National Security

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The X-35B — the Marine Corps version of the new Joint Strike Fighter F-35. Lockheed Martin, Peter A. Torres/AP

The Obama administration’s 2013 defense spending plan, detailed as part of its overall new federal budget, includes $178.8 billion to buy new weapons, ranging from jet fighters and artillery to naval cruisers and satellite systems. But the real costs of these programs to the federal budget are unlikely to be disclosed in its budget documents or dozens of detailed weapons program reports due on Capitol Hill in March, according to a recent federal audit report.

The true costs of some of the biggest pieces of the U.S. arsenal are mostly hidden, the audit concluded, because the Defense Department’s public documents typically list only how much has been spent or will be spent to acquire its fighters, ships, and vehicles.

The long-term costs of owning such armaments, including all the operations, maintenance, and repair expenses, are often misstated or ignored in the Pentagon’s reports to Congress, or compiled only in an aggregate number that defeats careful analysis of rising costs in individual programs or prudent planning for future military spending, according to the auditors.

About 70 percent of the cost of major armaments have often been obscured in this way, according to a figure given to the auditors by officials at the Pentagon. The estimate appears in a little-noticed General Accountability Office report to the House Armed Services committee dated Feb. 2.

The significance of this oversight is not hard grasp: Anyone who owns a computer printer knows that repeatedly buying the ink eventually draws far more from your wallet than the machine itself, making it useful to have a plausible forecast of those expenses in advance.

Fast and Furious

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  House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., right, confers with the committee's Ranking Member Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., on Capitol Hill prior to the start of the committee's hearing on the controversial fast and furious program. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Attorney General Eric Holder and a House chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, have squared off over the Justice Department's flawed gun-smuggling probe.

Issa, R-Calif., is demanding the department turn over documents about how it handled congressional inquiries after problems with Operation Fast and Furious came to light.

At the start of Thursday's hearing, Issa said the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will do what is necessary to force the Justice Department to produce the information.

The attorney general says he will consider Issa's demand.

Issa has threatened a contempt of Congress ruling against Holder for failing to turn over the congressionally subpoenaed documents. The lawmaker alleges the Justice Department is engaging in a cover-up.

The Justice Department on Wednesday rejected an assertion by a House committee chairman that top Justice officials are covering up events surrounding a flawed gun-smuggling probe, Operation Fast and Furious.

Rep. Issa made the accusation in a letter threatening to seek a contempt of Congress ruling against Attorney General Eric Holder for failing to turn over congressionally subpoenaed documents that were created after problems with Fast and Furious came to light.

In Fast and Furious, agents lost track of about 1,400 weapons they were tracking after they were sold to low-level straw purchasers believed to be supplying Mexican drug gangs and other criminals. Another 700 firearms connected to suspects in the investigation have been recovered, some from crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S., including a murder scene in Nogales, Ariz., where border agent Brian Terry was slain.

National Security

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This Dutch reactor in the town of Petten is one of only a handful worldwide that make isotopes for use in medical procedures. A drive to persuade producers to use low-enriched uranium in such production is still getting off the ground. Peter Dejong/AP
In the post 9/11 world, the threat of a nuclear bomb being fabricated and used by terrorists is real. Now a group of nuclear experts has told Congress that a loophole in a bill meant to limit the use of bomb-grade uranium in medical isotopes could undo years of work to curb the risk of such material being diverted to such a bomb.

National Security

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The Defense Department’s budget is the focus of a major political debate this year. Andy Dunaway/U.S. Air Force, AP file
In November, when lawmakers were discussing the defense budget, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued a dire warning: In a letter to Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, he wrote that a threatened deep reduction — about $1 trillion over the next decade — would create “an unacceptable risk in future combat operations.”

National Security

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What do average Americans say when they are faced with the budget tradeoffs on national security that policymakers face today? When polls ask in the abstract about defense spending, Americans are often reluctant to cut it. However when Americans are asked to consider the deficit and presented with tradeoffs ... (cont'd)

National Security

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Surveyor Craig Sotlin spray paints a marker on land where a $1.5 billion uranium enrichment facility that will supply U.S. nuclear power plants is to be constructed, east of Eunice, N.M. Jake Schoellkopf/AP
A new industrial plant producing a key nuclear weapons ingredient, enriched uranium, opened in China last year, near the Sichuan city of Hanzhong. Other such plants opened last year in France and Japan.

