Government Executive - Authors - John Grady

Putting Veterans on a Path to Careers

John Grady — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 12:40:12 -0400

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., is worried about the unemployment rate for veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. At a recent Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee hearing, he noted former service members face major hurdles in translating their military service into meaningful civilian careers.

Kaine, who has a son in the Marine Corps and has heard hardship stories from veterans while on the campaign trail, successfully pushed major sections of his proposed Troop Talent bill into this year's National Defense Authorization Act. The goal is to get service members “the credential that a civilian official understands," he said.

This effort already is taking hold across the country. At Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash., for example, a partnership involving trade unions, vocational schools and community colleges offers separating soldiers and airmen the guarantee of employment when they successfully complete special courses before leaving active service.

But what is going on in Puget Sound is only a small start at helping veterans—particularly the enlisted and certainly those without a military retirement—move into careers, not just jobs.

The stakes couldn't be higher now. More than 1 million service members will be leaving the military in the next five years, and they are "departing into a tough job market," Kaine said.

More troubling is the subset of veterans who are really being left behind.

The spotlight has been aimed directly at the under-25 age group. While their unemployment numbers are high, in reality many of them are taking time off. Some are waiting to enroll in school; others are decompressing and will begin a serious job hunt a few months after separation.

The spotlight should have been focused on war veterans who are between 25 and 34 years old—many of whom are married and have children. Their unemployment rate in February was 9.2 percent, compared with 7.5 percent for their peers who never spent time on active duty.

Two programs appear to have the strength of commitment and the resources to make a difference for those vets. One is in the traditional building trades and construction industry, an area the armed forces is very familiar with. The other focuses on advanced manufacturing, an area in which the services have barely scratched the surface. But after more than a decade, the numbers these programs are reaching are relatively small. And one suffered across-the-board budget cuts in the 2011 Budget Control Act.

Helmets to Hardhats

Darrell Roberts, a Navy veteran who also served in the Army National Guard, directs the Helmets to Hardhats program, a partnership between the building trade unions and the construction industry. The no-cost apprenticeship program is operating at Lewis-McChord, including Veterans in Piping and Veterans in Construction Electrical.

The 11-year-old program has been successful even with the ups and downs of the construction industry, according to Roberts, who is a sheet metal worker. "We keep plugging away, trying to be creative" at special expos, inviting former service members to consider the building trades for a career, he says. Veterans "are leaders on the work site and in the classroom," Roberts adds. "We want to be where the men and women are transitioning."

The certification veterans receive through the program is transferable from state to state with companies all over the United States. The basic four-week core course teaches them how to read a blueprint, among other things, and helps them decide whether construction is the right career path for them. "We tell them you got to do the research," he says. "We don't charge and we offer free placement."

The program is trying to regain the momentum it had in 2008 when it placed more than 1,700 veterans. Roberts he is looking to add staff after cuts several years ago. The hit came when the $3 million a year funding the program received from the Defense Department was axed by sequestration. The staff dropped from 20 to three, ironically at a time when its services were increasingly in demand. Roberts puts the return on the government's investment at $15 million annually.

Now Helmets to Hardhats relies on support from the unions, industry, associations and nonprofits.

Get Skills to Work

Seth Bodnar is a U.S. Military Academy graduate who served in the 1st Special Forces Group and is now a GE executive. He recently moved from its global locomotive operations to global signaling. This spring day at The Garage in Washington, one of GE’s innovation labs not far from the White House, he is spreading the word not only about the company but also the Get Skills to Work coalition. The program trains veterans in advanced manufacturing techniques from 3-D printing to laser cutting and new technologies for milling.

He's as passionate as Roberts about building careers for veterans.

"There are 600,000 jobs in advanced manufacturing" that are going unfilled, Bodnar says. There are 10,000 veterans in GE's workforce of 130,000, and "they carry back an incredible amount of talent," he adds.

Roberts also touts the leadership skills of veterans. "They are not charity cases," he says, adding that the Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University has built a toolkit for employers and works to bust the myths about former service members.

