What Recent War Making Decision History Tells Us About Power And The Price We Pay

“THE ATLANTIC”  From “The Iraq War and the Inevitability of Ignorance” By  James Fallows

“The U.S. is destined to keep over-learning the lessons of the last conflict; leaders considering war or peace, media stoking or questioning pro-war fever, and 99 percent of the public in considering the causes for which the military 1 percent will be asked to kill, and die.”

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“There’s a specific reason it is so hard to be president—in normal circumstances—and why most incumbents look decades older when they leave the job than when they began. The reason is that the only choices normal presidents get to make are the impossible ones—decisions that are not simply very close calls on the merits, but that are guaranteed to lead to tragedy and bitterness whichever way they go.

Take Barack Obama’s famed choice not to back up his “red line” promise in Syria, which was a focus of Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Obama Doctrine” Atlantic cover story two years ago. The option Obama chose—not intervening in Syria—meant death and suffering for countless thousands of people. The option he rejected—intervening—would have meant death and suffering for countless thousands of the same people or others. Agree or disagree on the outcome, any such decision is intellectually demanding and morally draining. Normal presidents have to make them, one after another, all day long. (Why don’t they get any easier choices? Because someone else has made all of those before they get to the president.) Obama’s decision to approve the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound turned out to be a tactical and political success. When he made it, he had to weigh the possibility that it could end in world-publicized failure—like Jimmy Carter’s decision to attempt a rescue of American hostages in Iran, which ended in chaos, and which Carter later contended was what sealed his fate in his re-election run.

A special category of impossible decision, which I was introduced to in the two years I worked for Jimmy Carter in the White House and have borne in mind ever since, turns on the inevitability of ignorance. To be clear, I don’t mean “stupidity.” People in the government and military are overall smarter than press portrayals might suggest. Instead I mean really registering the uncomfortable fact that you cannot know enough about the big choices you are going to make, before you have to make them.

Sometimes that is because of deadline rush: The clock is ticking, and you have to act now. (To give a famous example: In 1980 U.S. radar erroneously indicated that the Soviets had launched a nuclear-missile attack, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, had to decide at 3 a.m. whether to wake the president to consider retaliation. Before the world was rushed toward possible nuclear obliteration, the warning was revealed as a false alarm before Brzezinski could place the call.) Most of the time it is because the important variables are simply unknowable, and a president or other decision-maker has to go on judgment, experience, hunch.

This point sounds obvious, because we deal with its analogues in daily-life decisions big and small. No one who decides to get married can know what his or her spouse will be like 20 years in the future, or whether the partners will grow closer together or further apart. Taking a job—or offering one—is based at least as much on hope as on firm knowledge. You make an investment, you buy a house, you plan a vacation knowing that you can’t possibly foresee all the pitfalls or opportunities.

But this routine truism takes on life-or-death consequences in the choices that presidents must make, as commander in chief and as head of U.S. diplomatic and strategic efforts. The question of deciding about the unknowable looms large in my mind, as I think back 15 years to the run-up to the Iraq war, and think ahead to future such choices future presidents will weigh.

There’s a long list of books I wish presidents would have read before coming to office—before, because normal presidents barely have time to think once they get there. To give one example from my imagined list: the late David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace is for me a useful starting point for thinking about strains within the modern Middle East. The book argues, in essence, that the way the Ottoman Empire was carved up at the end of World War I essentially set the stage for conflicts in the region ever since. In that way it is a strategic counterpart to John Maynard Keynes’s famous The Economic Consequences of the Peace, written just after the conclusion of the Versailles agreements, which argues that the brutal economic terms dealt out to the defeated Germans practically guaranteed future trouble there.

Also high up on my “wish they’d read” list is Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, by two Harvard professors (and one-time mentors of mine), Ernest May and Richard Neustadt. In this book, May and Neustadt reverse the chestnut attributed to an earlier Harvard professor, George Santayana, that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Instead they caution against over-remembering, or imagining that a choice faced now can ever be exactly like one faced before.

The most famous and frightening example is Lyndon Johnson’s, involving Vietnam. Johnson “learned” so thoroughly the error of Neville Chamberlain, and others who tried to appease (rather than confront) the Nazis, that he thought the only risk in Vietnam was in delaying before confronting communists there. A complication in Johnson’s case, as this book and all other accounts of Vietnam make clear, is that he was worried both about the reality of waiting too long to draw a line against Communist expansion, and perhaps even more about appearing to be weak and Chamberlain-like.

