Why Most US Weapons Methods Are Worse than Russia’s

On this fascinating evaluation, our contributor explains why the US navy is in deep trouble, unable to compete with Russia, and unlikely to alter going ahead.  He has expertise within the navy, civil service, Congress, and the lobbying and contracting sectors.  He lives within the Washington, DC space.

Recently we’ve seen some good evaluation on the bounds and vulnerabilities of the American navy in mild of occasions within the former Ukraine and particularly Russia’s demonstrated competence in Syria.  

So we’ve the “what” of the difficulty, however how in regards to the “why”?  

As a U.S. Military veteran and a longtime resident of the Beltway—together with four-and-a-half years residing on Crystal Drive in Arlington, Virginia, which has most likely the densest focus of “protection” contractors anyplace in America—I feel I perceive what’s basically flawed with the U.S. military-industrial complicated (MIC.)

In the beginning, the MIC has lengthy been incapable of manufacturing sturdy, environment friendly, versatile weapons.  

We don’t even should look to the F-35 on this one.  

(America’s newest fighter which has changed into a spectacular technical failure and large  ($1.5 trillion!) expense  – see our super-popular article about how this airplane stacks up in opposition to the Russian competition- edit)   

Simply contemplate probably the most fundamental merchandise, the M-16. 

The M-16 Assault Rifle

My subject expertise with this piece of junk is that it runs into issues within the presence of even a small quantity of sand. When sufficient sand will get in to the chamber and mixes with the lube oil on the bolt meeting, the grit thus shaped ends in as much as each second spherical misloading.

God forbid it is best to brush an oiled open breach in opposition to the aspect of your foxhole—you might be out of fee.  Within the absence of air or artillery help or sheer overwhelming numbers in your aspect, you might be lifeless meat in opposition to anybody with a gun that features in a sandy setting.  And why?  As a result of, as I used to be instructed in boot camp (whether or not it’s true or not), this factor is completely constructed to have zero fault tolerance.  

Supposedly, nearly each metallic part within the M-16 is solid and/or machined to perfection reasonably than stamped.  Distinction this with Russian or Chinese language weapons which are stated to be constructed like can openers to spray lead underneath any circumstances.  In different phrases, the M-16 is so refined that it would not work effectively.

It’s now acknowledged that the M-16 with its 5.56mm rounds is insufficiently deadly past a few hundred meters, making it unsuited to long-distance firefights over open terrain (once more these deserts, or maybe shootouts between mountain ridges.)

The M-1 Abrams tank

One other nice instance – this is usually a actual canine.  The engine is a gasoline turbine, like with an plane, besides that it’s being pushed round in deserts and even sandstorms, making it extraordinarily finicky and high-maintenance.  (Would you fly your Boeing right into a sandstorm?)  After all, the Abrams was designed to battle in Germany the place sand isn’t a problem.  However through the Iraq journey, sand so tore up the turbine followers (or no matter) that over 1000 of those million-dollar “energy packs” needed to be eliminated and despatched up for depot-level upkeep or refurbishment stateside.  

Sure, that’s proper—these items can’t even be mounted within the subject.  All you are able to do is pull them out with a crane and ship them again to the civilians at monumental expense.  On the top of the Iraq journey, round 2007, the upkeep backlog was so dangerous that even the nationwide media acquired wind of it.  

After all, when you could have the world’s reserve foreign money, you possibly can afford all that and extra—all the world is paying to your wars.  

However the waste and inefficiency are a truth.

The Primary Downside :  Extreme Complexity

I feel the issue right here is that American battle planners and logisticians want originality, complexity, and/or expense-for-the-hell-of-it over versatility and ease of use and upkeep.  That is no shock given America’s wealth and the longtime beneficiant funding of its armed forces.  In any case, each navy displays its personal society. 

Sadly for Uncle Sam, what he will get is tools which will work very effectively in a single setting however not one other.

However a lot for American tools per se.  Let’s discuss Crystal Drive (a neighborhood in suburban Washington the place many protection contractors have workplaces – edit.) —or extra broadly, the MIC.

