Wampum

[Reposted from April 22, 2005, BRAC background.]

Everyone who reads political blogs on the left hand side of the dial has some idea that Paul Wolfowitz was Donald Rumsfeld's deputy at the OSD. Who Gordon England is and what job he's currently doing is more a trivial pursuits, sailor edition, than part of the generic journo-blogo repitoire of political literacy.

But he is interesting and he is the nominee for Donald Rumsfeld's deputy at the OSD. From his biobraphy at SECNAV

Prior to joining the administration of President George W. Bush, Mr. England served as executive vice president of General Dynamics Corporation from 1997 until 2001. In that position he was responsible for two major sectors of the corporation: Information Systems and International. Previously, he served as executive vice president of the Combat Systems Group, president of General Dynamics Fort Worth aircraft company (later Lockheed), president of General Dynamics Land Systems Company and as the principal of a mergers and acquisition consulting company.

That makes him an Iron Triangle arbitrager who made it into the boardroom of General Dynamics and is now doing the revolving door at pseudo-Defense -- first in the chaos that isn't getting any better in Joe Lieberman's and George Bush's colosal blunder -- the Department of Homeland Security, and now at the Navy Department.

Yesterday's piece on the Base Closure and Reallignment Commission made the point that at least two of the uniformed services -- the Air Force and the Navy, are institutions lacking strategic missions. The problem for the Air Force goes even deeper than the end of parity with the Soviets, but I haven't yet written the piece on strategic bombing of electrical infrastructure (which I expect only VJ will read anyway, but writing is for writing), so I'll leave the strategic (non-nuclear) bombing value proposition as an assumed truth.

He made news recently by putting his mark on a bit of procurement policy paper approving the closure of General Dynamics' yard in Maine, making the economic vaporware arguement that the Navy would save $300 mil per unit if all future Destroyers were built at the Litton Industry's yard in Mississippi. The DD(X) procurements are currently split, one hull in three at the Maine yard (Bath Iron Works), two hulls in three at the Mississippi yard (Ingalls at Pascagoula). Fortunately for the Republican majority in the Senate, and several thousand Mainers, and possibly most tax payers if single-source and non-competitive government contracts is a bigger failure of process than 300 million hypothetical "economies of scale and efficiency saved" green stamps in a system that loses billions of dollars on well-known bogosities every year, someone at the OSD, or more likely, someone in politics who cares about the Republican majority in the Senate, scotched Gordon England's clever plan.

But that's ordinary administrative venality, playing with pretend money and sacking an entire town somewhere "out there" in fly-over land. There's worse.

As Secretary of the Navy England should have been figuring how to de-couple the Navy from an obsoleted or vastly down-scaled mission -- being the third leg of America's Strategic Nuclear Deterrence. There's not a lot left to deter, whether what's being "deterred" is run out of Moscow or Beijing. Getting at least half of the SSBN fleet off the operational budget and onto a lower cost maintenance and life-extended budget, and getting more than two crew shifts per boat to maintain manpower should have been his first priority. Instead, like several SECNAVs before him, he's left the SSN and SSBN fleets drift downward with few accelerated retirements. In effect, the only "signal" from the Navy's portion of the "deterence trident" that the Soviet Union, and China, no longer present a credible threat of initiating an intercontinental nuclear exchange, is the fact that no new SSBNs are entering the fleet. Everything is riding down its 30 year plus or minus life-time operating cost curve, mostly undisturbed by policy oversight.

It is the SECNAV's job to notice things like that.

However, if the SECDEF is keen to transform the Army from a stable institution composed of stable commands in Europe and Korea, into an unstable institution composed of ad hoc situational commands, anywhere on a moment's notice, the "agile spear", and the SECNAV's loyalties are ... not to the Navy's permanent mission of bi-coastal blue water defense, then the SECNAV's job is replacing the blue water navy with a brown water navy -- one Rumsfeld can take with him into the littoral combat sphere of operations.

There are some real problems with the littoral combat sphere of operations theory. First, it assumes that the unfortunate recipients of the brown water navy's attentions lack the means to pot shallow-draft, fast, unarmored boats shooting up their shores. Its 100 kg of commodity explosives, a commodity rocket moter, and a guidance system of choice, from joy-stick and wireline to active sensors and integrated, or standoff illuminators. Rinse and repeat.

But lack of surface-to-surface artillary capability in the littoral combat zone as an article of faith is not the only problem with the littoral combat sphere of operations theory. Not only must the natives be passive recipients of the attentions of the brown water navy, but they must lack the means deny use of the littoral zone to vessels other than those shallow-draft, fast, unarmored boats. Its 1,000 kg of commodity explosives or a dozen commodity RPGs, a commodity fast boat, from Zodiac inflatables to Cigarette boats, and a guidance system of choice, from hand-on-wheel to auto-pilot. Rinse and repeat.

But lack of water-born denial capability in the littoral zone of the area of operations, the inability to repeat the War of the Tankers as an article of faith, is not the last problem with the littoral combat sphere of operations theory. These two articles of faith posit littoral combat operations without cause. I'm getting tired of beating around the bush. The "brown water" isn't the Orinocco or the Amazon, its the coast of West Asia, the Persian and Arab and Omani Gulfs.

The littoral combat was for the control of indefensible oil embarcation points, and associated sealift landings for the logistical tail of the on-shore portion of the operation, and the unrestricted transit to and from those indefensible oil embarcation points and sealift landings, and the "reach back" to the ports where forces were "surged out" from, and where tankers and containerships go to and come from to sustain the purpose of the original US vs Other State military conflict.

The last article of faith of the littoral combat sphere of operations theory is that no other blue water navy, either regional or global in nature, will engage the brown water navy in blue water, or otherwise compromise the strategic exercise of sea power confined to brown waters.

With those three articles of faith, the Litorial Combat Ship (LCS) program at the expense off the Next Generation Destroyer (DD(X)) program isn't criminally insane, If those articles of faith are just someone's wishful thinking, and there is a lot of that in the current crop of Cabinet and sub-Cabinet political appointees in the Pentagon, then its a trillion-dollar fiasco, as if it was the Wasp, Hornet and Lexington that went down on December 7th, 1941, leaving the US to fight out the rest of the Pacific naval war with the Arizona, the Idaho, and the California -- ships of the line circa 1914.

That's why Rumsfeld wants England bumped up from SECNAV to DSECDEF. Rumsfeld has a lot more "modernizing" to do. He's got the whole dump-the-armor-for-Intel for the Army program to sell to Congress, That's "Intel" as in "Intelligence" and "Intel" as in laptops-as-a-substitute-for-armor. He needs someone who has the "agile spear" vision, and England appears to have that, and not a lot else. Except for one little detail.

The top three corporations in the defense industry account for 25 cents out of every defense budget dollar, and as MB pointed out last December 7th, is lobbying to both drive the defense budget up to 4% of GNP, and to capture as much of the Defense budget as it can for high margin "missile defense" and exotic and/or space-based or space-expoloiting products, where those top three capture much more than 25 cents on every dollar.

Gordon England is both from GD, one of the big three, he's also from the zoomie / exotics / tech side of GD. SECNAV and stepping on the toes of the black shoes in the fleets was just a step up to the big-time -- SECDEF after SECDEF.

Not my choice for a senior staffer at the OSD, but then again, I count how many attack boats India's got or is buying off the Russians, and how many attack boats the PRC is on-schedule for, all of these are blue water sea-denial assets, and tastes vary.