Pentagon Weighs Cuts & Rev's of Weapons

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Registered: 03-18-2000
Pentagon Weighs Cuts & Rev's of Weapons
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Sat, 04-04-2009 - 10:29am

Pentagon Weighs Cuts and Revisions of Weapons

Complete article at....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/washington/04defense.html?ref=global-home

The Army’s expensive Future Combat Systems is likely to be cut back. So are exotic missile defense programs. But the supersonic F-22 fighter jet might survive. And problems with both old and new aircraft carriers could eventually lead to at least a temporary reduction in the number of carrier battle groups.

These are the consensus expectations of worried defense executives and consultants about the sweeping changes in military programs that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is expected to announce on Monday.

The decisions are expected to be the first step in a broad reshaping of the military under the Obama administration. Normally, the powerful industry’s lobbyists would already have the detailed blueprints of the Pentagon’s plans. But Mr. Gates required top Pentagon officials to sign agreements promising not to disclose details of the deliberations. Aides added that he would not make decisions on some of the dozens of programs until this weekend.

As a result, Mr. Gates’s spokesman, Geoff Morrell, said Friday, “All this chatter out there is just chatter.”

Mr. Gates has made no secret of his intention to take a hatchet to troubled high-tech programs designed for fighting countries like China or Russia. Such moves would help free up money for simpler systems used for fighting insurgencies like those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I think you will see that he is attempting to reshape and rebalance the budget so that we are not so heavily weighted to preparing to fight conventional conflicts against near peer countries that may or may not take place, and instead spend more of the money to fight and win irregular conflicts like we are in now,” Mr. Morrell said.

Industry executives say that it is clear from such comments — as well as the scattered pieces of information they have gleaned from the deliberations — that the missile defense programs and parts of the Army’s sprawling modernization program will both be cut considerably.

Defense experts say that Mr. Gates is likely to cut $1 billion to $2 billion from missile defense programs. President Obama and other officials have made comments indicating that they are more interested in systems that protect soldiers from shorter-range missiles than still-unproven ones meant to destroy intercontinental missiles.

Several industry officials said they thought Boeing’s airborne laser system, which would equip a modified 747 jetliner with a laser to shoot down missiles shortly after they are launched, might be killed. They also said that Boeing’s ground-based midcourse defense system, which is also designed to destroy long-range missiles, could be scaled back.

Executives say they believe that Mr. Gates has already decided to revamp the Army’s Future Combat Systems, a $160 billion mix of robotic sensors and new combat vehicles, with the number of manned vehicles being scaled back to two or three, from eight.

But they expect the Pentagon to push ahead on the network of sensors, which are meant to protect soldiers by providing them with greater battlefield intelligence. Mr. Gates has prodded the Army to speed the development of some of the sensors and deploy them as quickly as possible.

Mr. McAleese and Loren Thompson, another consultant with ties to some of the biggest defense companies, both said they expected Mr. Gates to let the Air Force build 20 more F-22s next year. The Air Force would like to buy those and at least 40 more over the next two years to bring its fleet of the planes to at least 243.

The advanced fighter, which was designed in the cold war and has not been used in combat, has been a symbol of many of the cost overruns and delays that have plagued military programs. Other industry officials said Friday they were not sure if Mr. Gates would continue to finance it.

Other controversial programs, like a new presidential helicopter that has been riddled with cost overruns, are expected to be killed or curtailed. Those in the industry also expect Mr. Gates to end a Navy program to build a $3 billion stealth destroyer, though it is not clear how many will be built of the three ships that have received some money.

Representative Gene Taylor, a Democrat from Mississippi and chairman of a House seapower subcommittee, said questions had emerged about whether a new system for catapulting planes off the next generation of carriers would work. If it does not, the Navy would have to return to a traditional system, delaying the new carriers by a year.

Meanwhile, he said, the Navy has been debating whether to spend $1.5 billion to refuel one of the oldest carriers. If it does not, that could lead to a temporary cut in the carriers below the 11 that Congress has required.

Mr. Gates’s proposals will go to the White House, which will send a budget to Congress in May.

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Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 12-25-2008
Sat, 04-04-2009 - 11:32am
Sounds good in theory, though I myself have my doubts about the solidity of the premise that we won't have to fight China or especially Russia at some point.

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Sat, 04-04-2009 - 6:34pm

This article gives an idea of some of the potential cuts & why.


Can Robert Gates Tame the Pentagon?


Complete article... http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1879176,00.html



If you are a firm believer in the war in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert Gates' grim assessment last month of what lies in store for the U.S. might have made you shudder. "If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money, to be honest," he said.


But if you are a defense contractor who has enjoyed a decade of bottomless Pentagon funding, it was Gates' comments about a struggle much closer to home that are keeping you up at night. "The spigot of defense spending that opened on 9/11 is closing," he said. "With two major campaigns ongoing, the economic crisis and resulting budget pressures will force hard choices on this department."


