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Restructuring Defense
bebarce
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This might be a little Pie in the Sky, but given authority (knowing such authority doesn't actually exist) I would restructure a lot of how our national defense operates.
So Military spending can be divided into 4 costs. Offensive weaponry, Defensive Equipment, Support (read this as initiatives and incentives for troops - Grants, Training, College), and Logistics.
Right off the bat I would drastically redistribute offensive weaponry. I think we have enough firepower at our disposal.
A majority of that budget would be split between Defense and Support. Increased safety mechanisms for troops increased support towards shoring up national security.
I understand the line between the two will always be murky, but classification and regular multi-tiered review is constantly necessary.
So I’d bring the actual military functionality of the military (the act of warring) down to levels comparable if not slightly higher than other countries.
Now the problem with just cutting military spending is that a lot of military spending goes towards incentives and training for the troops. Many people only find options for survival by enlisting.
So then we modify the focus of the military to expand the army core of engineers. Turn it into the world’s largest global community service organization. Nation building through actual building. Continue to provide the incentives for troops that volunteer their service, but change the focus from military to building/training. That way, when the tour of duty is done, we have highly trained engineers returning to our country with the ability to build and maintain our own infrastructure. Highly trained citizens able to respond to our own national emergencies. An army of people training in energy, agriculture, building, creating communities that best utilize little resources.
So manufacturers of weapons in America may lose their jobs, but will then be replaced with the increased demand in building energy structures, or modular housing components.
So fill me in on what the downside would be to this? What part of the picture am I missing? I ask this honestly because I don’t have enough information to know how ridiculous my thoughts actually are.
So Military spending can be divided into 4 costs. Offensive weaponry, Defensive Equipment, Support (read this as initiatives and incentives for troops - Grants, Training, College), and Logistics.
Right off the bat I would drastically redistribute offensive weaponry. I think we have enough firepower at our disposal.
A majority of that budget would be split between Defense and Support. Increased safety mechanisms for troops increased support towards shoring up national security.
I understand the line between the two will always be murky, but classification and regular multi-tiered review is constantly necessary.
So I’d bring the actual military functionality of the military (the act of warring) down to levels comparable if not slightly higher than other countries.
Now the problem with just cutting military spending is that a lot of military spending goes towards incentives and training for the troops. Many people only find options for survival by enlisting.
So then we modify the focus of the military to expand the army core of engineers. Turn it into the world’s largest global community service organization. Nation building through actual building. Continue to provide the incentives for troops that volunteer their service, but change the focus from military to building/training. That way, when the tour of duty is done, we have highly trained engineers returning to our country with the ability to build and maintain our own infrastructure. Highly trained citizens able to respond to our own national emergencies. An army of people training in energy, agriculture, building, creating communities that best utilize little resources.
So manufacturers of weapons in America may lose their jobs, but will then be replaced with the increased demand in building energy structures, or modular housing components.
So fill me in on what the downside would be to this? What part of the picture am I missing? I ask this honestly because I don’t have enough information to know how ridiculous my thoughts actually are.
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As you point out, the point of the military is to win wars. The soldiers we send out into the field should be equipped and trained to the highest degree possible to win those wars and thus live through them. Anything ancillary that detracts money and time from that is bad.
It would create a level of dishonesty in the potential duties a recruit would be required to perform. It would basically take the "I signed up for the national guard to help after hurricanes, and now I'm on a firebase in Afghanistan" problem and make it even worse.
What it sounds like is that you want to expand and professionalize the Peace Corp. Which is probably a good idea. And the money to do that could certainly be removed from the DoD's budget somewhere. But conflating it with soldiering doesn't make a lot of sense.
Think about this: The cost to train one basic infantry soldier, is $55k. Not counting the cost of further specialized training, or the cost of ongoing training, etc. Why would you invest all that time or effort to train someone to fight a war, if what you really want them doing is aid work in non-warzone countries?
Also I think the amount of crossover in skills between 3rd world aid projects, and US based infrastructural needs, is much less than you think.
Marines specialize in combat occurring in littoral zones, which is extremely important and allow the other branches to focus on land, air and sea dominance respectively. Essentially, they basically shoot everything within a few miles of the coast line, allowing other forces to land and operate.
