Remembering Wampanoag
American defense procurement is a disaster
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This is a riff on a Bing West article from the Heritage Foundation in July 2024
In 1863, the Union Navy laid down a coal-fired screw frigate they called Wampanoag. This 4,000-ton vessel was for hit-and-run operations against British ports and commerce in the event of war. With an unusually long and tapered hull, her machinery included a unique slow-moving geared steam engine coupled to fast-moving propulsion gear. Design debate delayed construction, preventing Wampanoag from being commissioned before 1867. She made over 15 knots during her 1868 sea trials, a record that stood in the US Navy for over twenty years.
The Navy decommissioned Wampanoag soon after. A commission calculated that of all the weight the hull could accommodate, engines, boilers and coal supplies took up 84%, leaving only 16% for masts, sails, rigging, anchors, guns, provisions and water. Wampanoag also burned 136 tons of coal a day and carried enough for only five days of steaming: a serious handicap in a commerce raider expected to spend most of its time chasing down enemy ships on the high seas. So, she remained laid up, until 1874, when she became a receiving and store ship in New London. The Navy sold her for scrap in 1885.
Fast forward…
The Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) were two classes of US Navy warship that intended to fulfill many roles by swapping out “modules” of weapons and equipment. Built in the heady days after 9/11, their design meant they could work far inshore (AKA the littoral) to fulfill their missions. Note that no one in the Navy asked for the vessels, built in many shipyards with subsystems made by subcontractors all over the country. The Navy commissioned the first in 2008.
Then…
As of this writing, Congress has forbidden the Navy from contracting any more vessels, and the Navy has decommissioned or turned most into pier ornaments awaiting scrapping. The modular systems turned out to be not-so interchangeable, the cost overruns doubled, then tripled the costs, and the vessels have both structural and mechanical issues insoluble without complete reconstruction. Furthermore, the Navy literally has no missions for them, let alone the crews to operate them.
But…
Unmanned Ukrainian seaborne drones sank so many warships that Russia pulled its fleet out of most of the Black Sea, enabling Ukraine to resume grain exports deemed impossible when the war with Russia began. Ukraine employs its own patchwork drones to hit deep inside enemy territory. Cheap unmanned kinetic systems have changed the 21st Century face of war.
This has stunned the US intelligence community, the Pentagon, and its major defense contractors.
Over the past half-decade, the commoditization of digital technologies has forever altered the face of war, enabling unmanned systems to wreak destruction at a fraction of the previous costs. These cheap economies of scale are advantaging Iran, Russia, and China, but the American military procurement system has not adapted.
Creative destruction summarizes how upstart companies, decade after decade, have introduced manufacturing innovations that destroyed more established companies. Cars bankrupted buggy whip companies, digital photography doomed Kodak, and on and on. In the free marketplace, millions of consumers choose what to buy. If a company does not keep pace, its products cannot sell, and bankruptcy follows.
Countries and defense contractors should be no different.
Over the past three decades, the number of large defense contractors has plummeted from 51 to the current "Big Five" comprising Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman…all heavily invested in the LCS. Because the military was the sole customer that decided what products it wanted, the shrewder corporations developed unique skills and bureaucratic acumen, accumulating comparative advantages that blocked out competitors. These mega corporations subcontract to hundreds of small companies to manufacture parts and subsystems all over the country. Scattering these subcontracts ensures jobs for the friends of politicians in their home districts.
For decades, this closed-system oligopoly produced fearsome weapons, albeit also fearsomely expensive ones that are not always effective.
This business model, a legacy of Robert S. McNamara and his drive to treat war like a business, worked well when US defense budgets were five percent of the GDP (a bargain for a superpower), and when America’s enemies were second-rate armies or terrorists equipped with rudimentary technology. In the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were ample funds for high price tag items. Between 1980 and 2020, America possessed a monopoly on air power, overhead surveillance, and precision strike.
But the Legacy Pentagon oligopoly does not do cheap.
Northrop Grumman projected their Global Hawk drone to cost $10 million in 1994. Two decades later, the cost is $131 million….each. Congress paid the high sticker price after 9/11 when the US was fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The White House released photos of top officials mesmerized by precision drone strikes, bragging about killing any terrorist anytime, anywhere, with no collateral damage. Left unspoken were the millions spent on each strike package and the dollar value of the (non-human) targets. When those wars ended badly, it left a sour taste in Congress and especially in the mass media. America abandoned Afghanistan, but Iranian-controlled militias still take potshots at American troops in Southwest Asia and slaughter innocents almost at will with dime-store weapons.
The U.S. defense budget plummeted to three percent of the GDP.
This drove out any tolerance for error in procurement, and China has emerged as their technological peer. Now, the low-priced commoditization of digital military-applicable technologies has left the Pentagon with a losing business model.
US exquisitely engineered surveillance drones are too pricey;
US offensive strike missiles are too few;
A streamlined procurement and manufacturing process able to produce cheap unmanned weapons is unattainable—unimaginable—in Washington.
The US spends millions to destroy targets worth hundreds…and has for generations.
The anti-drone systems it uses cost ten to fifty times more than the drones they intercept, as the 9th Century Houthis have shown with their drone attacks in the Red Sea. Efforts to adjust have been embarrassing.
