06/21/12 – Winslow T. Wheeler – The Scott Horton Show

All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif, and I'm very pleased to have a guest on the line, a distinguished guest, Mr. Winslow Wheeler.
Mr.
Wheeler is the director of the Strauss Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information.
The Strauss Project and CDI are a part of the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Wheeler's authored two books, The Wastrels of Defense and Military Reform, and very interestingly, he has also authored an article called The Jet That Ate the Pentagon.
Welcome to the show, Winslow.
How are you doing today?
Good.
Thanks very much.
Well, I'm happy to have you, and the F-35, the jet that ate the Pentagon.
Let's start, if we may, by something you write in your article here.
38 percent of Pentagon procurement for defense programs is tied up in this F-35 program.
First of all, what is Pentagon procurement for defense programs?
Can you penetrate through that language and tell us what that really means?
Yeah, that's a calculation from the Government Accountability Office of the amount of money that the Defense Department will be spending on the F-35 program compared to other weapons programs.
That is just the acquisition costs.
By that I mean the research and development and the money for buying the articles does not include the money to operate and maintain the system throughout its lifetime.
That's another huge figure, but the point is that the F-35 is a huge part of what DoD is spending on procurement of weapons these days.
Wow, and man, so many different ways to go.
It's a big, long article full of juicy information.
Off the top of my head, why don't you talk about some of the problems that this F-35 system has?
Sure.
I think the most important thing to understand about the program is that it's got problems built into its DNA.
We are not experiencing cost overruns and test problems in a program that needs to be fixed and sent on its way.
We're experiencing what was designed in the program from the get-go.
By that I mean in the late 1980s, early 1990s when the basic program was hatched, they built into it so much complexity that the cost growth has been inevitable and the performance disappointment has been inevitable.
By that I mean on the performance dimension that, for example, the airplane was originally conceived as a supersonic airplane that could also land and take off vertically or near vertically.
The problem with that initial first step is that those two performance characteristics require two fundamentally different designs.
In engaging in the tradeoffs to get both of them in one airframe, they compromised performance one way or another.
Then they added another layer of complexity, which was to make it not just a light bomber like the Marines vertical takeoff and landing or a short takeoff and landing Harrier, but also a fighter.
Again, we had inherently contradictory design requirements that had to be traded off against each other and you ended up with an airplane that is neither a good fighter nor a good air-to-ground bomber.
Well let me just ask you real quick, who's calling the shots here Winslow?
I mean who's deciding if it's a fighter or a bomber or a what?
Is it just a big committee of military brass or what's going on here?
These are military service and civilian bureaucrats, especially at the top, that decided this is the way to go.
The conventional wisdom belief is that, for example, multi-role aircraft save you money because you can buy them for both the fighter mission and the bomber mission.
It turns out that an airplane like the F-35 is much more expensive than it would be needed if you had a pure air-to-air fighter and a pure air-to-ground bomber type aircraft.
A classic example are the F-16 and the A-10.
Now let me just ask you, the F-16, is that what they were flying around in Top Gun and the A-10, that's what they call the warthog that just has a bunch of guns facing downward that can just obliterate whatever's on the ground kind of thing?
Is that what we're talking about here?
In the movie Top Gun, they were actually flying F-14s, Navy aircraft.
The A-10 is a remarkable airplane.
The Air Force never wanted it in the first place.
They don't consider that to be an important mission, although it's probably, in terms of warfare, the most important mission the Air Force has.
It's a slow-flying, heavily armored airplane, the most prominent characteristic of which is its gun.
The airplane is literally designed around the gun.
It's a hugely effective weapon.
Just one anecdote about it.
Before Operation Desert Storm in 1991, when we kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, the plan was to not include the A-10s in the deployment of aircraft to the theater.
Finally, about 150 were sent, and the commander, General Schwarzkopf, remarked about the A-10s, it's a quote, thank God we had them, they saved our ass.
Wow, that's pretty strong language to be saying publicly, even for a military man.
They were tremendously, I think it was actually General Horner, the Air Force commander, said that.
But my point is they were tremendously effective against Saddam Hussein's ground forces, and they were tremendously survivable.
Their reputation was not that they would be survivable against the kinds of air defenses that the Iraqis had.
They were extremely survivable.
