ELPAgain…. this is NOT to get off the subject of JSF… but to sidebar for a second to give you a taste of one of many many ……. many examples of how people think of ways to waste my tax dollars like money grows on trees. So you can see why my confidence of the “system” to field a useful weapons system is questioned not to mention their ability to field a weapon system we don’t even need: JSF.
It shows M.I.C. ( military industrial complex ) in all it’s glory.
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Washington Post
June 7, 2005
Pg. 1
E-Mails Detail Air Force Push For Boeing Deal
Pentagon Official Called Proposed Lease of Tankers a ‘Bailout,’ Report Finds
By R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post Staff Writer
For the past three years, the Air Force has described its $30 billion proposal to convert passenger planes into military refueling tankers and lease them from Boeing Co. as an efficient way to obtain aircraft the military urgently needs.
But a very different account of the deal is shown in an August 2002 internal e-mail exchange among four senior Pentagon officials.
“We all know that this is a bailout for Boeing,” Ronald G. Garant, an official of the Pentagon comptroller’s office, said in a message to two others in his office and then-Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Wayne A. Schroeder. “Why don’t we just bite the bullet,” he asked, and handle the acquisition like the procurement of a 1970s-era aircraft — by squeezing the manufacturer to provide a better tanker at a decent cost?
“We didn’t need those aircraft either, but we didn’t screw the taxpayer in the process,” Garant added, referring to widespread sentiment at the Pentagon that the proposed lease of Boeing 767s would cost too much for a plane with serious shortcomings.
Garant’s candid advice, which top Air Force officials did not follow, is disclosed for the first time in a new 256-page report by the Pentagon’s inspector general. It provides an extraordinary glimpse of how the Air Force worked hand-in-glove with one of its chief contractors — the financially ailing Boeing — to help it try to obtain the most costly government lease ever.
The inspector general’s report, slated for release today at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, adds a new dimension to what Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), John W. Warner (R-Va.) and Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) have already called one of the most significant military contracting abuses in several decades. Already, the scandal has resulted in prison terms for former Air Force principal deputy assistant secretary Darlene A. Druyun, and a senior Boeing official, Michael M. Sears.
Besides documenting precisely who was responsible, the new report details the Air Force’s vigorous efforts on Boeing’s behalf. It also shows how Air Force leaders and Boeing officials jointly manipulated legislation to authorize the deal and later sought to suppress dissenting opinion throughout the Pentagon.
After interviewing 88 people and reading hundreds of thousands of pages of e-mails, the inspector general’s office concluded that four top Air Force officials and one of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s former top aides, Undersecretary of Defense Edward C. “Pete” Aldridge, violated Pentagon and government-wide procurement rules, failed to use “best business practices,” ignored a legal requirement for weapons testing and failed to ensure that the tankers would meet the military’s requirements.
The report also connects Rumsfeld to policymaking on the lease, recounting a statement by former Air Force secretary James G. Roche that Rumsfeld had called him in Newport, R.I., in July 2003 to say “he did not want me to budge on the tanker lease proposal,” despite criticism.
Earlier, after Roche made what he acknowledged was a “special pleading” for the lease at a key meeting with Rumsfeld on Jan. 31, 2003, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence T. Di Rita jokingly said “that my comments ‘were brought to you by the Boeing Company,’ ” Roche later told Air Force Chief of Staff John P. Jumper in an e-mail. “I didn’t rip his heart out,” Roche added.
Air Force spokesman Douglas Karas said he could not comment on the report in detail until it has been officially released. He said, however, that “we’ve learned from this experience” and will apply the lessons to future procurement of large weapons systems. Di Rita and Rumsfeld were in Thailand yesterday. A Boeing spokesman said the company could not comment on a report it has not read.
The Pentagon and Congress ultimately killed the lease deal. Pentagon officials have noted that the department is now conducting special oversight of Air Force weapons-buying, in part because of the problems with the Boeing deal.
In the copy of the report obtained by The Washington Post, 45 sections were deleted by the White House counsel’s office to obscure what several sources described as references to White House involvement in the lease negotiations and its interaction with Boeing. The Pentagon separately blacked out 64 names and many e-mails. It also omitted the names of members of Congress, including some who pressured the Pentagon to back the deal.
