06/12/09 – Winslow T. Wheeler – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our first guest on the show today is Winslow T. Wheeler.
He spent 31 years working on Capitol Hill with senators from both political parties and the Government Accountability Office, specializing in national security affairs.
Currently, he directs the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information in Washington.
He's the author of The Wastrels of Defense and the editor of a new anthology, America's Defense Meltdown, Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the new Congress.
He's got a series of great articles at Alexander Coburn's site, Counterpunch, including the most recent, I believe, Back from the Dead, Pentagon Pork.
Welcome to the show, Winslow.
How are you, sir?
Very good.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Well, thank you very much for joining me here.
First of all, I just want to say the Government Accountability Office is my favorite government agency.
If we abolished the entire state and left only that, I would be pretty happy.
You guys do some really great work there.
Well, some do, some don't.
Sometimes GAO has a reputation that doesn't always deserve.
Some reports are really good.
Some reports are really horrible.
And a lot of them are really mediocre.
Ah, geez, well, maybe I give too much credit.
Sounds like you set me straight there.
But it just seems like, well, pretty much the only time anybody is really sticking to the executive branch, it's either the ACLU or the GAO.
Some of the good reports do.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of reports that only give you a small piece of the puzzle.
And they pretend that they're giving you the whole picture, and they're not.
Well, thank goodness you're out of government now.
You can tell us the truth, right?
Okay, I'll try.
All right.
So this guy, Robert Gates, has a lot of influence in the previous administration.
This one, too.
He's not some marginal character with a strong national security visor marginalizing him like the Kissinger days or anything like that.
He's a very strong personality.
They say he faced down Cheney over conflict with Iran back a couple years ago and so forth.
And he's made a couple of very important speeches along the lines of, well, military transformation, I guess, and deciding which path the military is going to go down.
And I believe the argument can vaguely be summed up as should we focus on big-ticket items for some future war against China or something, or should we focus on the kind of weaponry needed to occupy little brown people in their countries from here to kingdom come?
And this is a big question of military spending priorities.
Does that basically sum up the fight inside the Pentagon?
Yeah.
He wouldn't use your rhetoric, but I think I'd agree with your rhetoric more than what he's really trying to do.
I mean, he wants to pursue these wars more aggressively.
He wants to orient the budget more towards them.
He's talking about less.
Toward the latter, toward the occupations indefinitely.
Right.
He's talking about less stuff for the budget-enhancing threat of China and Russia, but there's not really a whole lot less of that stuff in his budget.
Whenever he talks about canceling something like the F-22, he talks about pressing full steam ahead with the F-35 aircraft, which is an even worse idea than the F-22.
I do need to say, however, that Gates is very much a mixed bag.
He's the first Secretary of Defense in a real long time who's exercised the authority the Constitution gives him over the budget.
Most Secretaries of Defense, even brash sounding ones like Donald Rumsfeld, are little puppy dogs in the hands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when they go around behind his back under the table of Congress, getting more funding for their stuff.
Gates is a real authority on those issues and has attempted hard to put an end to that.
Well, you know, I guess let's focus on that sort of larger, more important truth there, about just how much power and influence the military establishment has, regardless of whichever civilian is running the thing.
I mean, for Donald Rumsfeld to be anybody's little puppy dog, jeez, how big and tough are these guys?
They can push him around.
He wasn't tough at all.
He talked tough, but when push came to shove, he was extremely cooperative with almost everything they wanted to do.
He had a few very visible examples of weapon systems he put an end to, some Army systems, the artillery system and a helicopter, but the Army turned right around and reinvested in new programs that basically replaced both of those things.
And so it was sort of a Pyrrhic victory on Rumsfeld's part.
Similarly, he did absolutely nothing to slow down the Joint Chiefs of Staff when they ran over to Congress behind his back on all kinds of weapon systems and went over to Congress also with their wish list of budget enhancements that they didn't get from Rumsfeld, so they'd just go over to Congress and get it directly from them.