Gates, the U.S.'s 22nd Defense Secretary, has declared a low-key war against the military services and the way they develop and buy the weapons they use to defend the nation. Up until now, he has done that mostly by jawboning: The U.S. can't "eliminate national-security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything," Gates says in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. That futile quest has led to weapons that "have grown ever more baroque, have become ever more costly, are taking longer to build and are being fielded in ever dwindling quantities."



The Air Force


Gates' first showdown looms with a $350 million--a--pop fighter jet. He has to decide by March 1 whether to add more F-22 Raptor fighters to the 183 purchased by the Bush Administration. For years, the Air Force has wanted to double the fleet, while Gates has made clear that he thinks 183 is sufficient. A month ago, some Air Force officials were saying privately that maybe 60 more F-22s would suffice. The Pentagon's acquisition boss, John Young, recently detailed why more F-22s might be a poor investment. The F-22s that exist are ready to fly only 62% of the time and haven't met most of their performance goals. "The airplane is proving very expensive to operate, not seeing the mission-capable rates we expected, and it's complex to maintain," Young said. Besides, he added, the Air Force plans on spending $8 billion to upgrade most of the F-22s it already has.


Gates has tangled with the Air Force before. Shortly after arriving at the Pentagon in late 2006, he pushed to boost production of unmanned aircraft for use in intelligence work, only to run into the Air Force's long-standing love of manned fighters. But Gates' hunch was vindicated in Afghanistan and Iraq, where cheaper, unmanned Predator and Reaper drones have been flying around the clock but expensive F-22s have yet to appear. Air Force Major General Charles Dunlap Jr. has written that drones are "game-changing" because of their unprecedented ability to loiter for hours, waiting for the enemy to reveal himself--and then kill him with their weapons. And yet Dunlap's service remains wedded to white scarves, cockpits and all their inherent limitations.



The Navy


Gates hasn't torpedoed anything that belongs to the Navy--yet. But its $100 billion plan to buy a new fleet of 100,000-ton aircraft carriers (and the ships and subs to defend them) is a tempting target. That's a huge investment in gigantic ships that are increasingly vulnerable to long-range missiles--and even pirates or terrorists in a dinghy. At the heart of the debate is whether the Navy can make do with the 281 ships it has or needs to grow about 10%, to 313 ships. Gates has good reason to be skeptical. The Navy's "battle fleet is still larger than the next 13 navies combined," he recently noted. "And 11 of those 13 navies are U.S. allies or partners."



A smarter option, the study suggests, is to build a Navy of many smaller and simpler ships, which would complicate enemy targeting and give U.S. commanders better intelligence. Nonetheless, the Navy has just begun spending $11 billion to design and build the first in a new class of carriers, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, scheduled to join the fleet in 2015.


The Army


Gates' final target is on land. The Army is getting $160 billion to outfit a third of its force with a complex network of electronically linked vehicles, beginning in 2015. This supposedly synchronized web of vehicles is called the Future Combat Systems (FCS) and would include tanks, troop carriers and unmanned aircraft ostensibly knit together in a computerized cavalry. The Army likes to argue that the FCS is a transformational approach to fighting wars, in part because it is giving up a lot of armor in favor of some 95 million lines of computer code designed to detect and avoid enemy fire. In theory, all this technology would give combat GIs the ability to destroy the enemy from far away.


That's the idea, anyway. In fact, there are serious questions about the FCS. Only two of its 44 key technologies are mature enough to generate reliable cost estimates, according to the Government Accountability Office. The Army has so far spent $18 billion trying to get the FCS to work and plans on spending $21 billion more before it gets a formal green light for production in 2013, when key performance tests still will not have been done. And the FCS's vaunted mobility has already been scrapped; the Army has abandoned plans to transport all those vehicles to the battlefield aboard C-130 cargo planes because they are too heavy. Costs are on the rise as well: the Army was able to keep the FCS's total price tag at $160 billion only by killing four of the program's 18 platforms in 2007--and is likely to continue cutting them to keep down the expense.


The bigger question is whether such a high-tech approach to war makes sense after the U.S. learned that getting soldiers out of their vehicles and mixing among the locals was a key to turning Iraq around. Weapons designed to kill from afar may not be best for counterinsurgencies, in which intelligence is most often gleaned only by personal contact. General Peter Chiarelli, the Army's No. 2 officer, disputes the idea that FCS "is a Cold War relic." But not everyone agrees.



 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 12-25-2008
Sat, 04-04-2009 - 6:44pm
I agree that there need to be some changes, just hope they tread carefully.

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Mon, 04-06-2009 - 1:16pm

I'm glad that all of that is being reviewed.