A friend of mine explained it that marines tend to be used to take territory, while the army tends to be used to hold territory
Of course, he was in the Marines, so his general outlook was that it was the marines jobs to be awesome and everyone elses job to tell them how awesome they were. So not sure how strategically accurate he was being.
So let's take a look at the way they actually do divide up the budget:
RDT&E is "Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation" and covers basically everything from DARPA to development on specific systems that aren't in full production, and Procurement covers everything they're buying that's in production rather than still in the development stage. This is my personal area of expertise and I've ranted about this before -- honestly, it's gotten a little better since then, with the emphasis on "little". There are still older projects that were done the old way taking up a ton of money and time, like JSF (which is now so far behind schedule that it's turning into an international diplomatic problem).
Personnel is everyone's wages and benefits and so forth. I have very little knowledge of what needs doing here, and so I hesitate to speculate, other than that the military has been trying to reduce the number of personnel by increasing the number of support contractors, which is not without its drawbacks, and really doesn't always save money in the long run.
Operations and Maintenance is the biggie; it's this huge chunk of money that covers everything from refueling and refurbishing an aircraft carrier to shooting people in Afghanistan. So, part of this expense is going to be based on the military's <i>operations</i>, which means you can reduce it by running fewer operations, and part is going to be based on <i>maintenance</i>, which will depend on the amount of equipment you want to keep in readiness and how expensive that particular equipment is to keep around (e.g.; a B-2 has far more maintenance costs than a B-52, because the B-2 needs to be kept in a climate-controlled hangar; that sort of thing. The F-35 is expected to have lower maintenance costs than the F-22 partly because the F-35 doesn't have radar-absorbing material over the heads of screws and other fasteners on the outside of the plane -- this decrease in maintenance costs comes with an increase in radar cross-section. You get the idea: engineering is full of trade-offs).
Beyond logistics, there's also a strategic replication, where the different branches find it difficult to work together. Although there is a push for joint force training, it's not anywhere close to where it needs to be.
I imagine a lot of the answers to the question of "should Defense be restructured" comes down to how you want to imagine its use. I'd like to see it remain flexible, but also remove some of these replications.
The military has a set of requirements (I'm speaking in engineering terms here; they probably call it something else), that we the people basically decide, and then we need to figure out how much we need to spend to meet these requirements. (It's important to remember that half-assing something is frequently just as bad as not doing it at all, and usually costs more money, take a look at, e.g., the UK's screwed-up military spending setup right now, where they're buying, at great expense, a carrier that they aren't going to have any planes to fly off of, and a second carrier that's going straight into mothballs as soon as it's built. It seems to me that they could have just not bought anything and would be at essentially the same capability level!)
Right now, the military is set up to be able to fight two wars at once, and tries to maintain a ten-year technological lead over every other military in the world. They need to be able to project force anywhere at any time. That basic starting requirement drives everything else; it's why we have eleven aircraft carriers and over a million personnel and so forth. Every new system developed is going to roll down from this.
If you want to significantly decrease the military budget (rather than just a little bit of belt-tightening or whatever), you need to figure out what your new requirements are going to be.
edit: I was going to post more here but now don't have the time; I guess I'll see if this thread is still kicking this evening.
we should get rid of intel, ESPECIALLY EVERYTHING TO DO WITH SUBMARINES
where
is
your
god
now
Inside.
The short answer is that the Harrier (and its successor, the F-35B) can operate from the amphibious assault ships (Wasp-class and America-class) that a Marine Expeditionary Unit is built around. A Super Hornet, for example, can't.
Is that a capability that is still relevant? I really don't know in this case, it just seems like the major uses of a Harrier, beyond its vertical take-off, could also be done with Naval or Air Force assets.
I thought the requirement was two wars plus additional engagements.
Each MEU is essentially built around an amphibious assault ship; if you take away the Harrier you significantly decrease the MEU's close air support until they get backup from a full-size carrier or something.
This stems into the whole "project power everywhere" thing: a MEU is supposed to be able to operate independently, and are deployed with that in mind. Equipment procurement follows capability requirements, or at least it's supposed to.
Man I would raze those fuckers.
Well, pull them on to land first. But then start razing.
My lack of understanding the financial structure lead me to connect a majority of the military spending goes towards the purchase of new weapons. The design would have focused on a reduction of our military engagements around the world, and a refocus on deploying humanitarian relief through an expansion of the army (and I imagine other military replication forms) core of engineers.
