Shovel-Ready F-22's to the Rescue

That such a patently ridiculous gambit carries enough weight to warrant a prominent story in one of our most prestigious newspapers is a natural consequence of Defense Power Games — i.e., habitual behavior evolved and perfected through trial and error by the competing players in the MICC, over the 40 years of Cold War budget battles. My pamphlet, Defense Power Games explains how these cynical games create continual pressure to increase the defense budget.

Briefly, Defense Power Games are a sophisticated bait and switch strategy that can be likened to political Blitzkrieg: Like a blitz, the first step in the gaming strategy is penetration by infiltration. Known in Pentagonese as Front Loading, the goal is to get a new high cost weapon program approved for engineering development by misrepresenting the future consequences of that approval decision (e.g., by inflating threats, exaggerating performance benefits, cooking tests, down playing future maintenance burdens and costs, etc.). The Front Loading operation slips the camel's nose into the decision-making tent by turning on the money spigot with a sophisticated multidimensional deception.

The second step, known as Political Engineering, is aimed at locking that money spigot open. The trick is to build a political safety net to guard against the risks of program termination, which naturally will increase because of the cost overruns and performance cutbacks consequent to the Front Loading operation. In contrast to subtle infiltration of the Front Loading operation, the Political Engineering operation is simple brute force because, to be effective, it must be paralyzingly obvious, like panzers spreading out in the rear area after passing through the main line of resistance. The milcrats and their partners in industry achieve this end by spreading dollars, jobs, and contracts to as many congressional districts as quickly as possible. The idea is to put a lock on the political decision-making system before it understands what it has signed. This is done by maximizing the extortionary pressure on a majority of individual congressmen and senators, should some poor soul in the executive branch or in Congress decide to make an effort to cutback or terminate the program.

Multiply the effects of these power games over hundreds if not thousands of programs, expending hundreds of billions of dollars, and the result is pressure for an ever increasing defense budget over the long term — a budget that is under continual pressure to grow independently of any changes in the threats that could possibly be used to justify those budgets.

That is why, in 1991, I wrote in Defense Power Games that the unexpected disappearance of the Soviet Union and the sudden end of the Cold War would not produce a long-term reduction (i.e. a peace dividend) in the defense budget.

As Mr. Barnes indirectly shows, there is no better example of the extortionary power of the defense power games than the fact that the F-22, a plane designed for the Cold War, continued so far beyond the Cold War and now is being cynically held up as a "shovel ready" jobs program that should remain in production even though the approved production quantity has been bought.

Chuck Spinney is a former Pentagon analyst.