Strategic Sealift - Issues that Won't Go Away

First up is a very short piece from Defense News which touches on the topic of who ought to pay for some Sealift ships - an argument has been made the the end user - the U.S. Army - might be a good source of funding. See here:

With bills piling up for the U.S. Navy, between manning and training a growing fleet and recapitalizing ballistic missile submarines, an influential Republican lawmaker is wondering if it is time for the nation’s ground force to chip in for its own transportation.

During a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., asked Defense Secretary Mark Esper if the Army should shoulder the financial burden of recapitalizing the aging sealift fleet. In the event of a significant conflict, about 90 percent of the Army’s equipment would be transported by sea. But the sealift fleet charged with performing that mission is woefully unprepared.

“You stated that of the strategic necessities for our nation, that B-21 [next-generation bomber] was responsibility of the Air Force,” Wittman said, referring to an exclusive interview Esper gave to Defense News. “The Columbia-class [submarine] was the responsibility of the Navy.

“Since surge sealift capacity is the ability for the Army to get to the fight, should it not be the Army’s responsibility to fund surge sealift capacity?”

The following touches on the David Larter article linked above.

Of interest are discussions of the need for more ships in the national sealift fleet, especially tankers, as set out in this 2020 piece here:

Buzby, former commander of the Navy’s Military Sealift Command, agreed.

“We need more ships,” he said, adding that a strong case may be made for adding upwards of 50 more vessels.

The maritime administrator also called attention to a shortage of civilian mariners that threatens the nation’s ability to successfully executive a sustained sealift operation. Partly with that in mind, he said the country would benefit from an increase in commercial vessels rather than reserve-status ships (since the vessels themselves would have greater readiness and in turn would facilitate larger numbers of trained crews).

Kaskin advocated expansion of the U.S. Maritime Security Program and also supported an administration proposal to create a similar structure for tankers. He said only a half-dozen American-flag internationally-trading tankers are available for use by the military, and three of those are already leased by the Navy for current operations.

“The requirement that U.S. Transportation Command has shown – and earlier studies have shown – is that we need more than 78 tankers,” he said. “Adding 10 is not going to be sufficient. So, what we really need to do is find ways of utilizing the tankers that we have in the domestic fleet – the Jones Act [ships] – to be able to support wartime operations.”

Here's a 2018 panel discussing Strategic Sealift, featuring Sal Mercogliano as moderator. Actual taking begins around the 4:30 point, so skip ahead. Toward the end, there's another mention of the need for tankers.

As you may gather, the main issue in maintaining a fleet that can do what is demanded of it is money. Money which should be spent wisely with an keen eye on national strategic needs.

Defense Budgets - Let's Get Serious

Well, it's an election year and there is someone proposing a budget. Actually, it's Secretary of Defense Carter proposing a budget for the Defense Department, as set out here by DoD's Cheryl Pellerin (emphasis added):

Addressing diverse global challenges requires new thinking, new postures in some regions and new and enhanced capabilities, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said this morning during a preview of the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2017 budget request.

Speaking at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., Carter said the $582.7 billion defense budget to be released next week as part of the administration’s fiscal year 2017 budget request, marks a major inflection point for the department.

"In this budget we’re taking the long view," the secretary said. "We have to. Even as we fight today’s fights, we must also be prepared for the fights that might come 10, 20 or 30 years down the road.”

Five evolving challenges drive the department’s planning, he said, including Russian aggression in Europe, the rise of China in the Asia Pacific, North Korea, Iran, and the ongoing fight against terrorism, especially the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Five Challenges

The department must and will address all five challenges and across all domains, Carter said.

“Not just the usual air, land and sea, but also particularly in the areas of cyber, space and electronic warfare, where our reliance on technology has given us great strengths but also led to vulnerabilities that adversaries are eager to exploit,” he added.

Highlighting new investments in the budget to deal with the accelerated military campaign against ISIL, Carter said the department is requesting $7.5 billion, 50 percent more than in 2016.