National Security

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Sgt. Ryan Pike, left, and Staff Sgt. Altaf Swati erect a tactical satellite radio antenna while on patrol in Afak, Iraq, Dec. 28, 2008. Department of Defense
After an investment of 15 years and $17 billion, today the Army is still struggling to build better radios and estimates it may need to spend another $12 billion to get what it needs. The U.S. taxpayer has paid the bill, but frontline soldiers like those from Task Force Rock bear the true cost.

National Security

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An Army strategist, John Arquilla, who in the early ’90s worked at the California think tank RAND, was one of the first to imagine a “cyberwar” force that would feature widely-spread, small groups of soldiers equipped with the latest sensors and communications technology.

This “highly networked” army would be capable of instantly reacting to an enemy and hitting him where he’s weakest. “What distinguishes the victors is their grasp of information,” Arquilla and a colleague wrote in 1993.

Arquilla’s vision proved irresistible to Army planners. Observing the rapid spread of personal computers and the growing popularity of Internet use, the Army in the late 1990’s decided to create a digital revolution of its own.

By transforming every soldier into a communications node, capable of transmitting and receiving large volumes of data from many sources, Army leaders imagined they could chart the path to an era of high-tech wars in which information was as important as bullets and shells.

But in doing so, the planners went the wrong way, according to independent analysts. Instead of repairing their communications problems with lighter, easier-to-use radios, and a simpler network, they chose heavier, more complex devices.

That solution, says Col. Gian Gentile, an Iraq war veteran now teaching at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, “took [the challenges of] close fighting out of the equation.” It ignored, in effect, the risk of trying to spread high-tech electronics everywhere amid the rough and tumble of brutal combat.

 

National Security

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In mid-November, when the Army asked soldiers to test and appraise the high-tech communications devices that came from what’s left of the JTRS program, the answers they got were not exactly reassuring.

After gathering in a dusty valley ringed by low mountains in New Mexico, a part of the White Sands Missile Range, the soldiers jumped from armored vehicles in a “village” composed of cheap plywood-and-concrete structures, including one with the word “mosque” sprayed on the side.

Guided by robotic aircraft droning overhead, they advanced towards a cluster of buildings, rifles raised, eyes scanning, radios softly chirping. Inside the buildings, heavily-armed “insurgent” fighters prepared a deadly ambush. Some were equipped with new JTRS-compatible Rifleman radios, which the Army had just agreed to buy from General Dynamics for $56 million, or around $8,750 a copy.

They also had prototype handheld devices meant to provide them Internet-like connectivity even in the middle of a desert; the devices are similar in appearance to an iPhone, and allow even the most inexperienced private to take and transmit photos and videos and track other soldiers via GPS.

But, instead of being thrilled by all that connectivity, some of the soldiers complained not only about the radios they used, but about the Army’s strategic vision of a battlefield Internet. “It’s a distraction,” Staff Sgt. Cody Moose told visiting media and industry officials at the White Sands mock village. “I don’t believe a private needs one.”

What a private needs, Moose said, is to pay attention to the ground around him, be ready with his rifle and listen to his squad leader. The smartphone-like devices are a classic example of “too much information.” “You get sucked into it when you could just look around,” says 2nd Lt. Adam Martin, standing nearby at a makeshift display for the new radios and smartphones.

National Security

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U.S. Department of State Wayne Partlow/AP
A new bill approved by Congress last week would again make the Defense Department the premier funder of security assistance to foreign countries, giving it more than double the comparable budget of the agency popularly associated with America’s foreign aid, the State Department.

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Smith worked for 25 years in a series of key reporting and editorial roles at The Washington Post, including national investigative editor, national security correspondent, national investigative correspondent, and a foreign staff bureau chief based in Rome.