Because of the disaster Johnson’s decisions caused—the disaster for Vietnam, for its neighbors, for tens of thousands of Americans, all as vividly depicted in last year’s Ken Burns / Lynn Novick documentary—most American politicians, regardless of party, “learned” to avoid entanglement in Asian-jungle guerrilla wars. Thus in the late 1970s, as the post-Vietnam war Khmer Rouge genocide slaughtered millions of people in Cambodia, the U.S. kept its distance. It had given up the international moral standing, and had nothing like the internal political stomach, to go right back into another war in the neighborhood where it had so recently met defeat.

From its Vietnam trauma, the United States also codified a crass political lesson that Richard Nixon had applied during the war. Just before Nixon took office, American troop levels in Vietnam were steadily on the way up, as were weekly death tolls, and monthly draft calls. The death-and-draft combination was the trigger for domestic protests. Callously but accurately, Nixon believed that he could drain the will to the protest if he ended the draft calls. Thus began the shift to the volunteer army—and what I called, in an Atlantic cover story three years ago, the “Chickenhawk Nation” phenomenon, in which the country is always at war but the vast majority of Americans are spared direct cost or exposure. (From the invasion of Iraq 15 years ago until now, the total number of Americans who served at any point in Iraq or Afghanistan comes to just 1 percent of the U.S. population.)

May and Neustadt had a modest, practical ambition for their advice to study history, but to study it cautiously. “Marginal improvement in performance is worth seeking,” they wrote. “Indeed, we doubt that there is any other kind. Decisions come one at a time, and we would be satisfied to see a slight upturn in the average. This might produce much more improvement [than big dramatic changes] measured by results.”

My expectation is more modest still: I fear but expect that the U.S. is fated to lurch from one over-“learning” to its opposite, and continue making a steadily shifting range of errors.
The decision to invade Iraq was itself clearly one of those. The elder George Bush fought a quick and victorious war to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991. But he stopped short of continuing the war into Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power—and so his son learned from that “failure” that he had to finish the job of eliminating Saddam. (As did a group of the younger George Bush’s most influential advisors: Dick Cheney, who had been secretary of defense during the original Gulf war, and returned as George W. Bush’s vice president. Colin Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the first time around, and secretary of state the second. Paul Wolfowitz was undersecretary of defense during the first war, and deputy secretary of defense during the second. And so on.)

Two of the writers who were most eloquent in making their case for the war—Christopher Hitchens, who then wrote for the Atlantic among other places, and Michael Kelly, who was then our editor-in-chief—based much of their case on the evils Saddam Hussein had gotten away with after the original Gulf War. (Hitchens died of cancer in 2011; Kelly was killed in Iraq, as an embedded reporter in the war’s early stage.) Then Barack Obama, who had become president in large part because he opposed the Iraq war — which gave him his opening against the vastly better known and more experienced Hillary Clinton—  learned from Iraq about the dangers of intervention in Syria. And on through whatever cycles the future holds.

Is there escape from the cycles? In a fundamental sense, of course not, no. But I’ll offer the “lesson” I learned—50 years ago, in a classroom with Professor May; 40 years ago, when I watched Jimmy Carter weigh his choices; 15 years ago, in warning about the risks of invading Iraq. It involves a cast of mind, and a type of imagination.
As the Bush administration moved onto a war footing soon after the 9/11 attacks, no one could know the future risks and opportunities. But, at the suggestion of my friend and then-editor Cullen Murphy, I began reporting on what the range of possibilities might be. Starting in the spring of 2002, when the Bush team was supposedly still months away from a decision about the war, it was clear to us that the choice had been made. I interviewed dozens of historians, military planners, specialists in post-war occupations, and people from the region to try to foresee the likely pitfalls.

The result, which was in our November, 2002 issue (and which we put online three months earlier, in hopes of affecting the debate) was called “The Fifty-First State?” Its central argument was: The “war” part of the undertaking would be the easy part, and deceptively so. The hard part would begin when U.S. troops had reached Baghdad and the statues of Saddam Hussein were pulled down—and would last for months, and years, and decades, all of which should be taken into consideration in weighing the choice for war.