Of that, he said $1.8 billion will go to buy more than 45,000 GPS-guided smart bombs and laser-guided rockets. The budget request also defers the A-10 final retirement until 2022, replacing it with F-35 Joint Strike Fighters squadron by squadron.

Strategic Capabilities

To support the European Reassurance Initiative, the Pentagon is requesting $3.4 billion in 2017, quadrupling the fiscal 2016 amount, the secretary said, to fund more rotational U.S. forces in Europe, more training and exercising with allies, and more prepositioned fighting gear and supporting infrastructure.

Investments in new technologies include projects being developed by the DoD Strategic Capabilities Office, which Carter created in 2012 when he was deputy defense secretary, “to reimagine existing DoD, intelligence community and commercial systems by giving them new roles and game-changing capabilities,” he said.

To drive such innovation forward, the 2017 budget request for research and development accounts is $71.4 billion.

U.S. Networked Swarm Boat

Carter said SCO efforts include projects involving advanced navigation, swarming autonomous vehicles for use in different ways and domains, self-driving networked boats, gun-based missile defense, and an arsenal plane that turns one of the department’s older planes into a flying launch pad for a range of conventional payloads.

Investing in Innovation

The budget request also drives smart and essential technological innovation, the secretary added, noting that one area is undersea capabilities for an $8.1 billion investment in 2017 and more than $40 billion over the next five years, Carter said, “to give us the most lethal undersea and anti-submarine force in the world.”

The Pentagon also is investing more in cyber, he said, requesting $7 billion in 2017 and nearly $35 billion over the next five years.

“Among other things,” Carter said, “this will help further improve DoD’s network defenses, which is critical, build more training ranges for our cyber warriors, and develop cyber tools and infrastructure needed to provide offensive cyber options.”

Cyber, Space, People

The Pentagon’s investment in space last year added more than $5 billion in new investments, and this year the department will enhance its ability to identify, attribute and negate all threatening actions in space, the secretary said.

That old budgeting magic

“With so many commercial space endeavors, he added, “we want this domain to be just like the oceans and the Internet: free and safe for all."

Carter said the Pentagon also is investing to build the force of the future, highlighting opening all remaining combat positions to women and strengthening support to military families to improve their quality of life.

Of course, the budget of the Defense Department has critics, an example of which being found in this U.S. News and World Report piece by William D. Hartung, A Golden Age for Pentagon Waste: Ridiculous Pentagon spending may be reaching historic levels:

As the Pentagon prepares for the formal release its budget next week, there is much talk within the department that the $600 billion-plus that is likely to be proposed is inadequate. In fact, rooting out billions of dollars of waste in the Pentagon budget would leave more than enough to provide a robust defense of the country without increasing spending.
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The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction has uncovered scandal after scandal involving U.S. aid to that country, including the creation of private villas for a small number of personnel working for a Pentagon economic development initiative and a series of costly facilities that were never or barely used. An analysis by ProPublica puts the price tag for wasteful and misguided expenditures in Afghanistan at $17 billion, a figure that is higher than the GDP of 80 nations.
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It's not just about Afghanistan, though. Back in the United States, wasteful spending abounds. A Politico report on the Pentagon's $44 billion Defense Logistics Agency notes that it spent over $7 billion on unneeded equipment. Meanwhile, Congress is doing its part by inserting its own pet projects into the budget, whether or not they are top priorities in terms of defense needs. The most notable example is the F-35 combat aircraft, which at $1.4 trillion over its lifetime is the most expensive weapons project ever undertaken by the Pentagon. Despite the fact that the plane is far from ready for prime time, Congress stuffed 11 additional F-35s into the defense bill that was signed by the president last month.

