Defense politics: a lot of the time, what ought to matter most doesn't matter at all

First read this from a Politico story (mentioned by Charles Hoskinson today in Morning Defense) about Mitt Romney making calls to voters on Monday in advance of the New Hampshire primary:

[Romney] also secured the support of the second voter he reached, who was apparently a defense industry worker.

"I was a little disappointed to see the president pull back on the F-35 program," Romney said, talking on a cellphone and with a list of printed out list of [sic] names and numbers in front of him.

Now read the entirety of this article by Chuck Spinney, Thomas Christie, Pierre Sprey, and Winslow Wheeler. Here's the most important bit on the subject of the F-35:

Moreover, if the F-35 lived up to 100% of its depressingly modest design specifications, it would still be a complete failure in combat utility: a bomber of shorter range, lower payload and far higher vulnerability than the Vietnam War’s appallingly flammable, underperforming F-105 Lead Sled; an air-to-air fighter so unmaneuverable and sluggish in acceleration that any ancient MiG-21 will tear it to shreds; and a close support fighter that is a menace to our troops on any battlefield, unable to hit camouflaged tactical targets and incapable of distinguishing friendly soldiers from enemies. Individually and collectively, we often fretted with Boyd on the irresponsibility of equipping our people with such foolishly complex weapons designs, so bereft of practical combat effectiveness—and on the deep corruption of acquisition programs, such as the F-35’s, that deliberately plan to buy a thousand or more units long before user testing has fully probed combat utility.

The authors of this piece are experts in defense acquisition, weapon system design and testing, and the politics of national security. Mitt Romney seems to have a fair grasp of the latter, though he is not an expert in the other areas (and presumably neither is the voter that he spoke to).

The F-35 is a failed program. Mitt Romney doesn't care. Neither do any of the other candidates, which is primarily a reflection of the fact that most Americans – most voters – don't care, and the ones that do care are much less interested in the program's combat effectiveness than its function as a source of jobs and economic stimulus.

American taxpayers are pouring outrageous amounts of money into weapon systems that don't work as advertised, aren't delivered on schedule, and cost more than expected—but the costs are diffuse, spread over many years and several budget lines, and are unlikely to have a negative impact on the welfare of individual voters that is even remotely comparable to the effects of program termination. In short, to the people who matter to the political process – candidates and voters – all weapon spending is essentially good spending.

But what about our business? What about the so-called "defense intellectuals," the military analysts and journalists and budget wonks and policy writers and bloggers? Don't we have a bigger responsibility? That's where Spinney, Christie, Sprey, and Wheeler come in again—and they're at their excoriating best:

Here [citing uncritical advocacy for F-22 and F-35 by one think-tanker] is a paradigm of the moral decay so visible among contemporary Washington defense “intellectuals.” These dabblers in defense pretend to serve seriously the real needs of our national defense and our people in uniform—when, in fact, they are serving the needs of foundations, universities, non-profits or politicians funded by defense mega-corporations seeking to expand their sources of government largesse. And, even in a shrinking economy, these dabblers easily find comfortable home bases and plenty of venues to publish or broadcast their paeans to big ticket programs and budgets.

Here are the facts:

1) The F-35 has already cost a fortune and seems unlikely to perform adequately in the range of missions for which it is meant to be suited (though this is still uncertain, as the aircraft was rushed into large-scale production before sufficient operational testing could be completed).

2) Notwithstanding the above, Mitt Romney and Jim Carafano still are "a little disappointed to see the president pull back on the F-35 program." (I get the feeling Carafano's phrasing would be less delicate; again, those are the candidate's words.)

Somebody ought to say something, huh?

But really: how does this ever change? How can the incentive structures of American politics be altered to ensure that parochial concerns entirely peripheral to military effectiveness aren't permitted to dominate entirely the weapon system development and acquisition process?

I wish I knew the answer to this. But after several years of raging against the machine, I'm disappointed to tell you that I don't. Spinney et al. have some ideas, but one can't help but think that their collective decades of experience in the game and relative failure to enact meaningful change suggests that a sense of hopelessness is not only justified, but entirely appropriate.

UPDATE: In case you're not feeling melancholy enough, I should also have mentioned this excellent and topical piece by David Axe on the failures of another acquisition program, the Joint Tactical Radio System—headlined "Army seeks 'perfect' radio, creates boondoggle."