The Army Industrial Complicated (MIC) is failing on a large scale

It’s clear now that the MIC can’t construct something for lower than 200 p.c of its authentic deliberate price range (and that’s being extraordinarily conservative.)  Nor can something it cranks out these days meet efficiency or survivability expectations.  Apart from the endless supersonic practice wreck generally known as the F-35, we’ve different boondoggle failures such because the Littoral Fight Ship, which by all accounts is much less succesful and extra weak than the 20 to 30 year-old vessels it was supposed to exchange.

Or, going again just a few years, we see the Military’s “Commanche” helicopter, an supposed alternative for the Apache, which blew via $6.9 billion—in 1983-2004 {dollars}, most likely over $10 billion immediately—earlier than all the program was scrapped.  That’s proper, over $10 billion for nothing—not one Commanche was ever delivered for everlasting use to an Military operational unit!  

The place did that cash go, in the event that they didn’t truly manufacture something in addition to just a few prototypes?  Did they spend $10 billion on PowerPoint shows?  

My mind can’t even wrap round this.  Are you able to think about what Russia or China may do for $10 billion?  

Nonetheless, even that pales earlier than the Military’s cancelled Future Fight Methods program, which burned via an estimated (nobody is aware of precisely) $20 billion from 2003 to someplace between 2012 and 2014 (relying on what termination milestone you go by), with virtually nothing to indicate past just a few prototypes, plenty of idea artwork, and a 29-pound toy robotic made by iRobot of “Roomba” vacuum cleaner fame.  In actual fact, I can’t consider one huge new U.S. weapons system that has succeeded within the final 25 years, aside from maybe the Stryker armored automobile (although some have argued that time, and I simply don’t know sufficient about it.)

As identified by many different observers, a part of the blame lies with our political system, the place MIC companies purchase politicians after which obtain favors within the type of contracts, whether or not or not the contracts make any sense. Nonetheless, I feel this isn’t the one downside, nor even essentially the largest.  

Basically what I feel we’ve is systemic over-complexity leading to nothing getting accomplished, or accomplished effectively anyway.

US intelligence companies have the identical downside

That is akin to the deep systemic disaster in Uncle Sam’s intelligence companies, the place from 9/11 to the Arab Spring to Crimea to the ISIS conquest of Mosul to Russia in Syria, the phrase is at all times “we didn’t count on…”  On this case, we’ve quite a few companies—a few of them with overlapping features—which are drowning in paperwork and rubbish knowledge (or an excessive amount of knowledge) and are virtually completely ineffective.  

As some readers will keep in mind, it acquired so dangerous that in April 2014 the State Division launched a photograph collage aiming to show that (amongst different issues) a bearded Chechen battalion commander going by the identify Hamza, who appeared in Russian TV footage of the 2008 Olympic Warfare, was none aside from the bearded, chubby Slaviansk militiaman going by the call-sign “Babai”—in different phrases, Russian particular forces have invaded the Donbass.  (The New York Occasions ran with this and was then oh-so-vaguely and gently reproached by its personal ombudsman.)  

Shouldn’t this terrible joke have been prevented by the Workplace of the Director of Nationwide Intelligence, which is meant to advertise info-sharing amongst companies and centrally vet all claims and conclusions—particularly these being trumpeted on the State Division’s web site or at its briefings?  Apparently not!

Bureaucratic bloat

Then again, what the U.S. lack-of-intelligence complicated is excellent at—in addition to hiring approach too many buxom, flirty younger issues straight out of school and with no language expertise or any expertise in any respect (DIA and NGA, your ex-military managers prefer to beautify their workplaces)—is offering employment for tens of hundreds of its personal employees in addition to tens of hundreds of grotesquely-overpaid contractors, together with those that construct and run billion-dollar eavesdropping facilities which have confirmed incapable of choosing up something helpful, maybe as a result of whenever you attempt to hearken to the whole lot, you find yourself listening to nothing. 

The lesson right here is that the extra workplaces and companies, the extra managers and political appointees who will search to justify and increase their turf and budgets by shoveling out as a lot cash on as many contracts as potential, as rapidly as potential, in lots of circumstances even paying contractors to do little extra than simply sit round (typically at dwelling) ready for the subsequent contract.  (I’ve seen this many instances in Washington.)  

