Gates to Direct $60 Billion Package of New Capabilities to Reshape U.S. Forces

Jul 28, 2009 -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates is poised to direct the services to squeeze as much as $60 billion from their five-year investment plans to finance new capabilities he believes are higher priorities, a top Pentagon official said today.

David Ochmanek, deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development, said Gates is poised to issue revised guidance for the development of the force as soon as this week, a step that marks the first recommendations of the ongoing Quadrennial Defense Review. The classified document outlines programs and forces the Office of the Secretary of Defense believes the services must fund in their investment blueprints for fiscal years 2011 to 2015.

“The order of magnitude of the enhancement that the Quadrennial Defense Review has called for across the [future years defense plan] is on the order of $50 [billion] to $60 billion,” Ochmanek told defense reporters in Washington this morning.

The guidance effectively signals Gates’ opening move to begin recalibrating the Pentagon's FY-11 spending plan even as his proposals for changes to the FY-10 budget are still being considered in Congress.

In early June, Ochmanek recommended to Gates three proposals for new capability packages to reshape the U.S. military -- low-, medium- and high-cost options that carried approximate price tags over the five-year spending plan of $25 billion, $50 billion and $75 billion (DefenseAlert, June 17).

While the specifics behind the capabilities Gates wants the services to fund in their FY-11 to FY-15 investment plan remain under wraps, Ochmanek said that, in general, irregular warfare capabilities are manpower-intensive, while capabilities for dealing with anti-access challenges are capital-intensive.

“The Army is being asked to do a number of things, mostly to enhance the availably of key enablers to special operations and general-purpose forces doing counter-insurgency and counter-terrorist operations,” he said.

“The Air Force and Navy are being asked to do some of that but at the same time to enhance their capabilities to confront and defeat high-end anti-access threats,” Ochmanek added.

The services must update their five-year investment plans to ensure their spending proposals reflect Gates' guidance, which will mean shifting roughly $4 billion annually in each service’s budget plan -- a sum that will require some changes but not dramatic upheaval, he said.

“This mark on the wall of $50 billion to $60 billion in and of itself isn't a forcing function for massive change,” he said.

In August, the services will submit their spending proposals to the Office of the Secretary of Defense for review. In the fall, OSD will render judgment on the service budget proposals.

“The secretary made a deliberate choice in the QDR that the components” -- the services and the defense agencies -- “would have the first right of refusal, the first opportunity to make those trade-offs,” Ochmanek said.

“All the components have to make adjustments; the flavor of those adjustments varies by service and domain,” he added.

While he said QDR officials have assumed the defense budget will not grow, he expressed hope that the White House will find more money for defense.

“Frankly, we hope that the administration will be able to provide some positive growth to the DOD budget so that we don't have a lot of these painful choices because there isn't any 'low-hanging fruit' in the defense program anymore,” he said. “There's nothing that you can go to to find money that's not going to reduce some important capability.” -- Jason Sherman

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House Lawmakers Cast Anxious Eye on the Logistics of Iraq Drawdown

July 24, 2009 -- As Defense Department officials finalize plans for a large-scale redeployment of warfighting gear from Iraq starting next year, some lawmakers are concerned about the fate of the equipment the military wants to leave behind.

Michèle Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy, this week briefed lawmakers about the logistics involved in shifting the Pentagon's focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, which involves shipping more than 80,000 personnel and their equipment out of Iraq by next August.

After the closed July 22 session, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) issued a statement titled, “DOD Faces Challenges As U.S. Forces Redeploy From Iraq.”

The statement is meant to signal panel members' eagerness to provide close oversight of the complex process, which is expected to begin in earnest after the Iraqi general election in January 2010, a congressional source said. “There's a lot of concern that this goes right,” the source added.

“Our nation has not carried out a redeployment on this scale since the Vietnam War, and when I visited Vietnam years later I remember seeing rows and rows of U.S. equipment that we left behind,” Skelton's statement reads. “We must do a better job managing the redeployment from Iraq.”

Pentagon officials are in the midst of developing a “deliberate and rapid process” for the drawdown, DOD spokesman Air Force Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder said in a statement yesterday. Key decisions will center around the questions of what materiel needs to be transported, how quickly it must be shipped and what kinds of equipment will be left behind, he added.

The issue of leaving gear behind, in particular, raised concerns among some House defense panel members during the Flournoy briefing this week, according to the congressional source.

Defense officials typically consider leaving behind equipment -- for host-nation use or demilitarization -- when it is classified as excess materiel. Excess is gear so worn that the cost of shipping it would exceed its residual value.

Last month, Pentagon officials requested authority from Congress for a separate class of transferable items, worth up to $750 million, that could be left to the security forces of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

When the issue came up during debate on the fiscal year 2010 defense authorization bill, panel members decided against including the provision in the legislation. “Frankly, there were a lot of questions,” the congressional source said.

For one, Pentagon officials failed to explain what types of equipment they would consider parting with, according to the source. In addition, the source said, panelists had concerns about the counting rules, arguing $750 million in semi-worn warfighting gear, when counted at a fraction of the original purchase price, could result in a very large number of items.

Finally, DOD's proposal left lawmakers unsure about the effect of transferred equipment on the readiness of units, particularly those of the National Guard, whose service is crucial during domestic disasters, the source said.

Lawmakers this week also raised questions about what to do with equipment in the excess materiel category.

“Yes, some materiel is not worth shipping home -- generators, for example,” the congressional source said. “But there are a lot of communities in the U.S. who are planning for natural disasters who might want to have a shot at those generators and might be willing to pay for shipping them,” the source added.

At the briefing with Flournoy, Rep. Gene Taylor (D-MS) tasked defense officials to compile a list of “any and all” items they may consider leaving behind, Taylor's spokesman Ethan Rabin told InsideDefense.com today.

Taylor wants the list to be available to states and local communities across the United States, Rabin said. The idea is to “let the states and local communities make the decision of whether they want to bring that equipment back,” he added.

Meanwhile, members of the congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting this week began a 10-day trip to Iraq and Kuwait to examine DOD plans for the drawdown of government-owned equipment purchased by contractors, according to a July 21 commission statement.

“Determining the history, condition and usefulness of this property is a huge challenge and managing its disposition during the U.S. drawdown in Iraq will be a complicated and expensive operation,” commission Executive Director Robert Dickson is quoted as saying in the statement. -- Sebastian Sprenger

July 24, 2009

Inside Washington Publishers

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Afghans look beyond bickering leaders

WHEN Haji Faqirullah, the malik (head) of Korak Dana village, decided to marry off all five of his grandsons in one ceremony last year, there was an outcry in the community.

“People were shocked,” he laughed. “They were all complaining: that means you feed us only once instead of five times.”

That was exactly the point. Sitting in the shade of some mulberry trees, Faqirullah runs his fingers through his long white beard and plays with a mobile phone as he explains: “I was fed up with seeing everyone in my village bankrupted by weddings and wanted to set an example.”

High on the Shomali plains north of Kabul, in a landscape dominated by the snow-topped Hindu Kush mountains, Korak Dana is poor but extremely beautiful. Streams run through lush fields of green grapes, men wobble along stony lanes on donkeys and bicycles and women in blue burqas flit between the mudwalled compounds.

Like much of Afghanistan it has seen decades of war, first against the Russians, then different mujaheddin groups and lastly the Taliban. At one point Faqirullah led the entire village on a 17-hour exodus to the Panjshir valley during which several elders and children drowned crossing a river.

Today, far from the south and east of the country, where the Taliban have returned, the villagers want to move on from their troubled past.

Afghanistan will vote next month in its second presidential election since the Taliban were ousted eight years ago. In villages such as Korak Dana, with entrenched tribal traditions, notions of modern democracy may seem remote. Faqirullah says the elders have met several times to discuss how to vote and women tell me they will cast their ballots as instructed by their men.

Although only 90 minutes’ drive from Kabul, the village is still waiting for the government to build a road, bring electricity or open a factory that could give work to their young men. Meanwhile, it is the villagers who are making changes.

Ainuddin, the local teacher, leads me inside a low building and smiles at my astonishment as we enter a magical room of light and letters. Every inch of the mud walls is plastered with papers covered in drawing and writing, and more flutter from the ceiling.

For $100 (£60) a month provided by the charity Habitat for Humanity, he has made it his mission to teach the villagers to read and write. Fifty illiterate men and women attend his classes. Muhammad Mahfouz, 28, who never went to school because of war, walks four miles each way. “An illiterate is like a blind man,” he said. “I want to read so I can solve my problems for myself.”

An even more radical departure is the end of costly weddings. “The poorest family would spend $6,000 minimum on the marriage of a son,” said one woman, Parwin. “Imagine, some of us have five sons. All the time we were selling land and borrowing money to pay.”

Faqirullah said the village had been falling apart. “We had this crazy situation where the day after the wedding the bride would be left sitting alone in the house while her husband went off to Iran to work to pay for it all.”

Encouraged by female Afghan lawyers from the Women and Children Legal Resource Foundation, Faqirullah led the way in showing there was no shame in modest weddings.

Now villagers hold tea parties for the betrothed instead of banquets with rice and goat meat, or join together in mass weddings. All agree this simple step is making more difference to their lives than anything since the end of the Taliban.

While villagers such as these want to move on, the country’s leaders seem wedded to the past. Kabul is dominated by giant billboards from which the face of President Hamid Karzai stares out next to the brutish features of Marshal Mohammed Qasim Fahim, the Tajik former warlord he has chosen as his running-mate.

