This editorial will be published in the June 8 edition of The Weekly Standard.
Buried deep in the House version of this year’s defense authorization is a brief provision that has great potential to improve and accelerate the way the armed services buy weapons—yes, an actual reform of Pentagon procurement. The irony is that this reform would mark a reversal of past “reforms” that helped make the current acquisition system such a mess.
The provision in question is “Section 851. Additional Responsibility for Director of Operational Test and Evaluation.” The nub of the matter is that the Pentagon’s chief test officer now must “consider the potential for increases in program cost estimates or delays in schedule estimates in the implementation of policies, procedures, and activities related to operational test and evaluation.” And not only that, he “shall take appropriate action to ensure that operational test and evaluation activities do not unnecessarily increase program costs or impede program schedules.” In other words, the physician should first do no harm.
The Pentagon testing office has, alas, been a Mengele-like menace almost since its creation in 1983. “Unnecessarily increasing costs and impeding program schedules” could almost be its mission statement. When he took office as Army chief of staff, Gen. Raymond Odierno explained the nature of the problem: “Sometimes we have tests that are done by the private industry and yet we redo the tests because we have to meet certain regulations and requirements.” Not surprisingly, he added, “I think those are areas that we could look at that could reduce those costs significantly.”
The testing office was a product of the “military reform” movement in -the 1980s, the work of a small band of Pentagon contrarians who were -convinced the “gold-plated” platforms of the Reagan buildup—the M1 tank, say, or the F-15 fighter, or the Aegis destroyer—were too sophisticated to function in wartime conditions. This proposition offered the appearance of reasoned opposition to Democrats like Gary Hart, who wished to slow defense spending without appearing too dovish. In 1986, Hart wrote triumphantly in the New York Times: “Five years ago, military reform was the province of a small band of iconoclasts in the Senate. Now the need for broad changes in the way we train, equip, and deploy our conventional forces has become conventional wisdom.” He was right: The Congressional Military Reform Caucus counted 130 members.
Creating an “operational” test office that would subject new weapons designs to supposedly “realistic” battlefield conditions was the reformers’ principal goal. “Strengthening operational testing,” promised Hart, “will give us more effective weapons at lower cost.” It was a tastes-great-less-filling argument that seemed plausible and, after the 1986 midterm elections returned the Senate to Democratic control, proved unstoppable. Reagan’s defense secretary Caspar Weinberger waited more than a year after Congress mandated the creation of the test office to appoint a director, and when he finally did, he chose former McDonnell Douglas F-15 test pilot Jack Krings for the job.
One of the first targets for the test office was the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle. What originated as a complex debate about the role of mechanized infantry on a high-technology conventional battlefield quickly degenerated into a morality tale. A retired Air Force colonel, James Burton, was charged with the task, and he argued that unless the tests were rigorous, “soldiers in battle could die unnecessarily.” Senator William Roth—a moderate Republican from Delaware and a World War II vet—demanded the “Army must submit the troop carrier to realistic tests in a combat environment.” The New York Times was filled with righteous fury, charging the Army and Pentagon leadership with negligence:
The Bradley was a rolling powder keg; the Army knew it, and the brass wanted to avoid the live-fire tests because they knew a single Soviet antitank round could pierce the Bradley’s skin, blow up its stores of fuel and ammunition and burn its crew to death. Worse, in the view of some inside the Pentagon, Congress would get wind of all this and cancel the program.
Amid the controversy, Burton eventually was given carte blanche to conduct the tests. But, as a subsequent study of the program revealed, that meant “tests where the Bradley would stand, fully loaded and engine running, against overmatches, attacks with U.S. and Russian munitions that would clearly destroy the vehicle.” Tied like a lamb to the altar and smacked with a big weapon designed to kill fully armored main battle tanks, the Bradley—wait for it—blew up.
The M1 Abrams tank was likewise a favorite target of 1980s reformers. In early 1990—that is, about a year before Operation Desert Storm—Dina Rasor, head of the Project on Military Procurement (now the Project on Government Oversight), obtained data from the Army’s tests on the Abrams. She concluded that the M1 “will travel an average of only about 44 miles before something breaks.” She also argued that it had been a mistake to power the tank with a turbine engine and that, overall, the 1950s-era M60 was a better tank. The M1 was an “expensive loser.”
Desert Storm took much of the wind out of the reformers’ simpler-is-better sails. Not only did the U.S. forces equipped with M1 and Bradley make it through the famous “Left Hook” maneuver, they rapidly and with almost no loss destroyed the Iraqi Republican Guard units they encountered. An even bigger setback was the happy result of the air war: The F-15 dominated the skies, and its radar-guided missiles—another technology the reformers claimed was too sophisticated to ever work—accounted for the vast majority of the air-to-air kills.
But Hart was correct: Conventional wisdom was not rebuttable. And so the operational test office lived to fight another day and remains dedicated to proving that a big enough weapon can destroy anything. The latest program to fall victim to the testers’ logic is the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship. The LCS is—as the name suggests—a smallish, 3,000-ton vessel intended for use in coastal waters. The LCS was originally called the “Streetfighter” and was itself a “reform” effort intended to wean the Navy from its addiction to ever-bigger and more exotic surface combatants. The Navy balked at the idea and eventually redesigned the LCS to be more survivable, but that—among other things—increased the cost and slowed the program.
Given the opportunity, the test office has attacked the LCS by arguing that a recent “shock test” in “near combat conditions,” such as a mine detonation, showed “resiliency” problems for the ship. This is, essentially, a repeat of the Bradley tests but with water added. As with the Bradley, the point of the LCS is to avoid a hit, not stand still and slug it out. But, as the blog Next Navy bitterly observes, the test office “has gamed the LCS and the Navy quite well. By forging a temporary alliance with the Navy’s resident LCS-haters, [the test office] must be absolutely giddy about the prospect of strangling the LCS after the first block buy. Nothing validates a tester more than a program kill.” And, in fact, former defense secretary Chuck Hagel, feeling the pressure of budget cuts and sequestration, limited the LCS buy to 32 rather than the 52 ships the Navy had set as the program minimum. Not surprisingly, the per-ship cost of the LCS continues to rise.
In sum, the operational test and evaluation office’s only purpose can be to say no. It is the ultimate in unaccountable bureaucracy: It has no responsibility for fielding anything, or for making the inevitable trade-offs in designs, or even for reckoning the costs of time lost in fielding weaponry. It was conceived in error and continues to make mischief and increase the cost of all it touches. By insisting on randomizing its test conditions—supposedly to replicate the uncertainties of combat—it limits their utility to weapons designers, who need to control tests in order to harvest the most useful insights.
Krings, who passed away last year, summarized the paradox of the office from the start. “There are people in the Congress who don’t think that any test is really valid until you have a real live operational unit in a real live scenario. Well, that means you have to wait until [a system] is pretty grown-up, and therefore you have invested a lot of money.” In other words, the only real battlefield test is the battlefield itself. Randomly blowing things up is not a test of survivability.
But only Congress can undo what Congress has done, and that’s particularly hard when Congress feels virtuous. It’s hardest when the Senate is pleased with itself, and from the beginning the Senate has been infatuated with the Pentagon’s test office—You do think it’s right to test weapons before we send our forces into harm’s way, don’t you? The Armed Services Committee has marked up its version of the defense bill, and it does not include any provision like the one passed by the House. The House language, which basically wants the test office to reckon the opportunity costs it creates, is a pretty mild measure. But it would be a sea-change in the meaning of defense “reform,” a first unraveling of the regulatory mindset that’s made such a mess of Pentagon procurement.
Thomas Donnelly is co-director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
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