known as Federal Prison Industries. It’s a government-owned corporation, established during the Depression, that employs about 20,000 inmates in 70 prisons to make everything from clothing to office furniture to solar panels to military electronics...

Patriot assemblers Raytheon and Lockheed Martin aren’t the only defense contractors relying on prison help. As Rohrlich notes, Unicor “inmates also make cable assemblies for the McDonnell Douglas/Boeing F-15, the General Dynamics/Lockheed Martin F-16, Bell/Textron’s Cobra helicopter, as well as electro-optical equipment for the BAE Systems Bradley Fighting Vehicle’s laser rangefinder.”...

Last year, Unicor grossed $772 million, according to its most recent financial report (.pdf). Traditionally, inmate salaries make up about five percent of that total."

In short, the taxpayer funded federal prison system is being used to provide handsome subsidies to military contractors even while there is 20% real unemployment in the United States. This, like the $600 billion in 0% interest loans from the federal discount window that Goldman Sachs was given as part of the bank bailout (a deal that was only revealed as a result of lawsuit), is an example of the shadow economy; where elites have gamed the system entirely.

Boeing gets $35 billion contract for a plane we don't need

2011-03-02T11:37:00.000-05:00

Makes you want to bang your head bloody against the wall.

Boeing Boondoggle: Pork Can Fly

"at a time when drones seem to be bypassing the need for manned military bombers and fighters of any kind, and when schoolteachers and firefighters are being terminated across the country, the awarding of this long-delayed and always questionable military-industrial-complex scam is simply perverse.

There has always been vast bipartisan support for spending upward of a trillion dollars a year on the various items that claim to enhance our national security. For Republicans, their attacks on big federal spending rarely include the more than half of the federal discretionary spending gobbled up by military programs. For Democrats, defense pork has always been defended as a jobs program, and that was the theme of what the Seattle Times headlined as a “victory rally” in the historical home of Boeing operations, where the new plane is expected to create about 11,000 jobs.

At the rally, Washington’s liberal Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell was cheered by the crowd when she said, “there could be no better economic news” for the region and “Boeing will maintain their superiority in making the best airplanes in the world.” She and fellow Democratic Sen. Patty Murray were hailed by “workers shout[ing] `thank you’ and ‘my children thank you.’ ” There is not a word in the article quoting anyone as to why this new plane is needed other than as a jobs program.

Actually, it isn’t a new plane at all, but rather a militarized retrofit of the wide-body Boeing 767, the passenger plane that is to be replaced by the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which has had all sorts of problems. Bloomberg News’ report on the rise in Boeing stock after the Pentagon awarded the contract made the connection between defense and profit quite clear: Building the tanker means Boeing can continue to make the wide body 767 jet on which the plane is based. The backlog on the 767 has dwindled to 50 orders as customers await the 787 Dreamliner, the composite-plastic plane now about three years behind schedule. … The news is an antidote to Boeing’s struggle in recent months with the Dreamliner and the 747-jumbo jet. The passenger version of the 747-8 is a year late, and Boeing is running two years behind schedule on the freighter model.”

So, faced with major problems in developing the next generation of civilian aircraft, Boeing has been blessed with a massive Defense Department contract that will allow it to use an old, about-to-be-discarded assembly line to refurbish the 767 at enormous cost to the taxpayer so that it is fit to haul fuel and serve as a gas station in the sky for planes that no longer have a pressing strategic mission requiring such refueling.

This is the same plane that Republican Sen. John McCain killed some five years ago when his staff sparked an investigation that sent to federal prison Boeing’s chief executive officer and a former Pentagon official who had been given a $250,000 vice president’s job at Boeing; the company also hired her daughter and son-in-law. Boeing’s CEO resigned and Boeing’s contract to build the plane was cancelled. The Pentagon had not asked for the refueling tanker, but top Air Force officials in collusion with Boeing lobbyists did an end run to Congress that resulted in passage of an appropriation to lease the planes.

McCain described the situation in a Nov. 19, 2004, speech: “Nearly three years ago, behind closed doors, the Appropriations Committee slipped a $30 billion rider in the fiscal year 2002 defense appropriations bill. Before the rider appeared in the bill, Air Force leadership never came to the authorizing committees about this issue. In fact, tankers never came up in either the President’s budget or the Defense Department’s unfunded priority list. … The rider was, in fact, the result of an aggressive behind-the-scenes effort by the Boeing Corporation with considerable effort from [a] senior Air Force procurement official … and others.”

At that time, post-9/11 hysteria was the fuel that drove this egregious waste of taxpayer dollars. Today it is the stalled economy and the jobs and profits that military contractors spread throughout the land. But the result is the same; for all of the talk by politicians from both parties about cutting waste, the military boondoggles remain sacrosanct and hardly provide the tempting target for savings afforded by a schoolteacher’s salary."

In support of Rosanne Greco for City Council

2011-02-28T17:51:00.001-05:00

I have discussed the F-35 issue with Rosanne and I have found her to be very receptive to the arguments and concerns surrounding the basing of the F-35. She came to my house the other day to talk to me and some other concerned neighbors and we all left feeling like she was capable of being a strong advocate for the community in regards to this issue. I'll be voting for her tomorrow and expecting good things from her service in this area as well as all the other areas in which SB needs an about face and a wake up call.

UPDATE:
Congratulations Rosanne!!!

Simple is best

2011-02-28T09:58:00.000-05:00

The best comment ever on the professed Too Big To Fail nature of the F-35 program:

"throwing $1B into the trash is a lot cheaper than throwing $20B in the trash."

Too bad congressional capture by the contractors involved will never allow us to cut our losses and move on.

EIS delays

2011-02-14T13:03:00.003-05:00

The schedule for the Environmental Impact Statement for SB
"The schedule for the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) began with the publication of the Notice of Intent on December 30, 2009. The EIS process is expected to continue through Late Spring 2011. As milestones are reached additional information will be posted to this website. The F-35A Ops Basing EIS schedule is under revision. Please check back for the most up to date timeline."

Funny there is no mention of the "death" that is supposedly the reason for the year long delay of the EIS posted here. Guess you have to be an insider that is running for City Council, not an actual councilor mind you, to get this kind of "information".

UPDATE:
Cheryl Parker, the woman in charge of the South Burlington EIS down at Langley AFB, has died.

She had me right up until the end

2011-02-14T11:31:00.001-05:00

You have to be frackin' kidding me, Greco. The Air Force has an incomplete technology that MIGHT make the F-35 quieter than the F-16? You might as well have told us that they might use nonexistent nuclear fusion technology to power the planes. What? It could happen! Thanks for the heaping plateful of VTANG propoganda.

Pin the tail on the moving target: rationalizing the F-35 hits another reality snag

2011-02-12T18:55:00.000-05:00

New Life for Old Fighters: The A-10, F-15, and F-16 will be in the inventory for years, and the Air Force will make the most of them.

"The torture process, known officially as the full-scale durability test, will discover if the F-16 fleet, already five years beyond its originally planned retirement date, can serve well into the 2020s. The Air Force is betting it can, and is preparing a series of upgrades intended to keep the Falcon credible and capable right up until it is withdrawn from service...

The Government Accountability Office, in a summer 2010 audit, said that even if the Air Force is able to buy F-35s at the rate of 80 per year—which the GAO found dubious at best—the service will fall further and further short of the 2,000 fighters necessary to fulfill the national military strategy. That means some of the old fighters will have to be kept in service simply to keep the Air Force in business...

"Should the F-35 not deliver on the anticipated schedule, … there are potential work-arounds," said Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, Chief of Staff of the Air Force."

So much for USAF Lt. Caputo's dire pronouncements at the South Burlington public forum, warning that the F-16's were on their way out and the only way for the VTANG to stay afloat was to welcome the F-35. Parlez-vous Horse puckey?

Meeting with Bob Kiss regarding Lockheed Martin deal

2011-02-01T13:09:00.002-05:00

Summary of conversation with Bob Kiss by Laurie Essig and Liza Cowan

This Friday, January 28th 2011, Liza and I met with Mayor Kiss for a little more than half an hour. I think here were several important pieces of information we gained:

1. THERE IS NO STOPPING THE MAYOR
The Mayor is not going to stop this process from going forward. Although he said he wanted to “keep the conversation going” he was very clear that he will continue to explore areas of “cooperation” between Burlington and Lockheed Martin.

When asked whether there was anyway to change his mind, he said no. When asked whether a City Council resolution against such cooperation would change his mind, he said such a resolution is “non-binding.” When asked whether he could be moved by Burlington citizens to end this agreement, he said he saw no reason to end it.

2. GREENWASHING OUR CHILDREN
These areas of cooperation include possible summer camps on sustainability. Although Kiss said he could not order the schools to let Lockheed in, he did not see any problems with allowing them into Burlington schools to share their “expertise” with our children. When I said I thought it was against the policy that was passed in 2005, he said that was a policy issue, but he himself thinks it would be beneficial for our schools. However, if the School Board says no, then that is a School Board decision.

The summer camps, however, will accomplish the EXACT same thing. Working Burlington families will appreciate the highly subsidized camps for their children and the “great people” at Lockheed Martin who either sponsor them or even teach them. In other words, they are a way of making Burlington residents feel better about having Lockheed Martin around and better, ultimately, about the F 35s being here.

3. A REFUSAL TO BE POLITICALLY SAVVY
One of the most disturbing things was to see that the Mayor seemed incapable or unwilling to get the bigger picture. He refused to see that our schools have no money because 54% of our tax revenues go to the Department of Defense and corporations like Lockheed Martin. He refused to see that Lockheed Martin is attempting to get F35s in here and so their attempt to “cooperate” with Burlington on global warming is really an attempt to co-opt us. He refused to see that Lockheed Martin is not interested in converting their swords into ploughshares. Indeed, the Mayor suggested that Burlington might be able to encourage them to do so. As if the corporation has any interest at all in economic conversion given the unprecedented profits they make from war.

4. THE DANGERS OF MORAL EQUIVALENCY
The Mayor seemed unconcerned about the ethical implications of this agreement. His goal is to “combat global warming.” When we insisted that global warming cannot be confronted without dismantling the military industrial complex, of which Lockheed Martin is a huge part, the Mayor argued that all of us are morally compromised and each one of us contributes to global warming therefore we shouldn’t be making these sorts of ethical judgments.

In other words, because I drive a car and pay taxes, I am as implicated as a corporation that gets 85% of their profits from the Department of Defense and is the largest consumer of fossil fuels. This sort of moral equivalency is particularly dangerous. If we can’t take a stand against corporations that rely on permanent war for profit, if we can’t distinguish between our individual forms of consumption and a war industry that does nothing but kill and pollute, then we are surely lost.

Note: Laurie and Liza are members of the "No to Lockheed Martin" Facebook group (http://www.facebook.com/#!/home.php?sk=group_192503360762465)

The People of Burlington v. Lockheed: the Big Showdown

2011-01-31T19:33:00.000-05:00

The People of Burlington v. Lockheed: the Big Showdown
Burlington City Council Meeting@ Contois Auditorium Feb 7 @ 7pm

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

2011-01-31T11:51:00.001-05:00

US Troops Die Because of Their Country, Not For It

"There is a reverence for the military in the US on a scale rarely seen anywhere else in the west that transcends political affiliation and pervades popular culture. On aeroplanes the flight attendant will announce if there are soldiers on board to great applause. When I attended a recording of The Daily Show, John Stewart made a special point before the show of thanking the servicemen in the audience.

But while the admiration for those who serve and die may be deep and widespread, interest in what they are doing and why they are doing it is shallow and fleeting. During November's midterm elections it barely came up. In September just 3% thought Afghanistan was one of the most important problems facing the country. When Pew surveyed public interest in the war over an 18-week period last year, fewer than one in 10 said it was the top news story they were following in any given week, including the week Stanley McChrystal – the four-star general commanding troops in Afghanistan, was fired. The country, it seems has moved on. The trouble is the troops are still there...

...to engage with what went wrong would demand a sharp reckoning with why so many thought it would was right to begin with. The country would have to interrogate its militaristic reflexes and proclivities, and face the fact that while there were few good or certain options after 9/11 (ranging from the diplomatic to containment) this was one of the worst – and the others were never seriously considered...

Back in 1971, during the Vietnam war, John Kerry famously testified before the Senate foreign relations committee. He put the question: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Forty years later, the answer appears to be that you simply stop paying attention to their deaths.

It seems American soldiers are not so much dying for their country, but because of it.

F-35 Operating costs to be 40% higher for the Navy

2011-01-31T10:51:00.001-05:00

This program was sold based on the assumption that it would be significantly cheaper than the existing fleet. This affordability was going to be the product of 70-90% parts commonality. Commonality is now so low that it has been completely dropped as a tenet of the program and in the case of the Navy which uses the F-18, the cost of the f-35 program will be 40% higher. Across all the services, the costs of the F-35 is now 1.5 times the cost of the existing fleet. But don't tell our SINO (socialist in name only) senator Bernie Sanders, who is still using the original commonality figures in his F-35 propaganda. Gah!

2011-01-27T13:21:00.000-05:00

Cow Most Sacred: Why Military Spending Remains Untouchable

"Washington knows how to start wars and how to prolong them, but is clueless when it comes to ending them. Iraq, the latest addition to the roster of America’s forgotten wars, stands as exhibit A. Each bomb that blows up in Baghdad or some other Iraqi city, splattering blood all over the streets, testifies to the manifest absurdity of judging “the surge” as the epic feat of arms celebrated by the Petraeus lobby.