So why aren't veterans between 25 and 34 finding fulfilling careers? In too many cases, they didn't plan for life after the military. Transition GPS, a Defense Department assistance program, is encouraging service members to start thinking about what they want to do months before separation.

Get Skills to Work, pioneered by GE, Lockheed Martin, Alcoa and other large companies, and managed by the Manufacturing Institute, now involves 541 large and small businesses and 55 educational institutions. Since the coalition's founding in 2012, it has reached 41,000 veterans and 700 are in training. The goal is to reach 100,000 veterans by 2015.

"Many found they wanted to continue their education" after an initial six-week course, Bodnar says, adding that they’re discovering "manufacturing is cool."

The Path to Success

Separating the wheat from the chaff has been tricky in examining programs that say they help veterans build careers outside the military, especially when there are large piles of money at stake from the revised GI Bill. That money is sometimes wasted on for-profit institutions and vocational training programs that falsely claim they can place vets on a path to success. Forests have been felled to produce oversight reports from the House and Senate Veterans Affairs Committee alone on such scams and fraud.

Still, efforts to get veterans on the path to success are critical. "The Department of Defense recently conducted a pilot program on military credentialing and found that the cost of a service member completing their credentials was nominal, about $280 a person,” Kaine said in an email. “By comparison, DoD spends $9.663 billion on unemployment insurance each year."

Coalitions like Helmets to Hardhats and Get Skills to Work need to grow with new public-private partnerships at the state and local levels to make a difference. In ticking off his concerns about the future for veterans, Kaine said, "we want to make sure they get traction" in the civilian workforce.

John Grady, former director of communications for the Association of the United States Army, is now retired and writes about defense and national security.

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Analysis: Listening Tour Gauges Real Cost of Army Cuts

John Grady — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:00:00 -0400

As April comes to a close the Army is wrapping up listening sessions across the nation, where officials have heard from communities surrounding 29 installations about the impact the service has on their hometowns.

No, these sessions are not associated with the Base Closure and Realignment Commission. This Congress is no more likely than the last to approve new BRAC rounds. Nor are the sessions related to sequestration. The listening tour and the Army’s request for comments from localities earlier this year are tied to the service’s plan to cut the active-duty force from 540,000 to 490,000 by 2017 and eliminate at least eight brigade combat teams.

The Army already has begun reducing its civilian workforce of more than 200,000 employees.

“People realize that cuts in federal spending must happen,” said Douglas Peters, president and chief executive officer of the regional chamber of commerce in Fayetteville, N.C., after a session April 22 to discuss Fort Bragg’s future. As one of the 40 speakers at the forum, Peters said he came away feeling like it was “a very positive give and take” that highlighted for the record what the community does for the Army.

“We’ve been very supportive of our warfighters since the early 1900s,” he said. “We told [the Army] how we take care of the military families when the soldiers deploy.”

With its 44,000 service members and 11,000 civilians, Fort Bragg “is the economic engine” in Fayetteville, Peters said. “Forty percent of our economy is tied to Bragg,” he added. The installation pumps $10.9 billion into the local economy. It also has spurred the city’s population growth from 150,000 residents a decade ago to 210,000 now. After the 2005 BRAC round that closed Fort McPherson in Atlanta, the Army moved the Army Reserve Command and its several thousand civilian employees to Fort Bragg.

But growth has come at a cost, Peters said, citing the added demands on local schools and roads. “We’re the only major Army installation that was not connected to the interstate highway system.” Now the county is building a highway outer loop to move traffic more efficiently on and off post.

In West Texas, Richard Dayoub of the Greater El Paso Regional Chamber of Commerce has dealt with similar issues in his city, which is home to Fort Bliss. State and local officials developed a creative financing plan to build the 7.4-mile Liberty Expressway that connects the base to the airport. Dayoub notes this is one example of the Army working together with surrounding communities to address a host of problems.

But along with the challenges come opportunities.

The Army’s growth has been spectacular in the El Paso area, where most of the troop movement and spending took place during the 2005 BRAC round. Fort Bliss, formerly a post with about 9,400 soldiers, is now home to anywhere from 35,000 to 39,000 soldiers, with most in maneuver units. The result has been $5 billion in new construction for the surrounding community.