Fahim was blamed in a Human Rights Watch report in 2005 for “systematic human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law” such as murdering prisoners of war in the 1990s.

The president has also secured the support of General Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord known for running over his enemies with tanks.

Ordinary Afghans and the international community are horrified by the reemergence of such figures. Among the most vocal in protesting to the president was Kai Eide, the top United Nations official in Afghanistan.

“We need more competent politicians and fewer warlords,” he said. “There’s been a very significant improvement in government over the past seven or eight months with some new reformist ministers and we don’t want to lose that.”

Although Karzai used to blame the warlords for the destruction in Afghanistan, supporters say he has had little alternative but to work with them.

Prince Ali Siraj, the grandson of one king and the great-nephew of another, sits in a house full of black-and-white photographs of his illustrious ancestors.

“The most important thing Karzai has done is keep this country together,” he said. “He has to make deals with strong men to avoid breaking Afghanistan into north and south.”

This election is far more hotly contested than the last in 2004. Then, there was no doubt about the victory of Karzai, who had been installed as interim president by the West.

The international community and local population now seem equally disenchanted. A poll in May showed Karzai’s support was down from 55% to 31%, although the next highest candidate scored only 7%.

To ensure reelection, Karzai has had to turn to regional powerbrokers. “Dostum got 1.2m votes in the last election,” said the president’s elder brother Mahmoud Karzai, a businessman who is running his campaign. “We can’t ignore that.”

To the fury of his international backers, Karzai also pardoned one of Afghanistan’s few convicted heroin traffickers because he came from a powerful family.

“I prefer to call it forgiving, not pardoning,” Karzai told The Sunday Times. “It’s giving a new chance to someone whose

family has made many sacrifices for this country.”

Although it is hard to find anyone in Kabul who says they will vote for Karzai, most expect him to win because of support from his fellow Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group. He has been helped by the failure of the opposition to unite behind one candidate. There are 41 candidates, most of whom have no hope. Two are women, one a psychiatrist and the other the widow of a murdered aviation minister.

The 51-year-old president’s main challengers are two former ministers, Dr Abdullah Abdullah, 49, an ophthalmologist and former foreign minister, and Ashraf Ghani, a 60-year-old academic and former finance minister.

Both took part in the country’s first presidential debate last Thursday, broadcast by the private Tolo network on radio and television. An empty podium stood between them after Karzai refused to take part in the discussion.

“He didn’t want to favour one channel,” said his brother. Others said he was scared.

Ghani came over better in the debate, helped by advice from James Carville, the US strategist who oversaw the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992.

Aiming to attract the votes of young people – about two-thirds of the population is under 25 – he promised to create 1m jobs and provide wider access to education.

Support is mounting for Abdullah, however. He is well known for his past in the mujaheddin, who fought the Soviet occupation.

Among his backers is Karzai’s uncle, Asadullah Wasafi, one of the country’s most respected tribal elders. “It’s because Karzai is my nephew that I know he’s not capable,” he said.

The biggest challenge is making sure the election happens. In the Election Commission office in Kabul, British-printed ballot papers are being sent to 7,000 polling stations. Thousands of donkeys have been hired to reach remote areas.

With security worsening in the face of an increasingly powerful Taliban insurgency, the big question mark is voter turnout, particularly in the southern Pashtun region. According to the latest UN security map, 164 of Afghanistan’s 378 districts are highly unsafe. In May, for the first time, the number of violent incidents in a month passed 1,000.

General Karl Eikenberry, the former US commander in Afghanistan who recently returned as ambassador, said he was optimistic: “In spite of all the challenges, think about Afghanistan 10 or 20 years ago, when differences were being settled by Katyusha rockets fired into Kabul and tens of thousands of innocent civilians slaughtered, and here we are, the next president of Afghanistan being decided by open political debate.”

Nicolize [Nik-ol-ize]

tr.v. nik-o-lized, nik-o-lizing nik-o-lizes

The practice of listening to only a few bars of a musical selection in order to economize time or wireless internet download costs. Associated with busy people and those suffering limited Internet access. Common to Sub-Saharan Africa and Borneo, the practice was perfected by Dr. Nicola Moore.

DOD to Continue 'Systematic' Targeting of Extremist Leaders in Afghan War

July 23, 2009 -- U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan will continue to operate under a mantra proven successful in Iraq -- that victory against violent extremist groups can be achieved by dismantling their network of leaders, a senior Pentagon official said today.

“Going after an insurgent network or terrorist network's command-and-control capabilities and systematically picking apart the network through intelligence-led operations is a very important feature of counterinsurgency as we practice it,” Michael Vickers, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities, said during a breakfast with reporters.

“Those operations were central to our success in Iraq, and they have been very important in Afghanistan from the beginning,” he said.

U.S. forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere will continue to act directly or through intermediaries to achieve their objectives, according to Vickers. Indirect action, as military officials have called this approach, should be the goal in all U.S. operations because it carries less risk of alienating local populations or the American people, Vickers argued.

“The question is, do circumstances in the United States or in that country allow me to do that right away?” he asked.

Vickers' comments today seem rooted in a relatively new concept in Defense Department thinking, which stipulates that extremist groups should be viewed as complex networks that are best fought by network-like organizations of DOD and the intelligence community.

Intelligence plays a central role part in this construct of a “global counterterrorism network,” as Vickers called it in a speech last October at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“The idea of using intelligence to pick apart a shadowy network . . . by going after the top-level leadership and the mid-level leadership . . . is a very valuable approach,” he said today.

The secretive world surrounding this approach, with small teams of U.S. operatives located worldwide, remains entirely out of public view. Officials would only speak in general terms about the formation of “hunter networks” and the “global pursuit” to create what is known as the “global antiterrorist environment,” or GATE, in Pentagon jargon.

And, as Vickers said last October, the fight is “not for the faint of heart” because it requires “relentless” operations. -- Sebastian Sprenger

After 'Rush to Spend' Hundreds of Millions, Lawmakers Scrutinize CERP

July 23, 2009 -- A Pentagon program that arms commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan with more than a billion dollars in cash annually to fund small-scale, urgent humanitarian relief and reconstruction projects is coming under new scrutiny from lawmakers who are concerned about the effort's stewardship.

The House Appropriations Committee yesterday approved its version of the Pentagon's fiscal year 2010 defense bill that freezes $500 million -- or nearly 40 percent of the $1.3 billion the committee is prepared to allocate for the Commander's Emergency Response Program (CERP) -- until the Defense Department prepares a “thorough” report on the program.

“While the committee understands the value of CERP for our combatant commanders, it is deeply concerned that CERP has grown from an incisive counterinsurgency tool to an alternative U.S. development program with few limits and little management,” the panel notes in a report prepared by its defense subcommittee.

“The U.S. Army and U.S. Central Command have failed to justify ever-growing CERP budget requests or to execute proper management or oversight of those funds,” the report states.

Through CERP, commanders have a kitty to fund a wide range of construction and non-construction projects, including transportation, electricity and condolence payments.

The committee cites “recent reports” of “intense pressure” on provincial reconstruction teams and combatant commanders to “'rush to spend' hundreds of millions of dollars in the last quarter of the fiscal year,” the report states. “They have submitted a barrage of multi-million dollar CERP proposals that seem designed primarily to ensure that all available funds are spent.”

The panel says the Pentagon may be running afoul of a provision in the FY-09 Defense Appropriations Act designed to prevent a last-minute surge in spending by prohibiting more than 20 percent of the annual allocation to be obligated in the last two months of the fiscal year.

“Given these concerns, the committee believes a fundamental review of CERP is now urgently required,” the report states.

The lawmakers direct the defense secretary, in coordination with the national security adviser, to prepare a report on the program which explains: how CERP budget requests are generated and justified and an assessment of funding major projects during the last quarter of the fiscal year.

The review is also to assess the management and oversight of CERP funds, and provide an assessment “for Iraq and Afghanistan of the goals, purpose and expected requirement for CERP funds in the coming year” which accounts, according to the report, for the “appropriate mix of infrastructure projects and smaller-scale humanitarian projects.”

Lastly, the report -- due 90 days after the enactment of the FY-10 spending bill -- is to review “the appropriate relationship between projects funded with CERP and development projects carried out by the U.S. Agency for International Development.” -- Jason Sherman

Vickers Questions Need for New Military and Intelligence Authorities

July 23, 2009 -- While the legal authorities governing military and intelligence activities continue to blur in this era of irregular and asymmetric warfare, there is no pressing need to create a new statute to address that crossover, a top Defense Department official said today.

With both communities becoming increasingly intertwined in ongoing counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations, the focus should be on balancing the “suite” of existing authorities, instead of implementing new ones, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, Low-Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities Michael Vickers said today.

Title 10 of the U.S. Code provides the legal guidance for all U.S. military activities. Title 50 is the governing statute that sets legal parameters for the intelligence community.

“You would not go with a purely blended [approach] where there is a case that Title 10 ought to dominate, or if there is a case where Title 50 would dominate,” Vickers said during a breakfast in Washington. “It is really more the suite of the three that is important for the range of challenges that we have.”

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said he supported the creation of “Title 60” legislation, which would create a hybrid set of authorities that would fall between Titles 10 and 60, during his confirmation hearing in January.

“I really think we need a Title [60]. I think we need to get rid of this artificial division in this global campaign against terrorists when the tools that are available in the Department of Defense and the intelligence agency are both applicable and both need to be put together to get the job done,” Blair said at the time.

Ensuring and strengthening the operational relationship between the two communities, “is central to the environment in which we find ourselves, and we think we will continue to find ourselves,” Vickers said.