These examples of waste and abuse spark memories of past Pentagon spending binges.
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The common thread uniting the C-5 scandal of the 1960s, the spare parts scandal of the 1980s and today's array of wasteful expenditures is that they all came on the heels of major military buildups. When there is too much money to go around and no one is minding the store, spending discipline goes out the window. As then Pentagon procurement chief Ashton Carter said in a 2011 hearing, in the decade of increasing Pentagon budgets that kicked off the 2000s, it was always possible to reach for more money, "so it's natural that some fat crept into all of our activities during that time period."
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But the best management tool is to put the Pentagon on a tighter budget, so it is forced to make some tough choices. No one, hawk or dove, should sit still for the waste of tens of billions of tax dollars. Waste doesn't defend us. On the contrary, spending too much on the Pentagon just subsidizes bad choices. It's time for Congress, the president and the presidential candidates of both parties to speak out about Pentagon waste, and put forward concrete plans for reining it in. Otherwise, our era may have the dubious distinction of being the golden age of Pentagon waste.

"William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy." The Center for International Policy, an entity whose mission statement includes: "We advocate policies that advance international cooperation, demilitarization, respect for human rights and action to alleviate climate change and stop illicit financial flows." I invite you to visit his biography here. As we used to ponder in sociology classes - can he be "value free" in his approach to defense spending? I don't know who chose the "ridiculous Pentagon spending" part of the headline.

In any event, let's give Mr. Hartung his due. There is waste in defense spending.

Lots of it.

Probably enough to pay for a couple of Ford-class carriers, though there are those whose argue that these new, big carriers are akin to the battleships of early WWII - an expensive idea whose time has mostly passed. See Dr. Jerry Hendrix's Stop the Navy's carrier plan: The Navy's plan to modernize its largest ships would just make them obsolete. Here's how to fix it.. Jerry's solution? Build cheaper, smaller carriers and add boatloads (literally) of unmanned aircraft. If there's enough waste to cover a couple of Fords, there is certainly enough to cover several smaller carriers and, probably, all those drones. We touched on this in our recent Midrats show here about "naval presence." Dr. Hendrix suggests the need for a fleet of 350 ships - many of which could be paid for with savings on big carriers,  too, I assume.

But the waste? A great deal of it involves the way in which defense spending is authorized by Congress. Want to close a base that's no longer needed? You can be sure that a couple of members of Congress will be fighting you all the way as the impact of the loss of federal dollars in their state and district become clear. In short, Congress, not the Pentagon owns a big chunk of the waste problem.

Should we  declare some programs as too wasteful to allow to live - perhaps the F-35? Maybe the Littoral Combat Ship/Frigate? Call all the expenditure so far "sunk costs? Then answer the question of what will the U.S do for the future, when the current inventory of ships and aircraft grow too long in the tooth or too small to meet the national strategy? What if the F-35 ultimately meets the great expectations placed on it? What if the LCS/Frigate becomes a not-so-overnight success?

 Want to rein in the Pentagon slush fund - the Overseas Contingency Operations budget? Perhaps we could fold money into the "regular" budget to handle little things like small wars?

It is good to recall some earlier words of Secretary Carter from May 2015:

Slashed budgets and high worldwide demand for U.S. military forces have created an unbalanced defense program that is taking on increasingly greater risks, Defense Secretary Ash Carter told a Senate panel this morning.

The secretary testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee on the Defense Department’s fiscal year 2016 budget request. Joining him was Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“Over the past three fiscal years the Defense Department has taken more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars in cuts to its future-years defense spending,” Carter said.

The frequently sudden and unpredictable timing and nature of the cuts and continued uncertainty over sequestration have made the stresses greater, he added, forcing DoD to make a series of incremental, inefficient decisions.
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We’ve been forced to prioritize force structure and readiness over modernization, taking on risks in capabilities and infrastructure that are far too great,” he added.