The report is nonetheless the most damning of the three reviews of the tanker deal completed by the inspector general since early 2004. It includes, for example, a statement from an unnamed cost analyst that “numbers were contorted a lot of different ways to sell the program.”It also suggests that the foundation of the Air Force’s tanker lease — that KC-135 planes were experiencing unexpected corrosion and needed urgent replacement — was a house of cards. The report said the Air Force could not substantiate congressional testimony by two of the officials — Roche and Maj. Gen. Paul W. Essex, a former head of its global reach program office — on that subject.
“In fact, the studies that were available did not indicate an urgent or immediate requirement for the replacement of . . . KC-135 tankers,” the report said. That view was confirmed last year by the Defense Science Board, which said the KC-135 airframes were usable until 2040.
The report says that Marvin R. Sambur, then the top Air Force acquisition official, knew that this urgency “did not exist” but claimed otherwise and ordered data unflattering to the deal removed from a key document. His office made what a critic of the lease elsewhere in the Pentagon interpreted as a “thinly veiled threat” to manipulate other Air Force contracts if the dissent did not cease, the report shows.
Sambur and Roche, who have resigned from the Air Force, did not respond to phone messages requesting comment. Previously, they have said their actions were appropriate and endorsed by others, including White House officials.
Druyun improperly used her influence to increase the price paid for the tankers and also made incorrect statements to others in the administration, the report states. When Air Force cost analysts told her that leasing would cost $2 billion more than buying the planes, she told the head of the Air Force Materiel Command that “she no longer needed the financial management team . . . on the project.”
The Air Force has long maintained that any defects in the lease proposal were attributable solely to Druyun, who is serving a nine-month sentence in federal prison for illegally negotiating a lucrative job with Boeing as she supervised the lease negotiations. An employee at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld said the law firm no longer represents Druyun.
The inspector general’s report makes it clear that the Air Force’s aggressive pursuit of the lease over a three-year period was actually a team effort, and that shortly after Druyun agreed to the concept in a September 2001 meeting attended by Essex and top Boeing officials, other top officials fell into lock step with her. Roche backed the idea in a letter to Capitol Hill dated Oct. 9, 2001, without conducting a legally required analysis of alternatives, and blocked such an analysis in August 2003, according to the report.
Boeing’s interests were at the center of the deal, the report suggests. Less than a month after Druyun’s meeting with Boeing, the Air Force began developing requirements for the new tanker “tailored to Boeing . . . tanker aircraft capabilities,” the report states. The result fell short of what other services, such as the Navy, wanted, and it excluded the passenger, cargo and medical evacuation roles for the plane that some military officials desired.
Boeing prepared briefing materials that Druyun presented to lawmakers while seeking congressional approval of the deal and worked with Druyun to refine the wording of legislation that specifically named the company as the beneficiary of the deal. Roche and Sambur later cited that language as the prime reason for favoring Boeing.
Druyun “was accountable for manipulating the congressional language,” the report states.
Her tactics sowed previously undisclosed resentment among Air Force cost analysts and others, according to the report. At a June 2002 negotiating session in California with Boeing officials present — a meeting that later came to be known inside the Air Force as “The Long Beach Massacre” — Druyun “pretty much by herself pushed the Air Force team to the high end” of the price range, one of those present told investigators.
Cooperation between Boeing and the Air Force was nonetheless not always perfect, according to the e-mails recounted in the report. Roche complained in November 2002 to Sears, Boeing’s top financial officer, and Phil Condit, Boeing’s board chairman, that they were not lobbying hard enough on Capitol Hill.
Roche wrote, “Gee Mike, when I knew you and Phil, I had the sense you wanted to make money. Guess I was wrong.” Boeing executives later pressed subcontractors to call the White House, and met with Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, who backed the deal.
ELPThis is not an attempt to change the subject. Unfortunately… since the JSF costs sooo much.. you can’t bring it up with out considering where we are currently at ( not to mention the massive cuts on this years military sustainment budget where DOD PULLED money from existing units op budgets, to pay for the sink hole that is Iraq. )…
Wreck It And Run
US Military Collapsing Under Weight Of Iraq
By William S. Lind
6-8-5
http://www.rense.com/general65/wreck.htm
Among the many unhappy developments in U.S. industry in recent decades has been the advent of “wreck it and run” management.
A small coterie of senior managers takes over a company and makes a brilliant show of short-term profits while actually driving the business into the ground. They bail out just before it crashes, cashing in their stock options as they go, and leave the employees, ordinary stockholders and customers holding an empty bag.
It is increasingly clear that under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. armed forces have also been taken over by “wreck it and run” management. When Rumsfeld leaves office, what will his successor inherit?
