Colonels in Every Corner

...And with so many officers dedicated exclusively to the advancement of radar technology, the F-15 clearly had to have the ultimate radar with all the trimmings...

...If a crew of skilled accountants were to explore the F-15 to find where the $42.4 million went, they would encounter everywhere the consequences of allowing the Air Force to employ so many of its surplus colonels in the Systems Command...

...It was not to be...

...For example, when the Air Force was compelled in the early 1960s to accept the Navy's A-7 attack jet, it eventually gave in...

...just outside Washington, D.C., is itself a very large bureaucracy...

...In the Army the tendency to pursue technological advancement for its own sake is most prominent, as with the gas-turbine engine of the M-1 tank...

...Researchers repudiate the ready-for-production munition as "less cost-effective," and everyone concerned can happily start at the beginning all over again...

...While constantly complaining about Soviet numerical superiority, the Navy creates that superiority by designing ships so large that very few can be acquired, even with generous budgets...

...The Air Force has at times obliquely acknowledged the resistance of its own technical bureaucracy to real innovation...

...True, in the case of combat aircraft, the eagerness of a pilot-dominated Air Force to fly new planes gives a tremendous impulse to the development process...

...Having a large number of spare navigation consoles from scrapped B-52s in its depots, the SAC wanted the Air Force to buy the jets and planned to employ its own technicians to install the navigation equipment and convert the seating...

...Meanwhile, the Electronic Systems Division in Massachusetts immediately rejected the foolish notion that secondhand B-52 navigation consoles would be adequate for the new aircraft...

...Instead, the headquarters staffs, the supply organizations, and all the military bureaucracies expanded to absorb them, subdividing the work into thinner and thinner slices to keep everyone busy...

...In fiscal year 1984, during the great Reagan buildup, Congress allowed the Air Force to purchase a grand total of 207 fighters, airlifters, intelligence aircraft, and bombers—not a colossal number by any standard...

...There are two engines, which cost at least $1 million each...

...Much of what is laboriously specified by the Systems Command and eventually developed under its supervision to meet all those specifications is readily available from civilian sources at lower prices...

...For example, one crucial Air Force mission is to assist the ground forces against Soviet-style deep-column armored thrusts...

...This article is adapted from his book, The Pentagon and the Art of War, published by Simon and Schuster...

...The planners prepared for another great mobilization that would bring ten million or more Americans back into service...

...36 in 1984...

...This bit of technological ambition endangered the entire M-1 program, and the fact that the risk was taken is proof of the sheer bureaucratic power of the research-and-development crowd...

...statistics show that very few pistols are ever fired in earnest...

...As overall numbers dropped through the 1970s, so did those of the middle ranks...

...But the pistol is no more than an occasional self-defense weapon...

...Unfortunately, this is not what happened...

...To achieve a tolerable economy, these mines must be miniature munitions of advanced design that can be dispensed in large numbers from cluster-type bombs or special pods attached to the aircraft...

...None, it turned out, was sufficiently "reliable...

...The Systems Command has expanded and subdivided over the years to accommodate 10,524 officers, including no fewer than 34 generals, at last count (see chart...

...The F-15 is a wonderful aircraft, and its "subsystems" have many virtues...

...To put it differently, officers looked after one another in difficult times...

...Each of these chronically underemployed organizations shows the same tendency to suppress military innovation by keeping new weapons on the research merry-go-round...

...Nowadays the Stealth bomber is likewise being produced by Northrop and other contractors outside the official system, under a similar arrangement that bypasses all the bureaucratic layers until the very top...

...But to avoid "fraud, waste, and mismanagement" and to apply all the available expertise, none of the Air Force's three operational commands (strategic, tactical, and airlift) is allowed to write its own specifications for the equipment it needs or to do its own purchasing...

...The Air Force Systems Command, enemy of economical B-52 training, is a case in point...

...Second, with the introduction of competitively paid military service (the so-called "all-volunteer force"), there was a reluctance to dismiss officers in mid-career even if they were less necessary than ever before...

...There were then 51,241 middle-ranking officers, four per 100 enlisted men— more than three times the ratio of 1945...

...There are, for example, $2,500 aircraft video recorders that cost $7,000 for the special Air Force version, $14,000 diesel generators that cost the Air Force $56,000, and several hundred other such products...

...But it does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that extra officers should be kept on active duty...

...Moreover, additional electronics would need much more cooling power than had been allowed for in the original redesign, and that in turn would require more powerful engines, for which the airframe would have to be further modified...

