At the height of World War I, Frederick Lanchester conceived a string of mathematical formulas that helped to predict the outcome of armed conflicts.
His equations gave rise to attrition warfare and the notion that victory is achieved by overwhelming the enemy with sheer numbers and firepower.
Alas, it may be shocking to learn that in this day and age the Lanchester laws — deemed useless in most modern combat scenarios — continue to influence the design and procurement of U.S. weapon systems.
No wonder Defense Secretary Robert Gates urged military officers at the National Defense University last month to “be skeptical of systems analysis, computer models and game theories.”
In a politely worded indictment of the Pentagon’s weapon acquisition bureaucracy, Gates offered yet more evidence that billions of taxpayer dollars are being wasted on weapon systems that are not needed. Most of next year’s $180 billion budget for procurement, research and development, Gates said, funds conventional systems that the military may require some day, but that are not relevant to the current fight against terrorist groups.
“Support for conventional modernization programs is deeply embedded in our budget, in our bureaucracy, in the defense industry, and in Congress,” Gates said.
The secretary is by no means alone in questioning why the Pentagon continues to spend the preponderance of its procurement budget on weapons designed to fight World War III.
“The methods used to analyze weapon performance in warfare situations are incorrect and obsolete; they have been out of date for at least the last 25 years,” said Robert A. Frosch, a former deputy director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and assistant secretary of the Navy for research and development.
Former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency James Woolsey has reached similar conclusions. He worries that the entrenched ways of the weapons procurement bureaucracy will make the military more vulnerable in future wars. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which exposed weaknesses in U.S. equipment, were supposed to fundamentally shake up the culture. But they haven’t, Woolsey laments.
The Lanchester models that the Pentagon refuses to relinquish explain why the Air Force will argue that if it buys a fighter jet that is loaded with the latest bells and whistles, it will win the war even if it has a small number of them. The idea that doubling the capability of a jet or a ship means you therefore need only half as many is incorrect and misleading, Woolsey said. That delusion, nevertheless, continues to drive the procurement train.
Offering a baseball analogy, Woolsey compares the way the Pentagon procures weapons to a club owner acquiring a $100-million player and expecting him to make up for the lack of overall talent in the team.
More accurate analysis methods — known as “spatial” models — would show that making each weapon system more capable to compensate for the lack of numbers doesn’t work, said Woolsey. But the Pentagon keeps defending this approach because weapons have gotten so expensive that the only way to afford them is to acquire smaller quantities.
That pattern has persisted for the past five decades, Gates noted. “The trend has gone towards lower numbers as technology gains made each system more capable. In recent years these platforms have grown ever more baroque, ever more costly, are taking longer to build, and are being fielded in ever dwindling quantities … Given that resources are not unlimited, the dynamic of exchanging numbers for capability is perhaps reaching a point of diminishing returns.”
Veterans of the Pentagon “viewgraph wars” are all too familiar with the process. In the weapons acquisition world, the status quo is king. “Service programs of record are like a giant wrecking ball. You can’t stop them,” says Tom Ehrhard, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The so-called legacy systems have entrenched constituencies — including officers whose promotions depend on the survival of those systems — and anything that is perceived as disruptive is quickly rejected, Ehrhard told defense contractors at a recent conference.
A propensity to stick with “programs of record” is bolstered by the Pentagon’s allegiance to selected contractors that benefit from institutional inertia, Woolsey said. “There’s a lot of locked-in loyalty to existing companies and their models.”
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz recently called for the military to get back to the basics of “military requirements driving procurement programs.” At the Air Force Association annual conference, Schwartz cited the refueling tanker fiasco as an example of acquisition decisions being “excessively influenced” by interests other than military needs.
Anyone who believes that all weapon systems are approved and funded based on military utility is unaware of the dirty little secret of the procurement budget, notes Caleb S. Rossiter, an advisor to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Procurement decisions that drive the big budget numbers are made way in advance,” he says. “You can’t bring them down because of some change in strategy. The budget is there. It’s not based on strategy.”