Why can't we do math AND strategy?

By now everyone's familiar with the dismissive turn of phrase Bob Gates used to blow off the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission: "In terms of the specifics they came up with, that's essentially math, not strategy." The defense-defenders love this one, and they've deployed it aggressively: basically every recommended cut to a defense program or the defense topline is derided as "math, not strategy."

Hey, it's a good line. It's probably the same thing I'd say if I were the SECDEF. But it's wildly irresponsible for the Pentagon to say "hey, it's not us, we're doing our part!" as Gates did back in November:

"If you cut the defense budget by 10 percent, which would be catastrophic in terms of force structure, that's $55 billion on a $1.4 trillion deficit," Gates said. "We are not the problem."

(By that logic, shouldn't GE be saying "if you cut the F136 engine, which would be catastrophic in terms of Ohio jobs and the assured reliability of the Joint Strike Fighter, that's $2.9 billion (pdf) on a $553 billion defense budget. We are not the problem"?)

Secretary Gates wants to have his cake and eat it, too: he wants to dismiss critics of his cuts by saying the recommendations are based on strategy, but push back on those calling for deeper cuts by talking about math. But a responsible defense budget and a responsible federal budget must take both considerations into account: math and strategy. If ADM Mullen is right and the national debt really does pose the greatest threat to national security, then isn't the "math" part really, really significant? Strategy, after all, is inseparable from math: strategy is fundamentally about choices, about maximizing benefit with limited resources. The SECDEF said it himself just two years ago!

The United States cannot expect to eliminate national security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything. The Department of Defense must set priorities and consider inescapable tradeoffs and opportunity costs.

Gates's defenders -- and I'm one of them -- will say "but the Department already has set priorities, and this budget request is based on the real requirements of supporting our national security strategy!" And when it comes down to it, I probably agree with him on this one. Beyond this justification, Gates has to defend the requested figure out of simple adherence to his word: he told the service secretaries and chiefs that they'd get their savings back if they found fat to cut; if those dollars instead come out of the topline, just wait and see the foot-dragging when the next round of service-identified "efficiency" cuts comes around.

But just as expected, people aren't happy: conservative commentators, China hawks, the defense industry, and most of their buddies on the Armed Services committees think that $553 billion is just an irresponsibly paltry sum, while peaceniks, budget hawks, and proponents of other vulnerable spending programs are tearing their hair out at the seeming invulnerability of the defense budget. Add to that latter group the New York Times editorial board, which yesterday did its level best to oversimplify the issue and generally aid confusion and misunderstanding. On the subject of the EFV's termination, they wistfully bemoan the $3 billion already wasted -- as if anything the SECDEF might do could get it back. On the Joint Strike Fighter, they note a doubling of per-unit cost while arguing vaguely that "it should be cut back" -- apparently failing to absorb the irony of recommending action that will further increase cost-per-plane. And on the Osprey and Virginia-class sub, they argue for program cuts or cancellations based on oversimplified and outdated operational rationales.

And that's not even the worst part. Try this one on for size:

The Pentagon needs to jettison the ancient formula that guarantees each service its accustomed share of taxpayer dollars. Air and sea power that can be readily mobilized are vital to American security. But for a decade, the Army and the Marines have been pushed to their limits while the Navy and the Air Force have looked for ways to stay useful and justify their budget shares. 

Updating the formula to reflect a more realistic division of labor would wring significant savings from the Air Force and the Navy while protecting the Army and the Marines from the multiple combat tours that have strained service members and their families over the last decade.

I hear a lot about this "ancient formula," but I've never had it adequately explained to me. That said, let's stipulate that there is such a formula for ensuring each service gets its annual share of the budgetary pie; might it not be the case that this makes good sense? After all, you can't turn the entire Defense Department around on a dime, as Secretary Gates has learned, nor should it be easy to do so. This isn't just a matter of institutional interests and inertia  (though those are at play, too), but of preventing the crises of today from fundamentally destabilizing the kind of steady-state modernization that underpins the U.S. military's global freedom of action and deterrent functions.