...Colonels in Every Corner Overpopulation at the Pentagon By Edward N. Luttwak Some years ago the Strategic Air Command came up with a major money-saving scheme: instead of flight-training its navigators by having them sit in B-52s, the SAC wanted to use civilian executive jets fitted with B-52 navigation consoles...

...Under the name "wide-area anti-armor munitions" (WAAM), a research-and-3development program continues year after year, with no production in sight...

...With so many officers employed in specifying Air Force requirements, the research and development crews will rarely be deprived of work by the straight purchase of ready-made items...

...By the time the Systems Command had finished with the original idea, the trainer conversion would have cost far more than any possible fuel saving...

...Such complexity in a device needed in huge numbers was suspect, but with the need totally unmet, even this flying munition was an attractive prospect...

...The Korean War mobilization of 1951-52 might have arrested the middle-level officer bulge...

...Weapons developed by other services will be accepted only under the strongest possible pressure from Pentagon high officials and Congress...

...In his fiscal year 1985 Annual Defense Report, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger once again presented the WAAM program with the usual glossy prose, asking for $27.3 million of development funding and zero production funding...

...The problem is the refusal of R & D officers to put themselves out of business by declaring their work completed and ready for production...

...As early as 1943, when the war against Germany and Japan was still being fought, selected staff officers were given the task of planning the structure and missions of their services in the postwar world...

...Unfortunately, the many middle-ranking officers not needed in peacetime did not remain idle...

...Instead, the extra officers who would be needed only in a large war simply were kept on active duty...

...Had there been no expansion in the middle ranks, there would still have been 1.6 middle-level officers per 100 men, comfortably in excess of the 1945 ratio and undoubtedly sufficient...

...Between 10 and 15 percent of all mid-rank officers are so employed, with the highest percentage in the Air Force and the lowest in the Navy...

...While in no sense valid justifications, rank inflation and protection of loyal careerists are not in themselves greatly harmful...

...If the services were taking out remobilization insurance, they should have done many other things as well, which they conspicuously failed to do— notably, design basic weapons suitable for mass production...

...Even then the potential economies are usually lost because each service insists on major modifications...

...Divide and multiply Had the surplus officers been allowed to remain at home, had their salaries and benefits been granted as sinecures, no great harm would have been done...

...Beginning in the late 1960s, when the concept was first proposed (by the German defense ministry), the Systems Command set out to design suitable minelets...

...The problem is rather the refusal of the research-and-development officers to put themselves out of business by actually declaring their work completed and ready for production...

...That outcome is manifest across-the-board, from missiles to lowly unguided munitions, but it is most dramatic in the case of manned combat aircraft...

...The military experience of countries as diverse as Switzerland and Israel (see sidebar) shows that part-time reserve officers can attain high competence in this way, with not much more than one month a year of courses and exercises, as well as occasional one-day refreshers...

...In fact, after a small dip during the post-Korean demobilization, there was a steady growth in their number, so that the ratio continued to increase...

...These officers supervise the 68 "directorates" that divide the functions of the headquarters among them...

...It is responsible for the acquisition of all the equipment that the Air Force introduces into service...

...One obvious alternative is to rely on civilian reservists...

...And so it went for each of the research-and-development "communities" and its subsystems, from flight controls to electronic countermeasures, from the air-conditioning crowd (a separate "community") to the weapons-delivery people, and more...

...This is accomplished by dropping anti-armor mines in large numbers across the enemy's intended paths of advance...

...But the number of middle-ranking officers did not decline in proportion...

...The damage thus inflicted to Alliance relations is very serious...

...If colonels do exactly the same job that majors used to do, if Navy captains take over the functions of commanders, with no change in the structure itself, the only harmful result is that military spending increases by the very small amount of the salary differentials...

...800 is an inconceivable number...

...These are: space equipment (in Los Angeles), electronics (at Hanscom AFB, Massachusetts), aircraft (WrightPatterson AFB, Ohio), and armaments (Eglin AFB, Florida...

...Fifty rounds might be fired at a stretch, once or twice during a long war...

...Mines that fly Still, overelaboration merely costs money, and there is a second, much more serious, consequence of keeping a grossly overstaffed Systems Command: important military capabilities are lost because some things are not produced at all...

...Thus no mines were produced, and the research-and-development process started again...

...The systematic holding back of innovation in practice for the sake of greater innovations in theory has a serious impact on the overall military balance...

...By the early 1970s, Eglin had a design ready for production, but the creators rejected their creation in favor of a second, more advanced, design concept...

...at the peak of American involvement in Vietnam in 1968 there were 133,246...

