MAY 2017 FORBES ASIA | 11A BLOOD-SOAKED
MONEY-WASTING SCANDAL
BY STEVE FORBES, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF“With all thy getting, get understanding”FACT & COMMENT
PRESIDENT TRUMP has appointed Jared
Kushner to head the new White House
Office of American Innovation, which
is charged with making the government
more efficient. Its biggest challenge, by far,
will be dealing with the Defense Depart-
ment’s monstrously sclerotic weapons-pro-
curement system, which has unnecessarily
cost the lives of countless thousands of our
servicemen and -women and has literally
wasted hundreds of billions of dollars.
We can’t let this horror continue.
Back in 2010 the Economist declared, “The chronic problem
of exorbitantly expensive weapons is becoming acute.” Alas,
such dire warnings have been uttered countless times before and
since. President Trump has the opportunity to do what every
other U.S. Commander-in-Chief and defense secretary has failed
to do since WWII: truly reform this festering disgrace.
Our military needs a buildup on a scale not seen since
Ronald Reagan’s in the 1980s. Our services are under-
manned. Equipment is in dire need of repair and refurbish-
ment. New equipment, software and weapons are needed
for the U.S. to play its crucial role in keeping the world’s
aggressors at bay and meeting the challenges of the cyber-
space, unmanned systems and robotics era. The Navy alone
requires another 80 ships to meet our global obligations.
The Trump military budget for fiscal year 2018 won’t
even catch up on the maintenance of existing equipment and
weapons and is 6% less than spending was in 2012.
Overhauling the process of developing new weapons,
aircraft, ships and the like is no longer a discretionary matter.
What needs to be done is simply unaffordable under current
procedures. The magnitude of the task boggles the mind. The
Pentagon’s total back-office person-
nel numbers over 1 million people.
Every step in the development
of a new weapon requires clearing
major bureaucratic hurdles that
add years of delay. These mind-
numbing, molasses-laden obstacle
courses are spelled out in theDefense Department’s “bible” entitled
“Operation of the Defense Acquisition Sys-
tem.” During these innumerable reviews,
thousands of change orders are made to
reflect new wants and new “improve-
ments,” what critics dub “requirement
creep.” Anyone who has been involved in
remodeling a home knows how expen-
sive and delay-inducing changes made
during a project can be.
The F-35 fighter aircraft was originally
estimated to cost $233 billion for 2,
planes. The latest estimated cost: $391 billion for 14% fewer
planes. The price produced a sharp rebuke from President
Trump. Lockheed, the F-35’s chief contractor, now claims
that costs are under control. Which leads one to ask: How
did expenses get so out of control in the first place? The de-
lays and cost overruns of this airplane are relatively normal
in Pentagonland.
So hidebound is the procurement process that past de-
fense chiefs have occasionally had to yank a program out of
the morass to meet an urgent battlefield need. That’s what
defense secretary Robert Gates did in 2007 to get blast-
resistant vehicles to our troops in Iraq; bureaucratic lethar-
gy had led to hundreds of avoidable Marine casualties.
Our history is riddled with examples of the military’s
bureaucratic blob sticking with weapons that don’t work
or are manifestly inferior to available alternatives. During
the Civil War, the Army resisted the repeating rifle, pre-
ferring the single-shot version. That terrible decision cost
the lives of tens of thousands of Union soldiers.
A deadly modern-day example of this is the original
M16 assault rifle. Various people warned of its flaws. In
the early years of the Vietnam
War the M16 was notorious for
jamming. Yet the Army ordnance
officers and bureaucrats obstinately
ignored the criticism, even going
so far as to rig performance tests,
thereby costing who knows how
The F-35 fighter is a budget bomb. many soldiers’ lives. (Shockingly,DIGTIALSTORM/GETTY IMAGES