emergov, you’ll see that in my post #129, I recommended a book that I thought was pertinent to this debate. Below are two extracts from that book. The first cites the situation in the US military in 1978 and the second, in 1982.
The question that comes to mind after reading them is: “Does this sound like anywhere you know of in 2010?”
There is nothing in the past to compare with the Spinney Report. For that reason alone, it is arguably one of the most important documents ever to come out of the Pentagon.
Spinney's basic point was that the unnecessary complexity of major weapons systems was wrecking the military budget. He made public what only a few people in the Air Force knew: throughout the 1970s much of the Air Force budget went toward procuring tactical air fighters and weapons while nearly all other areas suffered. So much money was being spent on overly complex weapons such as the F-15 and the F-111D that there was little money to operate and maintain the aircraft. Training flights for pilots were being replaced by simulators. Maintenance skills required to keep the F-15 flying were so high that civilian contractors had to be hired. Electronics systems failed far more often and took far longer to repair than predicted. Spinney showed that supporting the F-15 was more expensive than supporting the ancient B-52. He showed that readiness was at an all-time low; in a full-scale war, supplies of the Air Force's favorite munitions would last only a few days.
But the most significant part of the Spinney Report was that readiness problems were not caused by lack of funds; they were caused by Air Force leaders who deliberately bought such expensive and overly complex weapons that fewer and fewer of each model could be purchased. The leaders' incentive was to force increases in their budget and to funnel more money to defense contractors, and they said whatever they needed to achieve that goal. Spinney proved that virtually everything the Air Force had promised the American people about the F-I5 and the F-I I ID was false.
In this following extract, you could be forgiven for asking if you couldn’t delete ‘Pentagon’ and insert ‘Russell Hill’ and likewise replace ‘America’ with ‘Australia’.
Civilians unacquainted with the ways of the Building have only vague ideas about what it is the Pentagon does. They think the real business of the Pentagon has something to do with defending America. But it does not. The real business of the Pentagon is buying weapons. And the military has a pathological aversion to rigorous testing procedures because in almost every instance the performance of the weapon or weapons system is far below what it is advertised to be and, thus, far below the performance used to sell Congress on the idea in the first place. Weapons development is inherently risky and the costs can be difficult to predict. But the big problem is what Spinney calls "front-loading," the practice of deliberately underestimating the costs in order for Congress to fund the program. The weapons-buying business has few checks and balances; from beginning to end it is an advocacy proceeding. Not only do military rewards and promotions go to the officer in charge of a major program but he almost always finds a high-level job in the defense industry upon retirement, often with the company whose project he ushered through the Pentagon. This is the true nature of the Building. And this is why Air Force generals did not want an unbending and rectitudinous man such as Jim Burton in charge of testing weapons.
Burton arrived at the OSD testing office in June 1982. From the time he walked in the door, Pierre Sprey besieged him to conduct tests showing how vulnerable American aircraft and armored vehicles were to Soviet weapons. Sprey was one of the most vocal critics of the Army's new Abrams Tank, and especially of how the vulnerability testing of tanks and armored vehicles was done largely by computer modeling. And the models were never verified by field tests. Thus, to Sprey, the model-based tests had no validity. Subject our tanks and our infantry carriers to realistic battlefield tests, he said. The lives of American soldiers are at stake.
Burton, with Sprey in the background, came up with the idea for a live-fire test program — that is, actually shoot live Soviet rockets and cannons at U.S. tanks to test their vulnerability. Such a program seems to be common sense, but in fact it was a radical departure from current practice. Boyd predicted that the Army would rise up in opposition.
For a year Burton briefed his ideas on live-fire testing to low-level Pentagon staffers and junior officers. After laying the groundwork and receiving the unanimous support of all branches of the services, Burton chose the first weapon he wanted to test: the Army's Bradley Fighting Vehicle. He could not have picked a weapon closer to the heart of the Army. The Bradley was supposed to be an advance over the traditional armored personnel carrier, which is just an armored box used to transport troops safely. The Bradley added a light turret to the armored box to allow it, in theory, to both carry troops and "fight." But the Bradley was too lightly armored to fight tanks: what it was supposed to fight had never been precisely detailed by the Army.
The Bradley was of crucial importance. First, it was the weapon whose safety affected the greatest number of soldiers; if America went to war, as many as seventy thousand soldiers might ride this vehicle into combat. Second, the Bradley program was in early production. This meant any problems could be corrected before thousands of the vehicles were sent to troops in the field. And third, the Bradley had never been tested for vulnerability to enemy weapons.
The Bradley was a tragedy waiting to happen. It was packed with ammunition, fuel, and people. The thinnest of aluminum armor surrounded it. So Burton sent the Army's ballistic research laboratory $500,000 to test the Bradley, and he insisted the testing use real Soviet weapons.
The Army agreed. But the first of the "realistic" tests consisted of firing Rumanian-made rockets at the Bradley rather than Soviet- made ones. The Army buried the fact that the Rumanian weapons had warheads far smaller than those used by the Soviets. To further insure that the Bradley appeared impregnable, the Army filled the internal fuel tanks with water rather than with diesel fuel. This guaranteed that even if the underpowered Rumanian warheads penetrated the Bradley's protective armor, no explosion would result.