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.

Forrestal was right: Why the Marine Corps isn't going anywhere, EFV be damned (UPDATE)

There's been a lot of hand-wringing and heavy breathing from some corners in the wake of last week's announcement that the Marine Corps' Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) program will be terminated. Despite the Commandant's insistence that he'd not only consented to but recommended cancellation of the too-heavy, too-slow, too-expensive, and generally too-problematic (pdf) next-gen amtrac, the defense defenders are coming out of the woodwork to eulogize the sea service and lament the destabilizing effects of its passing (or in the case of A#1 douchebag Loren Thompson, suggest investment in body bags). Without the obsolescent forcible-entry capability offered by the EFV, some said, the Marine Corps was being stripped of its primary purpose and its existential identity. But by Jim Forrestal's count, the Marines have just a bit more than 435 years of beach-storming and ass-kicking left in 'em thanks to that famous flag on Suribachi. Gen. Amos seems to agree; if his remarks to the Surface Navy Association this morning are any kind of signal -- and I think they are -- then reports of the devil-dogs' demise seem tad premature.

So is Tom Donnelly right that cancellation of the EFV "calls into question the future of the Marine Corps, whether the Marine Corps can function as it has since World War II as a kick-down-the-door force"? Nah. (As a matter of fact: "Naw. Naw, man. Shit, naw, man! I believe you'd get your ass kicked sayin' somethin' like that, man.") Can the USMC keep doing kick-down-the-door missions without the EFV? Sure, just like they could today or yesterday or ten years ago. But amphibious assault is a wasting asset, and everybody from the Commandant to Bob Work to Andy Krepinevich to the SECDEF knows that (no matter what they're saying in press conferences). What that means is that this capability will be neither particularly useful nor tremendously relevant in the future: there will come a day where neither the Marines nor anyone else are kicking down a whole lot of doors from the sea, but that's going to be a result of operational realities and the threat environment, not cancellation of a luxury weapon system.

But as for the future of the Marine Corps... they're on the ropes now, right? Down goes amphibious assault! Down goes amphibious assault! Down goes amphibious assault! Not gonna recover from that one. What the hell good is a Marine Corps that can't perform a forcible entry on a fortified beachhead? We all know a Marine's only as good as his extremely sophisticated, wildly expensive tactical vehicle, right? Yeah, I thought so too, but then here comes Amos just in time to prove us wrong.

The Marines have always been really, really good at public and Congressional relations. Maybe it's the flashy uniforms (uh, yeah, uniforms!) and the excellent recruiting posters and ad campaigns. Whatever the secret, they've needed it: I've yet to meet an active-duty or prior-service Marine who fails to mention how the Corps has had to justify its existence to every new administration and Congress for as long as they can remember. And should we be all that surprised? If you're wielding the budget ax, first on the block is going to be that duplicative 200,000-man ground force, that redundant "second army," the really-not-all-that-apparently-useful naval infantry formation (hell, the Army did D-Day!). But they've worked their pitch to the circumstances, and they've always stuck around.

The 35th Commandant inherited a proud tradition -- not just of leadership, but of salesmanship. He and his speechwriters didn't disappoint:

The Marine Corps is America's Expeditionary Force in Readiness-a balanced air-ground-logistics team. We are forward-deployed and forward-engaged-shaping, training, deterring and responding to all manner of crises and contingencies. We create options and decision space for our Nation's leaders.  Alert and ready, we respond to today's crisis, with today's force.TODAY.  Teaming with other services, allies and interagency partners, we enable and participate in joint and combined operations of any magnitude.  Responsive and scalable, we operate independent of local infrastructure.  A middleweight force, we are light enough to get there quickly, but heavy enough to carry the day upon arrival.  We operate throughout the spectrum of threats-irregular, hybrid, or conventional-or the shady areas where they overlap.  Marines are ready to respond whenever the Nation calls.wherever the President may direct.

