The Defense Authorization bill is a big win for the White House.
The Defense Authorization bill just signed into law, which (inter alia) finally kills the F-22, represents the strongest performance in years by the White House and the Office of the Secretary Defense in their perennial struggle to control military waste against the combined opposition of the services, the contractors, and their Congressional allies.
Just think how much better we would have done with more experienced President who believed in action rather than mere words. Â And since we know that Obama’s interest in bipartisan action reflects mere naivete, John McCain’s backing for the cuts must have been a mere accident and not the product of skillful management.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
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Robert Gates is quoted in the story as recommending President Obama to “shake up sacred cows". Holding which end?
"…the strongest performance in years by the White House…"
If that ain't setting the bar as low as it goes, nothing is.
And the total amount of the bill is actually quite a bit larger than that for FY 2009. Given the lack of results we're getting on the ground, how does this represent cost control? It would be accurate to characterize Obama and Gates as merely preferring to waste defense money differently than the services, the contractors, and their Congressional allies.
McCain was dubious and critical of the F-22 long before Obama ascended to office, so I'm not sure how much "skillful management" was needed to bring him aboard.
We'll see. Obama and Gates just killed a fighter that has gone through Development Hell and was ready for production (and had a defined role), in favor of a fighter that probably won't be ready until the end of his term (if that), and that will probably end up costing damn near as much per unit due to the fact that they now have to load everything on it (hint: complexity increases expenditure).
Personally, I wish they'd just sell the F-22 to the Japanese. That way, if the F-35 goes south (and it probably would, except that now the allied nations in developing and purchasing it would scream holy hell), we can always sheepishly come around and produce it again.
Let's not get started on the idiocy of killing the alternative engine for the F-35 (because obviously our design process is just so perfect that there is zero chance that the engine might have some issue that, without an alternative, could ground the entire fleet for a while, am I right?).
Heaven forbid the services might actually have an idea on what they want, as opposed to a Presidential appointee who came out of the CIA. Besides, doesn't what Gates is doing seem awfully short-sighted? He's killing modernization programs that take years and decades to free up funding for a conflict that we might not even be in in five years – eating the seed corn, so to speak.
That said, it's not all bad news. They finally killed FCS, which means that the good parts of it – the networking- will get incorporated into the services and we'll hopefully get a good modernization program this time, and the bad parts – the vehicles – will simply get brushed aside.
When we get back to a "well regulated militia" then I will believe anything about the MI complex.
You know, people use "Military-Industrial Complex" as a pejorative, but do you know why one exists? Because if you actually want to be a serious military and not import all your equipment, you need highly complex and specialized production lines to build the equipment and the spare parts to keep it in order. The days when we could pull a World War 2 – rapidly scale up a small force to a large one – are long gone.