On military procurement...

V-22 Osprey

Recently I have been listening to the audio book “The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey”.  It’s an exhaustive history of the V-22 tilt-rotor program over the decades, and it got me thinking about my own time working procurements in the Army. 

Procurement in the DoD is a nasty business.  To illustrate, let us use a theoretical example of a “joint” project, meant to save the DoD money by fielding one common system to all branches; Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. 

First, someone at the Pentagon briefs a long PowerPoint show on the money spent on cutlery in DoD dining facilities, and how things can be done better and cheaper if we can all just agree on a common solution which will take us through the next four decades.  Some four star agrees, funding is slipped into a bill in congress under the radar, and the Joint Spork Office is formed and staffed at some installation, somewhere. 

Theoretical "Joint Spork"

The services all go on a long TDY somewhere, to whatever location has better hotels, to have a week’s worth of day-long meetings to determine their requirements for the new spork.  The Marines are angry that they don’t get to go because the Navy gets to represent their interests at the meeting. 

The Army wants the spork to be capable of digging a fighting position, and the field artillerymen want to be able to quickly convert it for use as a flechette in case a dining facility is overrun. 

The Navy needs a marinized version in order to use the spork while underway at sea, and to shoot it out of torpedo tubes. 

The Air Force needs it to be able to survive an ejection at 60,000 feet, and be able to cut through an aircraft fuselage for airfield rescue. 

The Marines really need the spork to have a bayonet lug, so that they might attach it to their rifles when the battle is going very badly. 

After spending all week dining out but not agreeing on much of anything, the services retire to their respective installations, fire off lots of emails, and control of the project disappears deep into their separate bureaucracies, each with wildly different priorities and processes.  Months go by between meetings, years go by before the project gets any traction.  Somehow, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines make do with legacy edition cutlery, although some cut themselves and nearly starve due to the inherent inadequacies of the low-tech fork, knife, and spoon. 

Other DoD-level bureaucracies lobby to test the new spork, shooting it, electrifying it, blowing it up, or whatever they need to do to justify the existence of their individual testing organizations, which forces unforeseen design changes and cost overruns.  More years drag by.  The spork design becomes heavier and more costly, and hardly fit to eat with. 

By and by, the Air Force goes out on their own and procures their own spork, in defiance of DoD policy and federal law, but at least they are the first to field a spork, while the joint spork languishes in the two year long operational testing phase. 

Eight years later, the joint spork is ready for production, meeting 80% of the specified requirements, and costing in the neighborhood of $150 per unit.  Meanwhile, mil-spec copies can be found on eBay for $12.  While this is meant to be a humorous example, this is exactly how we get to the legendary $600 toilet seat of DoD procurement lore. 

There are other reasons for cost overruns besides “jointness”.  Let us examine a few of them. 

Particularly in the case of high-tech and leap-ahead technologies like the V-22 (read: technologies that have not been designed yet), it is impossible to know at the outset of the project how much per airplane you are going to pay.  Aircraft invariably gain weight and lose capabilities during development as the project transitions from fanciful requirements and marketing promises to what is actually achievable in reality with a fixed budget. 

By the time it is apparent that an aircraft will not meet both its target costs nor its performance goals, enough time and money has been invested (and the contract cancellation costs are so high) that it is not financially feasible to bail out of the project.  This brings to mind the DoD truism that there are two phases of any procurement project… too early to tell, and too late to stop. 

Another procurement truism simply states: good, fast, cheap… pick two. 

If you want high quality, you can have it fast, or cheap… but not both. 

If you want it fast, you can have quality, or low cost… but not both. 

And if you want it cheap, you can do it right, or it’ll take much longer. 

Not to say that any of this is correct, but it IS the way that the DoD does business! 