...Who's the boss...

...For example, when the Army was asked to choose a ready-made 9mm automatic pistol to replace the vintage 1911 .45-caliber, a buffalo-killer of inordinate weight and minimal accuracy, researchers tested the Italian Beretta 925B, the German P7A13, the Swiss P226, and the American Smith & Wesson 459M...

...The airframe is large and must therefore be costly— say, $10 million, including the overhead of the contractor and its plush Washington offices, the lawyers, the consultants, and so on...

...But a remedy was at hand: the Systems Command officers were eager to spell out all the necessary modifications in abundant detail...

...First, rank inflation, the familiar "grade creep" of government bureaucracies, has substituted for all salary increases when Congress is not in a generous mood toward the Pentagon...

...It is certainly not that the Systems Command overlooks any category of air armaments...

...It is true that many active-duty officers have a low opinion of their reserve counterparts, especially in the Army National Guard...

...Each of the Pentagon's major systems commands has enough middle-ranking staff to supervise the acquisition of all possible weapons—not only for all four services but for every armed force of the world, including that of the Soviet Union...

...That has been the fate of "remotely piloted vehicles ." These mini-aircraft can already substitute advantageously for piloted craft used in reconnaissance and easily could be developed to serve as strike aircraft as well...

...The greater number of middle-ranking officers were absorbed in this period by a process in which the military bureaucracies not only kept expanding but also subdivided their functions to absorb the surplus officers in many new separate offices...

...But the proportion of middle-ranking officers had changed by 1950, the historical low point in the overall strength of the armed forces...

...Many of these officers had personally experienced the massive disorder of the sudden mobilization that followed Pearl Harbor...

...The executive jets would cost $2 million or $3 million each, but they would be very cheap to maintain, and their small twin engines would burn less than one-tenth the fuel consumed by the eight engines of a B-52...

...Such decisions have tangible results: During the Lebanon fighting of 1983-84, the colossal firepower of the reactivated battleship New Jersey largely was wasted when it bombarded Druze and Syrian positions, because its guns were fired on map coordinates without concurrent target-finding or correction...

...If it could get away with it, the Systems Command no doubt would write Air Force specifications for toothbrushes—and make them so unusual that not one of the hundreds of toothbrushes on the market would be found acceptable...

...On the contrary, somewhere in the structure there are dozens of colonels investigating every possible air weapon, actual or imagined...

...Engine envy The same corruption of purpose is manifest in the Navy and Army counterparts of the Air Force Systems Command...

...Countless species of commands, departments, and bureaus have expanded in the past 35 years to accommodate tens of thousands of colonels and captains whose main job becomes fighting for turf against their colleagues down the hall...

...For fear of losing men, American commanders only rarely sent spotters with binoculars and radios into the hills beyond Beirut...

...Each of these overelaborate organizations shows the same preference for overelaborate weapons...

...Not one of the systems commands is capable of doing its assigned work speedily and economically...

...After so many disappointments, American offers of "two-way street" purchasing are met with well-justified cynicism...

...Edward N Luttwak is a fellow at the Georgetown University Center for International and Strategic Studies...

...Mostly headed by colonels who report to 11 deputy chiefs of staff, these directorates cut the work into very fine slices indeed...

...But thousands of middle-ranking World War II veterans were recalled, swelling their numbers to 94,425 in 1952, almost twice as many as in 1950...

...That was a result of key decisions made before 1945...

...Rather than improve national security, these institutions serve as havens for one of the greatest internal threats to the American military: the bloated ranks of mid-level officers...

...There were 143,558 officers of the middle ranks (from major to colonel or Navy lieutenant commander to captain), 1.3 of them per 100 enlisted men...

...In 1945 the Cold War had yet to begin, but it was already clear that the overriding task of the armed forces would be to deter a war with the Soviet Union...

...That second design gave way to a third, very complicated, active minelet that was intended to "sense" nearby armor movements, determine their range and direction, jump up by a controlled explosion, and then hit the target with a self-forging fragment capable of penetrating thick armor...

...Similarly, the development of nuclear weapons is usually of great interest at the political level...

...It was calculated that the savings under this "companion trainer scheme" would pay for the purchase of the executive jets in a couple of years and yield large savings each year thereafter...

...When the need was really urgent, the entire Systems Command structure was bypassed...

...But they also offer a lot of overperformance, mostly unusable in combat...

...But at last count, in May 1983, there were 97,639 mid-rank officers, a ratio of 5.3 per 100 enlisted—four times as high as the 1945 ratio...