It conceivably might have gone better in Iraq, and very well could have, if not for a series of disastrously arrogant and incompetent mistakes by members of the Bush team. I won’t go into details here: I laid them out in several articles, including this, this, and this, and eventually a book. But the premise of most people I interviewed before the war, who mostly had either a military background or extensive experience in the Middle East, was that this would be very hard, and would hold a myriad of bad surprises, and was almost certain to go worse than its proponents were saying. Therefore, they said, the United States should do everything possible to avoid invading unless it had absolutely no choice. Wars should be only of necessity. This would be folly, they said, and a war of choice.

The way I thought of the difference between those confidently urging on the war, and those carefully cautioning against it, was: cast of mind. The majority of people I spoke with expressed a bias against military actions that could never be undone, and whose consequences could last for generations. I also thought of it as a capacity for tragic imagination, of envisioning what could go wrong as vividly as one might dream of what could go right. (“Mission Accomplished!”)

Any cast of mind has its biases and blind spots. But I’m impressed, in thinking about the history I have lived through and the histories I have read, by how frequently people with personal experience of war have been cautious about launching future wars. This does not make them pacifists: Harry Truman, infantry veteran of World War I, decided to drop the atomic bomb. But Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, Colin Powell (in most of his career other than the Iraq-war salesmanship at the United Nations)—these were former commanding generals, cautious about committing troops to war. They had a tragic imagination of where that could lead and what it might mean.

What lesson do we end with? Inevitably any of them from the past will mismatch our future choices. The reasons not to invade Iraq 15 years ago are different from the risks to consider in launching a strike on North Korea or on Iran, or provoking China in some dispute in the East China Sea.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/03/iraq-war-anniversary-fifty-first-state/555986/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. Fallows has won the National Magazine Award for his 2002 story “Iraq: The Fifty-First State?” warning about the consequences of invading Iraq; he has been a finalist four other times. He has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction for his book National Defense and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His recent books Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009) are based on his writings for The Atlantic. His latest book is China Airborne (2012). 

Cost Of Caring For Iraq, Afghanistan Vets Could Top $2.5 Trillion

“MILITARY TIMES”

“The cost of caring for veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan could top $2.5 trillion by 2050, creating tough financial decisions for both the veterans community and the entire country, according to a new analysis by the Costs of War Project.”

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“The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have created a veterans care crisis, with disability rates soaring past those seen in previous wars,” said Harvard University professor Linda Bilmes, lead author of the new estimates.

“This will take a long-term toll not only on veterans, but the U.S. taxpayers that will bear these costs for decades to come.”

The latest analysis of the costs of veteran care in coming decades is roughly $1 trillion over previous estimates by the group. Researchers cited “more frequent and longer deployments, higher levels of exposure to combat, higher rates of survival from injuries, higher incidence of serious disability, and more complex medical treatments” as the reasons for the higher price tag.

The group also noted that the increased demands are already putting pressure on the federal budget.

In fiscal 2001, before large-scale U.S. deployments to Afghanistan, mandatory veterans spending accounted for about 2.4 percent of annual federal spending. By fiscal 2020, that jumped to 4.9 percent, even as the number of veterans in America dropped from about 25.3 million to 18.5 million.

“The majority of the costs associated with caring for post-9/11 veterans has not yet been paid and will continue to accrue long into the future,” the report states.

“As in earlier U.S. wars, the costs of care and benefits for post-9/11 veterans will not reach their peak until decades after the conflict, as veterans’ needs increase with age. This time around, veterans’ costs will be much steeper.”

About $900 billion of the estimated costs will be for direct medical care by Veterans Affairs physicians and contractors. All post-9/11 veterans are entitled to five years of free medical care through VA, while individuals with significant service-connected injuries can qualify for lifetime care.

The group estimates another $1.4 trillion for disability benefits payouts. Researchers also estimated about $100 billion in additional spending for VA staff to keep up with the increased demands of veterans care.

Past analyses by the group have estimated that about 3 million veterans served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, either in direct combat deployments or support roles. The median age of the group now is just under 37 years old.

The new report comes as the United States completes its full withdrawal from Afghanistan ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks which prompted the start of the war on terror.

As the U.S. tries to close this chapter in its military history, an entire generation of veterans and families will not be able to do so,” the report states. “The cost of these wars in blood, toil and treasure will endure for the next half-century.”

