The late Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy, once suggested that the way to reform the Pentagon was to instruct the entire workforce to go outside and form two circles around the building, and then fire the outer circle. The Trumpian leadership now installed in the military headquarters is clearly fearful that Elon Musk’s Red Guards will storm the building and seize control as they have at other agencies. Hence the memo issued by Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg on April 7 ordering a sweeping overhaul of Pentagon management. The memo is replete with directions to clear away redundant positions and sprinkled with invocations of “streamlining” and “innovation.” This may or may not be enough to keep Musk’s minions at bay, but taxpayers should not expect that the end product will produce “the most lethal fighting force the world has ever known” - an aspirational pledge common amongst all factions of the war party, very much including Democrats.
The word “test,” as in testing weapons to ensure they are operationally effective, does not appear in Feinberg’s edict. Nor does it show up in Donald Trump’s April 9 executive order mandating a streamlined weapons-buying process, thereby promoting innovation.
Stockholm Syndrome in the Weapons Labs
The military establishment’s fear and loathing of operational testing - i.e. subjecting weapons system to conditions likely to occur in actual combat - has been evident ever since the creation of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation back in 1983 by a bipartisan congressional coalition. The office, which for a time enjoyed the protection of strong directors committed to the task, has subsequently been progressively enfeebled thanks to the installation of leaders more deferential to the priority of preserving the money-flow at all costs. Now, as Dan Grazier of the Stimson Center has pointed out, there is an insidious effort to combine operational testing with development testing. Development testing involves officials working alongside contractors building a weapons system to check that specific components and sub-systems meet specifications. In Grazier’s words: “Injecting operational testing personnel into the development process creates a potential Stockholm Syndrome risk. They would have a stake in the outcome because they will be involved in the development process when they should be neutral arbiters evaluating results right before graduation. In other words, under the hallowed watchwords of “streamlining” and “innovation” we will end up with a familiar roster of weapons programs unfit for combat.
$1Trillion Up for Grabs!
Trump did threaten to axe programs that are more than 15 percent behind schedule, 15 percent over cost, unable to meet any key performance parameters, or “unaligned” with the SecDef’s mission priorities. There is obviously a lot of vulnerable low hanging fruit out there, notably the infamous F-35 fighter (two hundred percent, at least, over budget) or the Sentinel ICBM (81 percent over budget) along with many others. However, assuming the possibility that one of these systems does get axed (a cut-back of F-35 production has long been on the cards) there are plenty of candidates pushing for a share of that $1 trillion budget promised by Hegseth and Trump. One has already garnered a slice - Boeing’s F-47 fighter, already in receipt of a $20 billion development contract, with a firm commitment for lucrative production contracts to follow.
Autonomous Maybe, But What Can it See?
The Anduril corporation, a competitor for the Collaborative Combat drone program slated to operate in conjunction with the F-47, is sure to reap copious rewards, the firm being a poster child for everything that is supposed to be new and different about the Silicon Valley way of doing defense business. Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy, featured on the company website, has much to say about the sclerotic state of U.S. weapons development, beset by lack of competition, excessive bureaucratic hurdles, the need to develop weapons more quickly. But central to the company’s mission statement is the assertion that “Software will change how war is waged” thanks to the advent of AI-driven systems that can coordinate with each other, detect and destroy targets, attack enemy cyber systems, etc. Such religious belief in the pending omnipotence of AI appears unmoved by the inability of AI systems to overcome the incurable problem of hallucination - making things up - nor of the more prosaic problem that an autonomous weapon, however artificially intelligent, has to be able to observe the real world through fallible sensors and make sense of what it sees.
Needless to say, the words “operational testing” do not appear in the Anduril mission statement.