But back to the editorial -- let's look at exactly what the two paragraphs above really say: "Air and sea power that can be readily mobilized are vital to American security... [but] a more realistic division of labor would... protect the Army and Marines from... multiple combat tours." Uh, what? This is really almost impenetrable. Presumably the writers mean to say that budget shares should more realistically reflect the actual intra-Departmental division of labor over the last several years (not "a more realistic division of labor"), and that cuts to the Navy and Air Force's budgets would allow for an increase in land forces end-strength and result in extended home-station dwell-time for Army and Marine units. But there are a number of very significant problems with this line of reasoning.

1. The suggestion that the Navy and Air Force have had to "look for ways to stay relevant and justify their budget shares" is based on two serious misunderstandings: the first is that air and sea forces' true value should be found in tactical utility in combat rather than strategic deterrent and guarantor of access, and the second is that "looking for ways to stay relevant" is a bad thing rather than an important driver of institutional adaptation. 
2. Calls to shift funding from expensive, sophisticated, long lead-time weapon systems to personnel accounts and other investments in land power force structure fail to acknowledge that high-end technical solutions cannot simply be purchased when needed, but are the end-result of sustained investment in the defense industrial base and commitment to developmental technologies.
3. Further end-strength increases will put additional strain on an already troubled recruiting base and increasingly challenge the Army and Marine Corps to build soldiers and Marines from suboptimal raw material. On top of that, absent significant reform to Tri-Care and military benefits, expansion of the active-duty rolls will carry with it the very same long-term fiscal commitments that are helping to cripple serious efforts at deficit reduction in the domestic portion of the federal budget.
4. If you listen to senior leaders in both the Defense Department and the broader United States government, manpower-intensive land wars aren't on anybody's top-five list of efficacious foreign policy solutions. U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan are about to start coming down, so what sense does it make to start budgeting for a larger Army and Marine Corps?

This editorial exhibits the very worst tendencies of both budget-cutters and budget-growers: bath math, bad reasoning, and an absence of strategic judgment.

Things aren't as simple as any of the factions in the budget debate want to make them. Beware of those who bring math or strategy, but not both.

FEAR THE GRIPEN (Updated)

The Air Force Association is hosting its annual conference down at National Harbor, just outside DC, this week. According to Gordon Lubold and Jen DiMascio's daily "Morning Defense" column from POLITICO, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force for ISR LTG David Deptula showed a video during his talk entitled "2010 Threats to Air Supremacy." The main threat identified by the "ominous-voiced narrator" was surface-to-air missiles, but:

THE PUSH FOR FIFTH-GEN FIGHTERS –

Deptula’s video also showed fighters being developed overseas, such as the Gripen, Rafale and Typhoon. “These fighters are being marketed worldwide and could be sold to a future adversary,” the video warned.

And that's exactly right, and an extremely compelling argument for... Well, I'm not sure what it's an argument for. And it's only compelling if you're Bill Gertz. But still.

You know what the world's most capable fifth-gen fighter [pdf] (defined as "state of the art") is? The F-22. You know where it's been developed and built? Hint: not overseas. That's right, it's right here in the good ol' U.S. of A. But what's the world's second-most capable fifth-gen fighter? you might be wondering. That's the F-35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighter. Which is, uh, also a U.S. system (co-developed with NATO allies and Australia). There are suggestions that the Chinese and Russians are also developing fifth-gen fighters (the latter potentially in concert with India), but that's pretty much it.

I'm not sure if this is Lubold and DiMascio's error or Deptula's -- though I would assume the former (it's a pretty good bet that the DCS/AF for ISR knows more about fighter aircraft generations and designations than I do) -- but the three aircraft listed in the article are known as "fourth-plus" or "4.5-gen" fighters. (Other 4.5-gen fighters in service for countries relevant to this discussion? How about the F-15E (U.S.), the F-16 Block 60 (U.S.), and the F/A-18E/F (U.S.)?) Which is to say that they're less capable than at least one U.S. system currently in the air, flying missions, and than another one that's soon to enter service, and that they're similarly capable to the three aircraft that make up the bulk of the U.S. fleet.