Another benefit is the new Texas Tech Health Sciences Center at El Paso, which works “hand-in-hand” with Fort Bliss’ William Beaumont Army Medical Center, Dayoub said. The school “is a pipeline for recruiting physicians and health professionals” into the Army, he said.

Fort Drum in Jefferson County, N.Y., presents a different scenario. “We’re very rural,” said Carl McLaughlin, executive director of the Fort Drum Regional Liaison Organization. In a region of dairy farms, the county’s population of about 120,000 is about half the size of Fayetteville. Fort Drum, the Army’s only active-duty installation in the Northeastern United States, hosts about 18,000 soldiers.

“We’ve added capacity in significant ways,” McLaughlin said about Jefferson County. He pointed to the recent Samaritan Hospital expansion as an example. “Fort Drum doesn’t have a hospital,” he said, adding that soldiers’ families account for 1,000 of the 1,700 births at Samaritan each year. The county also added 1,600 housing units to accommodate the addition of a brigade combat team in 2007, along with 1,600 hotel rooms to handle the 80,000 active-duty, Army National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers that train there annually.

This kind of investment by local government and businesses also can mean more debt for a region trying to make ends meet. With a 10 percent unemployment rate, McLaughlin said the county needs the Army’s active-duty population and civilian workforce of 4,400 to remain stable.

“We’re not crying or bleeding here,” he said. “We’re very good partners.”

In Fayetteville, on the other hand, a reduction in the Army’s active-duty force at Fort Bragg might not have much effect, according to Peters. If a brigade combat team of 3,500 soldiers were eliminated at Fort Bragg, it likely would be replaced by more Special Operations forces, which are projected to grow over the next five years, he said.

For now it is wait and see at the 29 installations. Army officials do not expect to make any restructuring announcements before the third quarter of fiscal 2013.

John Grady, retired director of communications for the Association of the United States Army, writes about defense and national security.

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Analysis: From war to work

John Grady — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 14:35:24 -0500

On Veteran’s Day, Americans should pause not only to remember the sacrifices of those who served in the armed forces years ago, but also to reflect on the men and women who deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. The stereotypes about these veterans that have emerged are as limiting as those that surrounded my generation of veterans in the Vietnam era.

“Although there are some members coming back with [post-traumatic stress disorder], they are not the majority,” Holly Petraeus, assistant director for Servicemember Affairs for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said at a recent panel discussion in Washington. Petraeus, who also is the wife of retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus, warned that stigmatizing service members and veterans complicates their attempts to find employment as they re-enter civilian life.

In the late 1960s and ’70s, perceptions of drug addiction and psychological problems complicated civilian life for Vietnam veterans -- many of whom were draftees. Project 100,000, a 1960s Defense Department initiative, lowered recruiting standards to fill the military ranks and, ironically, to fight the war on poverty. Many of those recruits left the military with less-than-honorable discharges. Employers paid close attention to military records because the draft took in huge swaths of the male population between 18 and 25 years old. I was fortunate to have an honorable discharge as well as a master’s degree, and was able to move swiftly into a job that I loved.

Now about 1 percent of the population serves in the armed forces -- all volunteers. The paramount challenges for today’s veterans are landing meaningful jobs and climbing out of crushing debt. About 80 percent of these volunteers serve only one tour in the armed forces and quickly find themselves thrust back into civilian life without retirement benefits, jobs or work experience.

Holly Petraeus said many financial problems plague those in uniform and those who have left military service. She cited student loan debts, predatory practices of for-profit schools, payday loans with high interest rates and underwater home mortgages compounded by moves to new duty stations.

Petraeus noted federal efforts to provide mortgage relief and expose predatory practices, but the most pressing issue for this generation of veterans, especially those younger than 25, is jobs. October’s jobless report showed the unemployment rate for Afghanistan and Iraq vets rose to 10 percent compared with 9.7 percent in September. That translates to 290,000 young men and women looking for work.

