[Salon] DOD, MEET DOGE

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This week in The Bunker: The Pentagon readies its non-sacred cows for Elon Musk’s DOGE marauders; fixed-price contracts are on the rise; Hegseth’s Braggadocio hype; and more.

DOD, MEET DOGE

Pentagon preparing small-bore cuts

In a reversal of the Pentagon’s usual “unfunded priorities lists” — annual so-called wish lists Congress uses to fatten up an already bloated U.S. military — the services are now putting together hoped-for “defunded priorities lists” for Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency.

The Defense Department has been scrambling to put together a list of lambs to sacrifice on DOGE’s altar. Predictably, among the early candidates are weapons the Pentagon doesn’t want, but that have been shoved down their wallet by lawmakers eager to keep defense plants back home churning out military hardware. They include aging drones, armored vehicles, and small Navy warships.

“In the past, the services put forth lists of potential cuts in a bid to shift funding toward newer programs they wanted to fund instead,” Nancy A. Youssef and Lindsay Wise reportedFebruary 14 in the Wall Street Journal. “Lawmakers who sought to preserve military spending in their districts would then routinely reject those proposed cuts. The result has been a steadily growing Pentagon budget since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”

History will repeat itself when DOGE comes calling. The Trump administration reportedly wants to shift 8%of the Pentagon’s $850 billion budget — about $68 billion — largely from bureaucratic bloat to new weaponry (layoffs are likely). “We welcome DOGE to the Pentagon,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth saidFebruary 12. “There are waste, redundancies and headcounts in headquarters that need to be addressed.”

But there’s also hardware worth scrapping. If Musk & Co. want to nip a gargantuan program in the bud, they’ll ground for keeps the Air Force’s fledgling on-again, off-againcrewed Next Generation Air Dominance fighter. Yet the service is already spending big bucks to make NGAD a reality: on January 27, it boosted development funding for a new NGAD engine from the original $1.95 billion ceiling, awarded in 2022, to $7 billion.

Beyond that, if Musk and DOGE are truly serious, they’ll put the long-troubled F-35 fighter program out of its misery. It’s more than a decade behind schedule and costs $209 billion(PDF) more than originally estimated. There’s no way buying 2,456 jets for the Air Force, Marines, and Navy for $442 billion (and more than $1.5 trillion [PDF] to fly them) makes sense, given today’s — and especially, tomorrow’s — battlefield. The Pentagon has already bought 36% of the F-35s it wants (at least 881 of 2,456). That’s not a bad batting average when compared to 25% of F-22s (the Pentagon actually ended up buying 187 of the 750 aircraft it wanted), and 16% of B-2s (21 of 132).

“Some idiots,” Musk said in November, “are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.”

Your move, Elon.

FIXING COSTS

What’s the best way to buy weapons?

There are two basic ways the Pentagon buys its hardware: cost-plus contracts, where suppliers bill the Defense Department for their work, plus a profit margin, and fixed-price deals, where contractors keep their trigger fingers crossed and sign up to produce weapons for an agreed-upon price.

Rampant overruns on cost-plus deals in recent years have some in the Pentagon pushing for more fixed-price procurement. That means contractors have to pay for cost overruns. (Boeing, for example, won a $4.9 billion fixed-price contract to develop the KC-46 aerial tanker, but has spent $7 billion more of its own money to complete the task.) Pentagon suppliers are growing increasingly leery of signing up for fixed-price contracts.

The Space Force, fretting about cost overruns in its nearly $30 billion annual budget, is at the vanguard of this shift from cost-plus deals. They account for roughly half of their contracts. “We’re going to look hard at figuring out how to get out of that, and that’s going to be painful on all sides,” Major General Stephen Purdy, the Air Force’s chief satellite buyer, said February 11. “We’re going to have discussions like, ‘Hey, how do we convert this to fixed price?’” Part of that process will be to reduce the military’s reflexive demand for the latest and greatest technology. “We tend to have a lot of pretty harsh requirements,” Purdy conceded. “We’re looking to draw some of those back.”

There have been tidal waves of additional requirements slathered on Pentagon weapons by contracting officers with little accountability. Naval expert Seth Cropsey said forcing higher-ups to approve such changes makes more sense. “The administration can begin to fix this system through executive action, requiring that any design change to a program over a given financial threshold — ideally around $100,000 — gain personal approval from the Navy secretary and chief of naval operations,” he said.

Sounds good to The Bunker. If we can’t hold the brass accountable for their flubbed wars, the least we can do is hold them accountable for their flubbed wares.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Style over substance

Debra Sokoll said that when her daughter called last week to tell her that Fort Bragg had just been named for Sokoll’s father, “I thought it was a hoax.” Well, let’s just call it a little olive-green Army lie.

The huge North Carolina Army base was named for Confederate General Braxton Bragg in 1922. But in 2023, after a lengthy review by an outside panel of experts, it became Fort Liberty because the idea of honoring traitorsseemed, well, un-American. But that was fine by President Trump, who opposed changing Fort Bragg’s name and those of eight other Army posts.

“Bragg is back!” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declaredFebruary 10 after ordering the Army to revert to the original name. But this time around, the post honors decorated Maine World War II veteran Roland Bragg, Sokoll’s late father. The Army was caught so flat-footed that it didn’t have a photo of Roland Bragg to hand out when Hegseth announced the change.

What’s next? A unilateral diktat upending 400 years of history by changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and punishing a venerable news organization for refusing to salute such geographic garbage?

Oh, wait.