Legendary Pentagon analyst and whistleblower Chuck Spinney joins today's Liberty Report to explain the budget nightmares a President Trump will face at the Pentagon. Why do these weapons systems cost so much and perform so badly? Chuck knows...and tells.
Legendary Pentagon analyst and whistleblower Chuck Spinney joins today's Liberty Report to explain the budget nightmares a President Trump will face at the Pentagon. Why do these weapons systems cost so much and perform so badly? Chuck knows...and tells.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel Inca Adams as co-host.
And Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
We have a special guest today, somebody that we've known for a while, and you've especially known him for many years, and you've admired what he's done.
But I think the best thing, we know he's been a Pentagon analyst for 30 years, and you can talk a little bit about that.
But I think what was neat is what Chuck Grassley said about him.
He was the conscience of the Pentagon, which means he is going to be over those years that he spent there checking on the budget and trying to protect the taxpayers.
So it ought to be very interesting.
Absolutely.
Chuck Spinney, I first met in, I think, 2000 when I first got back to Washington.
He's been one of my oldest friends and a real mentor.
So I'm really thrilled to have him with us.
Chuck, I think, was one of the first whistleblowers, you know, one of the early whistleblowers who suffered a lot of pain for doing so.
Oh, boy.
So, Chuck, thanks for joining us.
I'm very glad to be here.
Wonderful.
Let me go ahead and get started because I've always been known to be interested in budgeting and spending and deficits.
And you are well known for trying to protect the budget and stop the waste and fraud, especially in the Pentagon.
But you've also made some comments about what the Pentagon might be facing.
Everybody knows the $600 billion, and that's out in the open, and that's what we need.
But we've had vague promises in the campaign.
But you also have indicated that there might be more than what we see.
And can you reflect a little bit on what most people aren't looking at and why the Pentagon expenses may skyrocket in the next year or two?
Sure.
Basically, what you're referring to is what we in the Pentagon call the bow wave.
And I first heard the term bow wave in 1972 in literally the first meeting I ever attended in the Pentagon as a 28-year-old Air Force captain.
And basically, to understand what's coming down the pike, you have to understand how the Pentagon operates.
It operates according to a long-range planning system, a five-year planning system, much like the Soviet Union, where we have centrally administered prices, we do long-term planning, and we predict how much money we're going to have, how much our costs are going to be, and we put together this plan.
Now, what happens is the bureaucrats have learned how to game that system.
And when I say bureaucrats, I'm including civilian and military in that term.
And the way they game the system is they do, it's actually, I call it the defense power games.
And there are two types of games.
The first one is what I refer to as front-loading.
And that's a very common thing in government.
It's the abate and switch, where you lowball your current cost estimates, you overestimate how well a product will work, and that's to get the camel's nose into the tent.
And then, of course, as soon as you get the program approved by authorities, you then start spreading the money around to different congressional districts.
And that's called political engineering.
And front loading can be thought of as an infiltration tactic.
It basically gets you in the door.
And then the political engineering is they're sort of like the panzers following the infiltration troops, opening up the front and getting into the rear area and locking the door open.
The basic idea is to set up a social safety net for the program, in this case the Pentagon program, and by making as many congressmen as possible dependent upon it.
In recent years, it actually got pioneered in the Carter administration, but it was done ever since, in every administration.
We've actually started doing political engineering on an international scale.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is a classic case of how that's done.
I don't know how many countries are buying it, but they're also participating in the production and jobs are at stake.
So if you have problems, of which the F-35 has many problems, you can't really do anything to turn it off because you've got too many constituents.
In this case, you've got to break international agreements.
Chuck, when we talked before the show, you said you were interested in looking at what you call the time bomb that Trump is going to inherit from Obama.
Maybe you can explain a little bit what you mean by that.
Right.
That is the bow wave.
And essentially, if you look at the Pentagon's five-year defense plan, or future years' defense plan, as it's now called, what they've done is they've front-loaded all these programs in the early years of that program.
And by spending money, first starting off gradually and then increasing it as time goes by, they're creating more constituent pressure through the political engineering process I just explained.
And in this particular budget, President Obama has bequeathed a huge bow wave of programs to his successor, in this case, President-elect Trump.