Other than that, what else do the Gripen (Sweden), the Rafale (France), and the Typhoon (UK/Germany/Italy/Spain) have in common? Well, there's the fact that they're developed and operated by SOME OF THE UNITED STATES' CLOSEST FUCKING ALLIES ON EARTH. The Rafale is French and is only operated by the French. The Typhoon is a European co-production and is currently flown only by the countries of its manufacture, plus Saudi Arabia and Austria. The Swedes, meanwhile, are the really dangerous proliferators of this lot: the Gripen has been sold to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and South Africa, and they're lining up the Thais next! Now I suppose it's possible that one or all of these countries could become a "future adversary," but it doesn't seem likely.

This picking of nits is all sort of silly, though. The U.S. is developing and fielding fifth-gen fighters, and whether or not our close European allies end up selling their less-capable planes to undesirables, there are states out there that will probably seek to close the fighter gap (in both number and technology) with us. Which is really why the video is appropriately titled, leaving aside the poor examples it uses: there will, no doubt, be future threats to U.S. air supremacy. Let's take a look at the Defense Department definition of that term.

air supremacy (DOD) -- That degree of air superiority wherein the opposing air force is incapable of effective interference.

We're unlikely to face threats to U.S. air superiority, though.

air superiority (DOD) -- That degree of dominance in the air battle of one force over another that permits the conduct of operations by the former and its related land, maritime, and air forces at a given time and place without prohibitive interference by the opposing force.

See the difference? Air superiority means the ability to create an environment that's permissive to operations. Air supremacy means the ability to create an environment where operations are completely unchallenged from the air. This is a circumstance that's reasonably unique in history, and one that we shouldn't reasonably expect to continue (though one can obviously understand why the Air Force would strive to maintain its warfighters' edge).

And so we're back where we've been all along: talking about what's reasonable, not just what's possible; that is, what's a requirement versus a desired capability. (The DoD loves to use the term "requirement" for everything it wants, and here's an example of why it's pernicious.) Whether we should expect to spend exorbitant sums on ensuring global air supremacy rather than just air superiority, or whether that money could be more effectively spent on other requirements.

Furthermore, airplanes require bases. That means that if you want to use them in an expeditionary capacity, and you're not talking about launching them off of carriers (which face their own challenges from the development of anti-access weapons), you need partners to give you runways and hanger space. And you need to be able to protect those airfields, too.

What does all of this mean? Well, simple: maybe we need to be having a serious national conversation (ok, that's a bridge too far -- how about just a serious conversation in the security community?) about how much capability is required, how much is desirable, and how much is optimal, then stacking that up against the fiscal realities we're operating under (and here I'm talking about the entire range of military roles and missions, not just air dominance/supremacy/superiority). That purpose isn't served by service rivalry, parochialism, and scare tactics on the part of the unholy alliance between military professional communities/associations and the defense industry.

UPDATE: The incomparable GrEaT SaTaN'S gIrLfRiEnD has some thoughts on the subject (accessible only if you speak Courtney's language).

Israel's buying Joint Strike Fighters, and it's really not as bad as you think

I know a lot of my friends and acquaintances in the defense policy world get anxious about Israel. That's often justifiable, particularly when we get to talking about Tel Aviv's adventurism vis-a-vis Lebanon and, more worryingly, Iran. So this morning I've noticed a little bit of agita on Twitter about the recent announcement that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has approved purchase of 20 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, a deal that will be financed by American grant military aid. Does this deal threaten Middle East peace? Probably not, but the reality is that it doesn't much matter. This sale is actually a security-assistance success story.

Let's deal with one thing up front: Israel is the recipient of the largest chunk of American military aid, and that's something that's not going to change. In fact, the State Department and Congress have a plan to increase annual funding over the next several years with the aim of delivering a total of $30B in Foreign Military Finance (FMF) in the coming decade. Israel gets a whole bunch of American cash to spend on arms. That's a reality of American foreign policy, one that obtains no matter which party is in the White House or who controls Congress. So if your complaint is about the money, then you've got bigger issues. (I'm not saying those issues aren't legit, but they're not what this post is all about.)

So why is the JSF thing not only not a big deal, but actually kind of a good deal? Well, for one thing, Israel is the only recipient of FMF that isn't required to spend those U.S. aid dollars on U.S. materiel. They can use a quarter of the cash to support their own defense industrial base, so the choice to purchase a U.S. system is really a best-case-scenario when it comes to big-ticket, sophisticated defense articles. If that cash is headed to Israel no matter what, at least they're buying F-35s and not Rafales, Gripens, Eurofighters, or whatever else: foreign military sales help to keep U.S. production lines open and warm, lower unit costs for the U.S. military, and generally mitigate system risk.

