This html article is produced from an uncorrected text file through optical character recognition. Prior to 1940 articles all text has been corrected, but from 1940 to the present most still remain uncorrected. Artifacts of the scans are misspellings, out-of-context footnotes and sidebars, and other inconsistencies. Adjacent to each text file is a PDF of the article, which accurately and fully conveys the content as it appeared in the issue. The uncorrected text files have been included to enhance the searchability of our content, on our site and in search engines, for our membership, the research community and media organizations. We are working now to provide clean text files for the entire collection.
Back in July 1992, Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) delivered what was then seen as a watershed speech, challenging the Pentagon to take a hard look at service roles and missions and to make some tough decisions on organization, force structure, and concomitant procurement plans to make a solvent match between the nation’s national security needs and the diminishing post-Cold War defense budget.
His approach was statesmanlike and his arguments for a tough assessment were based on common sense and the Jessons learned during the five decades of United States-Soviet confrontation that spanned the Korean War, Cuba, the Vietnam War, and the various crises leading up to Operation Desert Storm.
Many national security pundits assumed that the speech was the first round of an orchestrated colloquy between the Senator • and General Colin Powell.
'■'the incumbent Chairman ;of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who would use the i expanded powers of that office under the Goldwater- I Nichols act, to seize the opportunity to make the long- awaited changes needed to further jointness, reduce service redundancies, streamline the operating forces, and I provide a coherent and affordable strategic modernization | plan.
The pundits were wrong. The Pentagon response was I muted and it’s business as usual, with the traditional service funding allocations—one-third each—as opposed to I the enlightened, top-down approach suggested by Sena- | tor Nunn.
President Bill Clinton’s election and former House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin’s move to the Pentagon has not made a change. In fact, the combination of reduced budgets and the bottom-up orientation of the Aspin crew has made matters worse. Exclusivity and discreteness in the decision-making process within the various categories and line items of the reduced defense budget have resulted in serious disconnects.
The base realignment and closure process, the force- structure drawdown, and the industrial base builddown all appear to be moving on random independent paths—there ls no cohesive national strategy to get the best value for the top-line defense dollar. Individual service priorities
have prevailed, and the concomitant suboptimization of overall acquisition expenditures—which Sam Nunn had hoped to redress—has been sustained.
The Navy will continue with its Seawolf submarine, the Air Force will develop the F-22 with its single-mission origin and bias, and the Marines will buy V-22s independently—without regard for Army lift requirements. While we have made significant improvements in the operational management and combined arms use of our forces, as evidenced by the high-technology blitzkrieg in the Gulf War, we have not been able to translate this cooperative approach to the acquisition process.
The combination of service parochialism and related political constituent industrial concerns has caused us, in many but not all instances, to build the wrong things, for the wrong reasons and protect associated technologies and
industries for political rather than national strategic interests. We are in grave danger of building an industrial and technological “Jurassic Park,” with lots of dinosaurs and submarines and very little that is relevant to the 21st century.
The balance that Senator Nunn and others in the Congress hoped to obtain by adopting a top-level integrated and joint perspective of our defense procurement needs has, to date, been forestalled by the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, old and new, and traditional resistance to change.
The one ray of hope that has emerged from Aspin’s bottom-up review that could herald and foster change is the yet to be defined Joint Advanced Strike Technologies (JAST) program. While the reviews did much to further Jurassic proclivities, the JAST program’s real benefit, if properly focused, could be to realign industry and government to create a match between our top-level needs and our reduced resources. It could provide the balanced approach that would give the Navy the stealthy, multirole first-strike capability needed to make our carriers useful in the 21st century.
Carriers without this front-end capability will not be blitzkrieg players, nor will the Navy. There are many ifs and could be’s in JAST, but it appears to be the only game in town to do what’s right for America.
This top-down approach substantiates the need for a strong, tough Navy with an enabling, sea-based tactical aviation blitzkrieg capability as a critical component of our national strategy
Admiral Hogan, a career fighter pilot, headed the Navy’s Office of Legislative Affairs prior to his retirement.
Proceedings/January 1994