“High demands on smaller force structure mean the equipment and capabilities of too many components of the military are growing too old, too fast -- from our nuclear deterrent to our tactical forces,” Carter told the panel.
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The secretary said that in recent weeks some in Congress have tried to give DoD its full fiscal year 2016 budget request by transferring funds from the base budget into DoD accounts for overseas contingency operations, or OCO –- funds that are meant to fund the incremental, temporary costs of overseas conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

“While this approach clearly recognizes that the budget total we’ve requested is needed, the avenue it takes is just as clearly a road to nowhere,” Carter said, explaining that President Barack Obama has said he won’t accept a budget that locks in sequestration going forward, as this approach does.
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“The Joint Chiefs and I are concerned that if our congressional committees continue to advance this idea and don’t explore alternatives we’ll all be left holding the bag,” Carter said, adding that the OCO approach does nothing to reduce the deficit.

“Most importantly,” he added, “because it doesn’t provide a stable multi-year budget horizon, this one-year approach is managerially unsound and unfairly dispiriting to our force. Our military personnel and their families deserve to know their future more than just one year at a time -- and not just them.”

Defense industry partners also need stability and longer-term plans to be efficient and cutting-edge, Carter said, “[and] … as a nation we need to base our defense budgeting on a long-term military strategy, and that’s not a one-year project.”

Such a funding approach reflects a narrow way of looking at national security, the secretary said.

Ignoring Vital Contributions

Year-to-year funding “ignores the vital contributions made by the State Department, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department and the Homeland Security Department,” he said.

And it disregards the enduring long-term connection between the nation’s security and factors like supporting the U.S. technological edge with scientific research and development, educating a future all-volunteer military force, and bolstering the general economic strength of the nation, Carter said.

“Finally, the secretary added, “I’m also concerned that how we deal with the budget is being watched by the rest of the world -– by our friends and potential foes alike. It could give a misleadingly diminished picture of America’s great strength and resolve.”
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To create a better solution than the one now being considered, he said, “I hope we can come together for a longer-term, multi-year agreement that provides the budget stability we need by locking in defense and nondefense budget levels consistent with the president’s request.”

Carter pledged his personal support and that of the department to this effort, and, he told the panel, “I would like to work with each of you, as well as other leaders and members of Congress, to this end.”

I high-lighted that part about "the whole world is watching" because it is so important. That and the idea that the current world situation is exceptionally complex - hence the overuse of our personnel and equipment.

To add to your thinking, consider this report, NATO's Nightmare: Russian Sub Activity Rises to Cold War Levels You think the potential "bad guys" aren't looking to exploit weakness?

Oh, and as seen here, I like that "arsenal plane" idea. We need to keep on the innovation path. Being static invites defeat.

Department of the Navy Fiscal Year 2016 Briefing Slides (dated 2 Feb 2015)

Bottom line up front:

Click on image to enlarge

PB 16 Roll-Out Press Brief Presentation Display Version_FINAL

Hat tip: USNI News.

More information available from Fiscal Year 2016 Department of the Navy Budget Materials. Of special interest to you bean counters is the Supporting Exhibits.

Saving Defense Dollars: Air Force Looks to Downsize JSTARS Aircraft Potentially Saving Millions and Millions

Saving Defense dollars is a good thing, especially if the mission can still get done albeit at the lower cost. The U.S. Air Force is lookiing at a way to shave $200- 500 million dollars a year from its budget by replacing big jets (Now a Boeing 707 variant - the E8-C) with smaller jets (Boeing offering up a 737-700 version and Grumman proposing either a Gulfstream G650 or G550 model) with updated technology.

Nice report from Aviation Week U.S. Air Force Scrimps On Jstars Recap Program: USAF embraces ‘art of the available’ with ground surveillance aircraft:

The Air Force expects to spend about $4.3 billion buying 17 new Joint Stars aircraft based on its fiscal 2015 budget request. But the savings are expected to come in the annual operating cost of the aircraft: The E-8C would require about $650 million in work to meet requirements in the coming years, according to Jennifer Cassidy, an Air Force spokeswoman.

