Category Archives: defense policy

New Acquisition Strategy

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants one, and he’s on the right track. Critical to that will be his willingness and ability to fire the bureaucrats in DoD who stay in the way of the critical changes Hegseth wants, but that’s a separate story. What Hegseth wants is faster, more flexible acquisition processes that enable, rather than hinder, competition in acquisition and production and that foster rapid contract letting and fast production of the contracted for articles. In loose sum,

… Overregulation, diffused accountability, and insufficient competition [must be eliminated]. “Every process, every board, and every review must justify its existence,” the secretary said.
The Pentagon essentially wants to make faster and more flexible contracting authorities the default instead of the exception, and give more priority to the private economy to solve military problems.

One step along this evolution was this that the WSJ editors noted:

Welcome is concentrating more authority in a “portfolio acquisition executive,” who could oversee a suite of programs and make tradeoffs on cost and performance. The current system includes far too many layers of authority. “Program managers answer to dozens and dozens of folks” and “have to go get permission to move a dollar to a better priority,” a former US Navy secretary for acquisition told Congress this year.

Hegseth needs to be absolutely draconian in removing those extraneous layers and terminate the vast majority of the bureaucrats incumbent in them. Very few bureaucrats will warrant reassignment within DoD, and there are—or should be—very few open slots for reassigning into.

I add a couple of improvements to all of this. Hegseth wants to buy the 85% solution and iterate together over time to achieve the 100% solution, but as articulated, it’s insufficient, with too much room for weasel-wording added pricing costs by the contractor. Rather than simply jawboning against endless specs, requirements creep must be stopped cold. Changes to the specs often are warranted, but better is the enemy of good enough, preventing the good enough from being acquired at all, leaving us completely without. “Better” should be included in follow-on contracts—or new contracts—and only after “good enough” has been in operation for some years. That will determine whether that “better” really is and, if so, will provide justification for that “better” going to testing and production.

In parallel with cutting off requirements creep by the contractor, requirements creep by DoD personnel must be cut off, also. Those new and better requirements that come from Pentagon bureaucrats (and here I include the myriad flags and O-6s and O-5s looking for Efficiency Report material for the sake of their personal careers and/or for post-retirement employment with those contractors) must only be considered after the system they’re “improving” has been in the field, operationally employed for some years.

A second parallel is cutting off mission creep by DoD personnel. The system under consideration is being designed, built, and employed for a particular class (narrow or broad) of missions. If the mission changes, or a new mission is identified—and they will be—those needs can only be considered for the next upgrade to the existing system, or the changed/new mission’s needs will call for a new system.

And this: those systems will consist of a platform for carrying and delivering to the targets those bullets, bombs, missiles, drones, what-have-you that will do the destruction of the targets. Those platforms must be as generic as possible so as to be able to carry new and improved bullets, bombs, … with as little physical modification as possible, requiring only software upgrades (which means the platform’s computers must be capable handling the newer generations of software). The flip side of that must include the requirement that the upgraded/replacement bullets, bombs, … and software must be designed to fit onto the existing platform as much as possible. It’s certainly the case that a platform will wear out or the new and improved bullets, bombs, … and software will truly need a new platform, but those should be the greatly infrequent exception rather than the norm.

Immorality

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The men and women of the People’s Republic of China government, led overwhelmingly by President Xi Jinping, are behaving in an utterly immoral fashion when it comes to lethal, illegal drugs and the precursors for manufacturing them.

Those men and women have been continually welching on the agreements they pretend to make to curb fentanyl and fentanyl precursors exports.

Even when Beijing toughens regulations on individual precursors, as it has done several times in recent years, including this summer, Chinese producers can get around the rules by slightly altering the chemical structure of their products.

This bit saucers and blows it.

China calibrates its cooperation on counternarcotics in response to the overall US relationship, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a counternarcotics expert at the Brookings Institution.

That’s a polite way of saying that the PRC’s government men and women will continue to poison our children unless and until we kowtow to their demands.

Or maybe Xi and his syndicate simply are amoral, with no concept of what’s right or wrong or the differences between the two—only naked power for themselves, nationally, and egoistically globally.

This, more than any military or cyber superiority, is what makes the PRC exceedingly dangerous.

Silliness

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President Donald Trump (R) has directed DoD to begin nuclear weapons testing. It’s unclear, at this point, whether he wants to test the existing arsenal or test delivery systems under development or to be developed.

Rhode Island’s Progressive-Democratic Senator Jack Reed has the present installment of silliness, as paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal.

[B]reaking the testing moratorium would prompt Moscow and Beijing to restart full-fledged testing.
US nuclear testing, he added, would also provide justification for Pakistan, India, and North Korea, which last tested in 2017, “to expand their own testing regimes, destabilizing an already fragile global nonproliferation architecture.”