The problems are strategic as well as operational. Old Cold War-era expectations that projecting U.S. power will enhance American clout and standing no longer apply, especially in the Islamic world. There, American military activities are instead fostering instability and inciting anti-Americanism. For Exhibit B, see the deepening morass that Washington refers to as AfPak or the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations.
Add to that the mountain of evidence showing that Pentagon, Inc. is a miserably managed enterprise: hide-bound, bloated, slow-moving, and prone to wasting resources on a prodigious scale -- nowhere more so than in weapons procurement and the outsourcing of previously military functions to “contractors.” When it comes to national security, effectiveness (what works) should rightly take precedence over efficiency (at what cost?) as the overriding measure of merit. Yet beyond a certain level, inefficiency undermines effectiveness, with the Pentagon stubbornly and habitually exceeding that level. By comparison, Detroit’s much-maligned Big Three offer models of well-run enterprises.

Impregnable Defenses

All of this takes place against the backdrop of mounting problems at home: stubbornly high unemployment, trillion-dollar federal deficits, massive and mounting debt, and domestic needs like education, infrastructure, and employment crying out for attention.

Yet the defense budget -- a misnomer since for Pentagon, Inc. defense per se figures as an afterthought -- remains a sacred cow. Why is that?

The answer lies first in understanding the defenses arrayed around that cow to ensure that it remains untouched and untouchable. Exemplifying what the military likes to call a “defense in depth,” that protective shield consists of four distinct but mutually supporting layers."

Follow the link to read the rest!

Stop the Militarization of Burlington:Public event in response to Burlington Mayor Bob Kiss' announcement of the City's 'Letter of Cooperation' with Lockheed Martin on 'Green Energy Initiatives'

2011-01-26T12:05:00.000-05:00

I am the first speaker.

Must Read

2011-01-24T15:36:00.000-05:00

The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War

"This current-war problem is the product of a subtle web of dysfunctional bureaucratic modes of conduct taking the form of a systemic pattern of behavior that evolved gradually over the forty years of cold war. This behavior co-evolved with a pattern of military belief systems and distorted financial incentives that also built up slowly and imperceptibly over those forty years. These bureaucratic belief systems slowly insinuated themselves deeply and almost invisibly into a domestic political economy that nurtures financial-political factions of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC). The result is a voracious appetite for money that is sustained by a selfserving flood of ideological propaganda, cloaked by a stifling climate of excessive secrecy. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us to guard against the corrosive danger of exactly this in his 1961 farewell address.2 He was ignored, and today, fifty years later, the domestic political imperative to steadily increase the money flowing into the MICC reaches into every corner of our society. It distorts and debases our economy, our politics, our universities and schools, our media, our think tanks, and our research labs, just as Eisenhower predicted it would. So, even without the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to hype the money flow, Obama could not have escaped massive pressures to increase defense spending.

In retrospect, it is clear that the cold war served as a domestic political engine to keep the money flowing into the MICC. Many believed— erroneously, as it turned out—that the end of the cold war would produce a “peace dividend” that would shut down the MICC and return the United States to being a normal country engaged primarily in peaceful business, not war. This view did not reflect the reality of the MICC’s political economy.3 By the time the cold war ended in 1991, a true peace dividend would have collapsed the defense industry and its powerful political dependents. To survive and flourish, the factions of the MICC badly needed to evolve a subtle, pervasive shift in strategy, a subliminal mutation in the MICC’s political DNA. It is now clear that this mutation has taken a frightening form: namely, the need to foment an enduring voter-terrifying threat and unending small wars to justify the money flow needed for the MICC’s survival."

F-35 too loud for Aircraft Carrier

2011-01-24T10:58:00.000-05:00

But just fine for South Burlington and Winooski neighborhoods!

Director, Operational Test and Evaluation FY 2010 Annual Report
"The CVN 78 program continues to have challenges with F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) integration. The thermal footprint from the main engine exhaust, shipboard noise levels, and information technology requirements need work. Design changes may be required for the jet blast deflectors, and active cooling may be required in the flight deck just forward of the jet blast deflector.”

Big 'Corporate' Brother

2011-01-18T16:12:00.005-05:00

How a Giant Weapons Maker Became the New Big Brother

"Have you noticed that Lockheed Martin, the giant weapons corporation, is shadowing you? No? Then you haven't been paying much attention. Let me put it this way: If you have a life, Lockheed Martin is likely a part of it.

True, Lockheed Martin doesn't actually run the U.S. government, but sometimes it seems as if it might as well. After all, it received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone, more than any company in history. It now does work for more than two dozen government agencies from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency. It's involved in surveillance and information processing for the CIA, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, the Census Bureau, and the Postal Service.
Oh, and Lockheed Martin has even helped train those friendly Transportation Security Administration agents who pat you down at the airport. Naturally, the company produces cluster bombs, designs nuclear weapons, and makes the F-35 Lightning (an overpriced, behind-schedule, underperforming combat aircraft that is slated to be bought by customers in more than a dozen countries) -- and when it comes to weaponry, that's just the start of a long list. In recent times, though, it's moved beyond anything usually associated with a weapons corporation and has been virtually running its own foreign policy, doing everything from hiring interrogators for U.S. overseas prisons (including at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq) to managing a private intelligence network in Pakistan and helping write the Afghan constitution.

A For-Profit Government-in-the-Making
If you want to feel a tad more intimidated, consider Lockheed Martin's sheer size for a moment. After all, the company receives one of every 14 dollars doled out by the Pentagon. In fact, its government contracts, thought about another way, amount to a "Lockheed Martin tax" of $260 per taxpaying household in the United States, and no weapons contractor has more power or money to wield to defend its turf. It spent $12 million on congressional lobbying and campaign contributions in 2009 alone. Not surprisingly, it's the top contributor to the incoming House Armed Services Committee chairman, Republican Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of California, giving more than $50,000 in the most recent election cycle. It also tops the list of donors to Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), the powerful chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the self-described "#1 earmarks guy in the U.S. Congress."

Add to all that its 140,000 employees and its claim to have facilities in 46 states, and the scale of its clout starts to become clearer. While the bulk of its influence-peddling activities may be perfectly legal, the company also has quite a track record when it comes to law-breaking: it ranks number one on the "contractor misconduct" database maintained by the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington-DC-based watchdog group.

How in the world did Lockheed Martin become more than just a military contractor? Its first significant foray outside the world of weaponry came in the early 1990s when plain old Lockheed (not yet merged with Martin Marietta) bought Datacom Inc., a company specializing in providing services for state and city governments, and turned it into the foundation for a new business unit called Lockheed Information Management Services (IMS). In turn, IMS managed to win contracts in 44 states and several foreign countries for tasks ranging from collecting parking fines and tolls to tracking down "deadbeat dads" and running "welfare to work" job-training programs. The result was a number of high profile failures, but hey, you can't do everything right, can you?

Under pressure from Wall Street to concentrate on its core business -- implements of destruction -- Lockheed Martin sold IMS in 2001. By then, however, it had developed a taste for non-weapons work, especially when it came to data collection and processing. So it turned to the federal government where it promptly racked up deals with the IRS, the Census Bureau, and the U.S. Postal Service, among other agencies.

As a result, Lockheed Martin is now involved in nearly every interaction you have with the government. Paying your taxes? Lockheed Martin is all over it. The company is even creating a system that provides comprehensive data on every contact taxpayers have with the IRS from phone calls to face-to-face meetings.
Want to stand up and be counted by the U.S. Census? Lockheed Martin will take care of it. The company runs three centers -- in Baltimore, Phoenix, and Jeffersonville, Indiana -- that processed up to 18 tractor-trailers full of mail per day at the height of the 2010 Census count. For $500 million it is developing the Decennial Response Information Service (DRIS), which will collect and analyze information gathered from any source, from phone calls or the Internet to personal visits. According to Preston Waite, associate director of the Census, the DRIS will be a "big catch net, catching all the data that comes in no matter where it comes from."

Need to get a package across the country? Lockheed Martin cameras will scan bar codes and recognize addresses, so your package can be sorted "without human intervention," as the company's web site puts it.

Plan on committing a crime? Think twice. Lockheed Martin is in charge of the FBI's Integrated Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), a database of 55 million sets of fingerprints. The company also produces biometric identification devices that will know who you are by scanning your iris, recognizing your face, or coming up with novel ways of collecting your fingerprints or DNA. As the company likes to say, it's in the business of making everyone's lives (and so personal data) an "open book," which is, of course, of great benefit to us all. "Thanks to biometric technology," the company proclaims, "people don't have to worry about forgetting a password or bringing multiple forms of identification. Things just got a little easier."

Are you a New York City resident concerned about a "suspicious package" finding its way onto the subway platform? Lockheed Martin tried to do something about that, too, thanks to a contract from the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to install 3,000 security cameras and motion sensors that would spot such packages, as well as the people carrying them, and notify the authorities. Only problem: the cameras didn't work as advertised and the MTA axed Lockheed Martin and cancelled the $212 million contract.

Collecting Intelligence on You
If it seems a little creepy to you that the same company making ballistic missiles is also processing your taxes, accessing your fingerprints, scanning your packages, ensuring that it's easier than ever to collect your DNA, and counting you for the census, rest assured: Lockheed Martin's interest in getting inside your private life via intelligence collection and surveillance has remained remarkably undiminished in the twenty-first century.

Tim Shorrock, author of the seminal book Spies for Hire, has described Lockheed Martin as "the largest defense contractor and private intelligence force in the world." As far back as 2002, the company plunged into the "Total Information Awareness" (TIA) program that was former National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter's pet project. A giant database to collect telephone numbers, credit cards, and reams of other personal data from U.S. citizens in the name of fighting terrorism, the program was de-funded by Congress the following year, but concerns remain that the National Security Agency is now running a similar secret program.

In the meantime, since at least 2004, Lockheed Martin has been involved in the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which collected personal data on American citizens for storage in a database known as "Threat and Local Observation Notice" (and far more dramatically by the acronym TALON). While Congress shut down the domestic spying aspect of the program in 2007 (assuming, that is, that the Pentagon followed orders), CIFA itself continues to operate. In 2005, Washington Post military and intelligence expert William Arkin revealed that, while the database was theoretically being used to track anyone suspected of terrorism, drug trafficking, or espionage, "some military gumshoe or overzealous commander just has to decide someone is a ‘threat to the military'" for it to be brought into play. Among the "threatening" citizens actually tracked by CIFA were members of antiwar groups. As part of its role in CIFA, Lockheed Martin was not only monitoring intelligence, but also "estimating future threats." (Not exactly inconvenient for a giant weapons outfit that might see antiwar activism as a threat!)

Lockheed Martin is also intimately bound up in the workings of the National Security Agency, America's largest spy outfit. In addition to producing spy satellites for the NSA, the company is in charge of "Project Groundbreaker," a $5 billion, 10-year effort to upgrade the agency's internal telephone and computer networks.

While Lockheed Martin may well be watching you at home -- it's my personal nominee for twenty-first-century "Big Brother" -- it has also been involved in questionable activities abroad that go well beyond supplying weapons to regions in conflict. There were, of course, those interrogators it recruited for America's offshore prison system from Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan (and the charges of abuses that so naturally went with them), but the real scandal the company has been embroiled in involves overseeing an assassination program in Pakistan. Initially, it was billed as an information gathering operation using private companies to generate data the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies allegedly could not get on their own. Instead, the companies turned out to be supplying targeting information used by U.S. Army Special Forces troops to locate and kill suspected Taliban leaders.

The private firms involved were managed by Lockheed Martin under a $22 million contract from the U.S. Army. As Mark Mazetti of the New York Times has reported, there were just two small problems with the effort: "The American military is largely prohibited from operating in Pakistan. And under Pentagon rules, the army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying." Much as in the Iran/Contra scandal of the 1980s, when Oliver North set up a network of shell companies to evade the laws against arming right-wing paramilitaries in Nicaragua, the Army used Lockheed Martin to do an end run around rules limiting U.S. military and intelligence activities in Pakistan. It should not, then, be too surprising that one of the people involved in the Lockheed-Martin-managed network was Duane "Dewey" Claridge, an ex-CIA man who had once been knee deep in the Iran/Contra affair.

A Twenty-First Century Big Brother
There has also been a softer side to Lockheed Martin's foreign policy efforts. It has involved contracts for services that range from recruiting election monitors for Bosnia and the Ukraine and attempting to reform Liberia's justice system to providing personnel involved in drafting the Afghan constitution. Most of these projects have been carried out by the company's PAE unit, the successor to a formerly independent firm, Pacific Architects and Engineers, that made its fortune building and maintaining military bases during the Vietnam War.

However, the "soft power" side of Lockheed Martin's operations (as described on its web site) may soon diminish substantially as the company has put PAE up for sale. Still, the revenues garnered from these activities will undoubtedly be more than offset by a new $5 billion, multi-year contract awarded by the U.S. Army to provide logistics support for U.S. Special Forces in dozens of countries.

Consider all this but a Lockheed Martin précis. A full accounting of its "shadow government" would fill volumes. After all, it's the number-one contractor not only for the Pentagon, but also for the Department of Energy. It ranks number two for the Department of State, number three for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and number four for the Departments of Justice and Housing and Urban Development. Even listing the government and quasi-governmental agencies the company has contracts with is a daunting task, but here's just a partial run-down: the Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Land Management, the Census Bureau, the Coast Guard, the Department of Defense (including the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force and the Missile Defense Agency), the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Technology Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the General Services Administration, the Geological Survey, the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Internal Revenue Service, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of State, the Social Security Administration, the U.S. Customs Service, the U.S. Postal Service, the Department of Transportation, the Transportation Security Agency, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

When President Eisenhower warned 50 years ago this month of the dangers of "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex," he could never have dreamed that one for-profit weapons outfit would so fully insinuate itself into so many aspects of American life. Lockheed Martin has helped turn Eisenhower's dismal mid-twentieth-century vision into a for-profit military-industrial-surveillance complex fit for the twenty-first century, one in which no governmental activity is now beyond its reach.

I feel safer already.