Further, Israel finally backed down on the persistent demand that they be able to modify the F-35 for integration of Israeli components and weapons, something that the USG is not one bit interested in. The JSF is a "closed package," meaning that you buy the standard configuration and that's it. Not only does this help the program folks to maintain and sustain the aircraft down the line, but it avoids any potentially nasty complications with industrial espionage and whatnot. (You know, not that our Israeli partners would EVER engage in something like that.)

So don't panic! This deal worked out about as well as it was ever going to. This is a boost to the F-35 program, which needs pretty much all the help it can get. The conditions of the sale are generally pretty good for the U.S. And let's be serious: do you think the Israelis are going to have a less difficult time threatening their allies with F-35s than they currently do with F-15s and F-16s? Especially in light of the fact that QME considerations already limit U.S. sales to Israel's neighbors to less capable systems?

F136 lobbying/advertising update (oh yeah, and legislative update, too)

Want to see something really bad? Here's Pratt & Whitney's new internet advertisement opposing the JSF alternate engine:

Yep, you're seeing that correctly: it's a dirty, tired, raggedy-ass infantryman, out there in the field fighting for your freedom, wondering why we're talking about $3B for an extra engine when he's out here wearing one pair of socks for three months at a time. "If you support the troops, you can't support the alternate engine!", his sad eyes seem to implore.

If you click on the ad, it takes you to http://www.f135engine.com/, which is Pratt & Whitney's response to GE/Rolls-Royce's http://www.f136.com/.

Another awesome, heartstring-tugging addition to the trail of embarrassing half-truths propagated by both supporters and opponents of the alternate engine. These guys are dicks. I'd like to punch Pratt & Whitney AND GE/Rolls-Royce right in the face.

(For what it's worth -- and it's not much at this point -- the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee voted 11-5 yesterday in favor of the alternate engine program. The White House is still threatening a veto.)

Why defense industry lobbyists are so damn likeable!

The Joint Strike Fighter (aka F-35) is the most expensive U.S. defense buy in history. By the time the whole shooting match is over, the Defense Department will have procured around 2,500 of the aircraft, to be fielded by all services but the Army, at a total cost of nearly $400B. (Recent projections say $112M per plane for a total of $382B, a figure that's 65% higher than the 2002 estimate.)

You may have heard that there's a little legislative tussle going on over whether the JSF needs a second engine program. The Defense Department says no. (Unsurprisingly, it's joined by Pratt & Whitney, the manufacturer of the engine that was selected when the program was originally competed.) A whole bunch of members of Congress (plus GE and Rolls-Royce, who lost the original competition), along with defense industry shills in the think tank world, say yes. In fact, the House slapped the extra engine (called the F136) into the defense authorization bill, then defeated an amendment that would've stripped that language out by a 231-193 vote. The White House has threatened a veto if the F136 provisions don't come out when the House and Senate authorization bills are conferenced, but the Hill seems confident.

I tell you all of this as prelude to the point that I really want to make, which is this: the defense industry, the lobbyists, marketeers, pollsters, and who work for them, and the think tank "professionals" who pimp themselves out to industry in pursuit of their ideological conviction that bigger defense budgets are always better... are all acting like assholes. Why don't we look at a few examples?

Anyone who reads the blog or follows me on Twitter will have sorted out by now what I think about the alternate engine program. But this isn't really about that. Let me prove it to you by first talking about the most recent bitch move taken by a participant in this little political drama: poll data commissioned by Pratt & Whitney. Here's a blurb from today's edition of Mike Allen's Playbook:

The new "bridge to nowhere"? -- Pratt & Whitney allies will distribute research on the Hill today arguing against an alternate engine for the Joint Strike Fighter: "Voters in the 19 districts surveyed have decidedly negative feelings about Congress spending $3 billion on an extra jet engine when explained the circumstances, especially when they learn that the engine is opposed by the nation’s top military leaders for being wasteful and unnecessary."

(To be clear, by "Pratt & Whitney allies," he means Pratt & Whitney's lobbyists.)

