HARDWARE, HUMANS, AND HUBRIS
U.S. quest for superweapons runs into reality
Did The Bunker miss anything during our week away? Did the Strait of Hormuz re-open? Was Iran’s “nuclear dust” cleaned up by President Trump’s phantasmically lethal Endust? Just asking. Hasn’t taken long for this unsanctioned, undeclared “little excursion” to transform itself into what increasingly is looking like a “quagmire” or a “long, hard slog.” Both fit, at least for now — take your pick! Fact is, watching this harebrained war unfold in real time is excruciating, so it was good to take a break. It’s a vivid reminder that building and buying the world’s best military hardware, operated by the globe’s finest and most-highly-trained troops, is no guarantee of victory. Or even success.
It’s refreshing to focus on hardware and put most of the Pentagon’s recent personnel drama on the back burner. Sure, you can fire members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and sundry other four-stars. But who, in the middle of a war, spends time ousting the Army’s chief chaplain? Or the ombudsman of the Pentagon’s Stars and Stripes newspaper? That must mean that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is winning the war against Iran so handily that he has plenty of time to fine-tune the U.S. national-security apparatus so that it purrs like a lapdog (if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor).
Turns out that while we were away, Navy Secretary John Phelan, who sometimes spoke truth to power, was forced to walk the plank with — predictably — no explanation. He’s the latest in a never-ending series of those apparently loathed by Hegseth. Raise your hand if you’re old enough to remember when “body count” referred to the number of Viet Cong killed by U.S. troops in Vietnam, and not the number of top Pentagon officials, both military and civilian, abruptly and unceremoniously fired by Hegseth because of mysterious transgressions (lately amid the biggest U.S. war in a generation).
But back to the hardware. For every successful dream of a new military technology that ends up working as advertised, there are 100 nightmares into which U.S. taxpayers are forced to pour money with little to show for it. The challenge, of course, is to pluck the winners from the losers before the billions have been spent.
That is one of the jobs of The Bunker, a prud and long-standing member of the Military-Industrial-Critical-Complex. Like its colleagues, including the recently-late-and-already-missed Larry Korb, we cheer the successes. But we slap our foreheads over brain-dead schemes bound for what President Ronald Reagan famously called “The ash heap of history.” Alas, while the Soviet Union can collapse only once, bone-headed defense projects dedicated to producing gold-plated silver bullets for a never-sated Department of Defense remain a perpetual-motion money machine.
The Bunker takes no pride in being a DoDebbie DoDowner, but somebody’s got to do it…