Planet Pentagon

2011-01-18T15:41:00.003-05:00

Originally published in Vermont Commons, a print journal and online forum for exploring the idea of Vermont independence – political, economic, social, and spiritual. http://www.vtcommons.org/

Take it from un-credentialed housewife, even a cursory examination of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program reveals the Pentagon ignoring its own by-laws and brushing aside its own stated values in pursuit of an unstated and inconsonant goal. The continuation of the F-35 program, a program that is unnecessary, egregiously underperforming, over budget and behind schedule but none the less replete with an embarrassing level of fawning congressional support, is an obvious “tell” of institutional failure, where the singular interests of global corporations can no longer be served within the rule of law. The Nunn-McCurdy Amendment, a measure adopted by Congress in 1982 to curtail cost growth in American weapons procurement programs, provides an excellent framework for revealing the disparity between the official mission of the F-35 and the actual cause being advanced. Both the DOD appropriation system and the congressional oversight of that system are fatally compromised in favor of sweet deals for military contractors to the direct operational detriment of the men and woman in the military and at the ever increasing burden of tax payers.

Nunn-McCurdy requires, among other things, the cancellation of any defense program whose total cost grew by more than 25% over the original estimate unless the United States Secretary of Defense submits a detailed explanation certifying that the program is:

1. Essential to the national security because there is no suitable alternative of lesser cost available
2. Affordable in so far as new estimates of total program costs are reasonable
3. Accountable in so far as the management structure is adequate to control costs

The F-35 program has violated Nunn McCurdy twice. In 2005, DOD was able to convince Congress that although the program was really big and really messed up, they could fix it. I imagine there was much rueful head shaking and some pro forma chagrin before congress recertified the program. In 2010, DOD argued that the program was now HUGE and incredibly messed up, but they could fix it and Congress re-certified. The difference being, in 2010 it was impossible for DOD to factually defend a single one of the assurances they offered to prevent the program from being cancelled on the spot as federal law required.

First, the F-35 program is not essential to national security because there are suitable alternatives of lesser cost available. The DOD/congressional meme dictates that our operational capacity depends entirely on this program so it is throw up your hands, the show must go on, too big to fail. This is unmitigated horseshit. With no meaningful flight testing to speak of, all F-35 capability currently resides exclusively in PowerPoint and a few vivid DOD fantasies. Not only are there many viable alternatives but ALL the alternatives are proven and less expensive. A combination of the new F-16 fighter jet, the moth balled A-10, the Gripen, the Eurofighter, the Super Hornet and cruise missiles can cover all the bases the F-35 promises to cover in some far off and misty technophilaic’s tomorrow. No one can argue that this program is essential except in so far as cancelling it and being forced to call a spade a $70 billion dollar Lockheed Martin R+D subsidy would be exceptionally embarrassing.

Secondly, new cost estimates are not reasonable. Initially, the projected cost of the F-35 was $35 million each. Today the projected cost is $155 million each. On what planet can a 450% increase in price (with serious performance concessions mind you) be labeled “reasonable”? Only on Planet Pentagon, where they can’t tell you who their contractors are, what their contractors are doing or if they’ve been paid once, twice or three times a lady! The Pentagon has been given a hall pass in respect to the Chief Financial Officers Act. This act requires audit readiness from all federal agencies and departments. The Pentagon has failed to meet the standard for 27 years running. (Having read a good many of their reports, I can posit that the use of impenetrable acronyms could account for a good deal of the confusion.) And before you reach for the “it is the nature of groundbreaking technological advances to have unknown costs” rationalization, let’s be clear that the reason DOD offered to explain the cost increases was that the initial estimates didn’t include the costs of machine tooling, construction materials or labor, items reasonably within the purview of even the dullest project manager. The real reason the price has gone up so exponentially is that the DOD knew what the price needed to be to sell the program and they simply and cynically and illegally provided that price knowing full well that once it was in the pipeline and once the money was flowing, it would likely never be cancelled. You know why they spread defense contracts around to every state? So every congressman will have the incentive to let these monsters keep rolling no matter the ultimate cost. The spiraling cost over-runs will only be exacerbated in the near future as foreign buyers renege on their purchase agreements due to increasing price and extended production timelines. The F-35 is engaged in an “acquisition death spiral”: as fewer planes are built to spread costs across, each plane becomes more expensive until it prices itself out of the market entirely. Back in the day, Pentagon propaganda ministers were pimp walking their epaulets around town saying they’d be building between 3,000 and 5,000 of these planes. Today the number stands at just 2,400 with Norway, Denmark, Canada, Japan, The UK and Australia delaying their purchases and reducing their orders. The only foreign buyer that isn’t balking at the F-35 purchase is Israel. That is because we are giving them billions of dollars in military aid to buy them with and Lockheed itself is giving them $4 billion in domestic manufacturing guarantees. Wait, you didn’t think American manufacturers were going to make all these planes did you?

Third, management structure is not adequate to control costs. Just 5 months after congress re-certified the F-35 program in 2010, the Pentagon turned around and de-certified Lockheed Martin’s aircraft cost and schedule tracking system, i.e. their management structure for controlling costs. According to a Pentagon procurement director, the cost and schedule tracking system had been significantly deficient for 3 years so the Pentagon was fully aware that management structure was not adequate long before the Ashton Carter stood in front of congress with his pants afire and testified that it was. I wonder what DOD will do at the inevitable 3rd violation hearing? Protest being forced the pay Lockheed in goats, the only remaining viable US currency? Or maybe they’ll do a Glee-style mash-up of Slave-4-U and Wrapped around Your Finger. This would be about as relevant and as serious as what they presented and Congress accepted at the 2010 hearing.

Beyond Nunn-McCurdy, the most non-partisan government agency out there, the Government Accountability Office, sent up the impartial government agency equivalent of exploding rainbow sparkle flares just 5 months after re-certification (it must be the DOD’s belief that the outer limit of Congress’ attention span is 5 months), with a report chock full of statements suggesting that the plane is going to be so late and so minimally functional that in the absence of a rescission of the second law of thermodynamics, military leaders are going to have to make like the Ministry of Truth and engage in a robust campaign of recidivist history and mass hallucination regarding U.S. military capability. The GAO is also voicing concern about the small issue of the F-35’s design/build concurrency. In a bid to forestall the acquisition death spiral by actually meeting a production deadline, Lockheed Martin is building planes while still designing their major systems. This guarantees a first run of $155 million “mistake jets” which will require crazy expensive retrofits or just be junked entirely and sent to the western desert to be used for target practice. Additionally, the GAO is fretting the estimated $1 trillion total lifetime cost of the program, worrying it may prove unaffordable given the austerity storm looming on the US budget horizon. Now seems like a good time to remind folks that the raison d’être of the F-35 program was greatly enhanced affordability relative to our current fleet. Current estimates (which will be revised substantially upwards in about 5 months, I figure) of the operation and support costs for the F-35 will be 1.5 times the cost of the aircraft it will replace. The most fundamental tenet of the program is lying in a savagely violated heap on the floor but no one can acknowledge it any more than a baseball player can grab at the hurt place when he gets hit by pitch.

In the absence of reality based justifications, the F-35 can be seen for what it is, Bernie Sanders: an effort to transfer wealth from tax payers to weapons contractors by a military-congressional conspiracy of rank deceit cloaked in a deeply cynical patriotic fog. The desertion of the rule of law and fact based decision making renders any appeal through the democratic process both frustrating and ultimately useless. This elite game of pin the tail on the moving target is mirrored by many of our dominant institutions as they labor to sustain their legitimacy and their power. Like bank stress tests, healthcare reform and airport security, this is stagecraft aimed at upholding the illusion for as long as possible while the mechanisms of disaster capitalism bleed the public dry. In the Palin Era, there will be no fact based reckoning allowed or, let’s get real, even suggested. But if our governing elites were to allow such a reckoning on the F-35 or any of the other Ponzi scheme boondoggles that are in play, a terrifying truth would be revealed: Oligarchic capitalism and the debt economy, escorted by the four horsemen of peak oil, the murder of American manufacturing, the financialization of the economy, and the immaturity, nescience and apathy of the American people, have popped their last bottle of bubbly. Despite the U.S Empire’s grotesque efforts to resuscitate it, the centralized democratic infinite growth paradigm is dead and the new boss in town is unelected. It is the Pentagon, securely tethered on Lockheed Martin and Co.’s short leash and accountable to none other.

Why We Fight

2011-01-18T15:35:00.002-05:00

A documentary well worth your time.

Dutch interview with military expert Winslow Wheeler: "I see it as dog in all of its roles."

2011-01-10T10:34:00.000-05:00

Dutch interview with military expert Pierre Sprey: "This is a very vulnerable airplane"

2011-01-10T10:31:00.001-05:00

"from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm"

2011-01-07T14:48:00.000-05:00

Brilliant commentary on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

Afghan report 2010: Deluding ourselves from one failure to another
By Colonel Douglas Macgregor

"American forces invaded Afghanistan more than nine years ago, and we still don't know whom we're fighting. It's hard to know who did the better job of playing us for fools a few weeks ago - the Afghan who passed himself off as the "moderate" Taliban leader, who was rewarded with American cash for his performance, or Hamid Karzai. All we can know at this point is that 150,000 U.S. and allied troops along with an equal number of civilian contractors are propping up a narco state in Kabul flush with cash from the opium trade and U.S. taxpayers.

Naturally, the four-stars in the Pentagon are in no hurry to deliver the bad news; the expensive and open-ended program of nation-building through counterinsurgency is irrelevant to the goal of disrupting, dismantling and defeating what little remains of al Qaeda living in the splendid isolation of northwestern Pakistan. Instead, it's easier to tell American troops they are breaking the Taliban, a breathtakingly irrelevant statement, fully the equal of "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten edifice will collapse" or "Mission accomplished."

No one in Washington is worried. Americans have short memories. The roads to Kabul and Baghdad were always paved with good intentions. Portrayed uncritically in the media as the means to win the hearts and minds of Muslim Arabs and Afghans through "good works," the false promise of nation-building through counterinsurgency made it hard for American politicians of both parties to defund the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Timelines for the emergence of a new, utopian republic on Iraqi soil were constructed with similar precision, only for us to watch as a succession of four-star Army generals replaced Iraq's secular, power-hungry Sunni Muslim Arab rulers with Iranian-allied Shiite Arab Islamists. Far from establishing a U.S.-friendly Iraqi government in Baghdad, as revealed in several of the confidential State Department cables made public by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, counterinsurgency in Iraq turned out to be an expensive "Trojan horse" for nation-building, one that installed Iran's allies in power.

With the lion's share of Iraq's southern oil fields in Chinese hands and the Kurdish nationalists determined to control the country's largest oil reserves, more fighting in Iraq is inevitable. This sort of thing would almost be funny, in an insane sort of way, if such military leadership did not result in the pointless loss of American lives, undermine American strategic interests and erode the security and prosperity of the American people - the things the nation's four-stars are sworn to defend.

Fortunately, conditions are changing. When it comes down to a choice of spending trillions of American tax dollars to economically transform and police hostile Muslim societies with dysfunctional cultures or funding Medicare and Medicaid, entitlements will win, and the interventions will end.

When the budget ax falls, many inconvenient facts will come to light, unmasking the great deception that America confronted a serious military threat in the aftermath of Sept. 11, a deception promoted and fostered by politicians and ambitious generals who sought to gain from it. It will horrify and discourage Americans to learn we've bankrupted ourselves in a fight that always was analogous to clubbing baby seals. From 2001 onward, we never confronted armies, air forces or capable air defenses. Bottom line: There was no existential military threat to the United States or its NATO allies emanating from Afghanistan or the Middle East. There is none today.

It's too soon to tell, but reductions in defense spending may demonstrate that it's far less expensive to protect the United States from Islamist terrorism as well as the criminality flooding in from Mexico and Latin America by controlling our borders and immigration. We must, however, stop wasting American blood and treasure on misguided military interventions designed to drag Muslim Arabs and Afghans through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in the space of a few years, at gunpoint. They will have to do these things themselves.

For the time being, no one will say these things. It's easier to go, in Winston Churchill's words, "from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm" and nurture the money flow to Washington."

mechanistic self-referential thinking

2011-01-06T14:35:00.001-05:00

From Chuck Spinney via Winslow Wheeler:

"The report,"With Air Force's new drone, 'we can see everything' in today's Washington Post is a good example of how the high-cost addiction to techno war is running amok.

One thing ought to be clear in Afghanistan: A tiny adversary armed with the most primitive weapons, and a command and control system made up of prayer rugs and cell phones, has brought the high tech US military to a stalemate ... or even worse, the looming specter a grand-strategic defeat, because we are becoming economically and morally exhausted by the futility of this war. It does not matter whether it is President Obama presiding over a vapid strategic review or a low ranking grunt on point in Afghanistan -- the central problem facing the United States in Afghanistan is the absence of what the Germans call fingerspitzengefühl -- or the fingertip touch needed for an intuitive feel for or connection with one's environment. As the American strategist Colonel John Boyd (USAF Ret.) showed, fingerspitzengefühl is absolutely essential to the kind of synthetic (as opposed to analytic) thinking that is necessary for quick, relevant, and ultimately successful decision making in war, where quick decisions and sharp actions at all levels must be made and harmonized in an ever-present atmosphere of menace, uncertainty, mistrust, fear, and chaos that impedes decisive action.[1] To paraphrase Clausewitz, these difficulties multiply to produce a kind of friction, and therefore, even though everything in war is simple, the simplest thing is difficult. Clausewitz considered friction is the atmosphere of war.

Nevertheless, according to the Post, the Air Force is about to deploy to Afghanistan a "revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town." Quoting Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force's assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, "Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything." Nirvana.

While the Post dutifully reports a smattering of opposing views, it misses the ramifications of the central idea epitomized by General Poss's confident assertion: namely, how the American ideology of techno war assumes it can negate the human need for fingerspitzengefühl on a battlefield.