Russia already is in the early stages of full-fledged testing, as evidenced by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bragging about his new nuclear hypersonic missiles, nuclear-powered nuclear-armed cruise missiles, and nuclear-armed torpedoes. The People’s Republic of China is expanding its own nuclear arsenal as fast as it can; such expansion doesn’t occur without testing.

Pakistan, India, northern Korea? The last has shown no restraint in testing nuclear missiles; it’s not even bound by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Baby Kim’s only reason for pausing is his publicly stated decision to focus on parallel development of his conventional forces. Pakistan and India have nuclear arsenals aimed at each other, and India faces a nuclear-armed and threatening enemy in the PRC. Neither Pakistan nor India are members of the NPT. There should be no doubt they’ll engage in testing as they develop their arsenals.

Demanding Instant Results

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The Trump administration has threatened tariffs, raised and lowered them (though rarely as much as they were raised), and concluded on-again, off-again tariff agreements with the People’s Republic of China. The bulk of these moves have come within the opening months of Trump II, even though some moves were made during Trump I.

The good editors at The Wall Street Journal are taking a dim view of this. The opening of their lede:

President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping struck their third trade truce in a year on Thursday, and the best we can say is that the deal averted more economic damage.

Later in the piece, they offered this…truism:

One lesson here is that trade wars aren’t easy to win, especially against a peer competitor.

To which I say, “Patience, Grasshoppers.”

Wars—and the PRC has been fighting this economic war with us for lots of years, even if we’ve been slow to recognize that—are rarely over in a day. WWI was fought over four years, and WWII took eight years out of our globe’s weal and life. Looking farther back was the 30 Years War and the 100 Years War. The barbarian’s 3-day invasion of Ukraine now is approaching its 4th year. Over in what is now the PRC, the period of the Warring States lasted 250 years, and the century of humiliation that the PRC still remembers (the opium wars were in the beginning of that period) lasted…100 years and a bit more.

The men and women of the PRC government take a long view of things, even a generational view. It would be good were the changing men and women of our government to take a similarly long view. The WSJ editorial board could contribute by doing the same.

Trump’s moves may, indeed, end up with no material net effect, or they may end in national disaster, or they may end in a renewed and refreshed century of Pax Americana. It’s years too early to tell.

Doubting NATO’s Utility

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Trump I questioned the utility of NATO and wondered aloud whether the US should continue supporting it/staying a member. In immediate response, some (not enough) European member nations started honoring their promises of some years prior to contribute more to NATO—all of 2% of national GDP at the time. Over the ensuing years, most (though still only 2/3) of the member nations increased their contributions to very nearly meet (a large bump by these) or to meet or exceed those 2%. Trump’s overt disdain and blunt threats resulted in a material strengthening of the alliance.

Recently, the member nations met and agreed to push that contribution commitment to 5% of national GDP, and some nations are meeting that commitment (notably, the eastern and far northern European nations fronting on Russia). Also notably, though, Canada and western European members continue to freeload, and in order to get the agreement at all, the alliance was required to give Spain explicit permission to continue to freeload, despite its strongly growing economy.

Unfortunately, now the alliance is facing this. The headline and subheadline is the short and bitter of it:

NATO Member’s Top Court Considers Whether Saying Men And Women Are Different Is A War Crime
Finland’s Supreme Court heard arguments Thursday about whether quoting the Bible is illegal “hate speech” under its war crimes laws.

Yes, this is one of those far northern members, recently acceded to the alliance. Even so, this is a case of censorship by the nation’s chief prosecutor, unrestrained by either Finland’s President or Prime Minister, despite lower courts having repeatedly cleared the alleged miscreants of any wrong doing.

[Member of Parliament Paivi] Rasanen was first investigated for tweeting a Bible verse in 2019 to criticize Finland’s state church sponsoring a queer sex parade. Three criminal charges against her arose from the investigation, which also resulted in one criminal charge against [Lutheran Bishop Juhana] Pohjola for publishing a booklet Rasanen wrote about the Bible’s teaching on the sexes.

And

Two lower courts cleared Rasanen and Pohjola of all charges, but the prosecutor kept appealing, now to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization member’s highest court.

 

This is government censorship, government sexist bigotry, and government demand for political correctness all rolled into one.

If this case results in any form of conviction, then given the spread of censorship and sexist bigotry into the rest of NATO members—most notably, Germany, Netherlands, and UK—then it will be time to consider anew our withdrawal from an alliance too enamored of its political shower appearance to be able to resist the barbarian farther east.

It will be time to stand up a different, more serious mutual defense arrangement involving the Three Seas Initiative nations and the US.