My thought along offensive and defensive (and i see why it wouldn't work) was more a general reduction of the purchase and development of long range missiles or weapons that deliver heavier payloads, while maintaining budgets for things like radar, communications, vehicles, mine detection, armor, etc.
I had a vision of thousands of missiles being produced, purchased, going unused and decommissioned. Probably built up by media hyperbole.
Coykd we do this on a larger scale? Political realities asside, could we develop, produce and service all our equipment internally? Would we likely save a lot of money? Could we match the private sector in innovation?
Engineers need competition; even the Soviets had multiple competing "design bureaus"; they were just all state-owned.
If political realities didn't exist, yeah it would certainly be possible for the DOD to undertake huge engineering programs internally (see: Manhattan Project) to put more pressure on the outside contractors. I think they would certainly be capable of producing innovative designs, but a lot of that would be up to how it was managed and required to operate due to the political realities of this alternate world where it would be allowed to happen
Eliminating outside contractors entirely wouldn't be helpful, as the deep-research parts of the huge contractors like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin do some really, really cool stuff with the talent you wouldn't be able to grab on a government salary. DARPA does a pretty good job when they do internal engineering too, but I think most of their work is still done on contracts.
Another promising thing is that they're actually managing contracts from the top level. The way FCS was set up, for example,was shameful and iI'm glad that got shitcanned.
Also, in-house engineering means the customer can evaluate the contractors' designsmore eeffectively.
Ha, no. Marines are used to capture beachheads and airfields, from which the Army is used to capture (and hold) inland territory. In theory. And, to some extent, in practice. Though the Marines are also often used to augment the Army force as well. When we invaded Iraq in '03, the MEU was a major part of the force that went in...along with the 82nd, 101st, 3rd ID, an 173rd.
There's really no reason the Marines couldn't simply be specialized divisions of the Army, other than tradition. They do, however, probably benefit from the focus of being their own branch, considering they do have their own specialized mission that they're intended to perform (and which the Army doesn't train for). You'd either wind up having a "marine" force within the Army that doesn't rotate much outside their own, or you'd get a watered down force that spends most of their careers doing non-"marine" operations and training. The latter wouldn't be beneficial, and the former is a strong argument for just having them remain their own branch.
Federal employees are expensive, though. It's similar to the "why do we pay contractors to feed our troops, rather than Army cooks" question. Because we pay the contractor a (relatively) fixed fee for that service. Whereas if one of those cooks gets injured, we're on the hook for veteran's benefits forever (rather than the contractor dealing with that issue). On the civilian side, it's similar...in engineering, at least, DoD civilians are willing to take a minor hit in pay for job security and benefits. So either you're buying into some pretty excessive long-term (and unknown) costs to support those employees, or you wind up having to constantly RIF them as projects complete (and now you need to pay them more, to compete with the private sector).
Yeah. They've also done a better job of getting schematics and documentation from the contractor as part of the contract, so that they can competitively bid out stuff they don't want to do internally instead of having to go back to the original contractor and being locked in.
This is all true, yes. We've gotten a lot better at handling our own in-service engineering. But for the initial design and procurement, I just don't think we want or need to develop that capability. As long as we're getting the TDPs we need to support (from an engineering perspective) the platform for the long run, I think letting Boeing or Lockheed or General Dynamics compete (in theory) do the original development makes sense.
That's one way to look at it, but those costs are built-in to the labor rates that the contractors charge to the government as part of the contract. The place that I work is on the low end of rates, but what they charge for my time is significantly more than what I actually make due to overhead and other benefits. For places where you realistically are never going to work on a non-sponsored program, it doesn't look that different from an accounting standpoint I don't think.
Yeah, I'd generally agree with that as long as things keep getting better wrt TDPs and contract management.
As many issues as I have with the current military / industrial complex, I don't think the military could do everything on its own, nor should it.
Take for example strategic bomber (and to a lesser extent aircraft in general) development through the Cold War. The fact that Boeing and other companies could defray their research and development costs by selling to both the military and the private sector helped to subsidize and accelerate the development of pretty much all aspects of aircraft design. In many cases civilian and military aircraft were produced side by side, or civilian aircraft were converted to military needs (see the E-3 / KC135, which are just converted Boeing 707s).