Lastly, the requirements, budgets, and “want lists” of the services constantly change with the political winds, competing priorities for limited defense dollars, etc. etc.  This is where you sometimes feel sorry for the contractors.  Originally told that they will be building 2000 aircraft for three branches of service, two services will drop the aircraft completely over the decades-long development cycle, the sole remaining service will change the amount that they want to buy six times, money will too tight to fund all of the original requirements, and other requirements will be worked around and dropped at the behest of the service in order to stay somewhat on budget. 

When the final bills come in and only 400 aircraft are ordered of the original 2000, every newspaper on the beltway will report how badly the project is over budget and what a piece of junk the aircraft is, and the specter of the “military industrial complex” will ride again, for a short time. 

As ugly as the process is, it is ultimately important that we suffer through this charade and fund leap-ahead technologies to maintain our military’s technological overmatch against potential enemies, because we always roll into battle with what’s on the shelf, and not what we really need.  An example from Iraq:

During the initial invasion, I know soldiers who spent seventeen months in Sadr City, working out of light HMMWV vehicles, with NO armor, and only fabric doors.  This is unforgivable in 2003, as the light armor of the HMMWV vehicles had proven to be inadequate for combat in Somalia in 1993 and even in Bosnia in the late 1990s against the land mine threat… with nobody shooting.

HMMWV without armor

By the time I arrived there for the first time in 2005 with a ground unit, IEDs were taking a heavy toll on American troops, and there was a major push to armor ALL Army ground vehicles, first with torch cut plate steel doors, and later with bolt-on armor kits.  Casualties continued to mount from IEDs, as bombs can be built faster than armored vehicles can be designed and fielded.

HMMWV with armor kit

Beginning in 2007, the MRAP family of mine-resistant vehicles began to replace armored HMMWVs, and after six years and thousands of US casualties, the US Armed Forces had a solution that was NEARLY adequate to meet the threat on the ground. 

MRAP

Why did the US not have MRAPs earlier?  They WERE in Iraq, at least since 2005.  Not with the US, but in the service of some foreign armies.  Since the first MRAP designs were of South African manufacture, and symbolic of the apartheid era in that region, most Western armies wanted nothing to do with them and would not purchase them from South Africa, regardless of operational necessity. 

And those kind of decisions, along with unbridled spending cuts, get troops KILLED.  

Buffalo MRAP in Iraq, circa 2005

Where did the marsh go?

Following the BP spill of 2010, Louisiana has fought mightily with the federal government and BP for marsh restoration funding. At first glance, it might appear that the BP spill by itself had done irreparable damage to the coastal ecosystems in Louisiana, and the damage to plant and animal life in the area of the spill is well documented. But as pointed out in a Time Magazine article, the damage done to the marsh from the BP spill is just a “sunburn on a cancer patient” relative to what both Louisiana and the federal government have been doing to the marsh for decades.

There are two major categories of marsh damage, natural and man caused.

Left to itself, marshlands will naturally subside. More on this later as we describe as how man has greatly accelerated this natural process.

Second, Louisiana has had more than its fair share of hurricanes over the past decade, which rearranges the marsh structure and pushes salt water VERY far inland. Salt water kills freshwater plants, and the marsh dies back further.

Third, and bridging the categories of natural and man caused damage, the introduction of the fur-bearing Nutria to Louisiana in the 1930s has caused significant damage to marshland, such that the state has a formal Nutria Control Program and a $4 bounty on the head of each Nutria. This is beyond what you can get for the fur and the meat, assuming you are not looking for a new recipe.

Leading the parade of man caused damage to the marsh, decades of dredging has been done throughout the marsh in order to provide access for boats, pipelines, and shallow water oil platforms. If you want to hang one on the oil companies, here it is. Dredging opens up canals that were never meant to be there, salt water and freshwater go to where they were never meant to go, and once again, the marsh dies back. 

Canals in the marsh

But possibly most egregious is the mission of the Army Corps of Engineers.  The corps has a dual mission in Louisiana, flood control and maintaining navigable waterways, meaning the Mississippi river.  Oh yeah, and environmental stewardship.  