However, he maintained that the relationship between the military and the intelligence community “has never been closer” and that the operational realities of the global war on terror have already attuned intelligence and military officials on how to work within the current rules.

“That integration, whatever one calls it, about sharing capabilities and knowing that there is a purpose for Title 10 and there is a purpose for Title 50 and there is some blending,” he added. “That really is an important concept and it is part of our reality today and has been for some time.”

When asked if new legal authorities, akin to a Title 60-type mandate, would help reinforce those ties between the intelligence agencies and DOD, he replied: “There is always more you can do.”

That said, Vickers reiterated the need to maintain independence between the two authorities, while recognizing the “need for blended” activities will be a persistent hallmark of all current and future counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations. -- Carlo Muñoz



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DOD RETHINKS FORCE STRUCTURE; STRIKE FIGHTER GAP COULD SHRINK

As the Navy mulls what to do about a projected strike fighter shortfall that has ballooned to 243 aircraft in the next decade, a top-ranking defense official has hinted at force-structure changes that may come out of the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review that could have major implications on the size of that gap.

Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, vice-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee during his July 9 re-appointment hearing that Defense Department officials are laying out a strategy in the QDR that is “a departure from the two-major-theater-war construct that we have adhered to in the past,” and one that would focus more on irregular warfare.

His comments indicate that the Pentagon may be re-examining the value of carriers and carrier air wings as part of its shift in force structure, Ron O’Rourke, an analyst at the Congressional Research Service, said during a July 21 discussion on the strike fighter gap at the Center for National Policy in Washington.

The Navy is facing a strike fighter shortfall of between 125 and 243 aircraft -- and possibly more -- as early as 2015 when aging F/A-18A-D Hornets start retiring and the follow-on F-35 Joint Strike Fighter joins the fleet.

During hearings this year, lawmakers have voiced their frustrations to Navy officials about what they perceive as a lack of answers on what to do about the strike fighter gap. The Navy has countered that it is reviewing the issue in the QDR.

The Navy has three possible ways of dealing with the problem: extend the service lives of legacy Hornets; ramp up production of the JSF and ensure that it stays on time; or buy more F/A-18E/F Super Hornets.

But Cartwright’s comments indicate that the Pentagon may take a second look at just how many strike fighters would be needed overall, O’Rourke said.

“We’re moving to a new strategy that looks at these other kinds of conflicts and one major regional peer competitor rather than two overlapping major regional conflicts,” he said. “Then the question that would flow out of that is what value carrier air wings have in helping to fulfill that strategy and those kinds of warfighting concerns.”

Cartwright, responding to questioning from Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) about why the Pentagon had opted to end production of Air Force F-22 Raptors at 187 aircraft, attributed the decision to a “military requirement . . . associated with the strategy that we are laying out in the QDR.”

“The strategy that we are moving toward is one that is acknowledging the fact that we are not in that type of conflict [two major theater wars],” the general said. “We believe that the sizing construct . . . demands that we have fifth-generation fighters across all three services rather than just one, and that the number of those fighters probably does not need to be sufficient to take on two simultaneous peer competitors.”

O’Rourke noted that carriers and their air wings have value beyond conflicts.

“I think it’s important to remember that forward-deployed naval forces including carriers and carrier air wings are important even in the absence of war in terms of shaping the political environment,” he said.

Congress pushes for action

The Pentagon intends to weigh all issues relating to the strike fighter gap in the QDR, but many in Congress have expressed an unwillingness to wait.

In the fiscal year 2009 president’s budget request, DOD laid out its intentions to buy 18 Super Hornets in FY-10, but then ultimately cut that buy to just nine aircraft when the FY-10 budget request was released earlier this year.

The Senate Armed Services Committee recommended replacing the nine aircraft that were removed in its mark of the FY-10 defense authorization bill last month. House authorizers did not add more aircraft, but approved a future multiyear buy of Super Hornets. The House Appropriations defense subcommittee recommended buying 18 Super Hornets in the FY-10 defense appropriations bill, a mark that was approved by the full committee last week.

Lawmakers have urged the Navy to buy more Super Hornets, citing concerns over the ability of the JSF to stay on time and noting that it would be expensive to extend the service lives of legacy Hornets from 8,600 to 10,000 hours.

There are estimates as high as $26 million for extending the service life of a Hornet that far, O’Rourke said.

“Any scope of work you define will then be variable from one aircraft to the next, but as a general matter, there is at least a number that seems to be the current high-end quoted figure,” he said.

Due to concerns about the F-35’s ability to stay on time and the high cost of doing a service life extension, buying more Super Hornets makes more sense, according to Robert Dunn, president of the Association of Naval Aviation, who also spoke at the CNP event.

“You’re getting a new aircraft at a cost of 20 percent less per flight hour than what you would have if you continued with [legacy Hornets],” he said. “You would also have an aircraft with all of the latest bells and whistles.”

A number of lawmakers agree with Dunn’s view. Rep. Gene Taylor (D-MS), chairman of the House Armed Services seapower and expeditionary forces subcommittee, said in June that “it makes absolutely no sense to any of us that we should pay $26 million to extend the flying life of an older plane by just 1,500 hours when, for $50 million, they could buy a brand-new, more-capable plane that will be good for 8,000 hours.”

Service life extension program

Meanwhile, the F/A-18 program is continuing to work on the service life extension program (SLEP) in an attempt to find some aircraft that can be affordably extended to 10,000 hours and help keep the gap from growing larger.

While the SLEP program will not fix the problem, it is an essential part of the solution, said Bob Gower, Boeing’s vice-president for the F/A-18 and EA-18G Growler.

“This is a multifaceted problem and you aren’t going to fix it with any one solution,” he told Inside the Navy July 15. “You’re not going to fix this problem just by buying F/A-18s or by keeping JSF on track. You also have to go ahead and make sure funding is in place for the SLEP program to extend the current Hornets, so all those pieces have to come together.”

Gower said a “worst-case scenario” would involve the JSF being delayed and the SLEP only bringing Hornets to 8,600 hours. If that happens, the 243-aircraft figure “could actually grow,” he said.

The program is looking at up to 300 of the 600-plus legacy Hornets that could be extended to 10,000 hours, Gower noted. About half of those 300 could be characterized as the “best of the fleet” that have the best chance of reaching the 10,000-hour mark, he said. Beyond that, it becomes more difficult to extend service lives.

“There’s a decision point that says, ‘OK, to get from 150 to 300 airplanes, you’re not just taking the pristine classics, you’re having to go into some that have had more issues that they have to go address,’” Gower said.

The F/A-18 program has wrapped up phases one and two of the service life assessment program (SLAP) that will determine what needs to be done to the aircraft during the SLEP, Capt. Mark Darrah, the Navy’s F/A-18 and EA-18G program manager, said in a July 17 e-mail response to questions from ITN.

“At the time, the program is in the process of refining the plan and prioritizing all SLEP efforts,” Darrah said.

The SLEP is divided into three phases:

Phase A, which was completed last November, involved providing preliminary cost estimates and performing analysis of safety of flight;

Phase B, which will involve categorizing and prioritizing critical aircraft structure and developing structural analysis tools, began in December and will be completed in spring of 2010; and

Phase C, which will define and certify all required structural modifications, is scheduled to begin with engineering work in spring 2010, with SLEP modifications taking place in the 2012-2018 time frame, according to Darrah.

SLEP estimates are expected to reach “Phase B maturity” by later this summer, with further refinements over the next 12-18 months that will bring better definition to the cost estimate, the captain said. -- Dan Taylor

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DOD Taking Hard Look at Irregular Warfare Air Units in QDR

July 23, 2009 -- Pentagon officials are taking a hard look at how the creation of irregular warfare air units could enhance current and future IW-based operations and overall strategy, as part of the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review, a senior DOD official said today.

“Do [we] have light air capabilities . . . that you can use, that are particularly useful in a counterinsurgency environment?” Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, Low-Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities Michael Vickers asked. “That is one of the issues that this QDR is looking at, how to create these irregular warfare air units.”

The notion of standing up irregular warfare air units is one of many “enabling” capabilities DOD officials are exploring in the QDR to enhance IW capabilities, among special operations and conventional forces, according to Vickers.

“Further improving our irregular warfare -- across the force and not just [in] special operations forces -- capabilities and capacities is job one for the QDR,” he told reporters today during a breakfast in Washington. “So we will look principally where we still have gaps.”

Those enabling capabilities, he added, will harness the personnel increases made to the special operations force, allowing them “to operate more effectively, rather than expanding the operating units.”

The 2006 QDR called for an expansion of all special operations units by one-third. “Each part of the force took a different approach, but they all grew essentially at the same rate,” Vickers said. “Some of that growth is completed, some of it is still underway . . . that sort of takes us to where we are now.”

The Navy and the Air Force have been busy developing their own IW aircraft, the Super Tucano-based “Imminent Fury” plane and the MC-12W Project Liberty aircraft respectively, but a number of questions still remain regarding their role on the battlefield, Vickers explained.

“Should we do this, number one [because] nothing has been decided, and then what that mix might be?” he asked. “But then it might not reside in the special operations forces, it might reside in the general purpose forces. It is more of a counterinsurgency capability, and that is something that has to be looked at” in the QDR, he said.

The Navy's “Imminent Fury” aircraft had been set to undergo operational testing in Southwest Asia, but Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead scrapped those plans due to budget concerns.

The Air Force's MC-12W Project Liberty aircraft is already in production with one platform deployed to Iraq. Air Force officials are also working an analysis of alternatives on a new light-strike, light-mobility platform dubbed “OA-X.”