If you have the military developing and producing for the military, and the private sector developing and producing for the private sector, you end up with duplication of efforts. The output can be better suited to its specific role, but you lose the economy of scale.
There are certain benefits to using contractors / private companies. A big part of it depends on the mission and expected use too. If you expect your jets to sit in a hanger aside from X hours of training / year, it may be cheaper to just contract out maintenance to Boeing or Lockheed / Martin instead of recruiting, training, and supporting the fleet of maintenance staff that you are going to need.
On the other hand, if you are going to spend a decade with your aircraft constantly providing cover for troops, it's probably cheaper to maintain and support the aircraft with military staff.
We calculate those same rates for ourselves too, though. And they ain't cheap. It leads to stupid issues where we bid out work and the internal bid is higher than private bids due to our ridiculous overhead costs...so they don't get the work. But we still employ them, their overhead costs remain high because they're underutilized, and round and round we go. Or something like that.
So, if you are a Democrat who thinks we are going to get out of Afghanistan and do some low-intensity SpecOps / drone stuff for a decade or two, winding down makes a lot of sense. Why waste the production, why train up maintenance staff when everything is going to be sitting in the desert and obsolete until it rots away? Wind down, and coast for a generation on leftovers from the Cold War and a decade of ridiculous spending on the War on Terror.
If you are a Republican who thinks China is gearing up for WW3, the Russian Bear has been lulling us into a false sense of complacency, that we're going to need to intervene in Syria, Iran, and North Korea...you can see any cut in defense spending as money we're just going to need to spend in the future.
And hey, if we've invested that much money in the toys, it would be a shame not to use them...
My problem with defense cuts is that I don't trust us* not to enter another war, including another protracted bullshit occupation, regardless of the state our military is in. As a reservist to saw some reserve units doing one-on two-off deployment cycles, I think maintaining our military strength in line with our military needs and general bloodlust is important. And yeah, I just said that. Because our bloodlust doesn't seem to change regardless of what we can actually afford/manage to do.
* - And "us" doesn't mean Republicans. I remember the lead-up to Iraq. The American people are pretty shitty.
Our problem is that the Republicans running things:
A) Are dumbfuck chickenhawks, that think everyone has a hard on for warfare. Most people that aren't dumbfucks, that have been paying attention have realized that it just isn't worth it. There is no point in starting WW3 because even if you "win," you'll still lose.
I agree with where Obama is trying to take our armed forces. The huge conventional armies aren't terribly useful and we can get more bang for our buck by investing in things that allow us to do precision hits because most of our adversaries aren't going to be obvious state actors (the world economy kind of discourages states from going to war, not state actors probably care less about pissing off a public in regards to imploding the domestic market).
I think responsible R&D (as in something that big business is running horribly half-assed to defraud the gov't) is one of those areas where we should try to keep the funding constant. If it's being run responsibly and like a gov't asset (not a business, which means you'll spend money on research that might not have obvious guaranteed returns), it'll eventually return investments since the breakthroughs often have both military and civilian uses.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
AH-64:
Max. takeoff weight: 23,000 lb (10,433 kg) (that's 6,000 pounds of munitions or so)
Combat radius: 260 nmi (300 mi, 480 km)
AV-8b:
Max. takeoff weight, Rolling: 31,000 lb (14,100 kg)[1] (about 8,000 pounds of munitions)
Combat radius: 300 nmi (350 mi, 556 km)
F-35b:
60,000 lb class (27,300 kg)[1] (about 14,000 pounds of munitions)
Combat radius: 469 nmi (869 km)
The jets have much better range and payloads, as well as the air to air that you mentioned. The helicopters can do CAS better because they don't have to go past at more than 100 miles an hour to not fall out of the sky. Planes like the A-10 and most WW2 fighters fall in between those two ranges.
Notes:
0: you can increase payload by decreasing range somewhat. This mostly applies to the harrier and f 35 operating on short runways.
1: SVTOL gets all sorts of wierd with the weight. vertical take off is much, much lower. Short take off is unlisted.
edit: for giggles, since things are going this way for the military:
MQ-9 Reaper (predator b):
External Payload: 3,000 lb (1,400 kg)
Range: 999 nmi; 1,150 mi (1,850 km)
I suspect that we have seen the last US manned combat planes (or, at least, direct combat planes. Command roles will likely need to remain local, which means you need someone to ride herd on the drones). I would expect purchasing and operating expenses to drop dramatically and both payload and range to increase when pilots are pulled out of the planes.