Corporations and institutions that are trying to cut through the employment thicket should be applauded. General Electric, Home Depot and their partners in the Get Skills to Work program come to mind, as does Syracuse University’s pioneering Institute for Veterans and Military Families.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce leads the way in trying to place veterans in good jobs. A variety of factors affect the employment rate of young veterans, according to Kevin Schmiegel, a retired Marine Corps officer and executive director of the chamber’s Hiring Our Heroes program. The unemployment rate for vets younger than 25 discharged in 2011 was 29.1 percent. Many of them have never been in the full-time job market, some might be taking time off before seriously looking for work and others might be waiting for school to begin.

The chamber’s goal this year is to host 400 job fairs in partnership with private and public sector organizations that will lead to the hiring of 500,000 veterans and their spouses by the end of 2014.

“Many of our members said they wanted to hire veterans,” Schmiegel says, but didn’t know how to go about it. “We had to step up,” he adds. Of 300 job fairs held so far, 10,000 veterans and spouses have been hired. The chamber tracks employment related to the fairs for up to a year because the hiring process can be slow at places like the federal government.

Zeroing in on younger job seekers, upcoming fairs will offer transition workshops to help them develop “90-second elevator speeches” to sell themselves to prospective employers, take advantage of social media and use the chamber’s Fast Track program to find out what kind of jobs are available and where. “I really do believe Fast Track is a game-changer” in moving veterans into satisfying careers, Schmiegel says.

The Defense and Veterans Affairs departments, along with the Labor Department and the Small Business Administration, are rethinking transition assistance for veterans of all ages. Defense rolled out a pilot called Transition Goals, Plan, Success, or Transition GPS, this summer.

Susan Kelly, principal director of the Pentagon’s Transition to Veterans Program Office, says the program will be fully implemented by the end of 2014. Gone are the PowerPoint slides and mind-numbing lectures to groups of several hundred service members about to leave active duty. The key, Kelly says, is to start from the point service members reach their first duty station. As they track their military career goals at promotion points, deployment and demobilization, they also set and track goals for when they leave the service. “This is a cultural change for the military,” she says.

For now, VA programs are off the table for immediate cuts, but how veterans programs at other agencies, such as SBA and the Education Department, will fare even if sequestration is avoided is an open question -- especially for younger veterans.

That troubles Linda Bilmes, senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In one of her studies, her students -- many of them veterans -- found that funding was “disproportionately going to veterans who were falling through the cracks” or to older veterans.

The money and attention need to be applied to this generation of vets first to get them on their feet financially, educationally and occupationally. That was done successfully after World War II but not so well after Korea, Vietnam and Desert Shield/Desert Storm. The payoff for the country then was enormous. It can be again.

John Grady, retired director of communications for the Association of the United States Army, writes about defense and national security.

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Analysis: Educating the brass

John Grady — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 07:00:00 -0400

Professional military education has an inside baseball stigma that is hard to shake. The topic often receives a “so what” shake of the head when it comes up for discussion at conferences. And it rarely comes up on Capitol Hill since Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the strongest advocate of professional training in the military, lost his seat in 2010.

Yet it was Congress that required two-tiered professional military education at the command and general staff colleges, war colleges, National Defense University and Industrial College of the Armed Forces. Thousands of officers eligible for promotion must complete specific education requirements before moving up in rank. This was a key ingredient in the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols reform law that emphasized unified mission objectives over service parochialism and the need for the military and civilian arms of government to work together to educate the nation’s armed forces.

During the last 10 years of war, waivers of these requirements have been routinely given to officers focused on battlefield assignments, setting the military’s academic programs adrift. The services insist there will be no more waivers. While combat experience is important, officials are saying service members must learn how to lead in other situations and will have to go to school to be promoted. We’ll see.

Old habits die hard.

For many officers, the objective of professional military education is to be selected but get out of going, according to retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, a former commandant of the Army War College. That idea has to be put to rest. “They need to see the value” of attending the war colleges, he says, beyond the accelerated master’s degree. The senior-level resident program at the Army War College, for instance, is a 10-month stint. Most civilian master’s programs take up to two years to complete and require a thesis or special project.