Why don't we take a look at the poll results (pdf), commissioned by Pratt & Whitney and prepared by Clarus Research Group? Here's how the results of the "research" are introduced:

OVERALL TAKE-AWAY: Voters in the 19 districts surveyed have decidedly negative feelings about Congress spending $3 billion on an extra jet engine when explained the circumstances, especially when they learn that the engine is opposed by the nation’s top military leaders for being wasteful and unnecessary. Views expressed on the specific issue are clearly aggravated by, and must be understood within, the current political context in which voters believe that a massive amount of federal spending is wasted and that well-connected companies and special interests benefit from Congressional earmarks at taxpayers’ expense.

I for one am shocked that individuals would oppose spending deemed "wasteful and unnecessary" by "the nation's top military leaders," especially in the "current political context in which voters [presumably the same voters that are being asked these questions] believe that a massive amount of federal spending is wasted"!

Seriously, can you believe that shit? If that's not enough, let's look at the polling data a little more closely.

The survey found that 87% of voters agree with the statement: “If America’s military leaders at the Pentagon determine that a multi-billion dollar defense contract with a private company is wasteful and unnecessary, Congress should NOT spend the money.”

Only 87%?! Because I'd like to find the other 13% and punch them in the face. But really, when your interlocutor makes an argument from authority, throws out terms like "multi-billion" to people who probably don't have much sense for exactly how expensive defense procurement is, and then tells you that "America's military leaders at the Pentagon" -- another argument from authority, considering that no one wants to disagree with a general about what the troops want or need -- have determined that the program is "wasteful and unnecessary," how can you expect anybody to disagree? In a courtroom they call that a leading question (or maybe just in 7th grade mock trial; I'm not a lawyer or anything).

So who the hell are those 13% who disagree with that statement and think the money ought to be spent? Well, if you listen to the pollsters, those are just retards who didn't understand the question, or weren't asked forcefully enough. After all, among those who said initially that they support the extra engine:

• 35% to 41% of them say they are less inclined to support it when they learn that "President Obama, former President Bush, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and the country’s top military leaders are all opposed to spending the money for this extra jet engine because they say it is unnecessary and wasteful.”
• 56% to 61% of them say they are less inclined to support it when they learn that “many of the jobs the manufacture of the extra jet engine would create would be in Great Britain, because Rolls Royce is a British company.”
• 57% to 61% of them say they are less inclined to support it when they learn that “GE and Rolls Royce already have large government contracts and are spending millions of dollars on lobbyists and advertisements trying to put pressure on members of Congress to approve the extra jet engine they would profit from.”

So if instead of just saying "senior leaders at the Pentagon," you actually spell out who the senior leaders are, more than a third of those 13% will abandon their support. More than half will give up the extra engine if you make it clear that it's going to be built by dirty furriners. And a similar number can be cowed into agreement if you tell them that a dirty, dirty defense contractor is trying to exploit the gentle voter's innocent, unknowing support by pressuring Congress in order to enrich themselves. Easy!

But here's my favorite part: the conclusion.

Support for the extra jet engine is more likely to hurt Congressional incumbents seeking re-election than help them: To assess the bottom-line political impact of the issue, the following questioned was asked at the end of each survey interview: “If your member of Congress voted to spend the three billion dollars for this extra jet engine, would you be more or less inclined to support him or her for re-election in this November’s election?” The result: 7% more inclined, 67% less inclined, 13% volunteered it would make no difference.

So these nice, complicit pollsters are ready to give Pratt & Whitney exactly what they need: assurances to Congress that this goofy F136 business, which looks like it might help get them elected, is actually going to kick them in the ass, so why don't they just go ahead and give up on this nonsense already and oppose the extra engine?!

It's impossible to overstate just exactly how noteworthy it is for this polling data to get linked by Mike Allen, perhaps the most influential Inside-Baseball political reporter in Washington, in the most influential daily political digest, in a paragraph that leads with an invocation of a senseless spending fiasco from times past: the "bridge to nowhere."

And now for the other side. I've already taken up a whole bunch of your time, and you're probably bored with the subject of acquisition and defense spending anyway, so I'm going to be brief. Fortunately, Pratt & Whitney's competitors at GE and Rolls Royce have misrepresented reality in such an unbelievably egregious fashion that this can pretty much be summed up with just one image.