Yeah.
In fact, I think the way you put it in here was that Gates was simply rolled by the Congress here.
The Congress said, oh, you want to cut this and that?
Forget you.
We're going to do whatever we want.
It certainly looks to me like that's what's happening.
The underling wedge of Congress unraveling many of his April 6 decisions on 50 different programs, the C-17 transports, it's now a done deal that the additional eight airplanes for $2.2 billion will be in this war supplemental that will pass Congress early next week.
The House Armed Services Committee is already beginning to mark up its annual defense authorization bill for the overall defense budget, and there's going to be lots of exercises in that where members attempt to put back into the budget things that Gates thought he was taking out, and it's going to be up to Gates to fight hard to keep them out.
He didn't fight on the C-17s, and I'm hoping he will on some of these other programs, but we're going to have to wait and see if his exercise of cutting so many of these programs was a rhetorical exercise or a real exercise.
He's demonstrated he's got the authority to do it, and let's see if he takes on the Congress the same way he took on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
It's funny.
How far mired in details are we where none of this has anything to do with leaving the world to hell alone?
This is only about whether we're going to keep killing Afghans and Pakistanis, or whether we're going to prepare to one day fight our greatest trading partner, the Chinese.
I mean, this is all ridiculous, right?
Well, yeah, in a sense.
We're talking about a trillion dollars a year basically spent maintaining the American warfare state.
He's an advocate for fighting these wars, and I think you're entirely correct by calling them occupations.
He's talking about reorienting a lot of the budget towards them, but I'm not aware that a lot of the budget is being reoriented towards them.
There's not a big switchover in the amounts of budget dollars that are going into these occupations vis-à-vis China, Russia, a conventional war against some imaginary superpower in the future.
When you talk about preparing for those wars, I wouldn't call it that, because a lot of these systems for those wars, while they're extremely expensive, are not particularly effective, haven't been tested properly.
They're extraordinarily complex and unreliable.
Well, and isn't that an important point?
My understanding, and I'm not a veteran myself, but I've talked to Air Force guys before, and it seems so obvious just from what I know watching weekday wings on the Discovery Channel when I was a kid, that a flight of F-15 Eagles is basically capable of taking on any Air Force in the world in a day or so.
I wonder why anyone thinks they need F-22 other than just to waste the money.
Well, the F-22 is a huge disappointment in terms of performance.
Really?
Please elaborate.
Well, if you look at its aerodynamic performance, its thrust to weight is about the same as an early model of an F-15.
Its wing loading, the measure of maneuverability, is about the same.
It has a radar that they call low probability of intercept.
That means it transmits on various frequencies, making it hard for the opponent to interpret its signal, but the Air Force won't point out to you that they can still hear the signal, and that's key in alerting the enemy to the fact that the F-22 is out there.
So in other words, that defeats the whole point of the stealth from the beginning.
Absolutely.
A radar is an anti-stealth measure.
The radar is a very powerful electromagnetic beam, and it announces the presence of the aircraft.
No aircraft that calls itself stealthy should ever have a radar that's on.
I remember seeing one guy got stuck in the cockpit.
They had to destroy the plane to get him out of the thing.
Well, yeah, there was an F-22 that the cockpit wouldn't open, and they had to cut their way into it with a chainsaw to get the guy out.
It bombed out.
It was an embarrassing episode for the Air Force.
Well, and what about my perhaps exaggerated statement there about F-15s being perfectly capable of taking on the best MiGs in the world, even if it was the Europeans and the Russians at the same time?
Ten years ago, America's fleet of F-15s would be perfectly okay, not just to protect our skies, but to rule anybody else's skies at will.
Well, a lot of the history of air-to-air combat shows that the most important measure of who wins in an air engagement is pilot quality, and the best way in peacetime to acquire that kind of quality is time in the air, training in air combat maneuvering.