...In contrast, the ratio of junior officers (from second lieutenant to captain or Navy ensign to lieutenant) to enlisted remained stable at 1 to 10 from 1945 through 1983...

...The Pentagon's bureaucratic jungle is teeming with monsters like the Air Force Systems Command...

...There was much for those officers to do then—with, for example, some 90 Army divisions and some 40 corps, Army-Group, and theater headquarters in need of staffs...

...The price of the very cheap F-16—still widely regarded as sadly inadequate at Wright-Patterson, in spite of the many "enhancements" added—was $17.7 million per copy...

...In both cases the Lockheed aircraft company was allowed to insulate a small group of talented engineers in its secret "skunk works," and the Air Force let them work under loose supervision from the very top...

...Headed by a four-star full general (whose own inner-office executive group includes four colonels) with a three-star lieutenant general serving as vice commander, the headquarters is coordinated by a chief of staff, who has his own well-staffed inner office...

...Over the years, the mobilization argument could explain a relatively high ratio of officers to enlisted men, but it could not possibly explain the steady increase in the ratio that took place...

...At Eglin Air Force Base, home of the Systems Command's Armament Division, you'll find the usual hordes of colonels overseeing the research and development of tactical munitions...

...The largest possible number of middle-ranking (and senior) officers were to be retained on active duty, in storage as it were, ready to take charge of greatly expanded forces in the event of another global war...

...This would have been the perfect job for the remotely piloted vehicle...

...The Lockheed engineers did not have to produce tons of documentation for the Aeronautical Division or satisfy the desires of each "subsystem community" and then each one of its directorates at Andrews...

...For example, the 14 deployable carriers of the Navy are simply too few to cover the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Pacific, and the Indian Ocean, but the Sea Systems Command has succesfully blocked all proposals for "small," 50,000-ton carriers...

...The first consequence of this organization is that the Air Force will not purchase readily available civilian products—such as the fancy executive jets—even when they are perfectly satisfactory in every way...

...But when it comes to things that pilots cannot fly and that are non-nuclear— tactical missiles, rockets, and bombs—there are no such countering impulses...

...No production funds were requested for 1986 either...

...Underemployment is a chronic threat to bureaucratic survival...

...In the Navy, the overdoing of everything is plainly manifest in the sheer size of the ships...

...The latter are the famous, cheap "lightweight fighter" originally brought into existence by a brave band of dogfighting enthusiasts who successfully circumvented the Systems Command until the aircraft was very largely defined...

...But extreme and fanciful requirements are not the end of the story...

...When the Systems Command has a chance to design from scratch, it faithfully reproduces its own image: the grossly overelaborate structure yields equally overelaborate products...

...A rich country can afford to keep some tens of thousands idle...

...When a weapon is actually new in concept, when there is therefore no "user community" already in place to press for early production, innovation is greatly delayed...

...Most of the 207 were fighters-36 twin-jet F-15s and 144 F-16s...

...This argument for remobilization was sound, and it remains sound today...

...The Navy Air Systems Command has been researching unmanned aircraft for decades, but none was sufficiently perfect to be put into production, according to the pilots in charge...

...Congress never formally approved the mass remobilization plans and neither did higher civilian officials...

...And that is only the central headquarters...

...The F-15, a perfect representative of the Systems Command way of life, came in at $42.4 million in 1984...

...Through the expert scrutiny of the Aeronautical Division of the Air Force Systems Command it was soon discovered that all the commercial jets the SAC wanted to buy had grave defects, which had somehow been overlooked by the hundreds of pilots who had flown them...

...but only deployed weapons count, not blueprints and projects...

...Then its systems command insisted on "customizing" the aircraft, doubling its cost and reducing commonality with the Navy's A-7s to a mere 40 percent...

...Then there are the other parts, undercarriage, hydraulics, and more—a total of around $25 million...

...The upshot: B-52 navigators are still being trained in B-52s, with their eight thirsty engines...

...You'd think that the Air Force would want to encourage expeditious implementation of such common-sense cost-saving programs...

...Similarly, after the comparative evaluation of the M-1 and Leopard II tanks, the Germans complained that certain malfunctions noted during the tests had been contrived by the evaluators...

...After the Korean War, when the official strategy of "massive" nuclear retaliation justified a diminished reliance on conventional forces, the number of enlisted men in the four services continued to decline...

...They require much maintenance, and, above all, they raise the cost so high that the Air Force can buy only a very few F-15s (39 in 1983...

...All candidates were rejected after tests conducted in 1981-82...