The full report is available on the project’s web site.”

https://www.militarytimes.com/veterans/2021/08/18/cost-of-caring-for-iraq-afghanistan-vets-could-top-25-trillion-report/

The Deeper Lasting Costs Of War

Brown University “Costs of War”

Brown University “Costs of War”

Chris Ott, right, helps maneuver her son, former Marine John Thomas Doody, around their family house in September 2013. J.T., left, as everyone calls him, was shot while serving in Fallujah, Iraq., and subsequently suffered an infection and a series of strokes that left him in a coma and relying on a ventilator to survive. (Chris O’Meara/AP)

“MILITARY TIMES“

“A new collection of studies reveals at the often unseen effects of those wars both at home and abroad ranging from fractured families, strained caregivers, increased cancer rates to mistrust of health workers, demolished infrastructure and military suicides.“

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“Impact from the past two decades of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can be seen in dollars spent, lives shattered by injury or trauma and dead service members carried home.

“War and Health” is a collection of ethnographies covering a range of people affected from the wars beginnings, current day and likely long-term future ripples.

In it researchers have found correlations between areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan with higher number of drone strikes are also less likely to accept polio vaccinations and other medical assistance due to mistrust of government aid.

They’ve seen increased rates of behavior incidents and low school performance among children of frequently-deployed military parents.

The reports show waves of Iraqis seeking medical care in Beirut, Lebanon with late-stage cancers because they couldn’t get early screening in Iraq, which previously boasted the leading medical care in the region.

Researchers found military suicides, increased family violence and higher numbers of substance abuse and DUIs even among non-combat service members correlated with faster-paced deployment schedules and training.

While half of all caregivers for veterans are spouses, parents or immediate family, a full one-third of caregivers are friends or neighbors who don’t qualify to receive financial compensation created in recent years to ease the burden that caregivers for vets can face.

Catherine Lutz and Andrea Mazzarino edited the collection as part of their work with the “Costs of War Project,” out of Brown University.

The project collects information on war dead, military and civilian casualties, budget figures and other measures of the costs of the conflicts in the Global War on Terror. The project began in 2011 and recently kicked off a new effort to update past reports and develop new measures by 2021, the 20th anniversary of the start of the wars.

The same project recently released and updated notice on the fiscal costs of the Global War on Terror. The release noted that an estimated $6.4 trillion had been spent between late 2001 and today, a large portion of which has been financed through deficit spending.

But, those numbers can be difficult to nail down, as noted in the report, which quotes Christopher Mann of the Congressional Research Service.

“No government-wide reporting consistently accounts for both DOD and non-DOD war costs,” he said.

Part of the Costs of War Project’s work is to pull together disparate sources to find the tally of the wars.

Their research has found that that a growing cost will be medical care.

One example included 10-year costs estimates for post-9/11 veterans with traumatic brain injuries is expected to cost $2.4 billion from 2020 to 2029.

Mazzarino spoke with Military Times about the nature of the project and what she and its contributors hope it will accomplish.

She and others have participated in media interviews and, through the Costs of War Project, have been in touch with Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-VT and hope to testify before Congress on their findings.

“The whole point of the project is to move beyond the academy to influencing advocacy and public policy,” Mazzarino said.

That’s not an easy task. Data-driven studies such as past reports on increasing servicemember suicides and strains on military families garnered political and public attention, but that took years and resulted in some changes in programs.

What Mazzarino and her colleagues are working with is less black-and-white and more focused on the second- and third-order effects of having a military at war on a daily basis for decades.

But, it may be that what they’re finding will have as much a long-term impact as other major war-related concerns.

“People who were serving when the war started, they’re entering old age soon,” Mazzarino said. “That’s going to come with all kinds of financial burdens to the U.S. government, especially with care for those veterans.”

And overseas, the imprint of decades of combat leave their own kind of toll.

“There are subtle and unexpected ways that the destruction of infrastructure has affected public health,” she said.

The Costs of War Project website has compiled estimates that a many as 480,000 people have died in direct war violence. They estimate far more have died due to “indirect” war violence such as when access to food, water and medical care was restricted or unavailable due to combat.

Their research estimates that more than 244,000 civilians have been killed in connection to the wars and as many as 21 million have been displaced and many are now war refugees, with substandard living conditions away from their native lands.