What this translates to in reality is the corps spends untold sums of federal dollars damming up the Mississippi throughout Louisiana, to protect cities like New Orleans (below sea level and surrounded by water) and Venice (at the furthest south tip of the delta) to name only a few.  In doing so, they are fighting nature and the natural process of repairing the marsh.  Without the natural flooding of sediment over the banks of the Mississippi, the marsh can’t help but die, and the nutrient-rich silt that would normally replenish the marsh is directed off the delta and into the Gulf of Mexico, where algae blooms and fish kills are the inevitable result.  

And now the punch line. You, the taxpayer, are picking up the bill for:

- The Army Corps of Engineers, to build miles and miles of levees to protect New Orleans and every other town in Louisiana that was never meant to stay dry when the Mississippi is at flood stage;

- The Army Corps of Engineers to dredge the Mississippi in support of the Port of New Orleans, and navigation all along the southern portion of the river;

- Marsh restoration projects that would not be needed if the Mississippi were allowed to naturally flood and change course as it has since the beginning of time;

- Various scientific studies to tell us how bad all of this has been for the marsh, and... 


- Federal funding for bounty hunters to trap big furry marsh rats. 

One last item – earlier this year, the corps was forced to open the Morganza spillway for the first time since 1973, in order to prevent further flooding in New Orleans and other locations downstream of Morganza. Not surprisingly, the corps has known since at least the 1950s that the Mississippi has been trying to change course, straight through the spillway and into the Atchafalaya basin. But the water is needed for navigation downstream through New Orleans, and the rest, like the marsh, is history.

Stealth HELICOPTERS???

Since the successful raid on Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan in early May of this year, much has been made of the mysterious “stealth helicopter” which reportedly crashed during the initial phase of the raid.  Due to the loss of one helicopter and a section of its modified tail boom falling outside the walled compound, there was plenty of news fodder that brought out numerous self-appointed aviation experts, and speculation that ranged from wild guesses to opinions that defied both physics and the physical evidence at the crash site.  With only the tail boom of the new design to look at, it appears that the regular four bladed tail rotor was replaced with a five bladed design, and a hubcap-like cover was mounted over normally exposed tail rotor linkages, which would make at least the tail rotor both quieter and stealthier.

But like “jumbo shrimp” and “military intelligence”, “stealth helicopter” is a awkward concept at best.  While it is possible to make a helicopter quieter and while its huge radar-reflecting cross section might be made smaller, helicopters in this class are still a twenty thousand pound whirling mass of rotating and vibrating parts.  All of this does not add up to a package that “can be hovering right next to you, and you wouldn’t know it”. With all apologies to Blue Thunder, Airwolf and even the Romulans, it just cannot be done.  Ditto for the claim that the helicopter “can be coming towards you, but it sounds like its moving away” and “can’t be heard until its right on top of you”.   No, no, and NO!

So what can be done to make a helicopter more stealthy?  Several things.

Quieter rotor blades, such as this “Blue Edge” blade developed by Eurocopter significantly cut down on rotor noise (listen to the noise comparison in the above link).  Low noise designs such as this are not new technology, they have been operationally employed since Vietnam. 

Both the hot exhaust and noise of engines can be suppressed somewhat through creative ducting around the intakes and exhausts. 

Sikorsky builds both the UH-60 Blackhawk series of helicopters and the now canceled RAH-66 Comanche scout helicopter, designed from the ground up to be a more stealthy design.  It is not in the economic or business interests of either the DoD or the contractor to reinvent the wheel, so you can bet that the easiest, cheapest, and quickest way to modify a UH-60 was with bolt-on panels that were remarkably similar to what was developed for the Comanche program.  In fact, in 1991 at the Paris Air Show, the Sikorsky “Fantail” design built for the Comanche was first demonstrated to the public on a S-76B, another Sikorsky helicopter, which was itself a derivative of the UH-60.  Therefore, the safest guess is that the helicopter that crashed during the raid was a modified UH-60 which would look more like a Comanche. 

