The Pentagon Labyrinth

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104 | Evaluating Weapons: Sorting the Good from the Bad Victory at sea is equally unrelated to weapons cost. By the end of 1914, 28 diminutive German submarines, each one-fortieth the cost of a battleship, had wrested control of the seas from the 47 mighty battleships, 195 cruisers and 200 destroyers of the Royal Navy. The battleship had become irrelevant forever though the obstinacy of hidebound admirals and the corrupting power of lucrative procurement budgets kept the battleship in full tilt production for 30 more years. And in its carrier reincarnation, the battleship is still soaking up the lion’s share of the U.S. Navy budget to this day. The preoccupation with $14 billion carriers escorted by $1 to $3 billion destroyers has led to virtually complete Navy neglect of strategically essential coast control capabilities like $175 million minesweepers, $60 million coastal patrol ships, $35 million fast missile-torpedo boats and $4 million riverine-estuarine warfare boats. In the 1991 Gulf War, the Navy’s perennially inadequate minesweeping forces made it too dangerous to launch a 17,000 Marine amphibious assault that General Schwarzkopf had planned. 6 Recently, in the Indian Ocean, the U.S. Navy’s utter lack of coastal patrol and fast attack boats left our merchant ships mostly unprotected against pirates in rubber skiffs. As a result, we witnessed the ludicrous scene of using a $1 billion destroyer to subdue four rifle-armed pirates in a 25-foot inflatable. RULE 3: You can’t tell effective weapons from useless ones without a clear definition of each combat-essential effectiveness characteristic and that definition must be derived directly from combat evidence. Consider the marksman’s definition of rifle effectiveness: the ability to kill a standing soldier at 500 yards with one shot. That’s plausible to the layman but laughably irrelevant to anyone who’s ever been in an infantry firefight. Pursue the marksman’s definition and you’ll pick a rifle that’s got so much recoil, is so heavy and puts out so few rounds that it’s nearly useless to the average 19-year- (CAS) mission, the effectiveness characteristics required, and a comparison of aircraft available for the mission in 1974 (which remains essentially unchanged today, since no new CAS-specific aircraft or weapons have been developed in the intervening 35 years). Find a copy of this document at http://pogoarchives.org/labyrinth/09/03.pdf. See also Pierre M. Sprey, “Combat Effectiveness Considerations in Designing Close Support Fighters,” Briefing for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and for the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, 1983. This includes an effectiveness analysis, design characteristics and cost for a feasible close air support aircraft significantly more lethal and survivable than the A-10 at one-fourth the size and half the cost. See this document at http://pogoarchives.org/labyrinth/09/04.pdf. 6 Marvin Pokrant, Desert Storm at Sea: What the Navy Really Did (Westport: Greenwood, 1999), 98.
Pierre M. Sprey | 105 old GI ambushed by insurgents spraying lethal bursts from ancient but fully automatic AK-47s. In stark contrast to the marksman’s dream, real infantry rifle combat occurs far more often at 15 to 50 yards than at 500 and never involves single shots or single shooters. Targets are rarely more visible than a momentary muzzle flash or puff of smoke. Getting lots of rounds off nearly instantly is of overwhelming importance. Near misses (suppressive fire) are almost as useful tactically as hits. For a brief exposition of how this distillation of actual rifle combat translates into quantitative effectiveness measures, see below. 7 Similarly, real air-to-air combat is separated by a chasm from the technologist’s dangerously beguiling dream of beyond-visual-range (BVR) combat: push a button, launch a missile at a blip on the scope at 25 miles, then watch the blip disappear without ever having laid eyes on the target. That concept of combat, oblivious to the inconvenient details of real air-to-air fights 8 , leads to huge, cumbersome fighters loaded down with tons and tons of heavy stealth skins, massive radars and missiles, and failure-ridden electronics of unmanageable complexity. The most recent fighter built in pursuit of the BVR combat delusion, the F-22, has a $355 million sticker price and costs $47,000 per hour to fly, making it impossible to fly the hours necessary to train pilots adequately (people first!) and impossible to buy enough fighters to influence any seriously contested air war. As opposed to the BVR dream, actual air combat almost invariably starts with two or more attackers “bouncing” and surprising an unaware flight of fighters at 7 Pierre M. Sprey, “Coming to Grips with Effectiveness in Rifles,” Informal Briefing for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1981 and for the Congressional Military Reform Caucus. Presents a very brief synopsis behind the brilliant measures of rifle effectiveness developed and defined by Col. Richard R. Hallock as a basis for his 1965-1966 CDEC Small Arms Weapon System (SAWS) Field Experiment. Find this at http://pogoarchives.org/labyrinth/09/05.pdf. For a more detailed, formal definition of these measures and the associated test conditions, see pp. III-3 to III-8 in “The Evaluation of Small Arms Effectiveness Criteria, Volume 1,” Intrec Inc. for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, May 1975. This is the clearest available description of the pioneering SAWS Field Experiment, including the meticulously realistic details of the computerized target ranges, the training of test subjects, the squad firing scenarios and the extraordinary measures for preserving the test’s all-important target range unfamiliarity. Find a copy of this document at http://pogoarchives.org/labyrinth/09/13.pdf. 8 See Lt Col Patrick Higby, U.S. Air Force, “Promise and Reality: Beyond Visual Range (BVR) Air-to-Air Combat,” Research Paper prepared for Air War College Electives Program, Maxwell Air Force Base, March 30, 2005. This paper is available at http://www.vmi.edu/uploadedfiles/archives/adams_center/essaycontest/20042005/higbyp _0405.pdf. It is also available at http://pogoarchives.org/labyrinth/09/06.pdf.
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The World Security Institute’s Ce
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About the Authors Thomas Christie b
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security issues for members of the
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Table of Contents PREFACE . . . . .
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Preface This handbook aims to help
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xx | The Pentagon Labyrinth and for
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2 | Why is This Handbook Necessary?
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10 | Why is This Handbook Necessary
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Essay 2 “Penetrating the Pentagon
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14 | Penetrating the Pentagon of a
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16 | Penetrating the Pentagon years
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18 | Penetrating the Pentagon Washi
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20 | Penetrating the Pentagon Back
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22 | Penetrating the Pentagon weapo
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24 | Learning About Defense In the
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26 | Learning About Defense with ou
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Essay 4 “Congressional Oversight:
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30 | Congressional Oversight: Willi
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44 | Careerism For example, Gen. Ji
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48 | Careerism brigadier general. Y
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50 | Careerism careerist- and agend
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52 | Careerism Accountability Offic
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Page 68 and 69: 56 | Careerism In sum, our armed fo
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The Pentagon Labyrinth

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