— A volunteer military without volunteers. The Army missed its active-duty recruiting goal in April by almost half. Guard and Reserve recruiting are collapsing. Retention will do the same as “stop loss” orders are lifted.
The reason, obviously, is the war in Iraq. Parents don’t want to be the first one on their block to have their kid come home in a box.
— The world’s largest pile of wrecked and worn-out military equipment (maybe second-largest if we remember the old Soviet Navy). I’m talking about basic stuff here: trucks, Humvees, personnel carriers, crew-served weapons, etc. This is gear the Rumsfeld Pentagon hates to spend money on, because it does not represent “transformation” to the high-tech, videogame warfare it wrongly sees as the future.
So far, deploying units have made up their deficiencies by robbing units that are not deploying, often National Guard outfits. But that stock has about run out, and some of the stripped units are now facing deployment themselves, minus their gear.
— A military tied down in a strategically meaningless backwater, Iraq, to the point where it can’t do much else. A perceptive reader recently wrote to me that “China has the luxury of the U.S. inflicting grievous wounds, economic and military, on itself from our commitment to spread ‘democracy’ … Although the Iraqi insurgents may have the limited purpose of ending an occupation, other global actors can sit back and watch us bleed ourselves slowly to, at least, a weakened state. From that point of view, the last thing these other actors wish to see is either a victory or a quick defeat. Instead, events are proceeding nicely as they are.” Exactly correct, and those other actors include al-Qaida.
— Commitments to hundreds of billions of dollars worth of future weapons programs that are militarily as useful as zeppelins but less fun to watch. If the Army had its Future Combat System, a semi-portable Maginot Line that will cost more than any Navy or Air Force program of equal uselessness, in Iraq or Afghanistan today, would it make any difference? No. Maybe FCS really stands for Funnels Cash System.
— A world wary of U.S. intentions and skeptical of any U.S. claims about anything. In business, goodwill is considered a tangible asset. In true “wreck it and run” fashion, Rumsfeld & Co. have reduced the value of that asset to near zero. A recent survey of the German public found Russia was considered a better friend than the United States.
— Finally, the equivalent of an unfavorable ruling by a bankruptcy judge in the form of a lost war. We will be lucky if we can get out of Iraq with anything less than a total loss.
Earlier this week, I attended the funeral and burial of one of the United States’ real military heroes at Arlington cemetery. Col. David Hackworth would not have sat silent, as our current senior military leadership sits, while “wreck it and run” civilian management drove America’s armed forces into the ground.
Rumsfeld & Co. will bear primary responsibility for the disaster, which will no doubt disturb them greatly as they enjoy their luxurious retirements. But our senior generals and admirals are the equivalent of the board of directors, and they would have some difficulty convincing Hack that they were just the piano players in the affair.
(William S. Lind, expressing his personal opinion, is director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.)
ELPthe Block level increments were always planned just like the spiral additions in the f-18e/f,f/a-22..spiral development is also being pursued in the JUCAS program as well as the E-10 and SBR programs…the DOD has really made spiral developmet something of a common practice.
Dont look at the JSF as a 250 billion program but more of a 50 billion one which is the developmental cost over a decade..the rest is the procurment cost which would have been spent anyways to replace the legacy systems..
Yes but part of those blocks when planned didn’t address engineering problems that leave the Jump version crippled in carry ability. At the end of the day I am paying for a system that is not even needed. The current ability of JSF is unimpressive. Considering where we ( the U.S. ) is going in other areas of weapons platform employment, the JSF is just a corportate give away that bleeds money from VERY limited dollars to support many other things that have REAL need. Cancelling JSF outright, is the right thing to do. As for the mention of the SH program, that was criminal by any other name. As for F22, we would have fielded those a few years ago if politics didn’t keep getting in the way. The only 22 that needs to be addressed now is serious ways is the V-22, which has only begun to kill people in it’s crashamatic flying habits. We are burning up cash on so many weapons systems we don’t need….cash that we no longer really have…. all while there are a host of other systems out there that need the money and actually provide a value to our military defense.
All while… there are more important things to redirect money at:
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ELPLong sad story of the Lie that is JSF… now graduated blocks…. some of those things were never on the original powerpoint briefings when they went and lied to congress.