General Poss's confidence suggests quite clearly he believes seeing everything enables one to know everything. This a stunning theory of knowledge. It is also a classic example of the American military's unquestioned belief that complex technologies coupled to step-by-step analytical procedures can negate the friction of combat to solve any problem in war. Lifting the fog of war is, in fact, a phrase frequently used in contractor brochures touting the efficacy of these technologies. This reflects a theory of knowledge -- really an unquestioned ideology -- that views war as fundamentally a procedural problem of methodical analytical thinking, as opposed to its messy reality of being in large part an art of synthetic thinking. In that sense, it reflects a triumph of Decartes over Einstein, of method over imagination, that misses a distinction the great captains and theorists of war have intuitively sensed since the time of Sun Tzu. Clausewitz, for example, struggled to understand this analytic/synthetic distinction by invoking and defining his humanistic idea of genius as the way to overcome friction. Clausewitz's idea of genius was inspired by his struggle understand Napoleon's art of war.

Why do I say this?

Since at least the end of WWI, Americans have rigidly adhered to the seductive idea of war being a mechanical procedure. This belief has its doctrinal roots in the flawed theory of Methodical Battle propounded by the French during WWI and afterword, which led to the Maginot Line, a techno solution that failed so spectacularly in May 1940. Over time, the Americans have linked the idea of methodical battle to the even more flawed theory that intelligence, or the ability construct a canonical picture of the battlefield, is simply an mechanistic problem of "connecting the dots." How many times since 9-11 have you heard or seen that empty phrase?

The see all-know all epistemology leads naturally to the conception of high tech sensor systems being connected to computerized decision-making templates and then coupled to precision guided weapons to quickly kill the high value targets identified by the first two links in the sequential process. The killing of high value targets (as opposed to defeating the adversary's mind and will to resist), by the tautology inherent in the definition itself, becomes the desired outcome, and therefore reduces to self-referencing formula for victory that can be measured precisely by the attrition of those targets -- and, voilà, the body count returns like phoenix rising from the ashes of Vietnam.

The logical simplicity and self-referencing nature of this conception make for a fabulously successful marketing pitch that takes the form of a modern reincarnation of the Cretan Paradox. That is, it becomes impossible to distinguish a priori between truth and falsehood of a self-referencing statement made by a Cretan when he says 'all Cretans are liars," unless one appeals outside the framework of the logic. But in the case of defense technologies, it is almost impossible for non-experts to appeal outside the parameters of the self-referencing argument, because they are masked by complexity and faux science.

That this kind of mechanistic self-referential thinking is now deeply embedded in the semi-concous substrata of our military mindset becomes quite evident when we listen to self-styled civilian grand-strategists, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, when they cite platitudes about actionable intelligence, connecting the dots, and a counter-terrorism strategy focused on killing high value targets to measure success. George Bush took the absurdity to an incredible low with his silly deck of cards having faces of terrorist claimed to be the high value targets.

Think about how preposterous the situation has become: It is well established by the Defense Department's Inspector General and the General Accounting Office of Congress that the Air Force whose leadership (among others) can not even construct a straight forward auditing system to accurately account for the the hundred of billions of dollars the taxpayer gives it to spend (such an accounting is an absolute requirement of the Constitution, which every Air Force officer has taken a sacred oath to preserve and protect). Yet the Washington Post is telling us the Air Force would have the taxpayer believe that it can spend more of the taxpayer's money to buy technologies that will permit the Air Force to perform the far more difficult task of seeing, accounting for, and understanding everything on an ever-changing chaotic battlefield. Moreover, in this case, it is a battlefield where we face a wily adversary who, armed with primitive weapons and command and control technologies, has already brought the huge expensive hi-tech, "see all-know all" American war machine to a stalemate!

Of course, the driving factor in this madness has nothing to do with the disconnect between the military mind and its battlefield. The central fact is that the fallacies of techno-war are highly profitable for defense contractors. Moreover, given the revolving door, with its lucrative opportunities for post-retirement employment (see Brian Bender's stunning report, From the Pentagon to the private sector, Boston Globe, 26 December 2010), few generals or colonels have an incentive to criticize these fallacies while on active duty. That these technologies do not produce success on the battlefield is of little importance to the real strategy of "don't interrupt the money flow," even when, as is now clearly the case in Afghanistan, the American military faces a low-cost, lightly armed, but competent adversary who appreciates the nature of his environment and has a zealous strength of will to resist.

Only in an America, poised on the twin precipices of economic bankruptcy and cultural meltdown, has it become natural for such preposterous logic to proceed unchecked at ever increasing costs."

Gates budget to cut F-35 purchases?

2011-01-06T12:10:00.000-05:00

Gates expected to slice orders for F-35 as part of spending cuts

"Gates will brief Congress today on a five-year spending plan for the Defense Department, including yet another restructuring of the F-35 program to compensate for repeated delays in development and testing.
Defense analysts said few details of Gates' intentions have surfaced, but he is widely expected to announce cancellation of the Marines' $13 billion Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, another weapons program plagued by years of delays and rising costs. Analysts said they also expect one or more other big-ticket weapons programs to be targeted as part of the 2012 budget proposal that President Barack Obama will send to Congress next month. But the Pentagon will likely just scale back the number of F-35s it had previously planned to order from Lockheed Martin over the next few years to pay for continued development and testing, they say."

Lalala, blablabla, the really interesting bit in this article is the following:

"The problem with the F-35 is it is a program that can't go away. All the services are wedded to this"

I would suggest to this person that the problem is actually people who think ANYTHING the government does and ANY service it provides is irreplaceable or sacred. This guy will be arguing this point even after the lights go out and the interstates are impassable. No program should be ever be placed above the cost benefit analysis, especially a program with the majority of its costs still ahead of it.

China's new stealth fighter is better than the F-35 that we won't even have for another 5 years.

2011-01-05T18:48:00.001-05:00

A Chinese Stealth Challenge?

Money quote:

"The Chinese prototype looks like it has "the potential to be a competitor with the F-22 and to be decisively superior to the F-35," said Mr. Fisher. The J-20 has two engines, like the F-22, and is about the same size, while the F-35 is smaller and has only one engine."

Doh!

EIS delayed...again

2011-01-05T14:25:00.000-05:00

F-35 basing decision delayed

"The Vermont Air Guard hopes to one day replace their F-16s with new F-35s, but a decision from the military has been delayed.

The Vermont guard is on the short list of bases being considered as an initial host for the joint strike fighters.

One major hurdle is an environmental impact study that includes such issues as noise pollution-- a real concern for some neighbors of the air guard base.

That study was supposed to be completed by the end of 2010 but will now not be ready for at least several more months.

"We are still hopeful that the study is going to come out and maybe mitigate some of the fears of the noise issue because of some of the things that the Air Force has been looking at," Maj. Gen. Michael Dubie said.

The F-35 is still in development, so even if Vermont is chosen new planes won't be in use for several more years."

I am wondering if the fact that they are a goddamn superfund site in all but name is figuring into this. Also wondering how the Kiss-Lockheed conspiracy feeds into it.

Meeting Notice

2011-01-04T20:09:00.000-05:00

Stop the Militarization of Burlington!
Thursday January 20th 7 pm
Contois Auditorium
Burlington City Hall

Do we want F-35 Bombers, Carbon War Rooms, and Endless Occupations--Or Green Jobs, Sustainability, and Funding for Public Services?

The opposition to the F-35 has been resounding since it was announced that the Burlington International Airport was a finalist to host the new jet fighter and bomber that the Pentagon has been developing for the past decade.

But these plans were apparently just the beginning. Last month plans were finalized to make Burlington a test city for Lockheed Martin's "Carbon War Room." an initiative who's stated goal is to use "the power of entrepreneurs to implement market-driven solutions to climate change. Do we really want defense contractors, who notoriously run over budget and under-perform, running something as important as climate change initiatives?

This attempt at greenwashing by Lockheed Martin is a transparent effort to open up Burlington to war profiteers and weapons manufacturers. To make matters worse the Vermont Air National Guard base is in the midst of an environmental clean up brought on by years of fuel dumping that will now cost taxpayers $18 million.

Residents of Burlington have said no to war before when the U.S. government was exporting it. Now we are having it imported into our own community and need to raise our voices against the tide of war and destruction and call for real environmentalism that promotes health, education and sustainable jobs for all.

Please come to this forum for more information on how to oppose the further militarization of Burlington.

For more info call Jim at 802-309-4824.
http://www.stopthef35.com

Must Read

2011-01-04T19:08:00.003-05:00

Greenwashing War: Burlington, Vermont Mayor Signs Deal With Lockheed Martin

"When it leaked in Seven Days, a local alternative weekly, that Mayor Bob Kiss of liberal mecca Burlington, Vermont had inked a deal with the world's largest war profiteer all hell broke loose inside the Burlington left. Charges of "corporate greenwashing" and hypocrisy lit up Facebook pages and coffeeshop conversations. These charges land fresh like the daily newspaper at the doorstep of most mayors of American cities. Mayor Bob Kiss however, is a former conscientious objector, and a member of Vermont's Progressive Party, the most successful third party in the US, which touts a platform totally at odds with war profiteers like Lockheed. It's the party that claims Bernie Sanders, the US' lone socialist senator, recent Filibuster leader and viral web sensation amongst its founders. Mayor Kiss, whose party has for 28 of the last 30 years controlled City Hall, was learning what many social movements that assume governmental control learn: wielding power without alienating the community organizers and social movements that put leaders into office can prove to be quite the difficult equation to balance.

That few details were available when the contractual "letter of intent," adorned with Lockheed Martin's corporate logo, was signed by Mayor Kiss and Lockheed's Senior Vice President certainly didn't assuage the rising indignation of community organizers. Interestingly, it was Mayor Kiss who approached Lockheed about the deal at the inaugural "Carbon War Room," which took place simultaneously with the Vancouver Olympics. The Carbon War Room is a pet project of the 212th richest person in the world, billionaire Sir Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Group. Branson's record and cola empire also counts amongst its corporate family global warming contributors like Virgin Airlines and the quixotic, carbon emissions nightmare of Virgin Galactic, space tourism for $200,000 a ticket.

Branson's Carbon War Room partners cities with corporations like Lockheed and private financiers to create market based solutions to climate change. The single-sided, single page letter of cooperation details vague projects for Lockheed to partner with Burlington on including "Urban Triage," "Vertical Wind Turbines," "Solar Photovoltaic Systems," "Telemetrics" and "Three dimensional LIDAR City models." Branson's War Room describes itself as a "30-month challenge to help cities around the world use innovative mechanisms to bring capital, energy technologies and jobs to their citizens in a sustainable and wealth creating way."

Wealth creating in this sense means privatizing existing not-for profit climate change fighting measures like the PACE program (PACE lets US home owners bundle home renewable energy financing into their mortgage, spreading out the payments over 25-30 years instead of the usual home improvement loan term of lease of five years). According to the Climate War Room's literature the United States' PACE market, "is valued at $500 billion." This sort of privatization, which spins governmental non-profit programs into new markets, and thereby so much gold for "gold-level" corporate sponsors of the "War Room" like Lockheed, and billionaires like Branson, is but one of the objectionable pieces of the deal to its detractors. Perhaps even more immediate and inflammatory is the planned interaction between Burlington's school children and Lockheed Martin engineers.

"Are We For Bomb Makers?"

One of the controversial aspects of the deal would allow Lockheed engineers to work inside Burlington schools with schoolchildren. In the past five years Burlington parents' and students' outrage boiled over when war profiteer General Dynamics' program of giving away pencils, bookmarks and books stamped with their corporate logo came to light. When a nine year-old student at Burlington's Champlain Elementary was faced with going to an assembly during the school day to listen to General Dynamics employees, her mom Laurie Essig says her daughter Willa asked, "'Are we for bomb-makers? Do we think it's right to kill people? Her basic question was, 'Why are we treating these people like heroes?'" Due to a perception on Willa's teacher's part, that nine year-old Willa might offend the weapons manufacturers’ employees, the teacher, "brought all the other students down to get their free books and left my daughter sitting alone in the classroom." Essig says. Longtime Vermont peace activist, Joseph Gainza said, during an interview, "I would hope that the City of Burlington and the Burlington School District wouldn't let a corporate member of the military industrial complex take credit for solving the climate change problems it helps everyday to perpetuate."

Meg Brooke, Chair of Chittenden County Progressives says of Lockheed's slated involvement with school kids:

I’ve been trained by the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors (NISBCO) and given many hours to council students how to avoid war. I’ve fought to remove military recruiters from our schools. I regularly taught classes in non-violent conflict resolution in Vermont high schools. I am deeply concerned by the way we normalize violence and war and desensitize our young to the horror our military perpetrates, especially on the young, women, and the elderly. Welcoming one of the leaders of this military industrial complex into our schools goes against all I, and many others, believe. I do not want young Vermonters to see the Lockheed logo on TV and have a positive thought about what that business might have done in their school.

Who is Lockheed Martin?

"We Never Forget Who We Work For" is Lockheed Martin's motto. That mindfulness of who they work for takes a different meaning when one considers that 84 percent of Lockheed's revenue comes from the US government, with the majority of that being Pentagon contracts. Lockheed contracted 98 different lobbyists, was mentioned in 142 Congressional bills and spent nearly $10 million in lobbying just in 2010. This is the multi-national war profiteer which to quote Bernie Sanders, "according to the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, the three largest government contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman — have engaged in 109 combined instances of misconduct just since 1995, and have paid fees and settlements for this misconduct totaling $2.9 billion." Further, something is seriously amiss when George W. Bush's Department of Justice, not exactly known for setting precedents in corporate crime prosecution, files a 2007 fraud lawsuit against a corporation raking in a net $3.033 billion in FY '07 (It's worth noting that 1% of Lockheed Martin's annual profits alone roughly equals the City of Burlington's approximately $30 million budget).