The platforms that housed the side-looking AN/APY-7 radars were old 707-300s purchased from airlines and outfitted by Northrop Grumman with the sensors and onboard work stations as well as supporting computer equipment. It was a thorny project, as each separate platform had its own aging and wear-and-tear issues. Twenty years later, the platform and its legacy computers, displays and radar are proving troublesome due to diminishing sources for parts and age of the equipment. The only commercial operator still listing the 707-300 in its fleet is Iran’s Meraj Air.

The replacement program is expected to save 28% in operations and sustainment funding, a cost avoidance of $200-500 million annually. “The current Jstars Recap Program Office estimates show a return on investment between fiscal year 2028 and 2030,” Cassidy says. Service officials provided written information rather than discussing their plans in an interview.

Competition is good and downsizing for the right reasons is great.

TANSTAAFL, "There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch" and the Defense Budget

David R. Henderson, TANSTAAFL, There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

"TANSTAAFL." It stands for "There Ain't No Such Thing As a Free Lunch." Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein popularized the acronym in his novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
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There are two meanings of the expression, "There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch." The first, which is always true, is that there is scarcity, and scarcity necessitates tradeoffs. The second, which is almost always true, is that when someone offers you something "for free," he expects something in return. Both are important meanings of the expression. And both are highly relevant to understanding economics and human behavior.

About 42 or so years ago, an "Intro to Economics" course I observed used a book tited Tanstaafl (There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch) - A Libertarian Perspective on Environmental Policy by Edwin Dolan. Here's a portion of the introduction:

Just as a thought experiment, try pondering how "free" healthcare is provided.

Get it?

But, hey, this is post about National Defense! So how does TANSTAAFL apply?

Okay, how about this?

[President] Obama last week requested $3.7 billion from Congress to respond to the flow of children crossing the border but that did not include additional funding for the military, which is housing thousands of immigrant children and trying to contain the violent drug trade.

Regardless of the merits of spending $3.7 billion on people entering the U.S. illegally, there is the question of the tradeoffs the military must make in "housing thousands of immigrant children and trying to contain the violent drug trade." After all, the military is a scarce resource that must always tradeoff resources to accomplish its missions. What missions will be sacrificed to bear the costs associated with these children? Do we want to fire thousands of highly trained people to allow the budget to balance?

Perhaps.

The U.S. Army is looking to cut 120,000 troops by 2020:

The 2014 QDR states that the active Army will reduce from its war-time high of 570,000 to 440,000–450,000 Soldiers.

If you want to see how that plays out, look at the suggested economic impact (tradeoff) on some of the communities that surround military bases.

For example, at Ft Campbell, Ky which could lose up to 16,000 troops and civilians by 2020:

With those losses, yearly income in the area is expected to fall by 7.7 percent, or $986.6 million. Total reduction in sales is estimated at $768.6 million with a corresponding loss in sales tax receipts in both Tennessee and Kentucky estimated at between $7.4 to $11.6 million annually.

Sorry, FT Campbell, we need that money for other things more important than your local economy.

Or how about Langley AFB which has some 742 position cuts proposed?:

The plan does not break down the 742 positions between military and civilian personnel.

"It does not mean 742 people at Langley are losing their jobs," said Capt. Erika Yepsen, an Air Force spokeswoman. "It means that 742 positions are coming off the books."
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It should be considered "a disappointment to the local economy," but just how much remains to be seen, said Bruce Sturk, director of federal facilities support for the City of Hampton. It comes one week after the Army announced a potential cut of up to 4,200 people at Fort Eustis in Newport News should deep spending reductions return in 2016.
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The positions cut at Langley are part of a plan to reduce 3,459 positions in the Air Force, both in the U.S. and overseas. It is designed to save $1.6 billion in the next five years, but the positions will be limited sooner than that, said Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James.

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you can afford to "respond to the flow of children crossing the border."

