Dismantling the Empire_ America's Last Best Hope - Chalmers Johnson [69]
GUNNING FOR THE AIR FORCE
President Obama almost certainly retained Robert M. Gates as secretary of defense in part to give himself some bipartisan cover as he tries to come to grips with the bloated defense budget. Gates was also sympathetic to the desire of a few reformers in the Pentagon to dump the Lockheed-Martin F-22 Raptor supersonic stealth fighter, a plane designed to meet the Soviet Union’s last proposed, but never built, interceptor.
The Air Force’s old guard and its allies in Congress fought back aggressively. In June 2008, Gates fired Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley. Though he was undoubtedly responding to their fervent support for the F-22, his cover explanation was their visible failure to adequately supervise the accounting and control of nuclear weapons.
In 2006, the Air Force had managed to ship to Taiwan four high-tech nose cone fuses for Minuteman ICBM warheads instead of promised helicopter batteries, an error that went blissfully undetected until March 2008. Then, in August 2007, a B-52 bomber carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles flew across much of the country, from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. This was in direct violation of standing orders against such flights over the United States.
As Julian Barnes and Peter Spiegel of the Los Angeles Times noted in June 2008, “Tensions between the Air Force and Gates have been growing for months,” mainly over Gates’s frustration about the F-22 and his inability to get the Air Force to deploy more pilotless aircraft to the various war zones. They were certainly not improved when Wynne, a former senior vice president of General Dynamics, went out of his way to cross Gates, arguing publicly that “any president would be damn happy to have more F-22s around if we had to get into a fight with China.” It catches something of the power of the military-industrial complex that despite his clear desire on the subject, Gates has been slow to move when it comes to pulling the plug on the F-22; nor has he even dared to bring up the subject of canceling its more expensive and technically complicated successor, the F-35 “Joint Strike Fighter.”*
More than twenty years ago, Chuck Spinney wrote a classic account of the now routine bureaucratic scams practiced within the Pentagon to ensure that Congress will appropriate funds for dishonestly advertised and promoted weapons systems and then prevent their cancellation when the fraud comes to light. In a paper he entitled “Defense Power Games,” of which his superiors deeply disapproved, Spinney outlined two crucial Pentagon gambits meant to lock in such weaponry: “front-loading” and “political engineering.”
It should be understood at the outset that all actors involved, including the military officers in charge of projects, the members of Congress who use defense appropriations to buy votes within their districts, and the contractors who live off the ensuing lucrative contracts, utilize these two scams. It is also important to understand that neither front-loading nor political engineering is an innocent or morally neutral maneuver. They both involve criminal intent to turn on the spigot of taxpayer money and then to jam it so that it cannot be turned off. They are de rigueur practices of our military-industrial complex.
Front-loading is the practice of appropriating funds for a new weapons project based solely on assurances by its official sponsors about what it can do. This happens long before a prototype has been built or tested, and it invariably involves the quoting of unrealistically low unit costs for a sizable order. Assurances are always given that the system’s technical requirements will be simple or have already been met. Lowballing future costs, an intrinsic aspect of front-loading, is an old Defense Department trick, a governmental version of bait-and-switch.