The bulk of Amos' speech, recounting the many ways in which Marine forces have been employed of late, reads like a nearly exhaustive laundry list of recent and ongoing DoD missions: combat deployments (division-sized presence on the ground in Afghanistan, not to mention air operations), humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, security cooperation and capacity-building -- activities across the spectrum of conflict and the range of military operations. 

But the Corps has more to commend it than high OPTEMPO and eagerness for a fight, and the Commandant isn't afraid to be explicit about the advantages his service offers the nation. Let's think about this for a second: if you're trying to preserve force structure in the face of inevitable budget cuts and the prospect of an extended, indefinite era of austerity, what's your pitch? Well, you probably don't want to be pigeonholed into just one mission area, like, for example, amphibious assault. (How do you know Donnelly, Thompson, and Goure don't give a shit about the Marine Corps but care a lot about expensive acquisition programs? Look at the way they find it impossible to imagine meaningful missions for the pointiest end of America's pointy spear in the absence of the amphibious-landing mandate.) Now we're on to something: flexibility. We're not interested in an airplane that can only dogfight, only attack ground targets, only operate in good weather, or only be flown by human pilots, and the same principle applies to ground forces: if you only offer a niche capability, we're just not going to be able to afford you absent special circumstances. The best life insurance policy: operational adaptability, something the Commandant was happy to demonstrate when talking about all the different missions accomplished by the same Mark 1, Mod 1 Leathernecks.

But that's not all! Marines have another advantage over their ground-force counterparts in Big Army: they're relatively light, having been built to deploy aboard ship with their entire complement of equipment. Marines don't require expensive and complicated logistical arrangements, as they spend their time at sea both in war and peace. As such, they serve as the nation's "force in readiness": this means they're agile and responsive, rapidly deployable to crises and contingencies, able to show up in Haiti or New Orleans or Afghanistan or West Africa or Kuwait at the drop of a hat. As Gen. Amos said, "You're either ready to respond to today's crisis with today's force, today, or you're late and risk being irrelevant." In an oblique shot at the Army's force-generation model, he also commented that "crisis response is incompatible with tiered readiness" -- in other words, how the hell do you expect to put boots on the ground in a hurry when half your damn force is in RESET at Fort Stewart?

And what if it's not just flood relief or a quick show of deterrent force -- what if they need to stick around? Well, the devil-dogs have you covered there, too. Marine units are scalable and self-sustaining, so they're easily tailored to the required mission and able to operate in austere environments without external support. This is a big bonus when they're the first guys to show up, particularly when you're trying to secure a lodgment for a larger force to conduct protracted operations. When they're relieved by follow-on forces or need strategic mobility, they can just helo out to their ever-present "Swiss Army knives of power projection": amphibs on station off the coast.

Taken together, that's a hell of a pitch. Amos puts it like this:

Factoring all aspects of our role in the Nation's defense, the United States Marine Corps affords the following three strategic advantages: 

• We provide a versatile 'middleweight' ability to respond across the range of military operations (ROMO).  

• We provide an inherent agility that buys time for national leaders.  

• We bring an enabling and partnering capability to joint and combined operations of any magnitude.

Here's what they called that in the good ol' days: any mission, any fight, any place on the globe, alongside whoever else you can bring to the show. From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. Just makes you want to sing a damn song, don't it?

A Marine Corps for another 435 years, I say! Or how about this: a Marine Corps 'til we don't need what they have to offer anymore, or until someone else can do it and everything else. I think the Commandant did a hell of a job showing that day's a good ways off yet. Breathe, Donnelly... breathe.

UPDATE: I was away from the computer on Friday, but I wanted to share Philip Ewing's commentary from Morning Defense, which I think totally misses the point.

BULLISH ON THE CORPS – In true gung-ho fashion, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos on Monday put an optimistic spin on the future of a service that could’ve just sulked after the cancelation of its beloved EFV and more delays for its new fighter jet. But the Marines are still America’s ready crisis-response force, Amos said, and America uses ‘em all the time for their specialty: Amphibious operations.