UNMODIFIED UH-60 BLACKHAWK

RAH-66 COMANCHE

"STEALTH" UH-60 BLACKHAWK (ARTIST CONCEPTION)

Would these modifications make the helicopter more difficult to control, and cause the crash, as some have proposed?  Maybe.  

There is very little correlation between fixed wing aerodynamics and rotary wing aerodynamics in a hover, so comparisons between the flight characteristics of a high flying stealth airplane and a modified helicopter are mostly meaningless.  

Adding weight and changing the shape of the airframe can definitely affect flight characteristics and controllability, but its not as if this mission was not rehearsed and flown in simulators many times.  High altitude may also have been a factor, but Denver is higher than Abbottabad, and helicopters routinely operate in Afghanistan at much higher altitudes.  At the end of the day, when you are sneaking in low, in close formation, in the middle of the night, on what is possibly the biggest clandestine raid of the war, there are about five hundred ways to crash a helicopter that have nothing to do with airframe design and high altitude.  

As for the leaked explanation that the helicopter crashed because the temperature was different inside the compound, so the helicopter “couldn’t hold the hover”... I cannot locate anybody who has been flying helicopters for any length of time who has any idea what the congressman is talking about.  Perhaps it’s a aerodynamic phenomenon unique to Pakistan?

Stealth helicopter or not, was stealth really a must-have requirement for this mission?  Probably not. 

First up, Pakistan is not noted for their impenetrable air defense network.  We give their equipment and their operators far too much credit, and our own people far too little.  If Mathias Rust could land a Cessna in Red Square, having flown in from Finland, how do you like the odds of the Pakistanis vs. Task Force 160?  Backed up by the US Air Force and Navy?

Secondly, the US did not just Hail Mary two helicopters into Pakistan and hope things went well.  This was likely one of the most overplanned operations in modern warfare, with all manner of diversions, electronic jamming, and reinforcements on call for every contingency imaginable.  The fact that they were able to lose a helicopter and still execute the mission and extract in around forty minutes is testimony to the professionalism and the preparedness of the team on the mission. 

Thirdly, THE PAKISTANIS KNEW BIN LADEN WAS THERE and any Pakistani forces able to respond to an attack on the compound were either smart enough to stay away, slow enough to not make a difference, or dumb enough to not even notice. 

And lastly, the number one reason why this mission did not need a stealth helicopter… the task force extracted on Chinooks!  About as stealthy as a Greyhound bus… though not as quiet.  

Pilot Joke

A young boy approaches an airline pilot at the terminal and says "Mister, when I grow up, I want to be an airline pilot too".  


Taking the young boy aside, the airline pilot says to him "Son, you can't do both of those, eventually you will have to choose one or the other".  

Taking care of the troops

ex·pert

[n., v. ek-spurt; adj. ek-spurt, ik-spurt]

noun

1. a person who has special skill or knowledge in some particular field; specialist; authority: a language expert.

First of all, a few basic assumptions to set the stage for this rant...

- To members of the military, WHERE YOU HAVE BEEN and WHAT YOU HAVE DONE while in the military is essential to establishing your credibility, and everything else is pretty much subordinate to this. It’s just the way they think.

- The Department of Defense is an intractable bureaucracy that wastes immense sums of taxpayer money on a daily basis without batting an eye. It is difficult to comprehend how high, wide, and deep is the fraud, waste, and abuse within the DoD. Moreover, the DoD hasn’t the slightest interest in addressing the problem or fixing it.

- The DoD is going to need to cut lots of money out of the budget very soon whether they like it or not.

- The military COULD stand to think outside the institutional box when making the aforementioned cuts.

- It MAY not send the right message to an all-volunteer force to propose deep cuts to their benefit packages in the midst of three wars.