The sad truth is that because our Air Force has been so fixated on procurement spending for hugely expensive airplanes like the F-22, they've been raiding accounts for other Air Force programs, including air combat training.
In the 70s, when we were getting out of Vietnam, an average Air Force fighter pilot would get about 25, maybe 30 hours of training in the air per month.
F-22 pilots get about a third of that, 10 to 12 hours per month.
F-16 pilots get about half of that, 15 to 17 hours a month.
That's a real disgrace.
If anybody in Congress were at all serious about having a well-trained, competent, effective Air Force, they would double or triple the money for air combat maneuvering, not in simulators, in real airplanes in the air.
But Congress, like the Air Force itself, is fixated on the hardware, and wants to spend money on that rather than the really important things like training.
It's hard to break apart training missions into every district, 435 little districts across America, like they do with the makings of the planes.
Training is a lousy pork generator.
You're exactly right.
That's one of the many reasons why they're not interested in it.
As a matter of fact, to pay for pork, Congress very typically will raid the accounts in the Pentagon budget to pay for things like training, for weapons maintenance, those kinds of things, because they regard that as the unsexy stuff.
They love putting into their press releases, to the press back home, the goodies they put in the Pentagon's budget for stuff at Fort Worth or Pensacola or wherever they happen to be.
Speaking of the disappointing F-22, there was an article not long ago in the Christian Science Monitor about one of the factories in Georgia where they put at least parts of these planes together.
They were just besides themselves and saying, this is going to cost us all these jobs if you cut the F-22.
Of course, they're ignoring the fact of where that money comes from and other jobs it could be spent on.
It's actually quite wasteful.
But besides that, the pressure was on in Georgia to save the F-22, hell or high water.
Sure.
If you're a Georgia politician and you're not in favor of building as many F-22s as the Air Force wants, in its most visionary dreams, people think that's not good politics.
If you look at it, however, if you scratch the surface of it, for example, there's not a lot of jobs in Georgia for the F-22.
Let me put it this way.
You could spend less money on other forms of federal spending and generate more jobs.
According to the University of Massachusetts, defense procurement spending is very inefficient as a jobs engine.
The overhead costs are high.
The material costs are high.
We have this vision in our heads of World War II production rates and airplanes coming off the factory door every few minutes.
In fact, at the F-22 final assembly plant in Marietta, Georgia, one F-22 comes out the factory door every 17 or 18 days.
We only make about 20 of those per year.
If we took that money and spent it on transportation, education, health care, or even tax cuts, we'd be able to generate more jobs with it than the F-22 generates.
Well, that's very interesting because I look at the whole thing as even World War II and they're coming out the hangar door every 15 minutes or whatever is still just wealth destroyed, wealth that could have been used to raise people's standards of living and instead used to destroy wealth and property in the worst war in history.
But I'm interested in the specifics of the study that you mentioned there.
Who did you say did that?
The people of Massachusetts at Amherst.
If you send me an email, I can send it to you.
You can put it on your website if you want.
Okay.
Yeah, I think we'll try to link to it in the summary of this interview, too, for the podcast archive later so people can take a look at that.
I guess it's the same with, they say like the roads, the states spend, I don't know, $0.60 on the dollar tax money on a road, but the federal government only spends $0.30 or $0.15 or whatever.
That's basically what we're talking about, complete and total inefficiency, even accepting the premise of making F-22s at all.
It's an extremely inefficient way to even make these planes.
Well, that's right.
When you have an F-22, you don't have an economic asset.
You have a national security asset or what people think is a national security asset.
When you build a road, you have something that generates more economic activity for the country.
So there is more second and third effect results from something like a road than an F-22.
Now, pardon me for the hyperbole, but I only say it basically so that we can try to get at the truth here.
You can answer however you like.
It seems to me that perhaps Congress isn't really Congress, that it's just an advisory kind of panel front group that represents the interests of Lockheed and Raytheon and Northrop Grumman in this country.