Vickers said he believes there is a need for an IW-based aircraft capability and that it is reflected clearly in the ongoing QDR deliberations. “But the question is how much and . . . exactly [what] is the mix,” he added. “I am fairly confident that we will come up with something.”

The great advantage of these aircraft, he added, is their adaptability to the “counterinsurgency battlefield” and their relatively low cost, making them affordable to a large number of partner nation forces, who cannot afford C-17s or F-16s.

“When you look at what a partner [nation] air capability might be . . . these kinds of aircraft would seem to be quite useful around the world, [and] they are getting a look” in the QDR, Vickers said, adding the air units are “an idea whose time has come.” -- Carlo Muñoz

The US takes to the shadows in Iraq

By Michael Schwartz. Asia Times.

Here's how reporters Steven Lee Myers and Marc Santora of the New York Times described the highly touted American withdrawal from Iraq's cities last week:

Much of the complicated work of dismantling and removing millions of dollars of equipment from the combat outposts in the city has been done during the dark of night. General Ray Odierno, the overall American commander in Iraq, has ordered that an increasing number of basic operations - transport and re-supply convoys, for example - take place at night, when fewer Iraqis are likely to see that the American withdrawal is not total.

Acting in the dark of night, in fact, seems to catch the nature of American plans for Iraq in a particularly striking way. Last week, despite the death of Michael Jackson, Iraq made it back into the TV news as Iraqis celebrated a highly publicized American military withdrawal from their cities. Fireworks went off; some Iraqis gathered to dance and cheer; the first military parade since Saddam Hussein's day took place (in the fortified Green Zone, the country's ordinary streets still being too dangerous for such things); the US handed back many small bases and outposts; and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki proclaimed a national holiday - "sovereignty day", he called it.

All of this fit with a script promisingly laid out by President Barack Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign. More recently, in his much-praised speech to the students of Egypt's Cairo University, he promised that the US would keep no bases in Iraq, and would indeed withdraw its military forces from the country by the end of 2011.

Unfortunately, not just for the Iraqis, but for the American public, it's what's happening in "the dark" - beyond the glare of lights and TV cameras - that counts. While many critics of the Iraq War have been willing to cut the Obama administration some slack as its foreign policy team and the US military gear up for that definitive withdrawal, something else - something more unsettling - appears to be going on.

And it wasn't just the president's hedging over withdrawing American "combat" troops from Iraq which, in any case, make up as few as one-third of the 130,000 US forces still in the country - now extended from 16 to 19 months. Nor was it the re-labeling of some of them as "advisors" so they could, in fact, stay in the vacated cities, or the redrawing of the boundary lines of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, to exclude a couple of key bases the Americans weren't about to give up.

After all, there can be no question that the Obama administration's policy is indeed to reduce what the Pentagon might call the US military "footprint" in Iraq. To put it another way, Obama's key officials seem to be opting not for blunt-edged, former president George W Bush-style militarism, but for what might be thought of as an administrative push in Iraq, what Vice President Joe Biden has called "a much more aggressive program vis-a-vis the Iraqi government
to push it to political reconciliation".

An anonymous senior State Department official described this new "dark of night" policy to Christian Science Monitor reporter Jane Arraf in this way: "One of the challenges of that new relationship is how the US can continue to wield influence on key decisions without being seen to do so."

Without being seen to do so. On this General Odierno and the unnamed official are in agreement. And so, it seems, is Washington. As a result, the crucial thing you can say about the Obama administration's military and civilian planning so far is this: ignore the headlines, the fireworks, and the briefly cheering crowds of Iraqis on your TV screen. Put all that talk of withdrawal aside for a moment and - if you take a closer look, letting your eyes adjust to the darkness - what is vaguely visible is the silhouette of a new American posture in Iraq. Think of it as the Obama Doctrine. And what it doesn't look like is the posture of an occupying power preparing to close up shop and head for home.

As your eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, you begin to identify a deepening effort to ensure that Iraq remains a US client state, or, as General Odierno described it to the press on June 30th, "a long-term partner with the United States in the Middle East". Whether Obama's national security team can succeed in this is certainly an open question, but, on a first hard look, what seems to be coming into focus shouldn't be too unfamiliar to students of history. Once upon a time, it used to have a name: colonialism.

Colonialism in Iraq
Traditional colonialism was characterized by three features: ultimate decision-making rested with the occupying power instead of the indigenous client government; the personnel of the colonial administration were governed by different laws and institutions than the colonial population; and the local political economy was shaped to serve the interests of the occupying power. All the features of classic colonialism took shape in the Bush years in Iraq and are now, as far as we can tell, being continued, in some cases even strengthened, in the early months of the Obama era.

The US Embassy in Iraq, built by the Bush administration to the tune of $740 million, is by far the largest in the world. It is now populated by more than 1,000 administrators, technicians, and professionals - diplomatic, military, intelligence, and otherwise - though all are regularly, if euphemistically, referred to as "diplomats" in official statements and in the media. This level of staffing - 1,000 administrators for a country of perhaps 30 million - is well above the classic norm for imperial control. Back in the early 20th century, for instance, Great Britain utilized fewer officials to rule a population of 300 million in its Indian Raj.

Such a concentration of foreign officialdom in such a gigantic regional command center with no downsizing or withdrawals yet apparent certainly signals Washington's larger imperial design: to have sufficient administrative labor power on hand to ensure that American advisors remain significantly embedded in Iraqi political decision-making, in its military, and in the key ministries of its (oil-dominated) economy.

From the first moments of the occupation of Iraq, US officials have been sitting in the offices of Iraqi politicians and bureaucrats, providing guidelines, training decision-makers, and brokering domestic disputes. As a consequence, Americans have been involved, directly or indirectly, in virtually all significant government decision-making.

In a recent article, for example, the New York Times reported that US officials are "quietly lobbying" to cancel a mandated nationwide referendum on the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) negotiated between the United States and Iraq - a referendum that, if defeated, would at least theoretically force the immediate withdrawal of all US troops from the country. In another article, the Times reported that embassy officials have "sometimes stepped in to broker peace between warring blocs" in the Iraqi Parliament. In yet another, the military newspaper Stars and Stripes mentioned in passing that an embassy official "advises Iraqis running the $100 million airport" just completed in Najaf. And so it goes.

Segregated living
Most colonial regimes erect systems in which foreigners involved in occupation duties are served (and disciplined) by an institutional structure separate from the one that governs the indigenous population. In Iraq, the US has been building such a structure since 2003, and the Obama administration shows every sign of extending it.

As in all embassies around the world, US Embassy officials are not subject to the laws of the host country. The difference is that, in Iraq, they are not simply stamping visas and the like, but engaged in crucial projects involving them in myriad aspects of daily life and governance, although as an essentially separate caste within Iraqi society. Military personnel are part of this segregated structure: the recently signed SOFA insures that American soldiers will remain virtually untouchable by Iraqi law, even if they kill innocent civilians.

Versions of this immunity extend to everyone associated with the occupation. Private security, construction, and commercial contractors employed by occupation forces are not protected by the SOFA agreement, but are nonetheless shielded from the laws and regulations that apply to normal Iraqi residents. As an Iraq-based FBI official told the New York Times, the obligations of contractors are defined by "new arrangements between Iraq and the United States governing contractors' legal status". In a recent case in which five employees of one US contractor were charged with killing another contractor, the case was jointly investigated by Iraqi police and "local representatives of the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation]", with ultimate jurisdiction negotiated by Iraqi and US embassy officials. The FBI has established a substantial presence in Iraq to carry out these "new arrangements".

This special handling extends to enterprises servicing the billions of dollars spent every month in Iraq on US contracts. A contractor's prime responsibility is to follow "guidelines the US military handed down in 2006". In all this, Iraqi law has a distinctly secondary role. In one apparently typical case, a Kuwaiti contractor hired to feed US soldiers was accused of imprisoning its foreign workers and then, when they protested, sending them home without pay. This case was handled by US officials, not the Iraqi government.

Beyond this legal segregation, the US has also been erecting a segregated infrastructure within Iraq. Most embassies and military bases around the world rely on the host country for food, electricity, water, communications, and daily supplies. Not the US embassy or the five major bases that are at the heart of the American military presence in that country. They all have their own electrical generating and water purification systems, their own dedicated communications, and imported food from outside the country. None, naturally, offer indigenous Iraqi cuisine; the embassy imports ingredients suitable for reasonably upscale American restaurants, and the military bases feature American fast food and chain restaurant fare.

The United States has even created the rudiments of its own transportation system. Iraqis often are delayed when traveling within or between cities, thanks to an occupation-created (and now often Iraqi-manned) maze of checkpoints, cement barriers, and bombed-out streets and roads; on the other hand, US soldiers and officials in certain areas can move around more quickly, thanks to special privileges and segregated facilities.

In the early years of the occupation, large military convoys transporting supplies or soldiers simply took temporary possession of Iraqi highways and streets. Iraqis who didn't quickly get out of the way were threatened with lethal firepower. To negotiate sometimes hours-long lines at checkpoints, Americans were given special ID cards
that "guaranteed swift passage ... in a separate lane past waiting Iraqis". Though the guaranteed "swift passage" was supposed to end with the signing of the SOFA, the system is still operating at many checkpoints, and convoys continue to roar through Iraqi communities with "Iraqi drivers still pulling over en masse".

