Philip Taubman's June 24 article the New York Times and International Herald Tribune is another stellar example of uncritical reportage on national defense. Such stories help sustain a failing status quo by appealing to authority of establishment apparatchiks from an earlier era who are probably trying to worm their way back into the game, perhaps in an Obama Administration.
Cries about a defense brain drain and calls for better systems management have been heard from time to time since at least the 1960s, yet Paul Kaminiski and others interviewed by Taubman talk about loss of expertise and the Pentagon's grotesque acquisition management problems as if they are recent developments. Looking back, did not the F-111 and C-5 cost overrun scandals occur in the 1960s, even though both programs were sold at that time as examples of better systems management in just the same way that the problem plagued, cost overrun infected $200+ billion Joint Strike Fighter program was sold by Mr. Kaminski and his cohorts to the President and Congress in the early 1990s?
All that is new in 2008 is that Pentagon's excesses are occurring without a superpower adversary that would justify bloated budgets, an adversary comparable to the Soviet Union... yet the Pentagon still spends more than the rest of the world's military spending combined. To be sure, the scale of the current excesses is due in part to the monumental incompetence of the Bush Administration, but there is nothing really new going on as Taubman seems to suggest.
The truth is, as I and others have repeatedly documented over the last thrity years, the management/technology/economic pathologies that brought the Pentagon, and by extension the United States, to the current catastrophic state of affairs have been in the works at least since the mid 1950s.
It is also true that management and technical skills have declined as the weapons procurement game became more politicized over time, but as political skills — which are what count in the budget game — have increased, so has the wealth of the apparatchiks who move back and forth through the well-greased revolving door between the defense industry and the Pentagon. Indeed, the decline in technical and management skills was apparent to me as a young Air Force engineer in the early 1970s, though it took a little longer for me to understand the underlying but more crucial evolution of politicization, which shapes the hidden DNA of the emergent Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex or MICC.
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