[Salon] Mark Thompson: "THE LAST MANNED FIGHTER? The Air Force is punting a key decision to Trump"

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This week in The Bunker: big changes could be coming, including no pilots aboard the next Air Force fighter; no bullets aboard the Navy’s jinxed warship; no “bottoms up” for the next secretary of defense; and more.

THE LAST MANNED FIGHTER?

The Air Force is punting a key decision to Trump

Change happens gradually in the U.S. military, until it happens suddenly. Ernest Hemingway said that’s how a character in The Sun Also Rises describes how he went bankrupt. But the same principle applies to the growing push to replace crewed (crude?)warplanes. Cockpits filled with flesh and blood are being usurped by those running on silicon and electricity.

The Air Force’s piloted Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter has been facing headwinds since it began rolling down the runway a decade ago (PDF). Biden’s Pentagon paused the program this past summer after evolving warfare looked like it might render piloted warplanes obsolete. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall warned that each new super-secret NGAD would cost “multiple hundreds of millions of dollars” per plane. He crushed the dreams of fighter pilots everywhere in September when he said the service wanted to buy a cut-rate NGAD that would cost no more than the F-35, about $179 million a copy.

Now, in the twilight of the Biden administration, the Pentagon is properly saying it will let Trump & Co. draft the blueprints for the nation’s newest and hottest fighter. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have highlighted the growing role remotely piloted drones are playing in modern warfare. They are the opposite of the exquisite and costly piloted warplanes long favored by the U.S. and allied militaries. Even the Air Force itself seems increasingly skeptical that it needs humans in fighter cockpits (although it’s not in a rush to have them bail out).

The Trump-aligned Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint for the incoming administration, calls for (PDF) a “next-generation air dominance systems of systems.” It should include “air moving target indication, other sensors, communications, command and control, weapons, and uninhabited aerial vehicles” — but is mum on piloted aircraft. And Elon Musk, Trump’s air combat consigliere, maintains that “manned fighter jets … will just get pilots killed.”

Unfortunately, killing pilots can be easier than killing major defense programs. NGAD competitors remain secret, but reportedly include Boeing and Lockheed. Even a president isn’t assured of a “clean kill” if he goes after a major program representing billions of dollars and thousands of jobs across the country.

Yet the stars are clearly aligning for a fundamental change in how the U.S. military achieves air superiority. While such aerial command may be required for human soldiers to prevail on battlefields below, whether those ground-pounders need human pilots in warplanes in the skies above grows less certain every day.

NO MORE BULLETS

If speed kills, this costly destroyer will live forever

Nearly a decade after its commissioning, a $9 billion warship is finally getting its weapons. Designed around a pair of twin 155mm guns, the USS Zumwalt was supposed to launch guided rounds against land targets. But the number of custom-designed shells fell as the size of the fleet plummeted from 32 to three. Fewer ships meant fewer custom rounds, which drove their estimated cost from a finger-crossing $35,000 to nearly $1 million each. Finally, in 2017, the Navy scrapped the rounds — and eventually the guns — leaving the three Zumwalts (total cost: $27.2 billion [PDF]) with little to do.

In 2021, the Navy decided to make the Zumwalt destroyers the first U.S. Navy warships armed with hypersonic missiles, able to travel seven to eight times the speed of sound. On December 6, Ingalls Shipbuilding announced it had returned the first Zumwaltto salt water in the Gulf of Mexico, 15 months after it dry-docked the hull to make the modifications needed to handle up to 12 of the new hypersonic weapons.

“Shortly after its arrival [at Ingalls’ Pascagoula, Miss., shipyard in August 2023], the ship was put back on land in order to receive technology upgrades including the integration of the Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) weapon system,” Ingalls said. “The Ingalls team also replaced the original twin 155mm Advanced Gun Systems on the destroyers with new missile tubes.” The Navy plans to begin testing the new weapon aboard the Zumwalt in 2027 or 2028.

All this almost makes that original $1 million bullet look like a bargain. “If any hypersonic weapons end up aboard these destroyers, they’re going to cost far more than $1 million each,” The Bunker said nearly three years ago. Turns out the hypersonic missiles bound for the Zumwalts will cost $60 million — each— to buy and maintain over 20 years. That Congressional Budget Office estimate (PDF)does not include “the cost overruns that are often associated with technically challenging programs” and also “exclude[s] research and development cost for the missiles.”

SECRETARY OF ABSTINENCE

It’s the best catch there is

The Bunker is old enough to remember when competence was critical to winning Senate confirmation to run the Pentagon. President George H.W. Bush tapped a seasoned John Tower for the post in 1991. But the former Texas senator’s nomination was derailed by his excessive drinking, despite his pledge to abstain while in charge of the U.S. military. Now we’ve got President-elect Trump tapping National Guard vet and ex-Fox News TV host Pete Hegseth, who has never run a large organization, served in a senior military billet, or managed a major defense contractor, for the post. According to numerous reports, Hegseth also has had trouble with alcohol.

“I’ve never had a drinking problem,” Hegseth insisted December 4. Nonetheless, despite his professed lack of a drinking problem, he said he would give up alcohol while running the Pentagon, just like Tower did. Hegseth finds himself in a classic Catch-22: He’s denying he abuses alcohol even as his lawyer recently denied sexual assault allegations while noting the woman making the claims was the “aggressor” while Hegseth himself was “visibly intoxicated.”

Is finding a sober-minded individual to oversee the U.S. military, among the more than 250 million Americans of legal drinking age, really such a challenge?