Recently, the occupation has also been appropriating various streets and roads for its exclusive use (an idea that may have been borrowed from Israel's 40-year-old occupation of the West Bank.) This innovation has made unconvoyed transportation safer for embassy officials, contractors, and military personnel, while degrading further the Iraqi road system, already in a state of disrepair, by closing useable thoroughfares. Paradoxically, it has also allowed insurgents to plant roadside bombs with the assurance of targeting only foreigners. Such an incident outside Falluja illustrates what have now become Obama-era policies in Iraq:

The Americans were driving along a road used exclusively by the American military and reconstruction teams when a bomb, which local Iraqi security officials described as an improvised explosive device, went off. No Iraqi vehicles, even those of the army and the police, are allowed to use the road where the attack occurred, according to residents. There is a checkpoint only 200 yards from the site of the attack to prevent unauthorized vehicles, the residents said.

It is unclear whether this road will be handed back to the Iraqis, if and when the base it services is shuttered. Either way, the larger policy appears to be well established - the designation of segregated roads to accommodate the 1,000 diplomats and tens of thousands of soldiers and contractors who implement their policies. And this is only one aspect of a dedicated infrastructure designed to facilitate ongoing US involvement in developing, implementing, and administering political-economic policies in Iraq.

Whose military is it?
One way to "free up" the American military for withdrawal would, of course, be if the Iraqi military could manage the pacification mission alone. But don't expect that any time soon. According to media reports, if all goes well, this isn't likely to occur for at least a decade. One telltale sign of this is the pervasive presence of American military advisors still embedded in Iraqi combat units. First Lieutenant Matthew Liebal, for example, "sits every day beside Lieutenant Colonel Mohammed Hadi", the commander of the Iraqi 43rd Army Brigade that patrols eastern Baghdad.

When it comes to the Iraqi military, this sort of supervision won't be temporary. After all, the military the US helped create in Iraq still lacks, among other things, significant logistical capability, heavy artillery, and an air force
. Consequently, US forces transport and re-supply Iraqi troops, position and fire high-caliber ordnance, and supply air support when needed. Since the US military is unwilling to allow Iraqi officers to command American soldiers, they obviously can't make decisions about firing artillery, launching and directing US Air Force planes, or sending US logistical personnel into war zones. All major Iraqi missions are, then, fated to be accompanied by US advisors and support personnel for an unknown period to come.

The Iraqi military is not expected to get a wing of modern jet fighters (or have the trained pilots to fly them) until at least 2015. This means that, wherever US air power might be stationed, including the massive air base at Balad north of Baghdad, it will, in effect, be the Iraqi air force for the foreseeable future.

Even the simplest policing functions of the military might prove problematic without the American presence. Typically, when an Iraqi battalion commander was asked by New York Times reporter Steven Lee Myers "whether he needed American backup for a criminal arrest, he replied simply, 'Of course'". John Snell, an Australian advisor to the US military, was just as blunt, telling an Agence France Presse reporter that, if the United States withdrew its troops, the Iraqi military "would rapidly disintegrate".

In a World Policy Journal article last winter, John A Nagl, a military expert and former advisor to General David Petraeus, expressed a commonly held opinion that an independent Iraqi military is likely to be at least a decade away.

Whose economy is it?
Terry Barnich, a victim of the previously discussed Falluja roadside bombing, personified the economic embeddedness of the occupation. As the US State Department's Deputy Director of the Iraq Transition Assistance Office and the top adviser to Iraq's Electricity Minister, when he died he was "returning from an inspection of a wastewater treatment plant being built in Falluja".

His dual role as a high official in the policy-making process and the "top advisor" to one of Iraq's major infrastructural ministries catches the continuing US posture toward Iraq in the early months of the Obama era. Iraq remains, however reluctantly, a client government; significant aspects of ultimate decision-making power still reside with the occupation forces. Note, by the way, that Barnich was evidently not even traveling with Iraqi officials.

The intrusive presence of the Baghdad embassy extends to the all-important oil industry, which today provides 95% of the government's funds. When it comes to energy, the occupation has long sought to shape policy and transfer operational responsibility from Iraqi state-owned enterprises of the Saddam Hussein years to major international oil companies. In one of its most successful efforts, in 2004, the US delivered an exclusive $1.2 billion contract to reconstruct Iraq's decrepit southern oil transport facilities (which handle 80% of its oil flow) to KBR, the notorious former subsidiary of Halliburton. Supervision of that famously mismanaged contract, still uncompleted five years later, was allocated to the US Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

The Iraqi government, in fact, still exerts remarkably little control over "Iraqi" oil revenues. The Development Fund for Iraq (whose revenues are deposited in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York) was established under United Nations auspices just after the invasion and receives 95% of the proceeds from Iraq's oil sales. All government withdrawals are then overseen by the UN-sanctioned International Advisory and Monitoring Board, a US-appointed panel of experts drawn mainly from the global oil and financial industries. The transfer of this oversight function to an Iraqi-appointed body, which was supposed to take place in this January, has been delayed by the Obama administration, which claims that the Iraqi government is not yet ready to take on such a responsibility.

In the meantime, the campaign to transfer administration of core oil operations to the major oil companies continues. Despite the resistance of Iraqi oil workers, the administrators of the two national oil companies, a majority bloc in parliament, and public opinion, the US has continued to pressure the al-Maliki administration to enact an oil law that would mandate licensing devices called production-sharing agreements (PSAs).

If enacted, these PSAs would, without transferring permanent ownership, grant oil companies effective control over Iraq's oil fields, giving them full discretion to exploit the country's oil reserves from exploration to sales. US pressure has ranged from ongoing "advice" delivered by American officials stationed in relevant Iraqi ministries to threats to confiscate some or all of the oil monies deposited in the Development Fund.

At the moment, the Iraqi government is attempting to take a more limited step: auctioning management contracts to international oil companies in an effort to increase production at eight existing oil and natural gas fields. While the winning companies would not gain the full discretion to explore, produce, and sell in some of the world's potentially richest fields, they would at least gain some administrative control over upgrading equipment and extracting oil, possibly for as long as 20 years.

If the auction proves ultimately successful (not at all a certainty, since the first round produced only one as-yet-unsigned agreement), the Iraqi oil industry would become more deeply embedded in the occupation apparatus, no matter what officially happens to American forces in that country. Among other things, the American embassy would almost certainly be responsible for inspecting and guiding the work of the contract-winners, while the US military and private contractors would become guarantors of their on-the-ground security. Fayed al-Nema, the CEO of the South Oil Company, spoke for most of the opponents of such deals when he told Reuters reporter Ahmed Rasheed that the contracts, if approved, would "put the Iraqi economy in chains and shackle its independence for the next 20 years".

Who owns Iraq?
In 2007, Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve, told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that "taking Saddam out was essential" - a point he made in his book The Age of Turbulence - because the United States could not afford to be "beholden to potentially unfriendly sources of oil and gas" in Iraq. It's exactly that sort of thinking that's still operating in US policy circles: the 2008 National Defense Strategy, for example, calls for the use of American military power to maintain "access to and flow of energy resources vital to the world economy".

After only five months in office, the Obama administration has already provided significant evidence that, like its predecessor, it remains committed to maintaining that "access to and flow of energy resources" in Iraq, even as it places its major military bet on winning the expanding war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There can be no question that Washington is now engaged in an effort to significantly reduce its military footprint in Iraq, but without, if all goes well for Washington, reducing its influence.

What this looks like is an attempted 21st century version of colonial domination, possibly on the cheap, as resources are transferred to the Eastern wing of the Greater Middle East. There is, of course, no more a guarantee that this new strategy - perhaps best thought of as colonialism lite or the Obama Doctrine - will succeed than there was for the many failed military-first offensives undertaken by the Bush administration. After all, in the unsettled, still violent atmosphere of Iraq, even the major oil companies have hesitated to rush in and the auctioning of oil contracts has begun to look uncertain, even as other "civilian" initiatives remain, at best, incomplete.

As the Obama administration comes face-to-face with the reality of trying fulfill General Odierno's ambition of making Iraq into "a long-term partner with the United States in the Middle East" while fighting a major counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, it may also encounter a familiar dilemma faced by 19th century colonial powers: that without the application of overwhelming military force, the intended colony may drift away toward sovereign independence. If so, then the dreary prediction of Pulitzer Prize-winning military correspondent Thomas Ricks - that the United States is only "halfway through this war" - may prove all too accurate.

A professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, Michael Schwartz is the author of War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (Haymarket Books), which explains how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the US to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling a sectarian civil war. Schwartz's work on Iraq has appeared in numerous academic and popular outlets. He is a regular at TomDispatch.com. An audio interview with him on the situation in Iraq is available by clicking here.) His email address is ms42@optonline.net.

(Copyright 2009 Michael Schwartz.)

The virtues of doing nothing: Why focusing on Afghanistan’s opium makes the opium problem worse

Joshua Foust, Reuters, July 21st, 2009

It would be an understatement to call opium cultivation in Afghanistan America’s headache. The issue of illegal drug cultivation and smuggling has vexed policymakers for three decades, and led to a multi-billion dollar campaign to combat the phenomenon.

Opium causes all of our problems, so they say—according to a factsheet at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul (pdf), opium creates instability, funds the insurgency, and wreaks havoc on the government. They’re not alone - entire books have been written on the subject.

The blame game on opium, however, ignores a critical - and quite uncomfortable - fact: it misses the point. The reality is, while the cultivation of opium does not help matters from a Western perspective, in Afghanistan it is actually a healthy economic activity. The concerns over its cultivation, too, are overblown: even a brief look at the numbers show it to be at best a trailing indicator of insecurity, insurgency, corruption, and economic malaise. Opium, therefore, is only an indicator of other, more substantial problems.