Jump jets… Cancel them… (1.) the safety record of the Harrier speaks for itself even if the tech is pretty different. ( 2 ) to quote the great Kurt Plummer :diablo: You have to question the sanity of placing complex aircraft deep in indian country on a large operation to “support the warfigher” :rolleyes: when you have to truck in or airlift in all those supplies to feed this short ranged, limited carry beast. It is just extra logistics you have to carry in. Add to that when in Vietnam we lost a good portion of our night interdiction ability in one night because of a mortar attack by the local hicks. So think about the real value of using a land based jump jet.
Fire support will get done without the waste which is JSF…. certainly not the waste of effort that is JSF.. . Conventional fixed wings, UCAVs, ( and as much as I hate attack helos… the Apache when geared up now with NCW ( netcentric warfare ) gear in 2 ship elements… is a wonderful night, netcentric killer… as part of a bigger team working hand in hand with JSTARS, UCAV, fixed wing fast movers already mentioned. Again the job will get done without JSF…. Fires support for the troops ( using “fires” to describe fire support needed by ground troops…. also has yet another improving member in various versions of small tactical ballistic missles which can arrive from 150 miles or more away in 2-3 minutes and kill with awesome precision. And they don’t collect flight pay.
As for sea use of the jumper version. Well… I would rather have all our Marines equiped with the Super Slow Hornet. It will have massive effect with a blizzard of PGMs in supporting mud Marines… and of course the other nasty the pilot mafia pays lip service to. X45 and X47…. I can give you 24/7 response with that airframe and it, working hand in hand with a super horror force will get the job done nicely. We can do all our work and never need the jump JSF ….or ANY JSF for that matter. …. as for any foreign sales of JSF…. anyone that wants there money back… please form a line. I would rather have a salty Typhoon and UAVs off of a carrier than the pork and waste of money and the lie which is J$F.
ELPAFA is a great organization to lobby for people issues ( enlisted – officer personnel matters ) housing, benefits etc etc…. when it comes to airpower they lose their way from time to time and fall lock step with the military industrial complex ( note the adverts in their printed publication ) so if the boss says “we need JSF” … they parrot it with little or no thought… or if former Sec AF ( Roche ) comes out and says the Tanker Lease is a good thing…. AFA parrots it with little thought in their writing… even though the JSF is a huge waste of resources, and there was a ton of criminal activity around the tanker lease…. ( hey… congress etc continue making CEOs and corp. board members secretarys of the armed services…. so who do you think these guys email and call on a regular basis even though a lot of the communication is illegal. :rolleyes: …. Long range UCAV? hmmmmm well….. medium range anyway… for netcentric intial strike warfare beatdown by land or by sea, I would rather have F22, B2 and X45/ x47, instead of F22, B2 and JSF and maybe X45 X47 when the funding comes around…..( funding for everything is going into a tailspin because of Iraq ) …..anyway…. X45 drops bombs already and JSF is yet to fly. Add to that after Big SAMs and enemy aircraft are beat down… I don’t really need stealth aircraft after that chore is done. Legacy airframes can do the rest of the work. ( keep building SH ( hey it can at least strike ) and F16 new Blocks in low volume.dropping SDB (quad rack for small jets ), JDAM, ( dual use ( laser or GPS/INS ) PGMs with Laser-JDAM, Enhanced or Paveway IV, and future dual use SDB ) WCMD, etc .. Get X45 and X47s fielded. Without refueling they will have 1200 + miles of range. Not bad.
ELPYup… the 80 500lb JDAMs in the B-2 is figured out to where it works…. how many airframes they have setup…for that particular smart bomb rack I don’t know, but as you can imagine, every bomb hanging on the rack in the bay needs some type of wire connectivity to the jet be it in some part on a bomb rack sub assembly itself, or independant cables for each, so the mission commander ( right seater ) can upload Lat/Longs to the weapon and set the digital fuse before it is released.
ELPWe have MANY military fighters stationed at many civil airports. Nice attempt at flamebait starting this thread though.
ELPLots of interesting guessing here, but so far in tests in Nevada, they aren’t having too much success at picking up an F22 before they themselves are declared dead. Super fighter? Maybe not, but if you aren’t getting off the first shot and the F22 force already knows where you are, and is scoring kills, you already have large problems. It certainly beats whatever is in second place, in a warfare arena where second place doesn’t matter. And that is just doing common air-to-air fighting where most of the core tactics are known. In this case the F22 can edge out of those core tactics where a legacy fighter design is limited by the old rules where the ability to detect or even have enough fuel to run, leaves the legacy fighter dead meat. This of course includes a wild contempt of engagement that the F22 provides with dash speed, fuel economy, and the serious limitations of an enemy to shoot weapons at it. It can if it wants, bingo fuel a legacy fighter design to death. The opposing force more times than not won’t get off the ground with much because their runways will already have a JDAM crater or two in their runway intersections and taxiways ( assuming the model that the US hits first as it has many times in the past ), more times than not, “kills” of enemy fighters will happen with SDBs airburst over their parking area, or breaking through their shelter. So it sounds nice to have all of these “what ifs” but for the most part, it is a complete waste of time for the F22 to engage in WVR. There just is no reason to give the other guy their only hope of even seeing you. Off course it is practiced for, but don’t expect it to ever happen. There is no reason to play fair when you have such a wild advantage.
