America’s Military Isn’t Providing Enough Bang for the Buck

By Bing West

Saturday, April 27, 2024

 

In the summer of 1944, German V1 drones attacked London, forcing the British to spend four times more on defense. Fortunately, already on the road to defeat, Germany could not exploit its advantage. Fast forward to April of 2024. As happened in 1944, the Iranian launch against Israel of 300 drones and missiles resulted in a disproportionate defense in terms of resources expended. Israeli costs were estimated at $550 million, with the American defensive screen of F-15 aircraft, destroyers, and Patriot anti-missile systems costing at least as much. This same disproportion pertains to the Red Sea, where in the past six months, the U.S. Navy has expended $1 billion, firing $2 million missiles to shoot down Iranian Shahed drones costing $20,000. You can’t prevail in a major war when the defense costs multiple times more than the offense.

 

How did we get into this situation? In WWII, America was the arsenal of democracy, unmatched at fast mass production. About 300,000 aircraft were built in two and a half years. Beginning in the ’80s, the American way of war shifted from mass production to high tech; precision replaced bulk. Finely engineered drones, with apposite names like Predator, tracked terrorists down crowded streets and obliterated them without harming passersby, while command centers and the White House watched in real-time.

 

An oligopoly of a half-dozen defense corporations was handsomely paid to produce missiles and drones as elegant and as expensive as Lamborghinis. While our troops were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were ample funds for items with high price tags. Between 1980 and 2020, we seemed to possess a monopoly on air power, overhead surveillance, and precision strikes. No nation could match us.

 

That suddenly changed when Russia invaded Ukraine. Motivated by penury, garage shops in Ukraine purchased Chinese commercial parts to turn out hundreds of thousands of drones, each carrying a pound of explosives. For about $500 per unit, frontline platoons now had hand grenades with eyes that could blow up Russian soldiers a half-mile away. This was an unanticipated adaptation of America’s surveillance-and-strike comparative advantage. Russia responded, acquired a million frontline drones, and employed heavier models to strike Ukraine’s housing complexes and power plants, reprising the civilian target set of the Nazi V1s in 1944. Ukraine cobbled together longer-range drones to hit airfields and oil depots inside Russia, despite White House disapproval. On a separate front, Iran supplied its surrogates with drones to strike ships in the Red Sea. Army General Michael Kurilla, commanding U.S. Central Command, said attack drones are at the heart of a “nascent military partnership” between Iran and Russia. Most ominous of all these trends, China, controlling 70 percent of the global commercial drone market, can secretly produce millions of attack drones whenever it chooses.

 

Put bluntly, the Pentagon failed to anticipate this low-price commoditization of military high tech. As a result, our military today has zero cheap frontline drones; its exquisitely engineered surveillance drones are too pricey; its offensive strike missiles are too few; and its defensive missiles cost ten to 50 times more than the attacking drones and missiles.

 

Looking forward, artificial intelligence (AI) should assist in drone targeting, helping to restore an American edge. But the Pentagon has issued a bewildering 21-page directive to administer AI. That directive, inter alia, “recognizes privacy and civil liberties . . . and will establish transparent governance and compliance.” This misplaced wokeism will smother AI innovation. No other country demands that AI for its weapons be approved by a committee dedicated to privacy, civil liberties, and transparency. The Pentagon’s AI directive must be rescinded. It insults the integrity and intelligence of all involved in military weapons innovation and deployment.

 

Concerning procurement, the Pentagon touts a program called Replicator, intended to produce thousands of “small, smart, cheap” drones, with costs ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Only in the Pentagon are hundreds of thousands of dollars labeled “cheap.” Drones, now costing $30,000 for frontline grunts, should cost no more than mortar shells (about $600). Drones should be expendable items like bullets or shells; fire and forget them. However, congressional and bureaucratic regulations, accumulating like barnacles over the years, have scraped away such commonsensical efficiencies. Every contract must pass through a maze of regulations, funneling most efforts into subcontracts to the prime corporations.

 

Sufficient money is not there to continue to buy only gilt-edged drones and missiles. For four consecutive years, President Biden has proposed defense funding below the rate of inflation. Defense spending was 4 percent in 1990, a year before the Soviet Union disintegrated. It is now heading below 3 percent. The amount of interest on our escalating federal debt now exceeds military spending. As that interest balloons, downward pressure upon the military budget will increase, jeopardizing our national security. Our military is not responsible for this irresponsible trend, but it must adapt to its reality.

 

In 1938, the British military pleaded a lack of capability to respond to Hitler’s seizure of the Sudetenland. When China challenges us — and it will — we don’t want our military, like the British in 1938, saying it lacks the capability to respond. The way forward is for our active-duty and retired generals to speak out on two fronts. First, by informing Congress that our inventory of munitions, drones, and missiles is too skimpy to be confident of prevailing against China. There are precedents for being that blunt. In the late ’70s, for instance, our admirals persistently and publicly told the Congress that the Carter administration’s view of military strategy was simply wrong. Our military supported President Reagan as he went in a different direction. Today, our military leaders have not made clear that they do not support President Biden’s consistent reduction of our forces and his diffidence toward our enemies. Second, our military leaders must speak out against the procurement process that inexorably enmeshes start-ups inside a web of inefficiencies and cost bloat. The Pentagon’s procurement culture of regulations and massive, slow-moving corporations simply has not kept pace with the commercial commoditization of high tech.