TANSTAAFL hits the Navy, too. See Navy Cancelled New Destroyer Flight Due to Ohio Replacement Submarine Costs:

The looming hit to the shipbuilding budget from the Navy’s plan to build 12 new nuclear ballistic missile submarines resulted in the cancellation of a fourth flight of Arleigh Burke destroyers (DDG-51) as well as the controversial plan to layup 11 Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers (CG-47), the navy’s chief shipbuilder told a congressional panel in a recent hearing on cruiser and destroyer modification.

The shifts in the Navy’s large surface combatants come as the $100 billion bill for the 12 new boomers begin to take up more and more of the Navy’s shipbuilding budget — leaving less and less for other shipbuilding programs.

You know, someone has to decide - which is more important - a new bunch of destroyers we want to replace anyway or 12 new boomers? Ah, well, boomers. Sorry, there, surface Navy, but . . . make do, make do.

Got a scarcity of ships? Well then, make them deploy longer to meet the identified needs. See 8-month deployments become the 'new norm':

“Our deployments are going to be seven-and-a-half, eight months,” said Rear Adm. Brian Luther, whose staff monitors operations tempo for the chief of naval operations. “So what I think you can say is the six-month deployments will be the exception rather than the norm. And the new norm now will be the seven-and-a-half, eight-month deployments.”

Navy officials strenuously objected to that notion of routine, longer deployments two years ago, but cruises continued to creep longer.

Indeed, the strain sailors have felt in the past few years is backed up by newly released Navy data showing the fleet’s deployment pace recently spiked to record levels, a flux littered with long cruises and short turnarounds that is upping wear and tear on sailors and ships.....

Tradeoffs everywhere.

Now, like anyone else who has suffered through a budgeting process, I know that deciding priorities is hard. Very hard. Especially when you are broke. But when you are broke, you need to learn to say "no" to things you can't afford so that you can eventually say "yes" to things that you need.

The key to budgeting is deciding what you what the end result to look like ("Given the obligations we face around the world, we need 340 ships of the following types to be in place by 2020" or "While we can make do with an active army force of 440,000, we need a strong reserve component for activation on short notice and we need to pay to maintain that force.").

Budgeting requires strategic planning and risk assessment to make the numbers involved relate to reality.

Then that budget has to be sold to the funding agent - Congress. Because National Defense is written into the Constitution, it ought to have a higher priority than non-Constitutional wants. On the other hand, someone in Congress should keep the military honest in its planning and risk assessment work.

Sadly, the tradeoff many Congressmen make in the defense budgeting process is making sure their state or district get its share of the pie.

Now, if you wonder that suggested big cuts to a major base in Kentucky have anything to do with the Senate minority leader being from that state and running for re-election, you might be a little cynical. Maybe.

Unable to attend the 2013 USNI West Conference and Exposition in San Diego last week?

Well, you might have missed some really good information - except that you can still view some of the key presentations and panels by watching them on USNI's YouTube page and get a summary of each day's summary here.

Almost like being there except you miss the giveaways at the vendor's booth.

Also, given that Midrats has Super Bowl "Best of" going this Sunday, it's a way to get your "talking 'bout National Security" fix.

Midrats Episode 126: "National Security in the 2012 Election" -5pm Sunday, June 3 on Blog Talk Radio

"Political Season," like "Hurricane Season," is upon us and it is a good time to look at some of the ramifications of the votes to come, which is exactly what we are doing this Sunday, June 3 at 5pm (Eastern U.S.) with Midrats Episode 126: National Security in the 2012 Election 06/03 on Blog Talk Radio

Five months and a bit to the November 2012 election.

The war in Iraq is over, the war in Afghanistan is adrift - but the underlying cause of both remains. OBL is dead yet the drone wars expand.

Our traditional European allies have never been weaker in living memory. The old order in the Arab world is changing, and the western Pacific grows in focus.

A military worn out by a decade of war is also looking at decreasing resources in a sluggish economy.