GAO did a study of the various airplane types that we deployed in Operation Desert Storm and found that, in a statistical sense, the A-10 was every bit as survivable as aircraft like the F-117, the so-called stealth light bomber.
Well, that brings me to, gosh, a couple of questions.
I'd like to save the stealth thing until after the break that's coming up here in a minute or two.
But you were talking about the problems ingrained in the DNA of this F-35 project.
And one obvious question is, with the F-14s, or whatever, and the A-10s, what in the world is the need for an F-35 in the first place?
I'm guessing there is none other than defense contractor profit purposes.
Well, no, I disagree with you.
Okay, well, please explain, because I just really don't know what I'm talking about.
And you're the expert, and please tell me.
The F-16s and the F-15s and the A-10s that the Air Force has, for example, have been around a long time.
They're getting very long in tooth.
We need a replacement aircraft.
You can refurbish these aircraft and keep them going.
But the optimal solution is to replace them with an even better replacement aircraft.
The aging inventory needs to be replaced, and we need to give pilots the best thing available.
The F-35 is not that.
Okay, so what do you think would be the correct course of action?
To cancel the F-35 program and to start doing two things right away.
Building some additional life into the airframes of the aircraft we have, and more importantly, to start right away a new program to replace aircraft in the air-to-air role and in the air-to-ground role.
If we're smart about it, we can do it much cheaper and result in a much better aircraft than the F-35.
Okay, we're talking with Winslow Wheeler.
More on the other side.
Sorry to ask you a question up against a hard break.
These breaks are kind of tricky, but we'll talk more about the F-35 and the Air Force and all kind of things like that on the other side.
Very good.
This show is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif, and I am very happy to have Winslow Wheeler as a guest on the show.
And we're talking about Winslow's article at foreignpolicy.com, The Jet That Ate the Pentagon.
And Winslow, we've only got 10 minutes left before the break is going to rudely interrupt us again, and there's so much information to cover and not enough time to do it.
You already talked about how the F-35 program has problems built into its DNA, as you say, how it's unfixable.
You mentioned the cost and some other things, but one thing we got to cover is this, as you say, so-called stealth technology.
According to your article, it's not so stealthy after all, is it?
Right.
The best way to describe the stealth characteristic is not that it makes you invisible in front of radars.
It does make you less detectable.
It shortens the detection range against some radars at some angles.
What I'm trying to say here is that the stealth characteristic is optimized for certain air-to-air types of radars for tracking the exact position of the airplane, and it's optimized for radars that are nose-on to the airplane or around what they call the waterline of the airplane.
If you have a search radar of a different wavelength characteristic, and if you're looking at the airplane from behind, above, or below, you get a much larger radar return against some types of radars, long-wavelength search radars that the Soviet Union built in the 1950s and 60s.
You can see this airplane as soon as it comes over the radar horizon.
The Serbs did that in 1999 when they shot down one F-117 in the Kosovo Air War and severely damaged the second one so that it didn't fly into conflict again.
They modified their SA-3 surface-to-air missile system and its search radars so they could get a track on the airplane.
That's just one way to deal with the stealth characteristic.
I just want to be real clear here, Winslow.
The American military spokespeople and media would have me believe that stealth bombers equate to Wonder Woman in her invisible wonder jet, and nobody can see it at all.
You're telling me that not only can they see it with certain kinds of radar or other kinds of radar, but they can modify their weapons to blow these stealth aircraft out of the sky like happened in Serbia 13 years ago.
I just want to make sure that I'm on the same page here.
That's really what happened.
But there's more to the story because to get that limited tactical advantage the stealth gives you, you pay a huge penalty.
The first penalty is in cost of the airplane.
Stealth aircraft are orders of magnitude more expensive than their predecessors, literally.
Secondly, you pay a penalty in terms of performance.
The stealth requirement requires that the F-35, for example, stow its weapons inside the airplane.
That means it's got two bomb bays.
If you look at the front profile of the airplane, it looks quite pregnant.
In other words, it's lugging around permanent weight and drag that have a serious impact on its range and performance aerodynamically.
Non-stealthy airplanes, of course, have lots of weight and drag when they're dragging around extra fuel tanks and missiles and bombs, but they drop them when they need to and strip off that weight and drag.