...The result is not just added expense, as in the case of the aborted B-52 training project, but also a preference for overelaborate weapons and a hostility toward any innovation that does not require extensive research and development...

...Earlier, when the Air Force (which has no pistol-design community) tested the same pistols, the Beretta averaged 2,000 rounds without a malfunction in a 40,000-round reliability test...

...That was the case when the innovative U-2 photographic-intelligence aircraft was needed in the late 1950s to achieve superhigh altitudes and very long ranges, and later when the more spectacular SR-71 intelligence aircraft was needed during the early 1960s...

...In addition to the mobilization plans, there are other explanations for what has happened to the officer corps...

...Those policy orphans are left at the mercy of research-and-development bureaucracies, which have the strongest possible vested interest in not finishing their work...

...Snuggled into layers of excess bureauracy, many mid-level officers lose sight of the operational needs of the military while pursuing the narrowest goals within the boundaries of their own offices...

...The need for service structures specifically designed for quick remobilization seemed obvious...

...The same systems-command people who would be put out of business if the foreign products were chosen are given the task of testing those products, and they know what to do, with results sometimes downright farcical...

...If it could get away with it, the Systems Command would write specifications for toothbrushes—and none already on the market would be found acceptable...

...Soviet numbers are supposed to be balanced by our more advanced technology...

...Cheat if necessary Insult is added to injury when civilian defense officials try to compel the services to evaulate foreign alternatives to their chosen designs...

...In addition, there are eight other lesser divisions and "centers ?' Whatever else may be said, the acquisition of Air Force equipment does not suffer from a lack of supervision...

...The rejection of "not-invented here" equipment is one more consequence of grossly overmanned bureaucracies that are fiercely determined to keep for themselves whatever work is to be had...

...In spite of its merits, the reserve-officer solution was rejected—if it was considered at all— by the planners of the postwar defense establishment...

...Preparing to mobilize In 1945, the United States was more fully mobilized than ever before or since, with more than 12 million men under arms...

...Since the Aeronautical Division was insisting on so many costly modifications, it was only logical to fit "proper" navigation equipment into the aircraft...

...When a weapon must be rejected, sheer cheating is not uncommon...

...These goings-on should not be accepted cynically as bureaucratic inevitabilities...

...The central headquarters of the Systems Command at Andrews Air Force Base...

...In addition to the directorates—which supervise the supervisors in the divisions outside the headquarters—there are nine supporting offices that provide services for the Andrews complex, including administration and "history," communications and electronics (not the kind that go into aircraft but what is needed by the headquarters itself), public affairs, police, and so on...

...The M-1's engine is very advanced and very desirable in every way—except in combat...

...It has long been understood that the best way to oppose armored thrusts from the air is to attack not the vehicles doing the advancing but rather the movement itself...

...But things are even worse when the new equipment threatens to reduce the role of well-established user groups...

...For Eglin and for the in-house Air Force labs, the completion of research and development for any one type of ordnance means that no more work can be expected in that line of business for 10 or 15 years...

...That result was obtained easily enough: to pass the test, each pistol had to fire 800 rounds at a stretch...

...There was no need for any such approval, because there was nothing controversial about those plans...

...By 1960 there were 101,537 mid-level officers...

...That's the job of the Air Force Systems Command...

...In their ignorance, all those wealthy business executives, film stars, and plain rich folk had been flying for years in sadly inadequate aircraft of dubious reliability...

...The Eglin remedy is simple: having worked hard for as many years as possible to develop the best possible munition, instead of certifying the projectoas ready for production, the Armament Division suddenly uncovers new and wonderful technical possibilities...

...Assuming that the middle-ranking officers of 1945 were fully employed leading vast forces in combat, their counterparts of 1950 must have been greatly underemployed...

...But even if part-timers are thought incapable of commanding large formations, they certainly could fill many staff positions in the combat forces, and even more in training, logistics, and administration...

...They were ready to supervise the research and development to modify the aircraft, as well as the actual rebuilding...

...1984 Edward N. Luttwak...

...In spite of the phantasmagoria of "smart" weapons reported by the press, there are very few projects going (roughly one air-to-ground missile and one bomb type every ten years, a single air-to-air missile over 20 years...

...They are the ultimate case of too many cooks in one kitchen—or rather, of kitchens greatly enlarged to accommodate more cooks around fewer pots...

...But the mini-aircraft will never be produced if pilot-dominated bureaucracies continue to control their development...

...Each branch of the military did its best to retain the largest possible number of middle and senior officers...

...The actual work of the Systems Command is distributed among four major divisions, each headed by a three-star lieutenant general...