The $1 billion cheap drones…
In FY 2022, unmanned systems (drones) made up 140 Procurement Line Items, mainly highly expensive, sophisticated surveillance platforms. In 2024, the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) invested $1 billion in "cheap drones" as expendable as bullets and shells. The contractor now prices these “cheap drones” at over $50,000 per unit without support equipment. Ukraine makes a million drones at $500 per unit that requires a cell phone to control and a battery charger to launch, while Russia keeps pace with its own, similar millions. China, controlling 70% of the worldwide commercial drone market, can annually produce well over a million attack drones for less than half the cost of a single American fighter airplane.
The Pentagon makes thousands of Lamborghinis instead of millions of Mustangs.
Unmanned drones force surface warships to stand farther and farther from the conflict zone to survive, rendering them less effective and making a mockery of the LCS. The proven effectiveness of drones makes the declaration that America needs more warships at best anachronistic, and at worst criminally wasteful. McNamara’s legacy procurement system is too onerous and expensive to keep because it rewards only scale and political distribution. America can’t build drones fast and cheap enough, or with better defenses against electronic warfare, given the onerous political and business overhead the current system imposes (and overruns it allows) on everything the military buys.
A billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
Attributed to Barry Goldwater
Not long ago, the Commandant of the Marine Corps decided Marines should be ready to sink Chinese warships by shooting missiles from atolls in the South China Sea. The Corps then bought 64 missiles with a 100-mile range at $2 million each. To get within that range, the Commandant asked for 35 small amphibious ships at $350 million a pop to carry four missiles each. Meanwhile, the Navy designed a new, cheaper missile with a 350-mile range, to be launched from an aircraft without endangering a crew.
Oopsie!
Now there was no need for Marines to risk ships and crews venturing into well-defended Chinese waters regardless of cost. But instead of treating the already-purchased short-range missiles as an expensive loss and getting back to winning land battles, the Marines still ask for those 35 vulnerable ships, at a total estimated cost of between $11.9 and $15 billion…so far. The tenacity of Marine leaders in denying the laws of physics and tenets of common sense reflects the stubbornness besetting the leaders in all the services, and in the procurement and design of weapons systems.
Professionally, they know cheap, Al-equipped unmanned systems armed with missiles have changed warfare.
Emotionally, they resist trashing their pricey, vulnerable legacy systems, and the ideas and bureaucracies and jobs behind them, to free up money to invest in cheaper upgrades.
It's not just the Navy and Marines that reject change. In land battle, drones now reduce the threat of a successful surprise blitzkrieg and make all supply depots in the rear vulnerable. Yet, the US Army is not adapting to the daily reality of the land battles in Ukraine.
Taiwan’s myopia.
That unmanned systems advantage the defense over the offense should make a mockery of Chairman Xi Jinping's pledge to seize Taiwan. To invade, China must mass a thousand ships or more. Ukraine is producing a million drones a year on with a 2022 GDP of less than $180 billion. If Taiwan (2022 GDP $780 billion) built cheap drones in its own factories, each Chinese ship would face a swarm of five hundred to a thousand attack drones. Instead, Taiwan is spending $360 million to purchase a paltry thousand US-made drones.
The commoditization of digital military technologies is undeniable.
America’s defense budget will not increase to accommodate the Pentagon's oligopolistic obsession with expensive weapons. Congress and the Pentagon must embrace the killer cheap Al-enhanced unmanned systems—land, air, and naval drones and missiles. However, the Gordian Knot of the ossified and bloated Pentagon procurement process prevents their production.
If that knot can’t unravel, cut it.
America built Wampanoag, a powerful warship for its time, thinking the need was more likely than it was, and built it with technology her opposing European sailors used and understood, and gave it to American sailors who did not understand it. Time might have solved her problems, but the traditionalists in the Navy Department didn't even try to address them. When the Civil War ended, the Navy mostly reverted to sailing ships, leaving her sizable coastal and riverine steam fleet to rust, and Wampanoag with them.
In the wake of 9/11 (when hijackers used utility knives and modeling clay to murder the most civilians in US history), the Navy got—without asking for it—the LCS that not only cost billions but ultimately didn’t work, and is now vulnerable to weapons systems that cost a fraction of their cost.
America cannot afford to repeat Wampanoag, the LCS, or 9/11, and no one in the Trump Administration, not even DOGE, is seriously addressing the waste that Pentagon procurement has been for generations.
The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan
In the ‘70s, we used to say the lowest bidder made our gear. To an extent that was true, but in WWII it wasn’t, and that made for some very expensive but effective systems.
The Fire Blitz happened because not only would Japan not surrender, but all other means of attacking the island by air failed.
And Finally...
On 10 May:
1863: Thomas Johnathan “Stonewall” Jackson dies in Guinea, Virginia. Struck by friendly fire nine days before during the battle of Chancellorsville, surgeons amputated Jackson’s right arm days before, but he contracted and succumbed to pneumonia.
1940: Neville Chamberlain resigns his post as Prime Minister of Great Britain. Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, took over the job as German forces were overrunning the Low Countries and northern France.
And today is NATIONAL CLEAN UP YOUR ROOM DAY, commemorating the first celebration of Mother’s Day in the US on this day in 1908. So, echoing mothers throughout the ages…
It's funny how more government generally assures less outcome.