Esper’s Convenient Lie

The largest defense weapons program during the last two decades, by far, is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, an aircraft that is certainly not optimized for counterterrorism or counterinsurgency. The F-35 program is estimated to cost nearly $400 billion in research, development, and procurement, with lifetime operating and sustainment costs estimated at over $1 trillion dollars. Other big-ticket defense modernization items over the past two decades include the $13 billion apiece Ford-class aircraft carrier which, again, is not a platform one invests in if designing a military for countering violent extremists.

Other modernization projects collapsed of their own accord, doomed by acquisition mismanagement and overly ambitious requirements. The Army squandered roughly $18 billion on Future Combat Systems attempting to network its battlefield, with little to show for it. The Navy spent a whopping $22 billion on the DDG-1000 Zumwalt stealth destroyer program to produce only three ships.

In reality, Defense Secretary Bob Gates struggled to focus the Pentagon’s force development priorities on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gates criticized the department’s tendency towards “Next-War-itis,” to focus on the future big wars against nation-state adversaries like Russia and China at the expense of the ongoing wars.

Instances where modernization programs against nation-state threats were put on the chopping block to free up funding for the wars, like Gates’ decision to curtail production of the air-to-air F-22 stealth fighter, were notable precisely because they were rare. Even in those cases, though, the counterfactual claim that the Defense Department would have been more ready for China and Russia were it not for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan doesn’t hold water. From 2001 to 2008, the non-war base budgets of the Navy and Air Force grew 22 percent and 27 percent, respectively, when adjusted for inflation. Prior to 9/11, the Defense Department budget was growing at only 2.5 percent annually. Were it not for 9/11, and the counterterrorism wars that followed, the Air Force would have faced a far more difficult budget environment in 2009, when the F-22 was curtailed. If anything, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan allowed overpriced, baroque weapon systems for future wars to hang on longer than they normally would have, carried along by the swell of defense spending.

If we don’t get to the root causes of why the Defense Department has failed to adapt to the suite of anti-access capabilities that defense analysts have seen coming for 15 years, and why the Pentagon remains over-invested in legacy, wasting assets, then the U.S. military never be able to respond to the China threat.

The reality is that the United States has a military that is not optimized for power projection into contested environments against a near-peer competitor, nor is the U.S. military optimized for countering violent extremism (which would look radically different). The United States has a military optimized for re-fighting the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Why? Because it’s comfortable. It’s comfortable with defense contractors, Congress, entrenched bureaucratic interests in the Pentagon, and even many senior military leaders.

Esper is right that “sequestration, continuing resolutions, and insufficient budgets, prior to 2017” all have harmed the Defense Department’s bottom line, and that the Department has seen “a great deal of funding” since Donald Trump came to office.

But to actually adapt to the challenges the U.S. military faces, the Defense Department needs more than just more money. The U.S. military needs to start changing how it fights. That’s uncomfortable. The U.S. defense community loves fixating on widgets, whether it is hypersonics, directed energy, artificial intelligence, or other techno-solutions. The military service branches are the worst at this. They fixate on numbers, even though those are precisely the wrong metrics. The Navy wants 355 ships. The Air Force wants 386 operational squadrons. The Army wants 500,000 soldiers. Those are the wrong metrics for a 21st century fight.

It is far more important what is on those ships and planes and ground vehicles, how they are networked together, how they fuse and share data, how units manage command-and-control in contested electromagnetic environments, and how they employ intelligent networked munitions. Many more generals and admirals seem to say this than the politicians who boast about funding them. Across the military, leaders are experimenting, prototyping, and developing new ways to operate in contested environments with the money they have. The problem is that when the rubber meets the road in spending, innovation runs into a brick wall. Congress and the Pentagon keep spending too much on the same outdated hardware.