Then you definately get so huge that folks merely journey over one another and the left hand doesn’t know what the proper hand is doing.

The US MIC labored nice 50 years in the past as a result of much less cash and other people have been concerned

So I feel that is what’s happening not solely within the intelligence equipment, however within the MIC as a complete.  We now have a whole lot of hundreds of employees and contractors in addition to navy officers assigned to liaise with them, every kind of mission managers and “six-sigma black belts” and different buzzwords, juggling tens of millions of PowerPoints throughout the river from Washington and all through the nation, and so they can’t subject a helicopter after spending $10 billion on it. 

Actually?  How did this nice nation ever defeat the Japanese Empire?

Go to the Nationwide Air and House Museum in Washington; you will note probably the most wonderful issues—e.g. mills designed to function on the floor of the Moon, drawing electrical energy from the warmth of plutonium decay—that have been developed when there was no Crystal Drive, no Tysons Nook, and so on.  

Then go to the museum’s extension close to Dulles airport and take a look at the SR-71 “Blackbird”, the quickest and highest-flying airplane ever constructed (this was about 50 years in the past.)  

How did they do it?  

Though there have been extra males in uniform again then, the MIC itself (or ought to I say the Army-Industrial-Intelligence-Homeland-Insecurity-Complicated (MIIHIC)) – had however a fraction of immediately’s civilian workforce.  Fortunately, most of these paper-pushing “techniques integrators” and PowerPoint rangers didn’t exist.  Blueprints have been drafted with pencil and paper.  

At this time, Uncle Sam can’t even construct a heavy rocket engine, to not point out a very good helmet or ejection seat for his F-35.

No hope for change going ahead

So it appears that evidently as a technical civilization we’re degenerating.  

Certain, there are fixed developments in microelectronics (a.okay.a. built-in circuits) and the packages they permit, however by way of heavy engineering—of which the MIIHIC and different authorities initiatives just like the house program have been on the forefront since WWII—it appears that evidently the U.S. is tapped out.  

And what?  Throwing more cash at it’s simply going to make it worse. 

The organizations with their budgets and their completely reasonable-sounding arguments for ever-greater budgets will develop, their workforces will develop, the contracting sector will develop, extra shiny workplace buildings will go up, however the consequence will probably be an ever-increasingly-negative marginal return.  

John McCain and all the opposite damaged information out and in of the Pentagon will say we nonetheless haven’t got sufficient funds to counter a pointless Russian invasion of parasitic, inconsequential Lithuania (at present headed by a longtime communist) or every other Nineties-era speculative wargame coaching situation that one way or the other carried over into the general public consciousness and morphed into the Biggest Menace to World Peace.

After all, so long as the U.S. has the cash to ship gazillion-dollar armies and armadas in opposition to illiterate natives armed with sharp sticks and coconuts, this may occasionally not visibly threaten its hegemony.  Virtually any downside or mistake might be papered over with cash, for a very long time anyway.  

However ultimately, even when the cash spigot doesn’t constrict, we’ll get to the purpose the place the navy actually can’t be used as something greater than a façade or a gunboat road-show, hoping nobody calls the bluff, as a result of the stuff simply doesn’t work prefer it’s purported to, or else is just too weak (witness the evacuation of the U.S. plane service from the Persian Gulf after Uncle Sam came upon that Russia has cruise missiles with a spread of at the very least 1500km, or the ridiculous sail-around of China’s little islands which had the sense to infringe solely very barely and briefly on that nation’s imaginary territorial waters), or the natives can devise their very own countermeasures. 

In actual fact, I’d say we’re at that time already.  To not point out, the U.S. Military and the Division of Veterans Affairs are nonetheless so tapped-out after Iraq and Afghanistan that one other main floor operation is unthinkable.  (At this level, Washington is extra probably to launch nukes at any person than threat one other floor battle.)

So you possibly can anticipate plenty of hand-wringing and much more cash being thrown into the breach.  That’s merely what the machine does; there is no such thing as a likelihood to reform it, nor will the Hegemony dissipate willingly (though currently it’s accomplished a very good job of dissipating unwillingly.)  

However all that cash might as effectively be flushed down the can. 

The brink has been reached and it is all downhill from right here.