Defense contractors are notorious for their fraudulent overcharging of tax payers for weapons systems that things must have risen to truly historic levels of fraud for Bush's DoJ to take action. Indeed Lockheed is number one in the Federal Contractor Misconduct Database, at 54 instances of contractor misconduct, totaling $577.4 million in settlements, nearly twice as many as the next closest war profiteer.

Lockheed Martin has had separate racial, age and gender discrimination lawsuits filed against it in the past two years alone. Does Mayor Kiss really want Burlington's hard won image attached to the world's largest war profiteer whose supervisors in the last 24 months allowed "deaths threats" and threats to "lynch" an African American employee "to continue unabated – even though the company was aware of the unlawful conduct"? One might think all of the above flies in the face of the subsections of Mayor Kiss' Progressive Party platform which state the Progressive Party will, "Insist Vermont will contract only with responsible employers, including local small businesses and local entrepreneurs, hiring local employees" and "Promote cooperative, worker-owned, and publicly-owned enterprises as democratic alternatives to huge profit-driven multi-national corporations." Indeed, many inside Kiss' Progressive Party have expressed concerns with these provocatively strange bed fellows.

Progressive City Councilor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak who represents Burlington's Ward 3 said in a statement:

"When any municipality considers partnering with a corporation there needs to be some sort of conversation around a set of standards and principals that reflect the community. With Burlington those standard would need to include language to reflect issues long enshrined in the fabric of the City's life: human rights issues, equality issues, peace and war issues. Any agreement or discussion needs to be guided by these community standards, be it on a project level or a policy level. Sometimes the money involved in a potential deal or partnership is not enough to compromise these principals. This deal, frankly, considering Lockheed's long track record would violate any reasonable community standards for the City of Burlington."

Lockheed and Grassroots Organizers

What isn't immediately clear is what is left for Lockheed engineers to do around Climate Change in Burlington that isn't currently being done by Burlington’s many NGO's, non-profits and local companies without war profiteer logos on their arms. From award-winning Efficiency Vermont to AgRefresh, from the University of Vermont's Gund Institute to Burlington Walk/Bike Council, from Carshare Vermont to 350.org, from Permaculture Burlington to the Localvore movement, and on and on. Even the City's Department of Public Works is involved, installing rainwater gardens into the very street itself on Decatur St in Burlington's Old North End. There are also local organic farmers playing funk and disco as they make the rounds in their solar powered veggie delivery van. "Corporations like Lockheed Martin are simultaneously funding the denial of global warming and trying to profit from it," says Brian Tokar, Director of Plainfield, Vermont's Institute of Social Ecology and author of the recent book Toward Climate Justice. "It's hard to imagine what they could possibly contribute to Burlington's already leading-edge efforts to become greener and more self-reliant." Progressive Party Chittenden County Chair Meg Brooke states in plainsong, "Lockheed is going to show and take credit for twenty years of grassroots organizers blood and sweat, paid for out of their own pockets."

Then there are the unspoken ironies of Lockheed working on climate change: the US military, with all its Lockheed technologies has a 363,000 barrel per day oil habit, making it the single largest purchaser of oil in the world. If the US military were a country it would be amongst the top 20 countries in annual oil consumption well in front of Australia. Activist Joseph Gainza points to this saying, "Private corporations that helped create climate change are not going to be part of the solution." What's more, as Chittenden County Progressive Chair Meg Brooke said, "The military is the number one enemy of sustainability and Lockheed isn’t going to do much to change that as their money comes from manufacturing machines that are completely unsustainable. Their F35’s, which threaten our environment, use 2,000-4,000 gallons of fuel and hour."

The F-35 is Lockheed's new next generation fighter plane which is controversially slated to be stationed at Burlington Airport. James Leas, one of the main organizers of the Stop the F-35 Coalition in Burlington writes in a widely circulated open letter to Mayor Kiss "Lockheed Martin is one of the world's largest war profiteers. Its products are designed to destroy the environment and living things. Please help me understand how Lockheed Martin, a company that is one of the chief purveyors of death and destruction, is going to be telling Burlington about sustainability?" In 2007, Lockheed sheepishly admitted it had overcharged, and would repay, the Federal government $265 million plus interest for over-billing American taxpayers on the same F-35. Lockheed called the $265 million dollar over-billing “inadvertent.” Author Brian Tokar says, "Lockheed's F35's and other military hardware are among the most petroleum-gorging products in the world. Burlington doesn't need their noisy fighter jets, nor should Vermont tolerate Lockheed's feeble attempts to greenwash their image."

That said, if this pact between Burlington and Lockheed was purely results based, "most sustainability bang for the buck” venture, and not about corporate greenwashing, could Lockheed silently fund the many engineers and community organizers who have been doing climate change and sustainability work inside Burlington for decades, often with little resources? If Lockheed wanted to get the most climate change prevention for their investment, without causing ripples, could they silently dovetail with Burlington's award winning Climate Action Plan and the 200 project ideas it generated? Unlike the Lockheed deal, the Climate Action Plan had many opportunities for public input.

Or perhaps this funding could quietly award under-capitalized companies like Efficiency Vermont, whose low income home weatherization has a two year waiting list. Additionally there is an unfunded Chittenden County Metropolitan Planning Organization study on how physical barriers to separate bike lanes from car traffic would positively or negatively impact downtown business. In many cities where the study has been done, including cities as large as New York City, physical barriers to demarcate bike lanes from car traffic have been shown to create safer, friendlier communities, which increases bike use while simultaneously helping businesses thrive. Absent the capital for the study though, the false "it's bad for business" argument will prevent these bike lane improvements. One climate change consultant estimated the cost of which to be about $10,000 or about the cost of 1/5th of one second in Iraq war spending. But if it were an anonymous benefactor Lockheed couldn't ride Burlington's credibility to the bank, and credibility is the only thing war profiteers like Lockheed Martin can't buy.

The Need For Action in Burlington

In an exclusive meeting with Mayor Kiss he said that the Lockheed/Carbon War Room was not the only way to finance the projects he envisions the City of Burlington taking on, merely the more "serendipitous." I asked Mayor Kiss at the end of the meeting to what degree the outraged grassroots of Burlington can shape the outcome, considering both the media and the community members have discussed possible civil disobedience to stop this contract with the world's largest war profiteer. Mayor Kiss, after demurring several times said, "Well there's nothing date certain in it. This is just a letter of intent, it doesn't have specific benchmarks for specific projects."

What the Mayor is saying is that the community organizers can shape the outcome by calling and emailing him, by organizing your friends and neighbors, and continually raising the stakes to oppose this. Certainly holding a single public hearing where community members could voice concerns would be a natural place for the Mayor to show his responsiveness to the electorate that put him in power. Community organizers and concerned Burlingtonians could ask for City Council resolutions the critiquing the deal using the community standards and principals Councilor Mulvaney-Stanak calls for.

Mayor Kiss and the Burlington City Council have proven themselves responsive policy makers for Burlingtonians when citizens organize and make demands of them in City Council meetings packed with advocates. Indeed that is exactly how in the past year Burlington passed a resolution to boycott the State of Arizona over its controversial immigration law SB 1070, and how legislation pushed by Burlington Police Chief Michael Schirling and downtown business organization The Church Street Marketplace Association to make it a crime to be poor on public sidewalks was stopped cold. If the community continues to organize against Lockheed and if the Mayor is responsive to the grassroots that built his party, then the single page "letter of intent," with no benchmarks, could be slipped deep into the City's archives. That is to say, as usual, everything depends on community organizers building a countervailing pressure to the moneyed interests of corporations and the military which is so strong the elected officials have no choice but to do the moral, just and right thing.

Here are the details for contacting the Mayor's office:

Call: 802-865-7272 (Mayor's Office)

Email: mayor@ci.burlington.vt.us

Jonathan Leavitt is a community organizer and writer based in Burlington, Vermont

The United States is a war state

2010-12-17T15:43:00.000-05:00

Evil Empire
"What a world might be like in which we began not just to withdraw our troops from one war to fight another, but to seriously scale down the American global mission, close those hundreds of bases—as of 2010, there were almost 400 of them, macro to micro, in Afghanistan alone—and bring our military home is beyond imagining. To discuss such obviously absurd possibilities makes you an apostate to America’s true religion and addiction, which is force. However much it might seem that most of us are peaceably watching our TV sets or computer screens or iPhones, we Americans are also—always—marching to war. We may not all bother to attend the church of our new religion, but we all tithe. We all partake. In a sense we live peaceably in a state of war."

F-35 Funding Obama Threatened To Veto Now In Budget Bill That Pentagon and WH Endorses

2010-12-16T08:58:00.000-05:00

Pork Finds A Way
"Next year we will be told that we have to make cuts in programs we care a great deal about, that help the people who aren't celebrating Christmas this year because they can't afford it... We will be looking at republican proposals for 2008 levels in discretionary spending, which to most of the world means cutting Pell Grants, student loans, food stamps, job training, etc. But we will be paying to protect a $450 million earmark in this year's omnibus ($3 billion over the next few years) to go to one of the world's richest corporations - oh yes, the one that it was recently disclosed got all those billions from the Fed in 2008."

A neighbor weighs in: Republican calls for Cancellation of F-35

2010-12-09T13:13:00.000-05:00

In a recent New York Times exclusive article, former Republican Senator Pete V. Domenici (who was on the Senate Budget Committee for more than 25 years) calls for the outright cancellation of all three versions of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter! Wow, a blunt and hard hitting proposal, which mirrors the calls for steep cuts in overall military spending recommended by the presidential debt-reduction commission! Where is our Vermont congressional delegation?

People are hungry in our own state. 1 in 7 people live in poverty. Take the $400-$500 BILLION from the F-35, and Lockheed Martin, and invest in mankind and the future. This cost is for only 2,200 planes! The Pentagon accounts for more than half of the government's "discretionary spending". The Pentagon spends over $760 Billion per year (which does not include the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) and will receive an additional $431 Billion from 2012-2016 for the inflation that the congressional budget office has projected. Has anyone received a raise over the last 2-4 years for inflation? Yet the Pentagon has calculated a $431 Billion dollar increase for themselves.

Cancelling the V-22 and the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, an amphibious assault craft would also save Billions, and as Def. Sec. Gates stated in his Sept. Newsweek interview, "we need to turn off the spigot of money".

-Mark A. Dickinson

Rand Paul

2010-12-07T12:33:00.000-05:00

Saudi Arms Deal is About Iran

"This month the US Administration notified Congress that it intends to complete one of the largest arms sales in US history to one of the most repressive regimes on earth. Saudi Arabia has been given the green light by the administration to spend $60 billion on some 84 new F-15 aircraft, dozens of the latest helicopters, and other missiles, bombs, and high-tech military products from the US weapons industry.

Saudi Arabia, from where 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers came, is a family-run dictatorship, where there are no political parties, no independent press, and where any form of political dissent is met with the most severe punishment. We are told that we must occupy Afghanistan to encourage more rights for women, an issue on which the Saudi regime makes the Taliban look rather liberal by comparison. We are told that our increasingly aggressive policies toward Iran are justified by that country’s rigid Islamic laws and human-rights violations, while the even more repressive Islamic rule in Saudi Arabia is never mentioned. So why would the US government, which spends hundreds of billions of dollars yearly and maintains hundreds of bases overseas to push global democracy, approve a deal like this with such a regime?...

Imagine if China had armed an aggressive, anti-American Mexico to the teeth. How would we feel? Threatened? That is likely how Iran feels with this massive arms sale to Saudi Arabia. To underscore this message, the US quietly announced early this month that it was selling 20 F-35 Stealth fighters to Israel. As Israeli military purchases are paid for with US foreign aid, we must realize that the weapons pointed at Iran in the Middle East are American made and largely paid for with American tax dollars...

Some will argue that these arms deals are international trade which we should encourage and applaud. Sadly, the United States does not build much that we can export these days. But the fact is that the US weapons industry is underwritten by the American taxpayer. From research and development to acquisition by the US military, the costs of the US arms industry are borne by American citizens. But, as so-called “private” companies, the enormous profits they make selling weapons to countries like Saudi Arabia are of course privatized. So the costs are socialized and the profits are privatized. There is a word for this arrangement and it is not “capitalism.”

Norway may cancel F-35 purchase on ethical grounds

2010-12-07T10:18:00.001-05:00

Norway’s F-35 purchases: Fact or fiddle?

"Norway’s purchase of F-35 fighter jets from the American Company Lockheed Martin could be an infringement of Norwegian legislation, according to the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). Lockheed Martin produces cluster munitions, weapons banned by the International Convention on Cluster Munitions, to which Norway is a signatory.The ICJ believes Norway is not sending the right message by acquiring fighter jets from a company that produces banned weapons, and that it may also be illegal. The Norwegian Penal Code stipulates, “it is illegal to assist, encourage or induce someone to take any action that is prohibited under the Convention....

Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin’s cluster munitions production caused the Oil Fund (Government Pension Fund – Global) to withdraw its holdings from the company, which was subsequently banned by the Ministry of Finance. “The Oil Fund withdrew [its holdings] on ethical, not economic grounds," says ICJ lawyer Cecilie Schjatvet. She criticises Norway for its double standards.

“It is worrisome that Norway defines itself as an advocate for the reduction of cluster munitions, but is itself helping support the production of the worst types of weapons." The ICJ also points out that Denmark has told Lockheed Martin it will not be purchasing aircraft from them until the company ceases production of these weapons, and wonders why Norway has not. “Norway is also in a much stronger position than Denmark to impose such requirements,” Ms Schjatvet says."

"Unfortunately, there have been a lot of years of bad practices”

2010-12-04T09:58:00.002-05:00

The first thing that strikes me reading this article is the fact that the VTANG is just now being held to civilian standards of pollution control even though they inhabit a densely populated civilian area. The second thing is that the base was once a SUPERFUND site (holy crap!) and it has lost that designation not because it is any less polluted but just because they have a plan for making making it less polluted. Try getting away with that as a private business in South Burlington!