Consider, for example, what I call The Nangarhar Swing. According to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, in 2005 Nangarhar produced nearly 1/5 of Afghanistan’s opium, but was virtually poppy-free in 2006. 2007 saw a 285 percent increase (pdf) in cultivation, making the province one of the country’s top poppy producers. Yet in 2008, it was once again virtually poppy-free (pdf). This shift cannot be tied only to security, as many like to claim: according to the violence statistics compiled by the Long War Journal, even as Nangarhar has stopped the large scale cultivation of opium, it has become steadily more violent. Moreover, there are many other areas of the country, like Khost province along the border with Pakistan, or Kunar province further north, where the insurgency has become worse even as those provinces were emptied of opium.

The discrepancy is really a trick of language: When the UNODC declares a province poppy-free, what they mean is, production there is “negligible”, not non-existent. Whether that is in the context of total production, other provinces, or some sort of absolute number (a percentage of arable land or total worldwide opium production) isn’t really clear. In Nangarhar, several times declared “poppy free” by the UNODC, there remain active opium eradication missions in outlying districts such as Sherzad. What’s noteworthy about it is not the presence of some fairly smallish opium farms in southwestern Nangarhar, as most opium farms are small family affairs. What is interesting is the density of the farms. In a single 5 km stretch of the countryside, teams found and destroyed 100 poppy fields. For a supposedly poppy-free province, that is simply stunning.

It also covers up the substantial effect of destroying the opium economy. In many parts of Afghanistan, opium is the economy, and the World Bank estimated in 2008 it accounts for 1/3 of the country’s economy. In opium-adjacent communities, opium funds underpin the entire local economy: especially in the opium “heartland” in the South, the only way for small farmers to get microcredit loans or deal with exporters is through opium traders. Through a system of loans called salaam, they in essence create informal futures markets on crops… but only opium. Cereal crops and fruits, or other licit agriculture, are not included in this system (even though it is possible for other actors, whether the government or NGOs, to provide this service). In fact, the ways these markets have developed in the south is remarkably similar to how informal credit markets formed in rural medieval Europe. It is normal. The West just happens to dislike the crop.

But even in opium “success stories”, there are significant problems to simply removing the crop. In Nangarhar, the wild swings in opium prices and cultivation crashed the rural economy again and again. Most of the microcredit salaam loans farmers take out are not denominated in any currency - they pay in opium. So, when prices crash or an eradication team sweeps through, farmers become trapped in a horrendous debt cycle where the only means of escape is to grow yet more opium. There are even rumors of farmers selling a daughter or son to the traffickers in payment, and many families have fled to either Iran or Pakistan to avoid reprisals for unpaid opium debt.

There is a more fundamental economic problem to growing poppy, however: areas that grow opium actually tend to be the wealthiest. Sherzad District in Nangarhar, where there is still opium cultivation and eradication, actually has relatively high income compared to the rest of Nangarhar. According to the International Monetary Fund (pdf), when Nangarhar province saw a huge drop in opium cultivation in 2005/6, province-wide GDP was about $1.3 billion (which was a big drop from the year before, when there was much more opium). The next year, 2006/7, when opium production spiked 285%, province-level GDP rose to $3.2 billion, only to fall the next year to $1.8 billion as the UNODC declared it poppy-free.

So what is to be done? The Obama administration has wisely recognized that opium eradication is a non-starter, and does far more harm than the marginal good of destroying some opium crops. UNODC Chief Antonio Maria Costa recently agreed, and suggested a “flood of drugs” in its place. Under this plan, somehow the borders of Afghanistan would be sealed so that no drugs can “escape”, in their words, thus crashing the price of opium. Feasible or not, Costa’s idea at least tries to examine other ways of reducing the need for opium cultivation. Looking at opium cultivation as an economic factor, however, leads one to many other conclusions that are inconvenient for a political and military apparatus designed to oppose the very idea of drug cultivation.

If opium is an economic puzzle, and not a political-military one, then there should be an economic (or at least non-military) solution to it. Several years ago, the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit published a study (pdf) comparing the factors behind the cultivation of opium in adjacent provinces in the “poppy-free” north. Water shortages, soil moisture and salinity, severe socioeconomic inequality driving food insecurity, a poor presence of formal institutions, all have decisive impacts on a household decision whether or not to cultivate opium.

More recently, a team of Norwegian researchers has noted a strong causation between violence and opium cultivation, but not in the way most think: in their research paper (pdf), they assert that opium follows conflict, and not the other way around. In other words, opium cultivation is simply a feature of ungoverned conflict zones, and especially in Afghanistan, something people do as a last resort when other economic activities fail to provide for their families.

Taken together, these studies (and the many others like them—this is a growing field of study) point to a counterintuitive conclusion: do nothing. That is, focusing only on opium misses the point, and doesn’t address the reasons why it is grown. If opium cultivation were an indicator of an ungoverned or contested space, then that would indicate that making that space governed and uncontested would also address the opium.

There are a few examples even within Afghanistan where governance and security came first, and then opium cultivation simply dropped off. Badakhshan province was the only province in the country that was completely Taliban-free in 2001, and as a result was the only one to grow opium in any really measurable amount during the Taliban’s prohibition. Since the American invasion, it has remained mostly quiet, and has seen a growing success in both trade connections to neighboring areas and better governance by multiple levels of officials. As an aid worker active there told me recently, “the price of poppy has fallen fastest in the north (where the poppy has a lower morphine content), and in Badakhshan, farmers can already make more from okra or onions than opium.” Selling vegetables is relatively low risk and carries a good profit margin - something that cannot be said for the majority of Afghanistan’s non-subsistence farmers.

Drug traffickers have taken enormous measures to lower the risk of drug cultivation, but the development community has not taken the time to do so for legal agriculture. It remains prohibitively expensive to ship anything out of Afghanistan, and border politics especially with Pakistan (one worker recently complained that difficulties in crossing the border into Pakistan meant an entire crop of potatoes from Khost province rotted at the border crossing, unsold) keep export-driven agriculture uncertain and extremely risky. By focusing so much of its energies onto eradication or somehow controlling the cultivation of opium, both the International Community and the government of Afghanistan have ignored providing other ways for farmers to make money legally - even when Alternative Livelihood programs exist in an area, they’re poorly administered and often barely make a dent in the local economy.

So why not do nothing? Opium is not Afghanistan’s biggest problem - it is horrendous poverty, bad infrastructure and no security. When it comes to all three problems, Afghanistan faces two major hurdles - underinvestment (money, equipment, education, health, and security) and corruption-driven illegitimacy. Making matters worse, the overwhelming majority of aid in the country flows outside government channels or oversight, which undercuts Kabul’s legitimacy even among the people it helps.

Focusing only on opium, therefore, doesn’t actually focus on the more fundamental problems facing the country. It is an obsession on symptoms, while the causes go unaddressed. The missing piece of governance, and with it the development of the necessary institutions of society and economy, is the critically ignored piece of almost all plans to eliminate opium in Afghanistan. And as examples like Badakhshan have shown, when even moderate progress is made on these fronts, people will voluntarily switch to growing other crops, and they will make enough money to support themselves. It’s enough to make one wonder just why there needs to be a plan in the first place. It’s counterintuitive, but scrapping the West’s counternarcotics policies is surest way to actually achieve the counternarcotics goal of a poppy-free Afghanistan.

(Reuters photos: Opium fields in Farah province/Goran Tomasevic)

House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee Trims FCS Funding; Adds Money for Strykers

INSIDE DEFENSE

July 21, 2009 -- Though generally retaining most of the Army's requested funding for the Future Combat Systems program, the House Appropriations defense subcommittee is recommending several significant cuts to FCS in its version of the fiscal year 2010 legislation.

The full committee is set to take up the bill tomorrow.

According to its mark-up of the bill, obtained by InsideDefense.com, the subcommittee recommends retaining nearly $2.6 billion of the $2.8 billion requested for FCS procurement and research, development, test and evaluation.

However, the defense appropriators argue that the Army's requests of $58.2 million in termination costs for the Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon program and $368.6 million in termination costs for the manned ground vehicle effort are too high.

Instead, the subcommittee says, the service should use unexecuted FY-09 funds -- which it says total $236.5 million for NLOS-C and $740 million for MGV.

Consequently, the defense appropriators reduce the NLOS-C termination budget line by $27 million to $31.2 million, and the MGV termination budget line by $184 million to $184.6 million.

The mark-up also halves the Army's request for the RDT&E effort to replace the MGV program. The Army has launched a ground combat vehicle initiative to produce a new vehicle for FCS.

“The Committee is aware of the Army's desire to proceed quickly with the new Manned Ground Vehicle program; however the Committee believes the estimate of funding required to initiate the effort is uncertain and accordingly the Committee recommends funding of $50,000,000, a reduction of $50,000,000 below the request,” the document reads.

The House too made reductions to the requested termination fees in its version of the FY-10 defense authorization bill, granting the service $100 million in sum for FCS contract liability costs. The Senate Armed Services Committee, in its version of the FY-10 defense authorization legislation, deleted all of the requested FCS termination costs, reallocating much of the money to research spending.

The Obama administration has formally opposed the Senate authorizers' cut, arguing in a statement of policy that FY-09 funds cannot cover the entirety of the termination costs.

Meanwhile, the House subcommittee also recommends additional money for the Stryker program. The mark-up adds $225 million, recommending a total of $613.6 million for the effort.

Though the Army's request calls for $388.6 million in FY-10, House defense appropriators make two changes. They first reduce the program budget by $25 million, citing “excessive program management costs.”