And, I mean, if we're in a situation where the Secretary of Defense says, hey, listen, we need to cut this, this, and that so we can focus on these other things, and Congress basically just serves to represent the military industrial complex firms that are on the dole in saying to him, no, you're going to continue to procure all these weapons you don't even think you need, then where the hell are we in the larger sense in this society?
You know what I mean?
Well, I worked on Capitol Hill for a little over 30 years.
Members of Congress there from both parties, liberals and conservatives and Republicans, Democrats, independents, are universally with very few exceptions.
They've become very fixated on pork.
There's huge amounts of it in the defense budget.
They think it's the route to their political livelihood.
It has all kinds of effects beyond just the money we spend on it.
It means that in a hearing, a member of Congress is not only disinterested in performance oversight, he or she is positively against it because if you ask an Air Force official aggressive, informal questions about the performance of, say, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, that general may be a little bit uncooperative when he hears from the Appropriations Committee that you've got a spending project that you need his support on and the committee will fund or not fund that little earmark depending on what the Air Force general says about it.
And so the member of Congress is decidedly uninterested in alienating that potential supporter for his earmark.
Now, this may be a novel description for some of your listeners to hear that the Pentagon is an integral part of the congressional pork system, but that's very true, and that's what I observed and participated in as a staffer on Capitol Hill for three decades.
A member's earmark in the defense spending bills is not going to get approved unless it gets approved by some mid-ranking officials in the Pentagon, and it's really a horrible impact that kind of system has on one of Congress's most important roles, the role of oversight, trying to find out what the heck's going on inside the executive branch and once you get the information, doing something about it.
And that, of course, is not happening either.
Well, this is what Dwight Eisenhower said in his last day in office was what we feared was, what he feared was the disastrous rise of misplaced power.
And that's really what we've had since World War II is what they call a warfare economy, right, where the whole thing really centers around these appropriations.
And, you know, as we were talking about before, it's a net loss, but it is pretty much the whole structure of our economy is based on this, trillions a year.
Well, defense spending is a huge part of our manufacturing, but it's also true that even though the amount of dollars spent on defense has been going up, the amount of dollars spent on other government activities is going up even more so that the proportion that we spend on defense spending these days, federal spending, is about 20%, but in the 60s, for example, during the Kennedy administration, it was more like 40%.
But the entire budget has increased, too.
I mean, what we're talking about in terms of raw dollars is, I mean, according to Bob Higgs at the Independent Institute, it's a trillion dollars a year if you count the health care for the veterans and the energy department's maintenance of nuclear weapons.
Homeland Security and interest on the debt, and he's exactly right.
Yeah.
Correct.
I mean, that's a lot of money, a trillion dollars a year.
We're going to start talking about quadrillions here before too long, and we're going to forget how much a trillion is.
It's truly amazing.
We're today spending more on the defense department than we have at any point since the end of World War II.
As a matter of fact, if you look at President Obama's plans for the defense budget, he will outspend Ronald Reagan on the Pentagon, even if you adjust the dollars for inflation.
Well, you know, he's got to face down the evil empire hiding in the mountains of Waziristan.
Right.
Wow.
Sorry, that was as close as I could get to an excuse.
I'm trying, but I can't think of anybody else on Earth that threatens us.
Let's see, Asia, Africa, Northeast, Southwest, South America.
Is there an empire in South America threatening us I don't know about?
I don't think so.
Well, if you asked that question to George Bush, he'd talk about Mr. Chavez.
Yeah, right.
I shouldn't go throwing around loose talk like that too much.
That's right.
All right.
Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today.
This has been very interesting.
I really appreciate it.
It's my privilege.
Thank you very much.
All right, everybody.
That's Winslow T. Wheeler.
You can find his great article, quite a few great articles.
The most recent one at counterpunch.org is called Back from the Dead, Pentagon Pork, or How the House Turned Robert Gates into a Ham Sandwich.
We'll be right back after this.