Amphibious work isn’t obsolete, Amos said – the Navy and the Marines have responded to “crises and contingencies” at least 50 times just since Sept. 11. (Marine Corps leaders have cited a range of numbers for this factoid, depending on how you slice it.) So even though the EFV didn’t work out, the Marines’ basic purpose in life – to appear from out at sea, kill people and break stuff – remains intact and vital, he said.

The Commandant's pitch was smarter than that, though: everyone knows the Marines can "appear from out at sea, kill people and break stuff," but this EFV drama has underlined the need to justify their existence with a bigger, broader set of roles and missions. By emphasizing non-traditional missions like humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, security cooperation, and defense support for civil authorities, then also giving us a reminder about persistent presence, strategic mobility, rapid deployability, operational adaptability, and combat power, Amos was saying "hey, we're not just about killing people and breaking stuff these days." That's why the Marine Corps remains relevant -- not just because the world still has oceans and beaches.

Another related note from the weekend: in a moment of tragic irony, 27-year old Iraq vet Sgt. Wesley Rice died Friday when his AAV sank in the Del Mar boat basin off the coast of Camp Pendleton. The other five Marines aboard were able to escape the vehicle safely.

If you think Loren Thompson is a bad defense analyst, wait 'til you see what kind of financial planner he is!

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and you can tell times are desperate when you see a whole bunch of folks in DC talking about making dramatic cuts to the federal budget. There seems to be a sort of informal competition going on to see who can recommend the deepest, fastest, most un-implementable and politically unsustainable austerity measures. The panel commissioned by the president hasn't even voted on a final report yet, but everyone's already complaining about the direction suggested by the so-called chairman's mark. Jan Schakowsky, who is on the commission, has her own plan. And then there's the Rivlin-Domenici plan, issued by the Bipartisan Policy Center. All have undertaken the necessary work of figuring out how to bring national expenditures more closely in line with national revenues (balance them completely? Let's be serious!), and each of the proposals has now met with the totally inevitable response: Of COURSE we have to cut things, but you can't cut THAT!

It's fair to say that defense spending -- representing as it does more than half of the discretionary federal budget and approximately 20% of total outlays -- will not escape scrutiny. The Simpson-Bowles recommendations, for example, slash defense to the tune of $100 billion. Sarah Palin and Buck McKeon may disagree (and so too does the SECDEF), but most serious advocates of fiscal restraint recognize that any approach to budget-balancing that refuses to consider defense cuts is simply a waste of time. Several dozen national security experts made precisely this point last week, signing a letter to the fiscal commission's co-chairs (pdf) that argues that "the defense budget can bear significant reduction without compromising our essential security."

Granting defense a special dispensation puts at risk the entire deficit reduction effort. Defense spending today constitutes over 55 percent of discretionary spending and 23 percent of the federal budget. An exemption for defense not only undermines the broader call for fiscal responsibility, but also makes overall budget restraint much harder as a practical economic and political matter.

But defense spending has its own huge and powerful constituency, so it's fair to say that the defense cuts recommended by the various commissions and proposals are no less controversial than those recommendations related to Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements.

This is probably going to come as a shock to you, but Loren Thompson is "not here to defend the current level of defense spending." He sees which way the wind is blowing, just like the rest of us.

When the current decade began, the United States accounted for about a third of global economic output and a third of global military spending.

Today, it accounts for a quarter of global economic output and nearly half of global military spending.

Obviously, the growing gap between these two measures of U.S. power is unsustainable: five percent of the world's population cannot continue funding 50 percent of military outlays while only generating 25 percent of economic output.

Of COURSE we have to cut things...

However, what I want to do in my remarks is explain the consequences of some of the weapons cuts that are being proposed.

...but you can't cut THAT!