Where do we prioritize? What is the best mix of strategy and programs to best prepare our military for the challenges of this century?

Which issues related to national defense will make it in to the 2012 contest? How do President Obama and Governor Romney differ in their views, plans, and priorities for our nation's military?

Our returning guest for the full hour will be Mackenzie Eaglen, Resident Fellow at the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Mackenzie Eaglen has worked on defense issues in the U.S. Congress, both House and Senate, and at the Pentagon in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and on the Joint Staff. She specializes in defense strategy, budget, military readiness and the defense industrial base. In 2010, Ms. Eaglen served as a staff member of the congressionally mandated Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel, a bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission established to assess the Pentagon's major defense strategy. A prolific writer on defense related issues, she has also testified before Congress.

Join us live by clicking here or later by downloading the show from here or from the iTunes page.

Defense Spending Questions

Aviation Week notes a lot of hype about defense cuts, asks most of the right questions in its editorial on Defense Spending Debate Misses The Point , but here's the rub in its conclusion:

Our intent is not to point fingers. Our goal is to make it clear that these are large, complex issues that must be addressed with rigor, intellectual honesty and sophistication about the broader foreign policy and economic implications. Defense spending is not arithmetic, it is calculus—and it is hard.

Hard work is not what Congress is noted for, so the unasked question is whether or not there are enough grownups in DC with the highlighted skill set to make mature decisions and avoid the "business as usual" drill?

Is this a self-answering question?

"What is NATO for?"

If you missed our last Midrats show, "Episode 75: From NATO and Russia; with questions" featuring CAPT Thomas Fedyszyn, (Ph.D.), USN (Ret.) - Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and Chair of the Europe-Russia Studies, you really ought to go listen to it (or download it from that site or iTunes for listening later), because it ties in nicely with this piece from Foreign Policy, "What is NATO for?" - By Paul Miller:

What is NATO for? Not for fighting wars. It proved in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya that NATO is not an effective fighting alliance. The wars it fights are fought by committee: or, worse, by bureaucracy. They are clumsy, inefficient, and violate the unity of command, one of the basic principles of war-fighting. Kosovo ended when the Kosovo Liberation Army began to make progress in ground combat and President Clinton appeared to be rethinking his no-ground-forces rule. Afghanistan has only turned around (barely) since the United States effectively re-Americanized the war starting in 2009 (Americans did not make up a majority of international military forces in Afghanistan until then). And Libya is likely to remain stalemated until NATO changes its approach or the United States takes over.

As noted in the piece, the U.S. spends a lot of money on defense and some portion of that is to allow us to defend our NATO allies under Article 5.

Our guest on the Midrats show argues that Article 5 (which requires all NATO nations to come to the defense of any NATO member that comes under attack) ought to be done away with while NATO shifts its mission - something about whether it makes sense for us to commit to "we will fight to the death of the last American for Estonian boundaries."

Some of us question whether or not NATO is needed at all - having successfully completed its mission, let's fold its flag and move on.

More at CDR Salamander's place where he has some nice graphics on European defense spending liberated from The Economist:

They end up with a phrase right off the front porch.

... why should outsiders bother to protect countries that won’t take their own defence seriously?

As I tried to pose in a question on the show, after 60+ years, haven't the European countries of post war activity grown economically sound enough to shoulder more of the financial burden of providing the military cover that allows parts of the world to be made safe for democracy?

Mr. Miller and Dr. Fedyszyn sort of reach the same point - let NATO morph into what is good at, but let's take a hard look at what Article 5 costs the U.S. in terms of the military benefits we get out of it.

UPDATE: This kind of highlights one of the issues addressed during the radio show about how slow the NATO decision processes can be:

"Nato decisions are very slow and very complicated. Nato send aircraft for reconnaissance, they take a picture, they take time to analyse the picture, then take time to take the decision to send the fighter to attack the target. Then the target moved.

Deliberate is okay unless you are the guy on the ground getting his ass shot off.