The subcommittee then adds $250 million “to support the continued production of new Stryker vehicles.”

Citing the addition of $200 million for Stryker vehicles in the FY-09 supplemental legislation, the subcommittee notes that the “Army is considering the fielding of additional Stryker brigades in order to improve the balance of heavy, medium and light forces to enable a sustained response to the full spectrum of potential threats.”

The subcommittee also makes a variety of smaller cuts to Army procurement funding. According to the mark-up, the subcommittee recommends reducing the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles budget line by $193 million to $965.5 million, citing a delay in the contract award from July to at least September, and reducing the Family of Heavy Tactical Vehicles budget line by $26 million to $786.6 million, again citing a contract award delay.

Additionally, the mark-up recommends a reduction of $55.2 million in the Joint Tactical Radio System program, bringing its total procurement budget to $35 million in FY-10.

The document notes that the contract option covering procurement of JTRS radios slated for use in “Multi-Service Operational Test and Evaluation” is “not expected to be exercised until fiscal year 2011 due to schedule delays.” -- Marjorie Censer

DOD to Cut $1.1 Billion From Current Budget, to Grow Army

Seek Additional $1.4 Billion to Grow Army

INSIDE DEFENSE

July 20, 2009 -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates has approved a temporary increase in the size of the Army -- a three-year, 22,000-soldier boost designed to provide relief to a service stressed from fighting two wars -- and promised to finance a $1.1 billion down payment on this end-strength increase by cutting existing programs from the fiscal years 2009 and 2010 budgets.

The end-strength increase -- which would not be used to form new combat units but to provide a pool of soldiers to support planned combat rotations and would bring the total size of the Army to 569,000 -- would be paid for in part by identifying offsets in programs that are currently planned, Gates told reporters at the Pentagon today.

“I am mindful that during this period of financial crisis, this decision will result in additional tough choices for the department, calling to mind my comments in the past about things that we don't need creating problems for us in the areas that we do need,” Gates said this afternoon in announcing the decision.

He added: “This is a zero-sum budget, money for one thing as opposed to another; there has to be an offset.”

Gates said the Pentagon would seek permission from Congress to reprogram $100 million in the final months of the current fiscal year which ends Sept. 30 to support immediate Army growth. In fiscal year 2010, the Pentagon will seek to shift $1 billion from lower-priority programs to pay for these new Army personnel costs.

“I've told the president and the Hill that we need their support, obviously, for reprogramming, but we will absorb those costs within our current topline,” the defense secretary said.

The total bill for the 22,000-soldier boost over three years is approximately $2.5 billion, according to an Army official familiar with the service proposal Gates approved.

“The department will not seek additional funds for fiscal years 2009 or 2010 to implement this decision and it will work together with the [White House Office of Management and Budget] to put together the necessary fiscal program in the remaining two years,” Gates said.

The Army expects to finance half of the FY-10 bill from within its current topline, and the balance would come from other Pentagon accounts that are yet to be determined, according to the service official.

Because the Defense Department is seeking only temporary authority for these additional troops, the Obama administration plans to ask Congress to consider this a war cost financed outside the Pentagon's annual base budget request, according to the official.

Key lawmakers quickly responded to the Pentagon's announcement.

“While Congress has authorized increasing the size of the military for several consecutive years, I commend Secretary Gates for accelerating plans to increase the size of the Army,” Rep. Ike Skelton (D-MO), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. “This important step will help reduce the strain on the overall force and help address readiness concerns more quickly than we had anticipated. It is the right thing to do. “

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), who has pushed for the Army to grow by 30,000 troops, also applauded the move.

"I commend Secretary Gates for making this decision, which will provide much-needed relief to our brave soldiers and their families," Lieberman said. "I have already introduced an amendment to give Secretary Gates the new authority he will need to add up to 30,000 additional soldiers, and I call upon my colleagues to vote to support our troops this week." -- Jason Sherman

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Pentagon to boost Army by 22,000

THE HILL By Roxana Tiron Posted: 07/20/09 08:34 PM [ET]

Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Monday announced a temporary increase in the size of the Army, boosting the military with 22,000 additional recruits.

Gates said at a Pentagon news conference that the temporary increase is intended to cope with the strain from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The increase would raise the total number of soldiers to 569,000 through fiscal 2012, which begins Oct. 1, 2011.

“Much has changed over the last two years, causing us to reassess whether we are properly sized to support current operational needs,” Gates said at the briefing.

Gates’s decision to boost the number of active-duty Army troops would add greatly to the Pentagon budget. It comes at a time when President Obama is seeking to cut military spending in the midst of an economic crisis and advance big-ticket social priorities.

The Pentagon will have to spend billions more over the next three fiscal years to support the additional personnel — the highest cost by far for the Department of Defense.

Gates said the temporary increase will cost about $100 million for the remaining months of this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, and about $1 billion in fiscal 2010. However, he offered no cost estimates for fiscal 2011 or 2012. Higher costs will likely be reflected in subsequent budget requests to Congress.

Gates also warned that the boost in troop numbers would mean harder choices at the Pentagon down the line, potentially affecting costly weapons systems and the investments the Pentagon will make over the next three years.

“I am mindful that during this period of financial crisis, this decision will result in additional tough choices for the department,” Gates said. Gates is in a tug-of-war with Congress over programs such as the F-22 Raptor and a second engine for the Joint Strike Fighter, which he wants to end but lawmakers so far have decided to fund.

This is the second time since 2007 that the Army boosted its forces to deal with multiple conflicts. Gates and the Bush administration had already increased the size of the Army to 547,000 soldiers. That expansion was recently completed.

Gates said that the circumstances leading to a temporary increase in the active-duty Army included the boost of forces in Afghanistan even as U.S. troops are being removed from Iraq.

Apart from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army has had to deal with a controversial policy known as stop-loss.

The decision to put an end to the unpopular practice, which keeps soldiers beyond their original enlistment dates, is also causing a shortage in the number of Army soldiers available to deploy.

“The Army has reached a point of diminishing returns … The Army faces a period where its ability to continue to deploy combat units at acceptable fill rates is at risk,” Gates said.

However, Gates stressed that “these additional forces will be used to ensure that our deploying units are properly manned and not to create new combat formations.”

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to add comment to Gates’s announcement. At press time, some congressional sources intimated that a bigger Army could also leave the door open for larger numbers of troops being deployed to Afghanistan down the line.

“This announcement is unrelated to any future considerations for additional troops in Afghanistan. This is strictly about the fact that the Army is under considerable stress as it is now,” Geoff Morrell, Gates’s spokesman told The Hill.

The new commander in Afghanistan is conducting a review of the situation there “and he has the latitude right now to request more troops,” Morrell said. “That would be given careful consideration but the bottom line is we do not impose arbitrary troop caps on our commanders.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) appeared supportive of the temporary increase.

“Sen. Reid has been supportive of past efforts to increase the size of the military to ease the burden of multiple deployments on our troops and their families,” said Reid’s spokeswoman, Regan Lachapelle. “He commends Secretary Gates for keeping these concerns in mind as we step up our efforts in Afghanistan.”

The office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) did not respond to requests for comment.

ep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, applauded Gates’s decision, as did Rep. Buck McKeon (Calif.), the ranking Republican on the committee.

“I commend Secretary Gates for accelerating plans to increase the size of the Army,” Skelton said in a statement. “This important step will help reduce the strain on the overall force and help address readiness concerns more quickly than we had anticipated. It is the right thing to do.”

Gates’s Monday announcement can also boost the case for an amendment to the 2010 defense authorization bill currently being debated in the Senate.

The plan to temporarily boost the Army by 22,000 troops is smaller than a plan by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) to add 30,000 troops to the Army starting in 2010. Lieberman, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, introduced his amendment to the 2010 defense authorization bill.

“I commend Secretary Gates for making this decision, which will provide much-needed relief to our brave soldiers and their families,” Lieberman said in a statement. “I have already introduced an amendment to give Secretary Gates the new authority he will need to add up to 30,000 additional soldiers, and I call upon my colleagues to vote to support our troops this week.”

Lieberman has several co-sponsors to his amendment: Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Mark Begich (D-Alaska), John Thune (R-S.D.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) rated the cost of Lieberman’s amendment — that of funding 30,000 more soldiers — at $2 billion for 2010 and $2 billion for 2011.

DOD Waives Procurement Restrictions for New Supply Routes to Afghanistan

Inside Defense

July 17, 2009 -- Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn this month waived two procurement policies standing in the way of Pentagon plans to build a new network of supply routes in the countries around Afghanistan.

Pentagon officials are pursuing plans to build what they have called a “Northern Distribution Network” (NDN) in the countries forming a geographic link between Afghanistan and Europe, plus Pakistan. As for logistical issues involved in the effort, they are pursuing two objectives: Ensuring the Defense Department is authorized to buy construction-related material and services locally, and giving local suppliers a leg up over international competitors.

The countries involved include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Collectively, defense officials refer to the group as “South Caucasus and Central and South Asia,” or “SC/CASA.”

Lynn issued two memos on July 9 determining that the Pentagon may do business with these countries despite a prohibition of doing so included in the 1979 Trade Agreements Act, which implements the World Trade Organization Government Procurement Agreement (WTO GPA).

Under the law, the envisioned countries are ineligible for procurements from the Defense Department or the General Services Administration, Lynn wrote.

Pentagon leaders, on May 21, requested a waiver from U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, covering the acquisition of “products, including construction materials and services . . . in direct support of operations in Afghanistan,” Lynn's memo states. Kirk authorized the waiver on June 2, Lynn wrote.