The military is held to a different standard for everything, even when logic and fairness demand otherwise. This is just one of a great many reasons these bases should only be located in remote areas.

Vermont Air Guard to upgrade pollution cleanup

"New, costly efforts are under way to speed the removal of contaminated soil and water beneath the Vermont Air National Guard base in South Burlington. The bill could be as high as $18.5 million.

Although the public and Guard members face no immediate danger from the pollutants, a more thorough cleanup will reduce the likelihood of future health risks, said Richard Spiese, the project’s site manager for the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation.

Fuel, lubricants and solvents have drained into on-site pits from the early 1950s through the mid-1980s, much of it through routine maintenance, according to documents on file with the department.

Updated strategies for the removal of “chemicals of concern” (including benzene and other carcinogens) will be presented by the Guard at 6 p.m. Thursday at the South Burlington High School cafeteria.

Cleanup methods favored by Englewood, Colo.-based consultants CH2M HILL (and reviewed by the Vermont Department of Health) would return groundwater at the six sites to Vermont standards for drinking within 20 years, and cost about $18.5 million — all of it borne by the Department of Defense.

“Unfortunately, there have been a lot of years of bad practices,” Spiese said. “They’re coming back to bite us.”

He praised the Guard’s recent action plan to reverse the damage as “a bang-up job,” noting that funding had not been an obstacle.

Progress in the cleanup has accelerated over the past two decades, but particularly after 2007 (when Executive Order 13423 mandated that the military adhere to stricter, civilian-grade environmental standards), said Adam Wright, the base’s civilian environmental manager.

“Like a lot of industries, the military started to ‘turn the leaf’ in the ’80s,” Wright said. “It took awhile for the culture to become ingrained.”

Early standard practices would be illegal today. Recorded by the Guard in a 2002 environmental site status:

• 1960-1980: About 700,000 gallons of jet fuel was poured into open trenches for fire suppression training.

• 1979-1980: About 1,500 gallons of chemicals collected from the community (including acetone, methyl ethyl ketone, propyl alcohol and waste paint pigments) were burned in open pits.

• 1954-1984: About 20,000 gallons of waste jet fuel sluiced into unlined wells as part of routine filter maintenance.

• 2000: “Unknown quantity” of jet fuel released after the discovery of a fuel leak in an old underground piping system.

Regulatory mixed messages punctuated the base’s messy legacy. In February 1995, the EPA removed the site from its Superfund list, citing adequate remedial action by the Guard. Four months later, the agency fined the Air Guard $81,300 for hazardous waste storage and inspection violations incurred in 1994.

Two large, white fuel tanks at the base, built in the 1950s and containing about 720,000 gallons, remain in use. Impervious lining has been added to their spill aprons — the shallow moats designed to contain spills.

Farther downhill, a series of wells pump petroleum-laced groundwater into separator tanks. Dozens of wells have been sunk on the property, and dozens more are planned.

To the north, across Poor Farm Road (also downhill), sit several dozen houses in the Country Club Estates. All of them are — and have always been — on the city’s municipal water system.

In 2002, the Guard’s site status delivered unsettling news to residents: “Groundwater contamination, including petroleum and chlorinated volatile organic compounds, extends (from an on-base site) beyond base property boundary on Poor Farm Road and across to the Country Club Estates property.”

According to the Guard’s “final proposed plan” for its six contaminated sites released last month, the interception of pollutants on base property has virtually eliminated the risk of contaminated water or gases from percolating into downstream neighborhoods — or the Winooski River.

The plan lists concentrations of contaminants beneath the base, and some of them are many times higher than what would be safe for drinking or showering.

Public disclosure, Wright said, has emerged as a sound policy for his 10 years on the job.

“There are concerns about property values, and of course, exposure,” he said. “It can be scary if you’re kept in the dark about this.”

Country Club Estates Homeowners Association President Bill Cooper moved to the neighborhood in 1968. He said he feels like he’s been kept in the loop.

“It’s been an open door; they’ve been in constant contact,” Cooper said. “We have a good relationship with those guys.”

CBS News on F-35

2010-12-03T09:06:00.001-05:00

"For the cost of the alternate engine on the (F-35) I can have 100 more Predators"

2010-12-03T08:52:00.001-05:00

Pentagon official sees mounting budget pressures
"To take a big swing in the defense budget right now really becomes a matter of how much risk is the nation willing to accept," Johnson told the conference.

Cartwright said the military too often imposed strict requirements to toughen and specialize weapons systems, which added unnecessary cost, reducing the number the Pentagon could buy and raising the price of the few it could.

If it continued on the current path, the Pentagon would be able to afford just two new bombers, one for each coast, and that was unacceptable, he said, noting the issue of scale was a big factor in shaping a new Air Force program for long-range strike that will likely be part of the fiscal 2012 budget.

"It has to change for us," Cartwright said. "For the cost of the alternate engine on the (Joint Strike Fighter) I can have 100 more Predators," he said."

Not just too big to fail...

2010-11-30T09:07:00.002-05:00

...to big to get through the door! This is like watching the keystone cops, for cripes sake.

JSF engine too big for regular transport at sea

"the Navy is struggling to remedy a significant design oversight that poses a major potential hindrance to its ability to successfully deploy and maintain the F-35C Lightning II, the carrier-based variant of the joint strike fighter: Its powerful single engine, when packed for shipping, is too large to be transported to sea by normal means when replacements are required...

Regular wear and tear, as well as mishaps such as an engine sucking a foreign object off a carrier deck, make the availability of replacement aircraft engines critical. High-tempo combat operations only increase the need. Carriers typically pack spares, but heavy demand can drain those stores, requiring at-sea replenishment.
However, the F-35C’s Pratt & Whitney F135 engine, contained in its Engine Shipping System, is too large for the cargo door on a standard carrier onboard delivery plane and for the V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft, the program office acknowledged in a response to a follow-on query from Navy Times. The engine can be broken down into five component parts, but just its power module and packaging alone won’t fit into the COD or the V-22.

The JSF Program Office says the V-22 Osprey, like the MH-53E helicopter, can externally carry the F135 engine module, the heaviest of the five components, at least 288 miles “in good weather.”
One outside analyst, Jan van Tol of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, wondered how the Osprey, in hover mode, could safely lower the module to the flight deck or pick up an out-of-service engine in higher sea states, given the heavy downdraft the aircraft’s 38-foot rotors generate when the engine nacelles are in the vertical position. When so positioned, with the aircraft hovering over the flight deck, the rotor wash can also affect sailors standing nearby – particularly those attaching the load sling, van Tol said. The GAO reported in 2009 that during shipboard exercises, the V-22’s downwash was so severe that in one instance, a sailor was directed to hold in place the sailor serving as the landing guide.

Heat could also be a problem. Depending on the amount of heat generated, sailors involved in sling operations could possibly be forced to wear heat-resistant suits, van Tol said.

Moreover, the Navy has no fleet V-22s and has no plans to acquire them. The Marine Corps flies the MV-22, but the Navy amphibious groups that carry its forces and aircraft to distant shores generally do not operate in the vicinity of carrier strike groups.

The 9,400-pound engine module and transport container also cannot not be transferred from a supply ship to a carrier during underway replenishments — when two ships are sailing side-by-side and connected by supply lines — because, Kennedy said, “It’s too heavy for the unrep station"...

The F136 would have similar dimensions and modularity,” said Navy spokeswoman Capt. Cate Mueller.

The F136 would use the same transport system, thus making it unable to fit into a COD or V-22."”

The Pentagon’s nearly unprecedented, wildly irrational spending binge.

2010-11-29T14:43:00.000-05:00

Waste Land
"Why does Washington assume that use of its fantastically capable military will always bring positive results? We keep sending our forces far away to insert themselves into other people’s fights. Because we are the good guys, we can’t face the reality that, most of the time, this doesn’t work. This is no failing of U.S. forces; it is simply the limit of power. Some problems cannot be solved with soldiers and air crew, no matter how well-equipped and skilled they are. And when we choose to deploy forces, vast costs follow: increased military health care expenditures, the long-term financial burden of looking after injured veterans, and the construction and maintenance of expensive bases in war zones. Asking why we are doing this could lead to many constructive reforms.

Yet these questions go unasked, because they are in no one’s interest in institutional Washington. Congress wants to spend money; the Defense Department and its sister organizations in intelligence want to command money; contractors want to receive money. Figuring out cost-effective alternatives is practically unpatriotic.

Institutional Washington tends to assume that exorbitant military spending is “just” waste, as if an enormous squandering of resources is annoying but has no other downside. Of course, no person would assume this about his or her own personal budget. Throughout the last decade, America has diverted a significant amount of its national wealth to defense and security. This year, the United States will spend about $315 billion more on defense and security than it did ten years ago, which equates to about 2 percent of GDP. Subtract over $300 billion annually from federal spending and the national debt becomes much less dire. And when Washington spends recklessly on overpriced weapons systems or unnecessary bureaucracy, the loss isn’t limited to entries on a ledger. That’s money that can’t be invested in preserving the vitality of America that the military is meant to protect."

the Pentagon budget be frozen until it can pass comprehensive audits of all programs, agencies and contractors.

2010-11-29T11:44:00.002-05:00

Memo to Tea Party Senators
"Eisenhower was wary of seeing his beloved republic turn into a muscle-bound garrison state--militarily strong, but economically stagnant and strategically insolvent."

Muscle-bound aptly describes the practice of DOD, and Congress, of preserving extraordinarily expensive, underperforming weapons designed to fight the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact and always delivered years late. The F-35, which unfortunately Secretary Gates continues to support, is a classic example. Originally promised to cost $35 million per aircraft, it will now cost at least $155 million each; it is just now being produced--years late--and aircraft design experts look at its performance characteristics and grimace. The Navy's LPD-17 and DDG-1000 ships and the Marine Corps' Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle are a few more of the many examples.

Practices like those have contributed to a level of military spending that almost equals that of all other countries combined. Counting just our potential enemies and taking the defense budgets of Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Cuba combined, we spend three times that amount.

There's a disconnect between U.S. military spending and real-world threats. Today and in the future, al-Qaeda and its global affiliates top the list of threats to the United States and our allies. $1.3 trillion dollars and nine years of fighting after 9/11, the problem is undiminished; military force cannot be the sole means to rely on, and it is likely to be most effective with astutely employed special forces.

Yet, the United States continues to maintain, for example, up to 11 classic warfare aircraft carrier battlegroups, with their associated cruisers, destroyers, submarines, oilers, supply ships and more--all in the absence of an opposing conventional navy. To the extent that naval experts worry about the Chinese, or even regional powers in the littorals, potential opponents are deploying ominous new missile and submarine systems that make our huge surface forces into little more than "targets," according to prevailing gallows humor...

Where to start bringing this huge federal agency's spending under control? Your colleague, Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, has a sensible proposal. He has recommended to each member of President Obama's Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (the "Deficit Commission"), on which he serves, that the Pentagon budget be frozen until it can pass comprehensive audits of all programs, agencies and contractors. To reform and control defense spending, it clearly must first be understood - the very reason for the accountability clause in the Constitution. "

From Newsweek

2010-11-23T19:23:00.001-05:00

War-Toy Wishes
"As Lockheed Martin’s Marietta, Ga., plant prepares to begin building the 187th—and last—F-22 super-fighter, the military is already dreaming of its successor. In a query to the aerospace industry earlier this month, the Air Force laid out its wish list, and it wants everything: a plane that can win dogfights, demolish air-defense missile networks, support ground troops, and run surveillance missions; a partial prototype would be ready by 2020, with entry into service by 2030.

This may be wishful thinking, given the saga of the current wondercraft, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. With a development and production price tag of more than $380 billion, the F-35 is the costliest acquisition program in Pentagon history. Different versions are being developed for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines. But the plane is bedeviled by technical problems, ever-rising costs, and slipping schedules, with the Marines’ incarnation presenting the toughest challenges. Last week the co-chairmen of President Obama’s deficit-reduction commission proposed gutting the program. On Nov. 22, a Pentagon review board is scheduled to take a hard look at it.

Speculation inside the services is that Defense Secretary Robert Gates may agree with the co-chairs. Gates wants, he has said, “greater quantities of systems that represent the 75 percent solution, instead of smaller quantities of 99 percent-exquisite systems.” A congressional air-power expert, who couldn’t be named because of Hill rules, says, “Over the past couple of weeks, the Air Force has begun to look seriously at the latest F-16s,” cheaper stopgaps if Gates slashes the F-35 buy...

Even if the F-35 survives, the Air Force’s dreams of a next-generation super-fighter are likely to remain just that. Priorities for future budgets are a new family of bombers and a new tanker fleet. And when next-generation super-fighters do arrive, odds are they won’t resemble either the F-22 or the F-35. They’ll probably be drones—“large numbers of increasingly capable UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles]…[with] the ability to disrupt and overwhelm,” as Gates told an Air Force gathering last year."

Here is the drone they are talking about:

I have trouble getting my head around the level of gall necessary for the USAF to already be pursuing the 6th generation fighter while continuing to sing out empty praise for the F-35. Given the current schedule estimates, the F-35 program will be fully mature just 6 years before they want to have this 6th generation fighter also matured and ready. A trillion dollars for 6 years of service? It boggles.

Bernie Sanders as snakeoil salesman

2010-11-22T16:43:00.001-05:00

I thought it worthy of mentioning all on it's own that Bernie Sanders is responding to inquiries about the F-35 by disseminating an utter falsehood regarding F-35 parts commonality.

Bernie's form letter contains the claim that the F-35 program utilizes parts commonality of 80% to enhance affordability. Commonality now runs under 60% and has been completely dropped as a cost saving measure. This is one of the reasons the F-35 is now 1.5 times more expensive than the fleet it will replace even though the whole reason the program got picked up in the first place was because it was supposed to be significantly cheaper.