And one of the most dangerous aspects of this bow wave, in my opinion, is a plan to completely modernize our nuclear forces from top to bottom.
We're going to have a new bomber, a new nuclear missile-carrying submarines, a new ICBM, a big warhead modernization program, including the B-61 bomb, and they're going to put guidance on the B-61 bomb, which means it's going to be a precision weapon.
Now, you know, it's sort of oxymoronic to have a precision-guided nuclear bomb, but it can only be justified by some sort of appeal to a nuclear warfighting theory like they tried to float in the 1970s.
In addition to that, there's going to be a whole bunch of new satellites put in to control these nuclear weapons.
And there has to be a large infrastructure investment in the nuclear weapons laboratories, which are old and need modernization.
And of course, we still got the waste problem, which we've never been able to come to grips with.
So there's a huge amount of money.
Most people are estimating this is about a trillion dollars.
Under Pentagon rules, you can multiply that by a factor of three.
So we're talking about three trillion.
The important thing about this is the Russians can't stand still and watch us modernize our forces like this.
They're going to say this is aimed directly at us.
I also forgot to mention increased investment in missile defenses, which are part of this.
So basically, this is a classic example about how a domestic porking operation, in this case with nuclear weapons to prop up the people who benefit from their production, is actually going to shape foreign policy over the long term.
And the only way you can justify these weapons is through increasing tensions with the Soviet Union.
And President-elect Trump, to his credit, in my opinion, has said he wants to defuse the tensions between us and Russia.
And, you know, as long as this nuclear program's in the out years of the future years defense program, and the political pressure to keep these things is growing, it's going to be increasingly difficult to control.
And the Russian leadership is going to look at that and say, well, he says he's trying to improve relations, but look what he's doing.
It looks like he wants to prepare to fight a nuclear war.
Chuck, that's my point.
Yeah, well, when this comes about, the Congress will be involved and they will have to rush and appropriate money or have a supplemental.
But what about some of the funding that goes on that I've never fully understood?
They talk about a black budget and how they do it and how they scheme.
Is that a term that is understandable?
And how do you explain what they call the black budget in helping to alleviate some of this spending?
The black budget increases the spending.
It doesn't alleviate it at all.
And basically what it does is it decreases what little oversight there is with white programs.
The problem with the black budget in terms of internal Pentagon management is that only a few people will get the clearances to look at these programs.
So in terms of people who are actually trying to manage things and reduce waste and get control of planning, people like myself, if I don't have those clearances, I can't go in from the perspective of the Pentagon and say, hey, wait a minute, you guys are underestimating the cost of this or your justifications for it aren't suitable.
So what it does is it decreases oversight both in terms of internal Pentagon management.
And of course, you having been a member of Congress knows that it really decreases your oversight as far as exercising your constitutional responsibilities in appropriating money because you don't know where it's going.
Right.
You know, Chuck, you point out something that I think is very interesting, and that is what I think will be the coming clash between what Trump says he wants to do and what he's doing in the Pentagon.
He says he wants better relations with Russia, but at the same time, he says he wants to rebuild the military.
I'm wondering, what do you think he means when he says rebuild the military?
What would you suspect it might mean?
We already spend more than the next, what, 17 countries combined?
Yeah, well, that gets you.
You're getting into a really complex issue that I call a defense death spiral.
If you look at the defense budget, even if you take out the money that was the so-called war-fighting budget that is called the other contingency operations, which a lot of which has been spent to pork up the main budget.
But set that aside, the budget increases since 1998 have been huge.
Now, what a lot of people don't really appreciate is that the size of the forces are now much smaller than at any time since, well, they're the smallest in history since the end of World War II.
And so what we have is a much smaller force being paid for with a much larger budget, which raises the question, of course, where the money go.
So if President Trump decides he wants to rebuild defenses, and let me give you a simple example, one of the simplest and clearest examples.
The fighter force in the Air Force is now, on average, probably about 25 years old or so.
Our goal when I first came into the Pentagon was to retire these planes at 22 years so you could have an average age of 10 years once you take into account the planes that are lost due to crashes.