With this in mind, it was with much distress that I read about the Defense Business Board’s plan to overhaul the military retirement system, essentially replacing the twenty year retirement with a tiered 401K type plan, and thereby saving the DoD untold sums of money… all by reneging on the cornerstone of the military benefit package, a proposed move that is sure to have a unbelievable impact on retention.

If you were to ask “have any of the knuckleheads on this board ever served in the military?” you might be on to something. The board roster reads like a who’s who list of noted academics and businesspeople without even a tangential connection to anything military, save for a handful of DoD civilians and a few who have, like the current Secretary of Defense, spent much longer in undergrad programs than in uniform.

In fact, among the 21 board members (bios are provided for 19) FIVE have served in the military. One is a retired USMC Major General, a nice start, but the remaining four have A COMBINED TOTAL OF 19 YEARS OF MILITARY EXPERIENCE, not all of it on active duty. TWO of the five have combat experience. None of them hold Chair or Vice-Chair positions. And these are the people charged with revamping the military retirement system, not one of them having a stake in the outcome.

So I ask you, would you appoint a commission of noted pastry chefs to determine how much doctors should be allowed to bill? How about a panel of rocket scientists to negotiate union benefits for plumbers?

Only if you had no earthly idea of what you were doing when you appointed the commission…

Send OUT the clowns...

A letter to Senator Mitch McConnell, KY...

Sen McConnell:

I recently read that you received a congressional inquiry regarding alleged mistreatment of Kentucky-based Reservists in the 8-229th Aviation Regiment during their pre deployment trainup for Iraq.  

As a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom with two Iraqi tours under the Texas Army National Guard, I share their sentiments and, I believe the DoD, the reserve component, and especially the soldiers and family members would benefit from a complete disbanding of the Army Reserve Training Divisions, with the trainup mission reassigned to the National Guard in the states where the units are located.  Similar trainup missions are already being performed by units such as the Combat Skills Training and Evaluation Battalion (CSTEBn) under the Texas Guard.  

Any soldier who has ever suffered through a reserve component trainup can testify to the time and money wasted by the Reserve Training Divisions dragging out three weeks of useful soldier skills training over three or four months.  The Reserve Training Divisions are jobs programs for largely useless officers and NCOs, and the missions are moved frequently from one unsuitable installation to another, in order that every installation can get a piece of the GWOT budget.  It is both shameless and obvious.  

It is particularly insulting to lock down troops (some of them Vietnam vets) for months with no civilian clothes, no alcohol, no privately owned vehicles, and little freedom, under the control of their Reserve trainers who work an eight hour shift, stay off post in a hotel, draw full per diem with benefits, and allegedly are subject to the same restrictions as the troops in training. 

In contrast, the CSTEBn under the Texas Army National Guard is a lean organization which chooses its trainers from guard veterans noted for their recent and relevant combat experience, and trains the troops what they need to know quicker and more efficiently, saving large amounts of money and time, and keeping the mission local and the money within the state.  

Moreover, the Air Guard regularly deploys airmen on a more frequent basis than the Army National Guard, with LITTLE OR NO time or money wasting trainup required.  

Finally, a personal note.  An aircraft from our sister company on my last OIF tour, Red River 44, crashed on the night of 17 September 2008 just after crossing into Iraq, due to spatial disorientation of the crew.  As a pilot who has flown in Iraq and Kuwait since 1994, I truly believe that if that crew had spent time doing USEFUL aviation training and not wasting the previous three months at Fort Sill under a Reserve Training Division, those seven men might still be with us today.  

Senator, this is a no-brainer in these days when we are looking to save the DoD money.  It can be done, it can be done smarter, and it can be done cheaper.  Shutter the Reserve Training Divisions and give the trainup mission to the states.  

Sincerely,

CW2, Retired

US Army

CF: Sen Cornyn, Sen Hutchison