No one can claim that the F-35 is affordable or that it will engender any savings over it's viable alternatives. It is especially unpleasant to see Bernie Sanders, who one might have expected to be critical of these kinds of programs, lying outright in their defense.

Eglin waits another year for delayed F-35

2010-11-22T16:30:00.002-05:00

F-35 delay: Especially painful at Eglin
"Now, it’s anyone’s guess how long it will be before Hlatky and Tomassetti see the two F-35s they were promised by the end of the year. Instead, the fighter jets won’t even leave the factory until April and then will be delivered to Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., so they can be flown by test pilots for another six months. It’s the military’s way of saying production F-35s aren’t ready for prime time.

The delay, widely reported by the media but not confirmed by the Pentagon, means the 33rd probably won’t start training airmen, sailors or Marines until late next year, at the earliest. Really, though, it’s anyone’s guess. The bigger question is: When is all this nonsense with the F-35 — delays and cost overruns — going to stop?

Not even a year ago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired the F-35 military program manager, extended the flight-test commitment, postponed operational deliveries and announced he was withholding $614 million in payments to prime contractor Lockheed Martin.

The “restructuring,” the word used by Gates, seemed like a move in the right direction. Obviously, it didn’t work.

The F-35 is the Pentagon’s largest weapons system project, coming in at about $382 billion. It was already more than four years behind schedule before the latest setback. It’s probably now another two years off, at least.

What is going on? Members of the 33rd, not to mention taxpayers, deserve to know.
The Pentagon has a chance to find out what the real story is when its Defense Acquisitions Board meets Nov. 22 for an in-depth review of the Joint Strike Fighter.

Whatever the deal is, the officials need to get serious. They must act on the behalf of the American people: No more cost overruns, no more delays — or Lockheed Martin will pay, big time.
Enough is enough. The F-35 can’t be so good that it’s worth this kind of time and money."

Boeing Super Hornet Superior to F-35C

2010-11-18T09:22:00.000-05:00

Which aircraft is better for the carrier air wing?
In this post Eric Palmer destroys any arguments for the performance superiority of the F-35C for Naval Operations and offers this as a kicker:

"Finally there is that other value in these in-debt times. The Super will cost less to procure and operate. Hell. As it stands now, you can purchase two Super motors for the cost of one F-35 motor."

Ashton Carter, the DOD’s top procurement guy, has been lying in the Nunn-McCurdy hearings. There are alternatives to this program, it isn't too big to fail.

Hegemony has become its own reward

2010-11-15T08:21:00.002-05:00

The Return of “The Return of National Greatness”

"It seems to me that the last thing our political culture needs is another round of hectoring people for being insufficiently patriotic on the basis of their disagreements over fiscal policy. “If you don’t agree to this proposal, you want America to collapse!” A good way to encourage resentment among a great many Americans is to try to guilt them into supporting a proposal through cynical invocations of the sacrifice of soldiers. Brooks’ column today is a good example of the pernicious effect of making fiscal and economic policy debates the subject of a new culture war."

I see this attitude at play in all the local commentary I've read regarding the F-35. It is possible to be patriotic, want the best for our troops AND vehemently object to their mission and the wider policies surrounding their mission.

GAO report

2010-11-12T12:29:00.000-05:00

JOINT STRIKE FIGHTER March 2010 Additional Costs and Delays Risk Not Meeting Warfighter Requirements on Time

This is an easy read (for a government document) and paints a very clear and irrefutable picture of the peril this program puts us in terms of preparedness and budgetary over-reach. Of special note:

-Pertaining to rewarding failure:

"DOD concurred with, but has not yet implemented, our two recommendations to report on its plans for mitigating the risks of using cost-reimbursement procurement contracts for low-rate production and transitioning to fixed-price contracting, and to ensure that the prime contractor performs detailed schedule risk analyses to provide important insight into use of reserve funds and manufacturing progress."

Why do we pay contractors using cost reimbursement rather than via fixed price contacts? Because fixed price contracts hold them accountable for their initial pie in the sky lies about the costs and potential of their program proposals. That's not how you milk a cash cow!

-Pertaining to near term deficits in capability due to the JSF's floundering:

"Cost increases and further delays pose a substantial risk that the program will not be able to deliver the quantities and capabilities in the time required by the warfighters. It is likely that either the dates for achieving initial operational capabilities must be delayed or the military services will have to accept less initial capability and defer some requirements to a future upgrade program...If delays continue the services may have to reduce, defer or revise operational requirements and pursue fall back plans to span capability gaps"

In other words, if this plane is as late and as minimally functional as we think it is going to be, we are all going to have to engage in a robust campaign of recidivist history and mass hallucination regarding our military capabilities. How is this giving our boys the best?

-Pertaining to concurrency:

"The intent of development flight testing is to discover and fix design and performance deficiencies during development when it is cheaper to do so than discovering problems and shortfalls during follow-on operational testing and after initial fielding. Purchasing aircraft before testing successfully demonstrates that the designs are mature and that the weapon system will work as intended increases the likelihood and impact of design, manufacturing, and requirements changes resulting in subsequent cost growth, schedule delays, and performance shortfalls. Systems already built and fielded may require substantial modifications, driving further costs...(JSF) has not been successful in meeting demonstration goals and testing schedules to support increases in production investments, placing billions of dollars at risk as it develops and produces aircraft concurrently. As the JSF program development and test program slips, it further increases the chances that costly design changes will surface in the later years of flight testing."

I guess they really need that photo-op whether the plane works or not.

-Pertaining to the scariest part of all, being on the hook for the procurement and maintainence of this TRILLION DOLLAR albatross in the midst of unavoidable future financial austerity.

"The program office currently estimates total life-cycle costs for operating, sustaining, and maintaining JSF fleets at $764 billion, substantially higher than earlier estimates. The cost per flying hour of the CTOL variant is projected to be higher than the F-16, one of the Air Force aircraft it is slated to replace. NAVAIR officials recently projected total life-cycle costs even higher, at more than $1 trillion. Service officials are concerned whether future budgets will be able to afford the higher costs expected."

Need I remind anyone that the most fundamental tenet of the F-35 program was to be more affordable to produce and maintain than our current fleet?

2010-11-11T14:15:00.002-05:00

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum
With crumps and lice and lack of rum
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
-- Siegfried Sassoon, "Suicide in the Trenches"

F-35 STOVL variant in trouble

2010-11-11T08:37:00.002-05:00

White House Commission: Kill The F-35B
A draft document issued by the two chairmen of the White House commission on reducing the federal deficit recommends scrapping the F-35B short-take-off, vertical landing (STOVL) fighter outright...In the case of the F-35B, the commission notes that it is the most trouble-prone F-35 variant and that its demise could speed the development of the F-35A and F-35C. However, the dual footnotes DTI's reporting of potential changes to Marine tactics and operations that could eliminate plans to use the F-35B's unique characteristics in austere land bases."

Stop the F-35 Speak-out and Rally

2010-11-09T14:20:00.002-05:00

2010 GAO chart

2010-11-06T12:57:00.006-04:00

I can't wait to see what this looks like next year...2018? 2020? $5 billion more? 10? Anything is possible when the inmates are running the asylum.

p.s. I must add that the circa 2001 estimates where for delivery in 2008. But what's a decade behind schedule and $100 billion over-budget between friends?

This program is officially indefensible

2010-11-05T13:08:00.001-04:00

Gates Briefed On JSF Delay

"Defense Secretary Robert Gates has learned that development of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will be further delayed, on top of the 13-month slip that was disclosed in March.

Gates also was advised in a Nov. 2 briefing that operations and support costs for the F-35 will be re-budgeted at 1.5 times the aircraft it replaces, more than twice the original goal and 50% more than more recent projections, according to reports...

Reports suggest that the U.S. Air Force/international F-35A and Navy F-35C variants will be delayed another 12 months and the Marines’ F-35B – still suspended from powered-lift flight testing due to a problem with an auxiliary inlet door – will be two to three years late. It is not clear whether that refers to the completion of developmental testing or to the initial operational capability date.

The need for more time to carry out flight testing and to mature software is the main reason for the delay. Although two USAF F-35A prototypes have been flying at a higher-than-expected rate at Edwards AFB, Calif., the F-35B program at NAS Patuxent River, Md., has fallen further behind schedule since last March, and the planned start of shipboard trials (in March 2011) will now be missed. Only six aircraft were delivered to customer flight test centers in Fiscal 2010 out of 12 planned in September 2009.

The direct cost is expected to be a $5 billion increase in research and development costs (currently budgeted at around $50 billion in then-year dollars). However, further delays are likely to accelerate the recent trend in which international customers – including Norway, the Netherlands and the U.K. – have decided to delay commitments and orders. The new Congress may also slow U.S. acquisitions to avoid an increase in concurrency, or the overlap of production and development."

So, this plane is more expensive to build than what it's replacing, more expensive to maintain than what it's replacing, no better performing than what it's replacing and is well into the vortex of the procurement death-spiral. That's 4 out of 4 vital pillars of the program (as mapped out by Lockheed) in a dusty pile on the floor.

Is the fat lady warming up?

2010-11-02T14:36:00.000-04:00

More cost increases, delays predicted for F-35

"The $50 billion development cost estimate for the F-35 could rise as much as $5 billion more, and Pentagon analysts now estimate that the aircraft may be as much as 11/2 times more expensive to maintain than the warplanes it will replace, the officials said. The F-35 has been billed as being less costly to maintain and operate than existing planes.

Air Force and Navy versions of the plane could be delayed another year and the Marines version by two to three years, the officials said.

The potential delays and increases would be on top of those the Pentagon acknowledged earlier this year. Those include a 13-month extension of the current development phase to November 2015, shifting of $2.8 billion in production funds for continued development and testing, and delaying the purchase of 122 jets to beyond 2015.

Further delays and higher costs will complicate Pentagon efforts to write its 2012 budget proposal, which has to be sent to the White House in coming weeks...

Gates "is engaging in a broader tactical aircraft discussion of which the joint strike fighter is obviously an important piece," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said in an e-mail.

"How many more reviews will Gates have to hear before he acknowledges the F-35 is an unaffordable failure?" said Winslow Wheeler, a program critic who is director of the Straus Military Reform Project. "The F-35 is rapidly becoming a millstone around his neck."

Protest notice

2010-10-25T13:23:00.000-04:00

Stop the F-35: Rally and Speak Out
Monday, November 1st, 5:00 pm
199 Main Street, Burlington
Next to the Broken Democracy Sculpture

After asking numerous times for a meeting with Senator Leahy and being denied by his staff, the Stop the F-35 coalition is calling for a rally and speak out outside of his office to say that we demand he listen to his constituents on this important issue.

His support of the F-35 shows his continued support for weapons industry contracts over social spending, green and sustainable jobs programs as well as a lack of concern about the negative impact of the F-16s currently stationed at the Burlington International Airport.

Senator Leahy's support for the F-35 is nothing less than a vote in favor of war and against human need.

Please join us Monday November 1st to tell Senator Leahy what kind of jobs Vermonters really need.

For more info contact Jim at 802-309-4824 and visit www.stopthef35.com

Letter from Senator Tom Coburn

2010-10-25T11:45:00.000-04:00

You should read the whole thing here, but here is the F-35 part:

"For waging conventional war, the new weapons we buy to replace old ones increase in cost far faster than the budget increases (which makes inevitable the shrinking and aging of our weapons, at growing cost). Also, the new systems rarely, if ever, bring a performance improvement commensurate with the cost increase. In some cases the new system is even a step backwards. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter‟s close air support capability is a good example. Among the aircraft it is to replace is the 1970s vintage – but still much used and almost universally praised – A-10 close air support aircraft. Even if the F-35 stays at its currently stated purchase price of $131 million per aircraft8 it will cost almost nine times more than an A-10, using inflation adjusted dollars. At that huge additional cost, it will have less payload than an A-10; it will not be able to loiter over the battlefield to help troops engaged in combat hour after hour; it will be too fast to be able to find targets independently, and even if it could, it will be too fragile to survive at the low altitude it must fly at to be truly effective, even against the primitive small arms and machinegun defenses terrorists and insurgents can mount. It also lacks the extraordinarily effective 30 mm cannon the A-10 carries, a weapon of astounding lethality against a wide variety of target types, including heavy armor."

Best for our boys, huh, Senator Leahy?

You can't reform spending if you don't know what you spend

2010-10-25T11:34:00.001-04:00

How many more trillion$ for defense?

"Real reform must start with fundamentals.

Right now, the Pentagon does not know how it spends its money, as the Government Accountability Office has reported for decades. It is literally "unauditable."

Routinely, DOD does not know if it has paid contactors once, twice or not at all. We recently learned it does not even know how many contractors it has, whom they employ and what they are doing. Google "audit" and "Pentagon" and read the horror stories.
Just look at a recent report from Sen. Charles Grassley(R-Iowa). It is long, hard reading, but it details how deep the accountability problems go. Not only are the Pentagon's books a gigantic mess, it reports, but the office charged with fixing it is broken.

Since the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 demanded that the Pentagon learn to track its money, DOD's managers have made promise after promise to reform. Each has been broken.

It is clear that if you ask what a weapon program has cost, or might cost in future, the DOD system seems likely to provide you any dollar amount it wants you to hear.

The F-35 "Joint Strike Fighter" is a classic case; for the last two years, the acquisition bureaucracy had to re-cook the cost numbers - upward, of course - to chase new revelations, and we are about to get yet another update, which will only be another way station on the cost escalator. Ask for an audit of those or any other numbers, and listen to the excuses.

The only jolt that could shock this broken system into reform is less money. That is the approach taken by a member of President Barack Obama's Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has written each commission member recommending that the DOD budget be frozen until it can pass comprehensive audits of all programs, agencies and contractors. Find a copy of Coburn's letter here.