One harder to measure item is how the estimated $5.9 trillion spent on the wars could have been spent, the report notes. What healthcare, infrastructure or education projects were curtailed, limited or ended as a result in budget priorities to fight the wars instead?

Mazzarino has seen firsthand some of the effects of the wartime military. Her husband serves as a submariner in the Navy. That’s meant more frequent and unexpected deployments that his predecessors faced.

And she’s seen that strain on fellow military families, members and commanders.

Some similar experiences were reflected in a section titled, “It’s Not Okay: War’s Toll on Health Brought Home to Communities and Environments.”

One vignette profiled Dolores, the young wife of an infantry sergeant whose unit had seen a number of murders committed by soldiers back home and increases in domestic violence.

Those experiences had weighed heavily on her husband who returned and completed another Iraq deployment, this time being injured and later diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Six years after he had returned from theater, she had become his main caregiver and had to quit her job to do that work and to advocate for his care.

The section’s authors, Jean Scandlyn and Sarah Hautzinger, wrote that many of the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan they interviewed still saw themselves as deeply entangled in what had happened during their deployments.

“Assessing war’s toll on health requires that we consider the ways we all become entangled in wars seemingly distant, and how war particularly erodes wellness in domestic military communities,” they wrote.”

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/11/14/why-the-deeper-lasting-costs-of-war-is-not-reflected-just-in-dollars-and-body-counts/

Report: Full Cost of U.S. Wars Overseas Approaching $6 Trillion

“Visual Capitalist” Military Deployments by Country

“MILITARY TIMES”

“Cost of Wars Project”

“The annual analysis from Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs shows a steadily growing tally for the 16 years of wars overseas.

Overseas combat operations since 2001 have cost the United States an estimated $4.3 trillion so far, and trillions more in veterans benefits spending in years to come.”

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“Study author Neta Crawford said the goal of the ongoing project is to better illustrate the true costs of overseas military operations.

“Every war costs money before, during and after it occurs — as governments prepare for, wage, and recover from armed conflict by replacing equipment, caring for the wounded and repairing infrastructure destroyed in the fighting,” she wrote in the 2017 report.

Of the total, only about $1.9 trillion has been reported by defense officials as official overseas contingency operations funding.

But the research includes another $880 billion in new base defense spending related to combat efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Pakistan since 2001, as well as about $780 billion in boosted Department of Homeland Security costs in that time frame.

Veterans spending has increased by almost $300 billion so far as a result of those conflicts, and future spending on those benefits over the next four decades is estimated to top $1 trillion more.

Crawford noted that all of the costs could rise with President Donald Trump’s recent decision to boost U.S. end strength in Afghanistan.

“There is no end in sight to the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and the associated operations in Pakistan,” she wrote.

Administration officials have already requested about $70 billion more in overseas contingency spending as part of their fiscal 2018 budget proposal. The entire federal budget plan, including mandatory benefits spending, totals about $4 trillion.

The full Costs of War report is available on the university’s web site.”

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2017/11/08/report-full-cost-of-us-wars-overseas-approaching-6-trillion/

 

Spending Trillions to Create More Enemies Than We Destroy

“THE CIPHER BRIEF- WALTER PINCUS”

“It’s time to think of the costs that more than 14 years of war have had on this country.

I’m not just thinking in terms of dollars, although we should worry because most of the added expense, over $1 trillion, has been put on a credit card. This so-called war on terrorism – with no end in sight – remains the first war that American presidents have not asked the public to pay for with a special tax.

I’m also concerned with how few Americans are directly or even indirectly involved in the conflict, with only one percent of U.S. citizens serving or having served in the military, and another two or three percent only being a part of the defense community.

That means more than 90 percent of the public are just observers, for whom this near decade-and-a-half of bloodshed is something that appears on television or causes a moment of recognition at some sports event.

Even the five presidential candidates give it only a sentence or two when they mention it at all, and they are almost never questioned about it.

However, with little or no public notice, the growing human and dollar costs were front and center the past two weeks on Capitol Hill, as military and civilian leaders from the Defense Department testified about the fiscal 2017 Defense Department budget.

“Today, less than half of our nation’s military is ready to perform their core wartime mission, and some critical units are in far worse shape than this 50 percent.” That was Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), hardly a military hardliner, speaking at a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee hearing March 15, referring to a previous classified briefing on military readiness he attended, but saying he was disclosing what was already made public.

