With his own words, Leon Panetta has shown that he is little more than a mouthpiece for keeping the defense budget at historically high levels and is incapable of coping with the coming era of modest (yes, modest) Pentagon budget reductions. Using DOD's budget history and the ongoing decay (not a typo) of our military forces at ever increasing spending levels as my perspective, I seek to explain in an essay that is running this morning at Time Magazine's Battleland blog. My thanks to journalist Mark Thompson for running this piece.
Is Leon Panetta the Right Man to be Secretary of Defense?
Winslow Wheeler
TIME Battlefield, December 13, 2011
This morning, three publications reported more (and important) information about a report submitted to Acting Acquisition Czar Robert Kendall in November about the F-35. This “Quick Look Report” was previously reported by Bloomberg News (Tony Capaccio). Today's articles expand the coverage of the contents of the report. These articles by Jason Sherman and colleagues at Inside Defense, Bill Sweetman of the Ares Defense Technology Blog, and Bob Cox at the Fort Worth Star Telegram are below.
F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Concurrency Quick Look Review
Concerns About JSF's Lethality, Survivability Triggered ‘Concurrency Risk' Review
JSF – What's Really Happening: Internal Pentagon report finds major problems with F-35 performance and components
Phi Beta Iota: A series of civilian and military leaders have willfully refused to be honest about the future of defense, to the point that we now have smaller older forces and we do not have what we need to implement anything even remotely like the 1998 “four forces after next.” DoD is in total amoral melt-down, where the 4% of the force that has integrity takes 80% of the casualties and receives 1% of the total budget–and still does not have a hand-held weapon able to out-gun the Taliban.
See Also:
Graphic: Pentagon Focused on 10% of the Threat
Graphic: Four Forces After Next with IO
Winslow Wheeler: US Generals/Admirals Corrupt & Bloated — Panetta Reverses the Token Cuts by Gates
Marcus Aurelius: SecDef to McCain on Sequester + RECAP on DoD Fraud, Waste, & Abuse
Review: Lines of Fire – A Renegade Writes on Strategy, Intelligence, and Security