Many of the problems here stem from the DoD side and not the contractor dragging their feet. I'll go into more detail when I'm not posting from my phone. Suffice it to say that if you stuff in a requirement that violates the laws of physics and then put the contractor on a cost-plus contract, the results will bepredictable and disappointing.
I don't believe we have the communication technology to allow unmanned planes to work in an air superiority/combat air patrol roles. CAS would be kinda scary as well. Intel gathering and strike, absolutely, but you kinda can't have a stealth drone as it is pretty easy to direction find their signals, and jamming technologies are pretty inexpensive. You really don't want failures when it comes to protecting stuff like carriers from other first world nation, if we ever end up in a serious shooting war. Drones suddenly being made totally ineffective is kinda a thing which can happen.
It is worth noting that for responsiveness reasons you may want to have your command in another nearby plane. But that plane could be reasonably stealthy, particularly if your drones are relatively smart. The only things that can take a drone out are either expensive or obvious. The first you defeat with numbers, the second with passive missiles (presumably, that are carried by your drones).
edit: another thought on stealth. You do not need your drone to broadcast if the guy giving it commands is close enough to use his own sensors. An F22 could certainly pull that off if they ever get around to finishing the electronics on them. A specialized plane build with that in mind could likely do a much better job (and for a bit less, particularly if you don't mind less aggressive handling).
It's easy to detect and jam the Ku signals we use now, but what about a laser uplink? Those are a thing now, and I imagine the military is big on getting those into their drones. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the RQ-170 already has something along those lines built in.
Anyway, how long do you think a jammer that can continually overpower the signal from a JSTAR or AWACS is going to last on a battlefield? Add some automation and the drones should be able to hold their own. Even if we lose a few, there aren't any dead or downed pilots, and the airframe is a fraction the cost of a manned aircraft.
You mention carriers, but again - when drones widely replace manned aircraft, carriers don't need to operate so close to the battlefield. You can setup a picket of drones to kill anything approaching the battle group, turn the missile systems and CIWS on 'automatic', and hold on until the battle is over. Hope no passenger airlines stray near the battle. Hell, the modern carrier battle group may just become obsolete outside of specific circumstances.
High performance (including heavy lift) drones have limited ranges, so your carrier group still needs to be close. Not very close mind you, but not in a harbor. You are spot on about extending your perimeter though. With loiter times on the order of days, you can afford to extend your perimeter to well over the horizon, which solves basically everything but submarines if you're willing to shoot everything that doesn't have a friendly IFF.
Its worth noting that using some variety of an AWACS plane to control your drones is asking for an expensive and bloody mess. They're giant targets, and they can't evade. You really want something along the lines of a high performance drone with its payload being a command/control system, some sensors and a human to assign targets. No reason to make the human worry about the flying, the drone is better at it than the human (humans pass out under high g loads, and they think slowly).
Yeah, that's true. Still, with reasonable automation and asynchronous communications (you aren't as worried about the drone sending information as receiving new orders / targets) it makes it much tougher to jam the signal.
Also, like you mentioned...a few HARM missiles will really put a dent in any jamming capability.
I've gotta disagree with the 'heavy lift = short range' argument. We currently operate / operated B1 and B2 bombers over Afghanistan out of Missouri and Diego Garcia. Take away the need for a human crew to sit for a day, and it becomes almost trivial to deploy from almost anywhere in the world.
The idea with using an AWACS plane is that it's going to loiter back behind the battlefield, with a nice picket of drones to defend it. Hell, go whole hog with the drone idea and make the AWACS / JSTAR aircraft unmanned, with a high-power and high-bandwidth data link patched back to a crew sitting in a trailer outside Reno.
When you take away the need for people in your aircraft, suddenly so many possibilities open up. Most of our heavy bombers are so 'heavy' because it's the most cost and personnel effective way of delivering a payload. But what if instead of one bomber carrying fifty bombs, you had twenty five cheap bombers carrying two bombs apiece? The odds of losing a few are much higher, but again - without crew, who really cares? With precision weapons (and spotter UAVs designating targets) do you really even need the ability to put 50 bombs in one place anymore?