The Economist on the US's biggest military problem
From a long article this weekend:-
America’s defence budget, at over $800bn a year, is far and away the world’s biggest, but allocating it is a ludicrously slow and political process. In theory, the administration lays out its defence strategy, the service chiefs tell the secretary of defence what they need to fulfil those goals and the administration then requests the sums necessary from Congress. In practice, things are not nearly so simple. Service chiefs sometimes lobby Congress directly to approve pet projects. Lawmakers often prevent the Pentagon from retiring obsolete weapons if their home state will be harmed. And Congress micromanages, allowing the Pentagon to move around no more than $6bn within the budget, and even then only with the approval of senior members of Congress for each slice of $15m or more.
The most baleful consequence of all this is interminable delay.
Drones in Ukraine have their software, sensors and radios swapped out every six weeks or so. Year-old AI is archaic. Yet the gap between the start of the Pentagon’s budget process and any money appearing is—at a minimum—two years. ................................
... In August 2023 Kathleen Hicks, the deputy secretary of defence at the time, announced that the Pentagon planned to buy “multiple thousands” of easily upgradeable drones to be ready within two years. T...................... “Replicator is delivering a lot of capability fast at a low relative price point.” .................drones with a pricetag of $17,000 apiece in 2018-22 now cost less than a tenth of that.
But to talk Congress into allocating just $500m to Replicator—about half of one percent of the defence budget—Ms Hicks and her team had to conduct nearly 40 briefings. Another example is Other Transaction Authority (OTA), a procedural innovation that allows departments to buy things without getting bogged down in the Federal Acquisition Regulation, a 2,000-page Talmudic set of rules that has spawned a priesthood of procurement officers. The Pentagon has spent $86bn via OTAs to date, mostly over the past five years, notes Austin Gray, who runs a defence startup. But their use has now “plateaued”..........................................