Click on the image for a bigger version, but yeah, you're reading that correctly: "LET'S COMPETE: GE and Rolls-Royce are building the F136 engine for America's next fighter jet. But some want to hand a $100 billion monopoly to a sole contractor. At a time of record budget defecits, competition is more important than ever for taxpayers and the military."

Now, one might fairly argue that the competition is already over, that the other guys won, that the "sole contractor" approach is pretty much generally how these things go once one side has already won the competition for the contract, that the taxpayers can't really afford nearly $3B in extra spending on an unnecessary piece of redundant gear, and that GE and Rolls-Royce aren't "building the F136 engine for America's next fighter jet" because they already lost the competition for the right to do that... but I figure you guys can sort that one out for yourselves.

F the defense industry, man.

Serious question on a totally different subject:

Do all these jokers like Todd Akin and Mackenzie Eaglen know about the historical baggage associated with their use of the term "fighter gap"?

Now, to be fair, a lot of people are doing it. Defense News, for one. (Or two. Or three.) Colin Clark at DoD Buzz, too. Then there's Navy Times and Air Force Times and National Defense magazine. But this is all pretty much just reportage and not advocacy or rhetoric, right? So that's not such a big deal.

It's a little more pernicious when the term starts getting tossed around as a mechanism to advocate policy changes. Like, for example, in this op-ed by Akin, who is the ranking member on the HASC Seapower and Expeditionary Forces subcommittee. The good Congressman argues that the Defense Department can "mitigate the impending fighter gap" by entering into a multi-year contract with Boeing to procure additional F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and EA-18G Growlers (the latter of which is an electronic attack aircraft, which is not exactly a "strike fighter"). Congressman Akin, in what is surely one of history's great coincidences, represents the St. Louis area, home to Boeing Integrated Defense Systems.

Heritage Foundation defense expert Mackenzie Eaglen apparently enjoyed Rep. Akin's piece, tweeting this yesterday: "Quantity has a quality all its own. The US military has a fighter gap. RT@ToddAkin: It's simple - carriers need planes http://bit.ly/ca0ApL]"

There it is again: "fighter gap." Just rolls off the tongue (and the keyboard), doesn't it? Why so familiar? Well, we've had other gaps before, you know. There was that missile gap back in the late 50s, when then-Senator John Kennedy warned that the US was "losing the [ballistic]-missile race with the Soviet Union because of... complacent miscalculations, penny-pinching, budget cutbacks, incredibly confused mismanagement, and wasteful rivalries and jealousies." And before that, in the mid-50s, there was that pesky bomber gap, when some analysts convinced themselves that the Soviets were dramatically out-producing the U.S. in the long-range, intercontinental bomber race. And now there's about to be a fighter gap, we're told, as Super Hornets exceed their allowable flight hours and are retired from service before sufficient numbers of Joint Strike Fighters have rolled off the production line to take their place.

So what's the problem with all of this? Well, the bomber gap and the missile gap were COMPLETELY MADE UP, that's the problem. Not only that, but some folks - led by an academic named Albert Wohlstetter - COMPLETELY MADE UP the missile gap all over again in 1974!

Am I saying that there's no such thing as a fighter gap? No, I'm not saying that, because I have no idea. Todd Akin may be exactly right, and a long-term, multi-year contract for additional Super Hornet procurement may be the absolute best thing for national security. I'm not an aviation expert, and even those folks can't seem to agree on whether there will be a strike shortfall or how significant it might be. So it's not about whether the fighter gap is as made up as the bomber gap or the missile gap, really.

What this is about is messaging, and the meaning of words. Shouldn't Akin and Eaglen be aware enough of history to know that they're using a tainted phrase? That they're directly ripping off an expression that was used more than once to identify an entirely fabricated national security scare, a military bludgeon created expressly for one candidate to smash another during a campaign?

Aren't they embarrassed to echo Wohlstetter, whose claims about a missile gap extended to accusations that the CIA was falsifying intelligence, deliberately underestimating the number of Soviet missiles in order to shape policy in a less confrontational direction? The same Wohlstetter whose anti-intel aspersions would drive the formation of the ludicrously politicized waste of time called "Team B," the CIA red team whose final report (pdf) "turns out to have been wrong on nearly every point"?

Basically, from a rhetorical perspective, couldn't they have come up with something better?