Thompson, who is a paid consultant for the defense industry, has a stake in preserving high-dollar materiel programs at the cost of personnel or operations accounts. So you'll have to forgive my yawn when I see him making a speech to the CATO Institute -- as libertarians, already predisposed to any proposal that would limit or even prevent altogether ill-advised, adventurist operations and close expensive bases abroad -- built on the premise that while defense cuts may be necessary, they certainly shouldn't come at the cost of expensive, underperforming, behind-schedule weapon systems. But that yawn turned into a painful guffaw (it sounded like this: LOLOLOLOLOLOL) when I saw Thompson's hilarious rationale, which can be boiled down to these three fundamentals:

1. SUNK COSTS!
2. Not only are you cutting a weapon system, but you're cutting ALL THE THINGS THAT WEAPON SYSTEM CAN DO!
3. Now you're going to have to spend a bunch of money building and buying something else to do all the things that you can't do because you cut the old system!

Here's how he actually phrased it in his remarks at CATO, just so you don't think I'm misrepresenting:

But there are consequences to killing weapons that tend to be overlooked in budget-cutting exercises...

-- First, you squander the money that has been spent to date on the programs.
-- Second, you deprive warfighters of capabilities the weapons would have delivered.
-- Third, you have to compensate for the lost capabilities by purchasing something else.

When these realities are factored into plans for terminating this or that weapon, the budgetary and human costs of cutting sometimes end up dwarfing any projected savings.

Thompson uses the rest of the speech to give details about four specific programs that could face the chopping block -- the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, the Osprey, the Joint Tactical Radio System, and the Virginia-class attack submarine -- while coming back to his three fundamentals, but the whole thing mostly relies on an appeal that wasn't outlined in his introduction: the vague but pointed threat that U.S. servicemen will almost certainly die if we fail to continue funding these programs. Want some examples? I knew you did!

On EFV, Thompson charitably grants that the program "is in the cross-hairs of just about every deficit-reduction panel proposing weapons cuts... with good reason, because EFV's [sic] cost over $10 million each and have suffered reliability problems in testing." But he goes on to say that EFV brings "much more speed, range, firepower, and protection" than the AAAVs that currently comprise the Marine Corps' amphibious tractor fleet. "The Marines have been waiting decades to replace their aged vehicles," Thompson said, "and during that time they have become sitting ducks for precision-guided munitions." He's mostly right about this, but the next sentence is total nonsense:

The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle would solve almost all the problems with the current amphibs, turning the sea from an obstacle into a maneuver space and enabling Marines to come ashore at the places where they are least likely to incur casualties.

Um, no. EFV would similarly be a "sitting duck for PGMs," and nothing about the system's design or manufacture will prevent that. The Navy-Marine Corps team's future littoral power-projection concept won't be based on a Mach 1, stealth amphibious tractor that can survive hits from land-based precision-guided missiles or direct counterfire against coastal defenses from 100 miles away; even if it was, the EFV doesn't offer these capabilities. The new vehicle is undoubtedly a step forward from the aging AAV, but it's not a game-changer -- it does exactly nothing to "[turn] the sea from an obstacle into a maneuver space," and the act of "enabling Marines to come ashore at the places where they are least likely to incur casualties" is far more likely to be accomplished through the development of evolved theater entry and littoral maneuver concepts than by a materiel magic bullet. On top of all that, the EFV is too expensive, doesn't offer significantly more protection than the AAV in a modern threat environment dominated by IEDs (don't ask me, ask the GAO! [pdf]), and doesn't actually meet the space and weight specifications that are a requirement of the system! Yes, AAAVs are old, and yes, we almost certainly need to maintain the capability to get Marines from ship to shore. But to suggest that EFV is the only way to do this, or the best way to do this, or that cancelling the program is tantamount to "wasting the lives of many Marines because they had to go to shore in deathtraps" is just ludicrously disingenuous. The amphib fleet can be sustained until such time as a new, more affordable solution can be found, and the reality of our complete and total disinterest in replicating a Tarawa-style forcible entry/opposed landing means that we're not actually ceding any plausible amphibious landing capability as a result.