What they've done now is because the new weapons for the Air Force, the F-22 and the F-35, are so expensive, production rates have gone through the floorboards.
And even though they've shrunk the force by, oh, 50%, maybe a little more, since the late 80s, the rate of replacement has actually slowed down because the high cost has slowed down production to such a point that the rollover rate of a shrinking inventory is increasing.
So you got this increasing average age.
So Trump walks right into the bag when he says, I'm going to rebuild these forces.
And if he thinks he's going to pour money into the budget to do that, as long as business as usual continues, costs are going to go through the roof and the actual replacement rate will continue to decrease, even if forces decrease.
That happened in the 1980s.
It's not too well recognized when Ronald Reagan came in and said he was going to rebuild the budget.
In the case of tactical fighters, we had in the late 70s a program in place to build the force to 40 wings and achieve an average age of 10 years for each fighter.
When the Reagan administration came in, the contractors just jacked up their costs and production rates of airplanes for the Air Force actually went down from what were they called inadequate rates during the Carter administration.
So on an annual basis, and this is irrefutable.
I mean, the budget numbers are actually in the public domain.
So in 1990, after all those expenditures during the so-called Reagan buildup, the tactical fighter force in the Air Force was smaller and older than it was than the Force Carter left him.
And the same thing's got to happen again.
This is the way the Pentagon operates.
It's not really, you can't really blame it on a given president.
The problem is, is when they come in and promise to throw money at the problem and don't understand what they're getting into, this is going to happen.
And there are a lot of people getting rich off of this.
Jack, we're talking about the weapons and the planes and all and the efficiency of it and how much waste and fraud is involved.
But what about the subject of really do we need these weapons?
What percentage of these weapons really are necessary?
I'm not an expert on the weapons and the planes, but I was in the Air Force too.
Throwing Money at Problems Worsens00:02:50
But right now, I think of airplanes as pretty old-fashioned.
You know, do we really need these?
Because they need them all the time.
There always has to be a new one because they will be fancier and more expensive.
But aren't some of these weapons building surface vessels, the Navy, having aircraft carriers, can't they be wiped out if we really get into a hot war?
Can't they be eliminated rather quickly?
Well, you know, that's a hard question to answer.
I think your fears are justified.
We don't really know, of course.
When I got into looking at the defense budget time bomb in the early 1990s, I was predicting, and I wrote reports to this effect, about how we would get into the mess we're in now.
And the only solution on the horizon that I could see would be to have scrapped the F-in the case of the Air Force again, it's the easiest to talk about, was scrap the F-22 and the F-35 and buy more F-16s just to maintain your inventories in a relatively modern state and replace the A-10, which is a low-cost,
very effective airplane with a better version of itself and possibly do modifications to existing A-10s and F-16s to keep existing ones flying longer.
Doing that, we could have gotten the average age down considerably, but we would have had to move out in the mid-90s to do that.
And they had other things in mind.
What is happening today, and the whole meltdown that's resulting in this huge budget, which I agree is totally excessive, is that basically this, it was a trap that was planted with forethought.
And that made it different than in the 1980s and the 1970s.
By the mid-1980s, we understood how just throwing at the money in terms of its internal political and economic dynamics, we understood how throwing money at the Pentagon without changing the way we did business was going to make things worse over the long term.
And in fact, when I testified before the House, I mean, I'm sorry, the Senate Budget Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2003, I'm sorry, in 1983, in 1983, Senator Tower said to me, well, what you're saying is we need more money.
And my response to him was, yes, sir, we do need more money to fund this program, but more money spent the same way is going to make things worse, which in fact happened.
He didn't like that answer, by the way.
Need More Money?00:00:50
Right.
Chuck, congratulations, Chuck, we're going to have to call an end to this, but this has been a very great discussion.
It could go on.
But you've been very helpful on enlightening us on how these things work.
But I can think of a few more questions.
But I do want to thank you very much for participating.
And hopefully we can do this again.
We'll keep an eye on things.
Maybe next year when we see some of this explosion in the Pentagon spending, we can get you back.
Yeah.
Well, I'll be here.
Okay.
Well, thank you very much.
And thank you.
Okay.
And I want to tell our viewers that it was great to having you with us today.