The military services need officers, warrants and noncommissioned officers with broad perspectives.

“The Army has a set of lieutenant colonels, colonels and senior NCOs -- in both the active and reserve components -- who are less than fully prepared for senior leadership,” retired Army Lt. Gen. James Dubik warned in the June issue of ARMY Magazine, noting they lack experience at headquarters and education on how the Army operates. Likewise, NCOs have insufficient developmental and educational backgrounds to be effective as tomorrow’s sergeants major and command sergeants major.

Complicating matters is a Defense Department debate over whether professional development programs should be considered education or training. The Army uses the phrase “select-train-promote” to describe its system of molding future leaders. Adding to the tension at the most advanced institutions is the changing relationship between the war colleges and the service chiefs, and between NDU and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

In a world of rank consciousness, the fact that the last NDU president wore two stars rather than three is important. Looking at the war colleges, reporting directly to the service chief of staff puts a school commandant higher in the pecking order than reporting to the service training chief.

The war colleges are considered the top of the military’s education system, but they need to “get rid of the deadwood,” Scales says. He argues the schools are staffed often by retired officers who transitioned out of uniform into their civilian positions and were never trained to teach, and a steadily growing crop of administrators with semi-academic titles.

Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security at the Naval War College, has a similar view of the practitioners teaching at the war colleges. Many have engineering degrees, she says, noting one could be a pilot or ship driver one week and the next week teaching history or national security. Johnson-Freese advocates a comprehensive career path in academia that provides time to research, write and develop relevant curriculum.

Even though war colleges are accredited by the same authorities as civilian colleges, they are no John F. Kennedy School of Government. Likewise, Harvard’s Kennedy School and other elite programs offering graduate-level national security studies are not war colleges, which are in a unique position of being “both a college and a serious preparation for the defense of the nation,” says Johnson-Freese. That’s clear from Congress’ intent. Education at the most senior level in the military should concentrate on strategic thinking, military history, leadership, national security affairs and joint military operations.

In his congressional push to beef up military education, Skelton emphasized these programs needed rigor. Scales agrees: “You give grades, and you have class standing” -- those two steps are absolute musts. The war colleges between World War I and World War II were known for their academic rigor and broad thinking.

Today’s programs are in stark contrast, critics say. “The students are critically aware that no one fails,” Johnson-Freese wrote in a recent issue of Orbis, a publication of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Students should be told in no uncertain terms that they are not the masters or owners of the schools.” She noted that being selected to attend a war college was a privilege.

What is at stake is not only how the U.S. military chooses to prepare a rising generation of flag officers, but whether this nation’s officer education systems will remain the gold standard for other militaries. It has a direct impact on the fledgling efforts by the services, the Army particularly, to develop a comparable professional education system for its civilians.

As push comes to shove over federal spending, there is increasing pressure to scale back resident programs. Critics argue the services already have distance learning and should expand it. True, but some say gone is the collegiality and mentoring that is vital to educating adults, not necessarily training them.

“Read, educate and think. There is no substitute for sitting down and reading,” says Rear Adm. John Christenson, president of the Naval War College.

But James Jay Carafano, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, sees potential value in a hybrid system that combines the best of distance learning and resident education. Carafano, who attended the Army War College through its distance learning program, believes schools like the command and general staff and war colleges should be much more universal and be offered to service members in their 20s rather than 40s. “People can use this kind of education in their 30s,” he says, not just at the tail end of their careers. “Strategic thinking takes 10 years to develop.”

Entire institutions likely will go away in the budget crunch this year, even without sequestration, if they cannot demonstrate value.

But as dark as the horizon may appear, there is cause for optimism. The Army recently surveyed 41,000 officers, warrants and NCOs who said they want to be pushed through crucibles to succeed in their profession. They realize they have a lot to learn.

John Grady, retired director of communications for the Association of the United States Army, writes about defense and national security.