I'm not going to spend a whole bunch of time picking apart the specifics of Thompson's other arguments, but suffice it to say that for the most part they're similarly specious, tendentious, and either misinformed or insincere.

"[W]hen you see a budget panel suggest killing" the programs he highlighted, Thompson said, "it's a reasonable conclusion that they either don't understand the program or they don't understand the nation's global security requirements." One might easily say the same thing about Loren Thompson: he doesn't understand the failings of the programs that he uncritically justifies, and he doesn't understand that his conception of the nation's global security requirements is neither universal nor uncontroversial. Not all previously appropriated money has been well-spent, and some of it must be written off as a waste. Not all "capabilities" that ought to have been delivered by ongoing programs or fielded systems constitute real "requirements," and some of them can be undercapitalized or abandoned altogether without grave risk to our national security. (We'll leave aside for a second the reality that many of these weapon systems DO NOT effectively deliver the capability they're meant to, and that those that DO deliver capability often fail to do so within the cost and schedule parameters the government has deemed appropriate.) And finally, those systems that are abandoned will not always need to be replaced; as the nation reconsiders the difference between what can be done and what must be done, it's fair to assume we'll give different answers to the question of what can be bought versus what must be bought.

Secretary Gates may criticize the Simpson-Bowles recommendations as an exercise in "math, not strategy," and he's right. But he's at least interested in engaging in a review of systems and programs in line with strategy so as to develop a budget that is sane, justifiable, and efficient. If you're in Loren Thompson's camp, you have to accept the argument that the government has made no bad decisions, has wasted no money or effort, has a bulletproof rationale for each and every acquisition decision it has ever made, and has correlated those acquisition and procurement decisions to an overall strategic concept that most effectively advances and protects American security interests in a rapidly changing and unpredictable threat environment. I don't have that kind of faith. Then again, my livelihood doesn't depend on it.

Amos on the EFV: will anyone dig in to whether or not this is actually true?

In his written responses (pdf) to the Senate Armed Services Committee's advance policy questions related to his confirmation hearings for Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James Amos insisted on the continued importance and utility of an amphibious forced-entry capability to assure access from the sea. He was pretty squirmy on the subject of whether the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle was the right tool for this job, expressing commitment to the requirement if not that particular platform. But here's what he had to say when asked if the EFV would be useful in staging opposed amphibious landings:

The Marine Corps will maintain the capability to conduct opposed amphibious landings with the EFV. The EFV’s ability to conduct high speed maneuver at sea as well as on land, combined with its weapon, communication, and protective systems make it a highly-survivable and lethal capability suitable for opposed landings as well as hybrid threats that accompany counter-insurgency environments. The program also includes a force protection component for use once ashore which consists of an underbody appliqué armor kit, employed to enhance survivability against IEDs, much as the Bradley and M1A2 underbelly appliqués are employed. The range and speed of the EFV, up to 26 knots or greater, allows for a substantial over-the-horizon launch process, providing stand-off that protects our naval amphibious ships from high end littoral threats, such as anti-ship ballistic missiles.

The emphasis is mine, and that last bit is the part I'm most interested in. Later:

In an era of increasing challenges to access, the capabilities of a vehicle like the EFV afford our amphibious ships the maneuver space and stand-off distance to better counter anti-access weapons.

So it's obvious that Amos is heeding the SECDEF's guidance to make future weapons programs relevant to projected future threats; here he's trying to tie EFV to one of Secretary Gates' recent bugaboos: anti-access weapons. But is his claim even remotely true? On its face, it seems pretty clear that it's not. This CRS report (pdf), for example, casts doubt on whether the EFV's 25 to 30 mile range for amphibious operations marks even a slight improvement from a fleet-protection perspective over the current amphib tractor, the AAAV.

The Navy and Marine Corps both accept that the future operational environment is likely to pose an anti-access challenge (pdf), and that new systems should take this into account. So why is the next Commandant sitting down in front of Congress and telling them that an amphib that does absolutely nothing to protect the fleet from anti-ship missiles is a step in the right direction?