October 30, 2024
Washington, DC
This week in The Bunker: (for your sanity, a special no-election edition!): the Pentagon could learn something from Boeing; China’s nuclear stockpile grows… to 10% of the U.S.’s; the Navy smartly spending half its ship-building budget on submarines; and more.
A MODEST PROSAL
The Pentagon should follow Boeing’s lead
Boeing, the Pentagon’s #4 contractor, was once an icon of American ingenuity and industrial prowess. But it has never recovered from the tailspin following its 1997 merger with bottom-line-obsessed McDonnell Douglas. Its new Air Force Ones and aerial tankers have hit heavy turbulence. Two of its 737 MAX airliners crashed. A fuselage panelblew off one of its jets. Safety concerns about its Starliner space capsule have left two astronauts stranded in space. Its biggest union remains on strike.
Last week, Boeing decided to pull its head out of its afterburner. The decision came as the company confirmed it had lost $2 billion on defense work over the prior three months. “I think that we're better off doing less, and doing it better, than doing more and not doing it well,” brand-new Boeing boss Kelly Ortberg said October 23. To right its flailing business, Boeing plans to shed pieces of the company, likely including some of its space programs.
The U.S. and its Department of Defense should take a lesson from Ortberg. After all, embarrassments like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with flubbed programs like the F-35 fighter, the Zumwalt-class destroyer, and the Army’s repeated failure to replace its Bradley Fighting Vehicles rate right up there with Boeing’s blunders.
The U.S. was the global colossus following World War II. While it accounted for 40% of the world’s economic output in 1960, that share has fallen to 26% today. Yet Washington still sees itself as the world cop, spending close to $1 trillion annually on its military, more than the next 10 countries combined. It has more than 170,000 troops based in 178 countries around the world and sold a record $238 billion in weapons to many of them last year.
The U.S. national-security state and U.S. national-security think tanks churn out reports every year warning that the Pentagon is underfunded and that defeat is just around the corner. They all flow from official documents from the White House (PDF) and Pentagon that insist the U.S. must be ready to defend pretty much anything everywhere at any time.
“The United States is the only country in the world that designs its military to be able to depart one hemisphere, cross broad expanses of ocean and air space, and then conduct sustained, large-scale military operations upon arrival in another hemisphere,” the Congressional Research Service said in an Oct. 2 assessment (PDF) exploring the size and cost of the U.S. military. “That U.S. policymakers for the past several decades have chosen to pursue, as a key element of U.S. national strategy, a goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia does not necessarily mean this goal was a correct one for the United States to pursue, or that it would be a correct one for the United States to pursue in the future.”
Boeing’s decision to trim its flaps is rooted in humility that can mature into wisdom. The U.S. should follow suit.
BE A-FRAID
The bigger-bang theory
Speaking of official documents, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency issued a report (PDF) October 23 tallying up the nuclear arsenals of potential foes. Those would be the Quartet of Evil — China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, with Beijing now seen as the frontrunner. The DIA warned in 2020 that China had about 200 atomic warheads and would at least double that by 2030. But four years later, the Pentagon’s spy shop estimates China already has 500. By 2030 the DIA projects it will have more than 1,000, “most of which will be fielded on systems capable of ranging [mil-speak for ‘hitting’] the continental United States.”
Once a nation has hundreds of nuclear weapons, the debate boils down to how high the rubble will bounce following a nuclear exchange. Talk about deterrence and counter-strikes only fuels building more atomic weapons and craftier ways to deliver them. “The threats from more advanced cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles, and other novel delivery systems, coupled with growing nuclear arsenals, are threatening U.S. military advantages,” the DIA warned (PDF).
Of course, any single additional weapon in the hands of a possible foe threatens U.S. military advantages. It’s the kind of verbal ju-jitsu the Pentagon deploys when arguing for more. The U.S., which is leveraging China’s nuclear threat to spend $1.7 trillion rebuilding its own nuclear arsenal, has roughly 10 times as many nuclear weapons as China. Yet any nuclear showdown — over Ukraine, Taiwan, or a nation to be named later — won’t be averted by building more and better atomic arms. To believe otherwise is to embrace nuclear con-fusion.