As for strke warfare where the first few nights are used to beat down air defense: Whole systems in the USAF and USN have been fielded now that makes the methods (sensor, planning and execution ) used in Allied Force 1999, look silly and ridiculous. More and more bugs have been worked out of net-centric warfare ( NCW ) ( mostly bandwidth ), to where the cycle between target detection and target destruction becomes very very short. Precision Guided Munitions ( PGMs ) strikes of major targets, in Desert Storm, many times took as much as 72 hours between detection, execution and destruction…that is at the high end but not much happened very fast in the dectection-decision-destruction cycle. Today that cycle can be down to 12 minutes or less and with few weather limitations. The ability of a few ( very expensive ) large double digit super SAMs to breath air long in a SEAD/DEAD environment that includes 24/7 NCW targeting with both manned and unmanned sensors…. is very very limited. It is the whole team. Not just the F22 but, the F22, B-2, modern-cheap sub 4 meter near all weather PGMs, and the NCW environment, and our final complete arrival into the targets per sortie era, where in the old days it took many, many, aircraft ( and their support: ECM, tanking, fighter cover etc ) to take out a few targets. Now, 8, 10, 20, 50 or more, real… valid first_nights_of_the_air_war, beatdown of enemy AD …. targets, can go away with one airframe. That is the rule book. This means that first nights of the war air defense targets will be killed in large numbers and that the ability to have air domination facing that is very limited. All of these systems mean that the enemy is showing up to a gunfight armed only with a knife. It’s not even an evolution in air domination method, it is a revolution. Once large SAMs and airpower are destroyed, our legacy airframes can pretty much do what they want, when they want. Making comparisons between modern air domination methods and legacy methods isn’t very productive or even worth the time, once the above things are realized. An F22 with SDBs or JDAMS, supported by the NCW ways, more times than not, will get through, and there isn’t much that will keep that from happening.
ELPAgree with most of that….
For more entertaining reading from that great Kurt Plummer here is some on point comments from him on the topic which connects the dots better I think.
http://boards.historychannel.com/thread.jspa?threadID=500000437&messageID=500008933#500008933
I’ll add more:
We have a moronic 2nd generation war of occupation that is now forced DOD to recall current sustainment budgets in USAF to pay for that moronic effort. Almost every type of day to day USAF operation is affected by this. Big time:
Including the following read:
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Pilot Training Time Slashed
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001581.html
( note like many clueless types… the no knowledge writer in question makes no mention of killing something like JSF )
“They’re not cutting fat, they’re cutting to the bone,” Hornburg said, noting the Pentagon has taken large sums of money away from the Air Force to pay for the Army in Iraq.
Again it isn’t just something like flying hours…. it is everything that makes the USAF run.
But wait there is more:
The M.I.C. ( military industrial complex ) morons want to waste 245 Billion and climbing for the JSF yet something simple like chump change to fully modernize the C-5 at 10 billion is dragging its feet. Or the next upgrade to the B-1 ( both these upgrades provide better mission up times etc )…. Numerous other programs will go into fallow.
JSF provides nothing of value. We can hit all the DMPIs when we want without ever using it. What an incredible waste.
ELPThe best thing that could happen is that the JSF gets cancelled outright. At 245 billion and climbing, it doesn’t offer us anything but a bleeding checkbook. Netcetric strike warfare can be done without this on the menu and we would never miss it. As for the foreign orders… anyone that wants their money back, please form a line. The JSF is one of the better criminal enterprises cooked up by the military industrial complex. Yuck.
ELPCool … Payback for Eldorado Canyon. :diablo:
ELPELPELPShouldn’t be a problem. OSX is UNIX by any other name and Unix runs on Intel boxes. Some tweaking and thats it.
ELPShouldn’t be a problem. OSX is UNIX by any other name and Unix runs on Intel boxes. Some tweaking and thats it.
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