Abandoned by the elite, too many officers sell out to the military--industrial--Congressional complex

In the Year of Our Lord 2020, the young pilots of America's armed forces will fly aircraft designed in a previous century for that earlier century's wars. The Army's ground troops will be weighed down by leviathan systems unsuited to the knife-fight conflicts of the coming decades. And the Navy will be splendidly prepared for the Second World War. Along the way, the United States may pay a trillion dollars for weapons that constrain rather than enable, that bankrupt the services, and that preserve cherished traditions at the expense of practical capabilities.

The world has changed even more profoundly than we have noticed. Nineteen eighty-nine marked not only the end of the Cold War, but the end of half a millennium of history dominated by the rise and fall of European empires. For the American people, a 250-year tradition of fighting empires came to a close--our major wars engaged empires and only empires, first those of kings, then those of demagogues. Even our Civil War was fought to cast off the vestiges of imperial inheritance, from human bondage to a loathsome aristocracy of landholders. The American purpose, unspoken but accomplished, was to destroy empires and their patterns of human organization. Now a quarter-millenium's mission has been fulfilled, and we are victorious but without compass.

Our military does not know what to do, so it does what it long has done: It organizes for grand wars against conventional militaries. No matter that the few such establishments still in existence do not, cannot, and will not threaten our nation and, at most, are positioned to annoy their neighbors--the portion of our wealth spent on arms will purchase systems to fight a reflection of ourselves. To exploit the weapons we are buying, we would have to share them with our enemies, or divide into teams and fight each other. Meanwhile, under-funded soldiers and Marines will do our nation's dirty work abroad, while in the skies and at sea we display a shining, irrelevant legacy. We have entered the age of the impassioned butcher, with a crude weapon in one hand, a cell phone in the other, and hatred in his soul. As of this writing, we see him in Kosovo, and we shall often meet his like again.

In this age of brilliance and dissolution, individuals and organizations long for verities. This manifests itself in religious fundamentalism, ethnic separatism, rejectionist terrorism, and Pentagon stubbornness. Our military hides behind technologies that give an illusion of progress, while preserving the old ways of thinking, organizing and fighting. But our military thinking, such as it is, looks backward, our organizations are ponderous and grotesquely inefficient, and, when allowed to fight by our political leadership, combat commanders must improvise their way to victory.

We are a land of fabulous, but not unlimited, wealth. As weapons costs increase--even as their versatility and dependability decrease--we must make sensible choices. Almost without exception, the services are determined to make disastrous ones. Our country will be ready for the war that will not come, but unprepared for the urbanizing, chaotic and morbid conflicts whose coming is already upon us.

Consider a few purchases in progress:

At a time when no power can match our control of the skies and none intends to confront us with dueling aircraft, we are buying three new fighters at a cost of $340 billion dollars, according to the Congressional Budget Office's accounting. The CBO's figure is that of an apologist, and does not include the metastasizing costs of fitting these systems to the force and keeping them there. Further, the General Accounting Office--our government's unpopular honest broker--states that "cost increases of 20 to 40 percent have been common for major weapon programs" and that "numerous programs experienced increases much greater than that" The trend-line for cost overruns rises sharply.

Of those three "indispensable" aircraft, the most promising is the Navy's F/A 18E/F, based upon a proven airframe and fulfilling at least some legitimate needs. The Navy insists the program is within budget, but maintains its numbers only by deferring problems. The F-22 Raptor, a supremely-unnecessary air-superiority fighter, is over budget $667 million years before the first plane has been produced for combat. The contractor, in a wonderful blackmail effort, has warned that costs will shoot higher if the Air Force does not continue to buy an unwanted aircraft, the C-130J, to keep assembly lines open. The final aircraft, the Joint Strike Fighter, is lagging in development, but being rushed forward. Its purchase will force an annual doubling of the aircraft procurement budget, even if costs do not increase one dollar beyond current projections. Yet, in an air campaign such as those in Yugoslavia or Iraq, it offers little more than planes we have.

Ultimately, we can fund these three evolutionary systems that slightly improve current capabilities (if, unlike the B-1 and B-2 bombers, they work as advertised). But, consequently, we will not be able to afford the truly revolutionary technologies that will become available early in the next century. We will be imprisoned by these lavish purchases of past designs. Worse still, the trend in military technologies is toward cheap kills of expensive systems. We may spend well over half a trillion dollars to buy aircraft that will be defeated easily by innovative technologies available at a discount. While the generals, admirals and the defense contractors who hire them upon their retirement will argue that threat-testing shows that these new aircraft are virtually invulnerable, the word in the Pentagon corridors is that tests that might expose weaknesses in the survivability of the aircraft are being watered down or simply avoided. Increasingly, our national defense is a business, and its business is not defense.

The Army, lumbering and unimaginative, cannot match the Air Force or Navy in the size of its expenditures, but exceeds them in its enthusiasm for yesteryear's solutions to tomorrow's problems. The centerpieces of its procurement program are the RAH-66 attack helicopter, an improved but far from revolutionary system little better than the currently-fielded AH-64 Apache, and the Crusader, a leviathan artillery system that will be difficult to deploy, hard to re-supply, and irrelevant to the most frequent threats the Army will face. Obsessed with building the perfect division at Fort Hood, Texas, the Army refuses to accept that the number one requirement for the future is the ability to get out of Texas on short notice. The Army is so overweight it cannot get to a crisis promptly. In an age when global mobility based upon advanced concepts of organization and lethality is the core military requirement, the Army's combat systems grow ever heavier, ever more costly, and ever more dependent upon a sprawling maintenance infrastructure. Instead of investing in research and development to design weapons for the future, the Army is determined to perfect the past.

Bewildered by the utter disappearance of enemy fleets, the Navy cruises toward the iceberg of irrelevance, still buying Congressionally-beloved submarines and surface combatants that have little combat power but enjoy tremendous political patronage. The Air Force and Army at least face genuine threats, if not those they crave. The best our Navy can do is to provide expensive, marginal firepower from inefficient ships and diplomatically-useful but low-combat-power aircraft carriers.

Beyond their dreary hurrah rhetoric, not one of these services has developed a doctrine for our changed world.

And what about the Marine Corps? Breaking ranks, the Marines have taken an honest look at the likely future of conflict and have begun to prepare for it--mind you, this praise comes from a retired Army officer and traditional rival of the Corps. Accustomed to doing things on the cheap, the Marines have developed innovative doctrine and training to prepare for everything from sorting refugees to fighting in the hell of urban warfare. The Marine Corps is the only defense bargain the taxpayer gets among the services.

Given the traditional image of the Marines as straight of back, straight of mind, and straight into the wall, it's startling to encounter more freedom of thought, impassioned internal debate, and plain honesty in the Corps than anywhere else in our defense establishment. Even the Marine Corps's primary acquisition program, the V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft (an ugly hybrid of helicopter and propeller transport) fits actual strategic and tactical requirements--it moves forces into combat quickly, with ten times the survival rate of the best transport helicopter. It isn't glamorous, only useful.