This week the NY Times' editorial board has been doing a series of longer pieces making the case that the US military and the defense industry are in trouble. As I pointed out Monday, the paper even admitting that Sec. of War Pete Hegseth was right about something. The Times had just seen a report which indicated the US military might be overmatched in a conflict with China:
The report is a comprehensive review of U.S. military power prepared by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and delivered most recently to top White House officials in the last year. It catalogs China’s ability to destroy American fighter planes, large ships and satellites, and identifies the U.S. military’s supply chain choke points. Its details have not been previously reported.
The picture it paints is consistent and disturbing.
They don't exactly give Hegseth credit, but they do admit that he was saying this a year ago. Since then the paper has published three more entries in this weeklong series of articles. The second one focused on the changing landscape of war.
Human history can be told as a series of advances in warfare, from chariots to crossbows to nuclear-tipped missiles, and we are living through what may be the fastest advancement in weaponry ever. Ask any five veteran national security experts and you will hear about five different emerging technologies with the potential to change the world of combat. Swarms of robotic aircraft that work in unison to find and kill targets without any human oversight. Advanced cyberweapons that can immobilize armed forces and shut down electrical grids across the country. A.I.-designed bioweapons engineered to kill only those with certain genetic characteristics.
Some of these weapons will remain confined to the pages of science fiction, but others are already in the works. Innovations in artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and quantum computing are set to change how we wage war just as they transform all aspects of our lives. The United States has the lead in some areas, especially in A.I., thanks to the massive investments of the private sector. But China, Russia and other authoritarian regimes are accelerating state investments at purpose-built universities and finding ways to incorporate innovations into their militaries now.
The third entry in the series focused on the military bureaucracy which makes every decision extremely slowly and cautiously.
To understand why the United States is struggling to buy and field the weapons of the future, consider the trouble it had buying the most basic weapon of the past.
In 2011, the Army decided to get its soldiers new pistols. The odyssey that followed included a 350-page list of technical specifications, years of testing and a protracted battle on Capitol Hill between competing gun makers. The Pentagon won’t complete delivery until 2027 at the earliest. The Army could have raised an infantryman from birth to within two years of enlistment age in the time it would have taken to get him a new handgun.
The story of the Pentagon’s new pistols would be funny if it didn’t point to a serious problem at the heart of America’s military. The Department of Defense has built a gilded fortress of people and processes that is slow, wasteful and married to the past. Of all the obstacles to fielding the military that America needs, the Pentagon’s bureaucracy may be the hardest to overcome.
The military’s top ranks are dominated by pilots, captains and other commanders who are disdainful of new, cheap alternatives to fighter jets, warships and tanks. The byzantine system for buying and testing weapons isolates the military from the innovative parts of the American economy. Congress underwrites the dysfunction with appropriations that are designed to deliver wins for its members rather than for America’s national security.
Part four of the series was published today. This one focuses on the inability of American industry to build things quickly that the military needs.
In 2020 the Navy had a simple plan to build its next fleet of small warships, the Constellation class: take a European design and build it in America. But the Navy’s constant changes complicated the project. The shipbuilders and supply chain couldn’t keep up. By 2025, the Navy had overhauled 85 percent of the original design —and it still wasn’t final. On Nov. 25, the military cancelled the Constellation project. It cost $3.5 billion and has produced zero ships.
The Constellation is just the latest in a string of American shipbuilding failures. Over the past 35 years the Navy has commissioned more than half a dozen new kinds of ships, from small combat vessels to large destroyers. Nearly all of them have flopped, running billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule and failing to perform as promised, leaving the military reliant on a fleet designed largely in the Reagan era.
Recent efforts to build fighter and bomber aircraft have similarly disappointed. It takes, on average, 12 years to produce a war-ready jet, ship or tank, and the Air Force is retiring planes faster than it can replace them. America’s defense industry, like so much of the economy, has lost the ability to build quickly and effectively.
The Times says the government needs to increase spending on new military construction. Yes, you read that right. They recommend spending an additional $150 billion on new military hardware. But that money can't be sunk into the same handful of companies that have created the current bureaucratic system.
The defense industry has consolidated from 51 major players in the early 1990s to five today: Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Boeing. Partly as a result, the U.S. domestic supply chain has withered as smaller machine shops that make key components for ships, submarines and aircraft have gone out of business.
Those big five contractors, known as the primes, have built their businesses around government contracts. They have become masters of the bureaucracy but are incapable of churning out weapons quickly, a fundamental requirement in modern warfare...
Mr. Trump is pushing a “Golden Fleet” initiative to develop new classes of Navy warships, along with an armada of unmanned vessels. In an attempt to imitate Ukraine’s successes, the Navy’s 2026 budget calls for spending aggressively on unmanned systems, including billions of dollars for air, surface and underwater drones. How the Navy plans to achieve any of this in the wake of one failure after another is anyone’s guess. So far, the government’s efforts to diversify and innovate have mostly shown how bad things have gotten, and how far we still have to go.
Once again, are you prepared to see the NY Times editorial page say something positive about President Trump and Sec. Hegseth? It actually happened today.
The Trump administration deserves credit for several moves addressing the defense industry’s shortcomings. Mr. Trump has announced large investments in shipbuilding and drone manufacturing, and in November Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, ordered a sweeping reform of how and from whom the Pentagon will buy weapons. “Either you — our companies, our industries, our defense industrial base — deliver, or we fail,” Mr. Hegseth told weapons makers on Nov. 7 at the National War College in Washington. “It is literally life or death.”
The administration’s messaging is on target. But it’s an open question as to whether it can follow through — and earn congressional sign-off — on these initiatives.
Trump has the right instincts on this issue and it's a really important one. But draining the swamp is never easy to do. There are a lot of entrenched interests who are profiting handsomely form the current system.
There's one more entry yet to come (tomorrow), but the gist of all of this so far is that the US military is desperately in need of some fresh energy to replace the bureaucratic thinking that currently runs every new project into the ground.
Of course the Times is unlikely to ever make this comparison, but the military needs less NASA and more Space X. The move fast and break things approach of Elon Musk is what's is missing. We need aggressive companies (like Anduril) that fail and break things, but do it quickly and learn at every step. It's sometimes hard to watch but it's how you build things in years instead of decades. It's how America avoids falling behind China.
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