Cutting Misconceptions

Grumman’s A-6F Intruder II #A166, currently a museum exhibit.

My first job as a freshly-minted engineer was for one of the big defense companies, working on a major upgrade project for the Navy's carrier-based bomber. It was a $600M program that involved updates to engines, weapons, electronic systems, and more, during the peak of the Reagan defense buildup. I and of hundreds more newly hired young professionals cut our teeth on that job. The job also taught us a lot about the vagaries of defense contracting when, barely two years into my career, politics came into play and the Navy decided to go a different direction.

Ultimately, three of a planned five prototypes were delivered - well after I had been moved to an SDI project - but the project dead-ended as the Navy retired its existing fleet of that aircraft and adopted/adapted a different platform for its mission.

That next job was on a program to build satellites to watch the Earth for ICBM launches, in a major upgrade to the then-existing constellation. I was on that job for seven months. It ran well after I moved on, morphing over time as such programs typically do, but was to the best of my knowledge eventually terminated. After about a billion dollars had been spent.

And so it went, with my subsequent job changing several times in scope and oversight, until the Reagan defense dollars firehose was stanched and thousands of young engineers had to repurpose their skills for the worlds of finance, technology, insurance, and others.

While it is absolutely true that jobs intended to develop new technology are not always going to produce working hardware, I saw enough to understand how many institutional realities about defense contracting simply burn money.

Some are the result of rotating government management. Because the officers at the top of a program are often swapped out every couple years, as I saw time and again, the incentive to make changes for their own sake is high. The new guy doesn't get credit for the old guy's successful ideas, but gets blame for any legacy failures.

Some are the result of mission creep. As a college friend who ended up working for the Air Force noted, they had a very bad habit of trying to turn their aircraft into "trucks," to load ever more systems and stuff into existing platforms.

Some are the product of "generals always fight the last war." Major programs get funded and perpetuated even though evolving technology and geopolitics make their usefulness questionable. Parochial rivalries across the services result in programs intended to keep one service's role in a particular class of warfare, rather than say "this isn't a good fit any more."

Some are Congressional politics. One of my bosses, when pitching our program to Congresspersons or their aides, would show a slide that noted our company's footprint in almost every single state, because the people who control the purse strings are more interested in moving tax dollars in their voters' direction than in using them efficiently. That's a big reason why so many jobs have so many subcontractors.

All that comes before the indifference and "job security" mindset that produces $600 hammers. Another plane I got to know a bit was briefly famous for $1300 ashtrays. Why? Because they had to be safe should the plane go into a negative-G dive or bank steeply, so they ended up being made of eleven pieces.

I once encountered a military specification for lemon pies. It was thirteen pages long.

I could not continue without mentioning the "burn your leftover budget at the end of the year" behavior that prevailed. Driven in part by supervisors wanting to protect their teams' jobs, and in part by contracts that were "cost-plus," meaning there was no incentive to save the taxpayers any money, we'd fill out our December time cards with the job charges that still had lots of hours in them, no matter what we were really working (or make-working) on.

These and much more are the result of defense spending being entirely about Other People's Money. Efficiency is not ignored, but it's not much incentivized either, no matter how many experts tried to tame this messy process.

My time working in defense left me quite jaded about the way our tax dollars are used. So, I roll my eyes when people hear the phrase "defense cuts" and immediately assert that cuts will necessarily harm preparedness. Our military could do its job as well or better with much less money, if only it managed that money in a fashion you and I would consider reasonable - and you and I should expect and demand.

Elon Musk and his DOGE team will soon turn their attention onto the military - if they haven't already - and I'm confident they'll be able to identify tens and perhaps hundreds of billions in potential savings. The hard part will be getting the needed changes past the calcified brass in the various services and the contemptible teat-suckers in Congress.

That's before we take a long hard look at our military priorities, and ask ourselves whether a nation $36T in debt and burning nearly $2T more per year than it collects can afford to continue playing globocop. Or before we ask ourselves what we've gotten for our globocopping. The Europeans are wetting themselves at the notion of having to build up their own defenses to the NATO-specified 2% of GDP (and probably more), but it's past time we tackle this perverse wealth transfer from American taxpayers present and future to Europe's self-congratulatory and hectoring welfare states.

Everything I wrote here about the military is applicable to countless other government endeavors. I guarantee you every single agency could do its job just fine with less money than it currently gets. Keep all that in mind before you reflexively clutch pearls at the mention of funding cuts to parts of the government you like.

Finally, for all the gnashing of teeth over jobs being lost to DOGE cuts, I don’t recall many tears shed for the waves of laid-off defense workers in the 1990s. The federal government is not a jobs or make-work program, it is a steward of taxpayers’ dollars. Since those dollars are forcibly taken, rather than freely invested, our politicians should be doubly prudent in their expenditure. Losing a job sucks, but it happens all the time in the private sector. On the public side, where the legal protections are so much more favorable, those down-sized will not be dropped on the street with just a couple weeks severance. It’s not pleasant, and some will be hurt, but it has to happen.