When Musk invades

In an oped in the Washington Post this week, former secretary of the navy Richard Danzig recommended deploying Elon Musk and his team from the Department of Government Efficiency to the Pentagon “not with a view to cutting costs,” but to “increase effectiveness” of our weapons systems. Danzig believes that “our first national security priority should not be to cut costs.” I believe that we can do both.

Musk does have an important record in the space and automotive fields to “apply technology to solve old problems in new ways.” However, he has a major conflict of interest, earning billions of dollars for himself from Pentagon grants and favoring increased defense spending. The United States spends as much on national defense as the rest of the world. At this moment, the United States is spending nearly $900 billion at the Pentagon, and an additional $400 billion at such key institutions as Veterans’ Administration; Department of Homeland Security; Department of Energy; and the Intelligence Community. Hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved with reasonable cuts in weapons acquisition and closing a number of military bases and facilities the world over. The United States has over 700 bases and facilities world wide. China has one overseas base on the Horn of Africa; Russia has two in Syria that are threatened by the new government in Damascus that replaced 55 years of tyranny under the Assad family.

Every aspect of the Pentagon’s budget, including research and development, procurement, operations and maintenance, and infrastructure needs to be scrutinized for additional savings. Capping increases in military pay would mean savings of $17 billion, and freezing DoD civilian salaries for three years would save $15 billion. Two additional drivers have been the cost of operations and procurement, which have been out of control over the past several years. There are huge logistical costs in transporting military equipment to our bases, particularly in countries with limited logistical infrastructure.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has concluded over the years that the “costs of developing and buying weapons have historically been, on average, 20-30 percent higher” than Pentagon estimates. Tens of billions are spent annually on Cold War systems ill-suited to the needs of the 21st century. The F-35 fighter jet, a costly and contentious program, was too sophisticated for use in either Iraq or Afghanistan. There is no better example of President Eisenhower’s warning regarding the military industrial complex than the procurement history of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Like the Marines’ V-22 Osprey aircraft, the F-35 has been a troubled program, with cost overruns, military mismanagement, and no political scrutiny. The next generation of pilotless armed drones as well as hypersonic cruise missiles have more uses – and fewer costs – than several thousand sophisticated fighter aircraft. The F-35 variants for the Navy and Marines never should have been built. The drone, however, presents the same problem for the Air Force (no pilots) that Admiral Hyman Rickover’s strategic submarines presented for the Navy (smaller crews, fewer officers).

Excerpted: ‘When Musk Invades the Pentagon’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org