The F-35 can't do that.
Next problem is availability.
Stealth aircraft are notoriously difficult to maintain and expensive to maintain.
The B-2 bomber flew in the Kosovo air war about once every five to seven days.
F-22s can't generate much of any sortie rate better than once per day.
If they're lucky, it's going to be more like once every other day.
In the Desert Storm air war against Saddam Hussein in 1991, the F-117s flew significantly less than one sortie per day.
The cost for the maintenance of all this complexity is very high.
The current, I would regard as low-ball estimate for maintaining, operating, and supporting the F-35 throughout the course of its 55-year lifespan, a long time, is $1.1 trillion.
That number is going to go up if they build the fleet as planned.
It's a hugely expensive proposition in terms of not just cost, but performance as well.
Wow.
You mentioned that that's the optimistic angle.
I'm just willing to be much more cynical and say I don't believe the Pentagon.
I am suspicious that they're low-balling up front and going to high-ball, so to speak, with regard to costs and overruns, etc.
Bank on it.
We're still in the buying stage with the F-35.
You can bank on the fact that these costs both to acquire and operate the F-35 are low-balls.
We're still in the buying stage.
I wish I could bank on it.
I wish there was a stock or an investment I could make.
I bet that the Pentagon is going to go over budget on this thing, but nobody's dumb enough to...
It already is, and it's going to get worse.
Wow.
That's terrible.
Okay.
You said definitely scrap the F-35 because it's such a boondoggle and it can't work, and you're sort of suggesting that it's going to kill the Pentagon.
It's going to just suck up all the money and there won't be enough left for what needs to be spent.
Is that your position?
Exactly right.
The editors at Foreign Policy gave that commentary an excellent title.
It was really insightful on their part.
We could, for far less money, hold a fly-before-you-buy competition for different air-to-air and air-to-ground designs and get far better aircraft for far less money if we did it right, like we did with the F-16 and the A-10.
Follow those design principles.
I'm not saying we need to replicate either airplane.
There's lots of room for improvement, but not the way the Pentagon does it in the way it approaches these things.
Remember, we got those airplanes back in the late 60s and early 70s because of Pentagon basically outsiders and mavericks, rather than from the bureaucracy.
The bureaucracies designed, for example, for the F-15 before it was made into a real war winner was a real kludge, but it was rescued by an Air Force colonel by the name of John Boyd and a highly successful airplane resulted.
If the Air Force bureaucracy had had its way, we never would have had the F-16 or the A-10.
Wow, that's amazing.
Apparently, that which is efficient and that which works is anathema to the way the Air Force and the military and the Pentagon work is what is suggested to me by that.
Well, these bureaucracies line up to get their goodies included, and the criteria is political bureaucratic success rather than what has proven itself to be highly effective in the battlefield.
At the expense of our security and our military and all of our interests, is there anything that I didn't ask you or that you want to go over or recover or talk about?
One important point in all of this, I think, is that people make the mistake that more money means more defense, or that if you pay over $400 million as we did to get just one F-22, that you really bought the best available.
High cost does not equate to high performance.
As a matter of fact, when we studied all this at the Government Accountability Office in the Operation Desert Storm air war campaign, we found that the cost of aircraft in that air campaign did not equate to the performance of the aircraft according to the Air Force and Navy's performance data on how those airplanes did in that conflict.
Money does not mean performance.
We see that all over government spending, and this is a very clear-cut example.
Well, in just the remaining minute or so that we have, can you say why that is?
What causes these cost overruns?
Why is it so gosh darned expensive?
We're talking about human behavior here and the way bureaucracies and government behave, especially when they don't have the sense that somebody's standing over their shoulder, watching them closely, and calling them when they're headed towards a clear-cut mistake.
The problems with the F-35 were very foreseeable in the late 80s and 90s.
As a matter of fact, some very insightful people warned us about them.
It all came to be true, and they were ignored, and here we are spending huge amounts of money for an airplane we shouldn't be saddling our armed forces with.
All right, we're out of time for now.
Thank you so much for appearing on the show and sharing your insight and your expertise.
Winslow Wheeler, the article is The Jet That Ate the Pentagon, talking about the F-35 and the outrageousness of it all.
Thanks for being on the show, Winslow.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
I appreciate the opportunity.