“This authority will allow the United States to provide the host nations with some economic benefit and will reduce overall U.S. transportation costs and risk,” Lynn wrote. Buying from the SC/CASA nations also would “contribute toward developing a responsible, stable and cooperative coalition of national partners to facilitate the movement of supplies” to Afghanistan, he added.

The State Department's latest human rights report, released in February, identifies some of the countries named as candidates to support the planned U.S. supply route as authoritarian regimes with poor human rights records.

Most supplies for the Afghanistan war are currently ferried through what Lynn's memo dubs the “Pakistan ground lines of communication” or PakGLOC. Insurgent attacks on these supply lines, plus “existing physical and bureaucratic limitations,” necessitated the search for a more diversified route network capable of greater throughput, he wrote.

“It is expected that a sizable, sustained force level in Afghanistan will be in place through the next several years, and maintaining a viable NDN is in the national security interest of the United States,” Lynn added.

In his second memo, Lynn exempts the Pentagon's NDN plans from the McNamara-era Balance of Payments Program. The DOD-specific policy mandates that certain construction materials purchased by the military must be manufactured in the United States.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in both houses of Congress inserted provisions in the emerging fiscal year 2010 authorization legislation that would give preference to local SC/CASA suppliers bidding for work on supply routes. Sources said the idea for the effort began during the tenure of former Pentagon acquisition chief John Young. In May, Pentagon officials formally asked lawmakers to put language to that effect into the defense authorization legislation (DefenseAlert, May 19).

In an April 13, 2009, memo, U.S. Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus ordered his staff to be “creative and aggressive” in contracting with suppliers in the SC/CASA countries.

“I understand following this policy will require patience, as it may not always lead to the quickest or most efficient means for fulfilling requirements,” he wrote. “I expect you to use sound judgment and exercise patience in balancing near-term risk with the long-term operational dividends healthy SC/CASA economies bring with them,” he added. -- Sebastian Sprenger

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Wasteful Defense Spending Is a Clear and Present Danger

We could afford a stronger military if we implemented some contracting reforms.
By JOHN LEHMAN WSJ

When John McCain was shot down over Hanoi in 1967, he was flying an A4 Skyhawk. That jet cost $860,000.

Inflation has risen by 700% since then. So Mr. McCain's A4 cost $6.1 million in 2008 dollars. Applying a generous factor of three for technological improvements, the price for a 2008 Navy F18 fighter should be about $18 million. Instead, we are paying about $90 million for each new fighter. As a result, the Navy cannot buy sufficient numbers. This is disarmament without a treaty.

The situation is worse in the Air Force. In 1983, I was in the Pentagon meeting that launched the F-22 Raptor. The plan was to buy 648 jets beginning in 1996 for $60 million each (in 1983 dollars). Now they cost $350 million apiece and the Obama budget caps the program at 187 jets. At least they are safe from cyberattack since no one in China knows how to program the '83 vintage IBM software that runs them.

There are other problems. Navy shipbuilding fiascoes like the staggering overruns on new surface combatants, the near total failure of the Army's Future Combat System that was meant to re-equip the entire army, the 400% cost overrun of the new Air Force weather satellite -- to name but a few -- all prove that we are currently unable to design, develop and deliver major weapons systems in anything approaching a cost-effective and timely manner. The Government Accountability Office recently reported that the cost overruns for the top 75% procurement programs were over $295 billion. We are rapidly disarming ourselves, even as defense spending grows.

On May 22, President Obama signed the Weapons System Acquisition Reform Act. Despite the grandiloquent name, it is in fact just an addition of 20,000 more bureaucrats who will only make matters worse.

Why is this happening? Where did things go wrong?

First, let's look at the customer.

Within the Pentagon, there has been an obliteration of clear lines of authority for managing procurement programs. What there has been is a steady growth in the size and layers of civilian offices, agencies and military staffs, resulting in severe bureaucratic bloat. In the private sector, a specific person is always responsible for the success or failure of a program. When it comes to the Pentagon, no one person is held accountable for good performance or punished for failure.

As a direct result of this lack of accountability, there has been a loss of discipline and control over equipment requirements and a surge in gold-plating in all Pentagon programs. New requirements and design changes -- originating in more than 30 different bureaus in the Pentagon -- are constantly being added, wreaking havoc with costs. On the Navy's new small warship building program (the LCS), for instance, change-orders have at times averaged 75 per week. Because of these constant changes, cost-plus-contracts have become the norm far into production, instead of fixed-price contracting when development is complete.

In addition, the Pentagon has surrendered control of many programs to large contractors. During the 1980s, the Pentagon employed thousands of experienced project managers and engineering professionals. Today most of this talent has gone to work for the contractors, and their duties have been contracted out to those same contractors. It's a classic case of the fox running the chicken coop. To make matters worse, the bureaucracies did not shrink because of this exodus, but actually grew as experienced engineering professionals were replaced by administrators and bookkeepers.

Next, let's look at the suppliers.

After the Cold War, there was a 70% reduction in procurement funding. The Pentagon encouraged consolidation and actually paid contractors to merge. That process went much too far, with some 50 prime contractors merging into only six -- far too few to support a competitive base for our current and future requirements. Because of lack of competition early in programs, there has been a serious decline in technological and engineering innovation. And costs have gone up steadily in mature production programs because of the absence of competition.

There is also the revolving door problem. While a number of experienced Pentagon procurement officials working for defense contractors and vice-versa is healthy, the current lack of any meaningful controls on this revolving door is creating an unhealthy tolerance of conflict of interest. All too frequently, procurement offices have become de facto out-placement offices for retiring officers seeking employment in the defense industry.

What must be done to reform the current mess?

First, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates must establish a culture that restores hierarchical decision-making authority and personal accountability to procurement. The backbone of such management should be the military departments, which have cultures of accountability. Each military department already has a service secretary and service chief who have the essential levers of control. Title 10 of the U.S. Code gives them power over assignments, promotions, retirements and expenditures. And it is they who should be held accountable. The staff of the secretary of defense should perform only those interservice functions that are essential to integrate and reconcile cross-service issues.

Second, the culture of unbridled design and engineering changes that has become entrenched in the Pentagon must be ended. Service secretaries alone should have the power to be the gatekeepers.

Third, the policy of ceding control to contractors should be abandoned and control should be taken back by the military services. That will require rebuilding cadres of procurement engineers, technologists and managers in the civilian and military ranks through special incentives, training programs and lateral recruiting from the private sector. No one should be assigned to any procurement executive job for less than a four-year tour.

Fourth, it should be general policy to maintain two or more providers competing throughout production. Programs such as aircraft carriers, where numbers may be insufficient to support annual competition, should be treated as exceptions, not the rule.

Fifth, there should be at least a 20% overall reduction in civilian and military staff bureaucracies. This can be done through normal attrition and early retirements, as has successfully been done in the past.

Sixth, for the more senior procurement positions, including the chief executives of the Defense agencies, there should be a major initiative to recruit outstanding leaders with proven records of accomplishment in private and public service. Like career procurement officials, they must commit to a minimum of four years in the job. So far the Obama/Gates picks are very promising.

It is wishful thinking, of course, to believe these changes can be accomplished rapidly or easily. But a new administration can provide a new vision and new discipline. To use an analogy from the old sailing Navy, we are being driven rapidly toward a lee shore set with the jagged rocks of nuclear terrorism and hostile powers. If we don't reverse course, we face future catastrophe.

Mr. Lehman was secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and a member of the 9-11 Commission.

Congressional Report Predicts Steady Decline in War Costs, Troop Levels Through 2012

July 16, 2009 -- The Obama administration's $130 billion war cost funding request for fiscal year 2010 is 10 percent higher than what the Defense Department will need to conduct wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new legislative-branch assessment.

The Congressional Research Service, in a July 2 report that examines U.S. troop level deployments, projects that war costs in FY-10 will be $117 billion -- $13 billion lower than the Defense Department's request -- and that the price tag for the two missions will decline to $92 billion in FY-11 and $70 billion in FY-12.

In addition, the report -- “Troop Levels in the Afghan and Iraq Wars, FY2001-FY2012: Cost and Other Potential Issues,” written by defense budget expert Amy Belasco -- estimates that the Defense Department will require a total of $133 billion in FY-09, $8 billion less than the $141 billion appropriated for the two wars.

Belasco writes that she calculated these costs by examining a wide range of Defense Department reports. A goal of the report, she writes, is to estimate troop strength through FY-12 and assist lawmakers in assessing Pentagon war funding requests.

“While it is not clear whether war costs will change precisely in tandem with troop levels, these changes can provide a benchmark to assess requests,” the report states.

The Obama administration earlier this year announced plans to increase troop levels in Afghanistan while drawing down forces from Iraq, adding 30,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines to Central Asia while gradually reducing force levels in Iraq to between 35,000 and 50,000 by the summer of 2011.

“CRS estimates that average troop strength in Iraq will decline to 135,600 in FY-09, 88,300 in FY-10, 42,800 in FY-11 and 4,100 in FY-11,” states the report.

In Afghanistan, the report predicts the average monthly troop level will climb to 50,700 in FY-09 and rise in FY-10 to 63,500 once all units that are part of the current force increase are in place.

By FY-12, when the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is supposed to be complete, the number of troops supporting these missions is expected to be 67,500, according to the report.

Meantime, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, today told reporters that he expects the current high pace of operations in Afghanistan will drive up war costs in FY-10 and could force the Obama administration to seek a supplemental appropriations bill in the spring (DefenseAlert, July 16). -- Jason Sherman