You can't reform spending if you don't know what you spend."

Its The Wars, Stupid

2010-10-22T10:56:00.003-04:00

From Second Vermont Republic:

"Vermonters have acquiesced to an immoral, violent, global empire and no one seems to care. We behave as though we have lost our soul.

I challenge Lt. Governor Brian Dubie, Senator Peter Shumlin, Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Patrick Leahy, and Congressman Peter Welch to pledge to (1) bring home the Vermont National Guard troops immediately, (2) stop all of the immoral, illegal wars in which the United States is engaged, and (3) block the deployment of F-35 jets at the Burlington International Airport.

I further challenge the faculty and students at UVM, Middlebury College, the Vermont Law School, and all of the other Vermont colleges to commit to the same objectives. So too might the Vermont Democratic, Republican, and Progressive parties as well as Vermont teachers, clergy, attorneys, and business leaders. Why shouldn’t Vermont patriots who work for Ben & Jerry’s, Green Mountain Coffee, IBM, General Dynamics, and Fletcher Allen Health Care follow suit? Organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church, the United Church of Christ, the Peace and Justice Center, the Quakers, 350.org, and Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility might lead the way.

It’s high time Vermont patriots reclaim their moral authority and commit to ending these barbaric wars.

Dennis Steele

(Independence Candidate for Governor http://www.governorsteele.com/)

October 26, 2010"

trying to compare a faulty, overly-complex, poorly managed and woefully under-tested weapons program to producing cars

2010-10-22T10:50:00.001-04:00

From ELP:

"The F-35 is an unknown quantity by a large margin. The U.S. taxpayer shouldn’t have to fork over around $50 billion dollars on hundreds of mistake-jets before flight testing is done. It is up to weapons makers and the DOD to present healthy and properly managed weapons programs to The Hill. In the case of the F-35–like so many other programs (LCS, EFV, DDX and so on)–this has not been done.The Congress is right anytime it tries to weed out sickly, grossly under-performing and expensive weapons programs."

FYI on air quality

2010-10-20T13:39:00.001-04:00

From the CCMPO report: Keeping Our Air Clean: Local and Regional Strategies to Improve Air Quality in Chittenden County

"Air Toxics: The federal government has identified various hazardous air pollutants that are known or suspected to cause cancer or other serious health effects. These pollutants, often referred to as air toxics, include industrial chemicals, solvents, pesticides, metals and combustion by-products. There are no national air quality standards for air toxics, however, Vermont has established ambient air standards for over 380 air toxics. Air quality monitoring in Chittenden County shows that four air toxics routinely exceed the state’s standards:
• Benzene – Benzene is a human carcinogen. It is used as an industrial solvent and is found in motor fuels. It is formed during combustion of petroleum and wood fuels.
• 1,3-Butadiene – 1,3-Butadiene is a probable human carcinogen. The primary source of 1,3-butadiene is vehicle exhaust; other sources include waste incinerators and wood fires.
• Carbon tetrachloride – Carbon tetrachloride is a probable human carcinogen. Consumer use of carbon tetrachloride was phased out in the 1960s; the compound is now used only in industrial processes.
• Formaldehyde –Formaldehyde is a probable human carcinogen and an irritant to eyes, nose and throat. Some people are known to be more sensitive to formaldehyde than others, and repeated exposure can increase sensitivity. Formaldehyde is used in glues and resins, notably in the resins used to make particleboard. It is also a byproduct of combustion, including motor vehicles and wood stoves.

These four problem air toxics come from a variety of sources, including motor vehicles, gas stations, home heating, dry cleaners and industrial sources. All are volatile organic compounds – and thus are precursors to ozone formation in the atmosphere. Except for carbon tetrachloride, all are considered to be generated locally....

Based on the monitoring data, Chittenden County currently complies with all of the criteria air pollutant NAAQS and is considered to be an “attainment area.” However, Chittenden County has only a slim margin in meeting the standards for ozone and PM2.5. Should concentrations of these pollutants increase, or the standards be further tightened, then Chittenden County could face being out of compliance with the NAAQS. A region that does not comply with one or more NAAQS is considered to be a “non-attainment area...

The impacts on non-attainment on a region are immediate, sustained and significant. Although health and environmental impacts are reduced once the air quality improves to meet the NAAQS, regulatory impacts and their associated economic impacts can last for 20 years after the region is designated as a maintenance area.
Given the extent of these impacts, it is highly desirable to prevent Chittenden County from becoming a non-attainment area. If the county does become a non-attainment area, it is also important to return to attainment status as quickly as possible."

F-35 Program's only tier one partner cancels F-35B order and reduces the rest

2010-10-20T08:40:00.001-04:00

This is what happens when a government realizes it can't afford it's DOD budget. It cuts the most glaring offenders. The U.S. can't be far behind in this realization.

Great Britain to delay, trim F-35 purchases

"Future prospects for the F-35 joint strike fighter program got a lot murkier Tuesday after British government officials announced plans to delay and dramatically trim their purchases of the warplane from Lockheed Martin.

The sweeping review of defense programs unveiled by Prime Minister David Cameron envisions cutting purchases of F-35s from 138 planes to as few as 40. It would also delay the first orders until later this decade and switch the type of jet the British navy will operate.

The moves by the British, who for 15 years have been the foremost ally of the Pentagon in planning and paying for development of the F-35, figure to drive up the costs of buying aircraft for the U.S. and other governments and lead to further delays by other nations expected to buy the jets.

"This is not good news, bottom line," said Mackenzie Eaglen, defense analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation. "Once there is a significant shift by any international participant, it opens the doors for others to follow."

To date, only Israel has indicated a firm commitment to purchase the F-35 -- and it will do so with funds from U.S. military aid programs. Lockheed officials say they expect an order from Australia early next year, while Canada has reaffirmed its intent to buy planes but given no timetable for doing so...

The Pentagon's most recent, sharply increased cost estimates for the F-35 program were based on having significant numbers of foreign orders, which would hold down the cost of planes for the U.S. military.

The British plans, along with the U.S. Senate's attempts to strip 10 F-35 jets from the 2011 defense budget, do not bode well for the program, said Loren Thompson, Lexington Institute defense analyst and a consultant to Lockheed and other defense contractors...

The British action further confounds the Pentagon's plans by switching away from the F-35B short-takeoff-vertical landing model, the costliest and most complex of the three versions. That leaves the U.S. Marine Corps as likely the only major buyer...

That in turn could lead the Navy to delay its F-35 purchases and perhaps open the door for additional sales of a cheaper alternative, the Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet.

"The delay of the [F-35B] is disruptive to all aspects of the program schedule and costs. If I'm Lockheed, I'm sweating; and if I'm the Pentagon, I'm scrambling," Eaglen said."

In their own words

2010-10-18T12:04:00.005-04:00

The hype, the spin, the Ponzi Scheme, a 2002 F-35 capability brief to Australia

-"We intend to build the Joint Strike Fighter on a single production line. As the aircraft moves through the various phases of production, the various unique aspects from the three variants will be rolled in.
What you’ll see...is about an 80% across- the-board commonality between the three variants. To build to that 80% commonality, you will have 100% commonality in the core engine. There’ll be 100% commonality in the mission systems. In the software, the software load will be the same software load for all three variants. And we see this again – that common production line – another key component of achieving that affordability, which is a fundamental pillar of Joint Strike Fighter."

Commonality is now below 60% for the F-35.

-"Why are we doing JSF? Well, first of all it’s replacing an ageing inventory. We have F-16s, F-18s that are coming near to the end of their life and we had to make some decisions to replace that inventory. We also have that old inventory, even if we could continue the life on it, it’s becoming very expensive to maintain.Yes, we’re still selling F-16s and F-18s, and there’s been a lot of reliability improvement efforts and maintainability improvement efforts that have been rolled into those airframes. But this gives us an opportunity, from ground up to design, in that maintainability and reliability that we need to have an affordable system."

Once affordability is off the table, the primary justification for this program disintegrates.

-"The bottom line on affordability is that it’s not affordable if it doesn’t meet the operational requirements that the war fighter needs. So that’s the standard and that’s where we go back to at least performance at least as good as an F-16 or F-18."

So now that affordability has been lost and F-35 performance isn't any better, we should buy more F-18's and F-16's instead, right?

-"What I’d like to really emphasis here is that the 3,002 airplanes is what all of our resource, our budgeting, our planning is all based on. We took no credit in our cost-projections for any additional international sales. So by virtue of that our numbers for you know recurring fly-away and production costs are conservative. We estimate – actually three different studies have estimated that there’s anywhere between 2,000 and 3,000 additional aircraft over that 3,002. Obviously the aircraft that our partners are projected to buy, those would be part of that greater than 2,000 number."

That's a good thing because now you are only making 2,457 of them.

-"QUESTION: Fred Benchley from The Bulletin magazine. You’re just touching on an issue I wanted to raise, that is sales to non-participant countries. The participants will invest quite a deal of money up front, in the various stages of the development of this aircraft. When it comes to sales to non-participant countries, will they get a return out of those sales?
COL DENNIS: Yes, two things will happen. Depending on the level of partnership, Level One and Level Two partners get a full waiver guaranteed on the non-recurring recoupment on the production aircraft. Level Three partners get a credit in the amount of their contribution towards the non-recurring, with a consideration of a waiver for the rest. That hasn’t been determined yet, we are a few years, eight years, ten years from producing the aircraft.The other aspect of the partnership is that, in relationship to the contribution that the partner nations contribute, they will be able to collect a levy against other international sales outside of the partner nations. So they do get a levy, for example, say, the United Kingdom came in at basically at two per cent of the SDD program. On each international sale, so those two thousand, three thousand airplanes, they’ll be able to extract two per cent of the non-recurring recoupment charge. The non-recurring recoupment charge right now has been estimated anywhere from about $6-7 million per copy."

Way to give partner nations an incentive to ram this program down everyone's throats regardless of it's effectiveness. Require large investments up front and they only make money if the plane sells to lower level partners.

2010-10-15T08:58:00.003-04:00

no comment

2010-10-14T16:36:00.002-04:00

More Weapons Face Cuts or Terminations, Mullen Says

"The U.S. Defense Department likely will recommend in its fiscal 2012 budget additional spending cuts or terminations in major weapons systems that are missing cost and schedule goals, the nation’s top military official said.

The cutbacks would follow more than 20 programs that Defense Secretary Robert Gates terminated or truncated in April 2009, saving what the Pentagon estimated as more than $300 billion in long-term costs.

Those were “really, really tough decisions,” Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview during a taping of “Conversations with Judy Woodruff,” airing Oct. 15 on Bloomberg Television. “There will be more cuts.”

“We’re going through that process right now,” Mullen said. “Major programs from all the services which aren’t performing well, which can’t get themselves under control in terms of cost and schedule, they’re going to be looking at either being slowed down dramatically or being eliminated.”

Stop the F-35 Community Forum at Chamberlin Elementary

2010-10-14T08:27:00.003-04:00

The forum last night was fantastic. We had a full house! The audience was very engaged and supportive and very concerned about both the near and dear and the far reaching implications of this program. Its a pretty big deal to get 100 people to come out on a Wednesday night for a citizen action group sponsored forum. I hope we can keep this momentum rolling!

Local F-35 protester in 7 Days

2010-10-13T13:18:00.001-04:00

Roger and I (along with several other brilliant and fierce opponents of the F-35) met with Senator Leahy's Vermont Office director Chuck Ross last week. Clearly, I was proud to be in his company.

Vermont's Stop the F-35 Coalition Recruits a Veteran Spokesman

"Coalition activists living near the airport tend to argue against the deployment on environmental grounds, charging that it will produce unbearable noise pollution and foul Chittenden County’s air with benzene emissions. Others, such as Bourassa, see the F-35 primarily as an expression of a militaristic U.S. foreign policy.

Describing himself as “extremely patriotic,” the soft-spoken suburbanite explains, “My love of country is based on an America that is an example of democracy in the world, and I think we’re failing democratically today.” Bourassa echoes Dwight Eisenhower, the president under whom he served in Lebanon, in condemning a “military-industrial complex” that encourages aggressive U.S. behavior in the Middle East and beyond.

“Our foreign policy involves using military means so we can remain a very prosperous nation,” Bourassa says. “But we need to be concerned about the global climate and about the billions of people who are living on $2 a day. Our country shouldn’t be accumulating resources but sharing resources.”

New German airport noise study in Time Magazine

2010-10-12T21:40:00.002-04:00

Airport noise increases risk of stroke, other health problems

"men who are exposed to jet noise have a 69% higher risk of being hospitalized for cardiovascular disease. Women living under flight paths fare even worse, logging a 93% higher rate of hospitalization with cardiovascular problems, compared with their counterparts in quiet residential areas. The study found that women who are exposed to jet noise (of about 60 decibels) during the day are 172% more likely to suffer a stroke...

People living close to Cologne-Bonn Airport also tended to suffer from psychological illnesses. "There was a higher incidence of depression among women who live near the airport," says Jens Ortscheid of the Federal Environment Agency. "This report should come as a warning signal to all governments and authorities that are planning to expand airports — there are serious health effects which need to be considered...

In a separate study commissioned by the local Bonn authorities, Greiser discovered that women near Cologne-Bonn Airport had an increased risk of developing breast cancer and leukemia. His research found that women who are exposed to 60 decibels of jet noise at night are twice as likely to contract breast cancer. "It seems women are more sensitive to jet noise than men, but I would advise everyone to think twice about living near an airport because it's not just aircraft noise which can be deadly; aircraft emissions are also dangerous," says Greiser.

When it comes to expanding airports, governments and the courts all over the world will have to weigh the benefits of commercial interests against the danger to public health," he says. "How many additional diseases is society prepared to accept?"