The cause, Kaine said, was “fourteen years of sustained combat together with the Budget Control Act of 2011 [that] have presented the nation with a unique readiness challenge. It’s kind of the perfect storm of two significant events, and that problem has no likely end in sight.”

His list, echoed in other hearings by Pentagon officials, included “no – zero – fully ready Army brigade teams…only nine ready BCTs [brigade combat teams] available for unforeseen contingencies. Less than half of the Marine Corps units are ready to perform their core wartime mission…80 percent of aviation squadrons do not have the required number of aircrafts to train…Less than half of our Navy ships are ready to ship to meet wartime plans…ship deployments that used to be six months are now eight to 10 months, which exacerbates the conditions of the ships and also creates challenges for those in the extended deployments.”

Marine Assistant Commandant Gen. John Paxton Jr., summed up what most service commanders also told Congress saying, “We mortgage our future readiness because we’re trying to fight today’s fight. So I have concerns about capacity and future readiness, and everything we do is trade space, and we – we need some top line relief.”

“The Air Force never came home from the first Gulf War,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh III told a House Armed Services hearing March 17. “We’ve had airmen flying in their tasking order for 25 years in the Middle East. During that time…we’ve cut 40 percent of our active duty force. So that lower force size combined with increased deployment operations tempo over the last 25 years, has limited the amount of training we can do for the other missions that we’re required to do in a different kind of conflict.”

“Fifteen years we’ve been running back and forth to Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. “And during that time, we’ve been fighting one typology of war against counterinsurgents or terrorists or guerrillas. And our higher-end training against conventional threats, hybrid threats, threats that involve enemy artillery, enemy air, enemy electronic warfare, et cetera, the higher end, high intensity type battlefields, have not been routinely practiced for 15 consecutive years. So our readiness against that type of threat has deteriorated over a decade and a half.”

What is it that the Defense Department is preparing for? Gen. Milley put it more bluntly, “The very first question any of us needs to ask is readiness for what?

Milley answered it this way: “We’re talking about great power war with one of, or two of four countries. You’re talking about China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. That’s the guidance we were given, that’s how we’re for sizing the budget, or that’s how we’re for sizing the force and that’s how we planned the budget, in accordance with the National Military Strategy, the Defense Planning Guidance, and a wide variety of other documents.”

You would think that the current election campaign would be the time for candidates at every federal level, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and for certain the Presidency, to be laying out their concerns on national security and their plans to meet them.

For example, we should be hearing candidates’ positions on the rebuilding of America’s triad of nuclear weapon delivery systems.

In last week’s hearings, Navy officials stressed that the multi-billion-dollar costs of constructing the planned 12 new Ohio class strategic submarines beginning in 2021 will, as Navy Secretary Ray Mabus put it, “Just gut…Navy shipbuilding for decades to come.”

The Air Force has a similar problem as it faces funding 100 or more new, B-21 strategic bombers at some $500 million apiece. Exploration has begun for future replacement of the current, 450 land-based, Minuteman III ICBMs.

Air Force Chief Welsh described the impending costs for rebuilding the Triad of nuclear delivery systems as requiring “a much larger discussion than any particular service. It has to be the Department of Defense. It’s Congressional, it’s a White House discussion. And I hope it’s something that the next administration takes on early in their tenure, because we need an answer pretty quickly, or we’re going to spend money toward a lot of programs that we can’t complete if we don’t fund them down the road.”

Here, at The Cipher Brief, we plan to start our own “larger discussion” in the coming weeks and months, not just on funding strategic weapons but many other defense programs, such as healthcare, retirement, roles and missions, acquisitions, contractors plus the need to generate funds to pay for them.

We are hoping you readers will contribute your ideas so we can start a conversation on these subjects. Eventually, the presidential and congressional candidates must realize they have to join in.”

http://thecipherbrief.com/column/fine-print/cost-war

“Walter Pincus is a Columnist and the Senior National Security Reporter at The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics from nuclear weapons to politics. In 2002, he and a team of Post reporters won the Pulitzer Price for national reporting. He also won an Emmy in 1981 and the 2010 Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy. He can be reached at wpincus@thecipherbrief.com.”

For our take on answers to the conundrum Walter conveys please see:

United States Warfare Realities Today

 

United States Warfare Realities Today