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Analysis: Taking bots into battle

John Grady — Tue, 22 May 2012 12:00:00 -0400

Something you probably didn’t know -- even if you devoured P.W. Singer’s Wired for War in hardback a few years ago or more recently read Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker’s Counterstrike on your Kindle or Nook -- the days of “one person, one vehicle, one joystick,” even in remotely piloted aircraft, are numbered. Remotely piloted vehicles like those operated from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada and flying over Afghanistan are only near-term solutions to long-term threats.

But what comes after today’s Reapers and Predators in the military and intelligence agency fleets is fraught with even more ethical concerns than the CIA targeting suspected terrorists in Yemen and Haqqani Network sites in Waziristan.

Unmanned systems -- air, ground, sea and underwater -- are among the exceptions in the Defense Department’s fiscal 2013 budget request. Instead of going down, funding slated for these programs is rising by $3.8 billion. Even the Pentagon’s research, development, test and evaluation budget request is up from $971 million to $1.1 billion.

This is a far cry from the shotgun blast into the ceiling from former Sen. John Warner, R-Va., before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when he called on the military services to buy more unmanned systems because the American public had no tolerance for American war casualties. Warner’s goal was for drones to comprise one-third of all U.S. military aircraft, ground vehicles and surface and underwater vessels within a decade.

Rough seas and communication difficulties literally are slowing the push for unmanned vessels on and below the surface. But in the air, about 40 percent of the Air Force’s fleet is unmanned. And ground bots are working tirelessly to spot roadside bombs and scout out rooms before soldiers move about in Afghanistan.

The overriding question is: As artificial intelligence advances, do humans have to remain in the loop?

As Norman Friedman, author of Unmanned Air Combat Systems: A New Kind of Carrier Aviation (Naval Institute Press, 2010), puts it, “People cost a lot of money. In the air world, the most expensive item is the pilot.” According to Friedman, you’re paying for the pilot’s judgment in targeting and firing, not just launching a cruise missile toward a predetermined target. Judgment is going to matter even more because potential enemies are “not wearing uniforms and [driving] vehicles that say ‘I’m the enemy,’ ” he argues.

Lt. Col. Thomas Rempfer, flight commander for the 2nd Special Operations Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, swears by his unit’s Predator operations. “There was no way when I was flying A-10s or F-16s that I could connect with the guys on the ground” from command centers to truck drivers in convoys, he says. “We’re more in the loop flying remotely piloted vehicles. The platform and operator are continuously engaged.”

But the golden age of unmanned aerial systems has not yet arrived, Col. Timothy Healy, chief of the Mission Command and Awareness Division at the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, said at a Joint Warfighting Conference in Virginia Beach, Va. In addition to devouring bandwidth to support a network transmitting high-definition images to someone on the ground while soldiers are on the move, the Army should ask itself whether lower-level commanders really need all this information, Healy said.

There is a safety concern when field commanders launch 10- to 15-pound UAVs into the same airspace where the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior, an armed reconnaissance helicopter, and UH-60 Blackhawk, are used to carry or medevac soldiers.

Occupying the same airspace is an increasing reality, and the Army is experimenting with teaming unmanned Shadow 200s with Kiowa Warriors. “They are all part of one organization, getting the same mission briefing, picking each other’s brain,” Healy said.

How effective will teaming be? The Army has taken tentative steps using Block III AH-64 Apache attack helicopters and a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles. Since 1997, Boeing, the manufacturer of the Apache, has worked on teaming, starting with its Longbow version. But, Healy said, “it all goes back to the bandwidth issue.”

The Joint Staff is thinking slightly differently as it tries to adapt the armed forces to a world of tight economics.

“It’s easy to move people. Hard to move equipment,” Lt. Gen. George Flynn, USMC, director J-7 Joint Staff, said at the conference, and that probably spells deeper cuts in the Army’s heavy forces and a greater reliance on unmanned systems.

Eliminating tanks, fighting vehicles and other heavy equipment means rethinking the future force structure. “Why are we keeping people in the loop?” Flynn said, noting that unmanned systems “have huge upside potential.” Think Predators vs. U-2s -- both capable of staying aloft 24 hours but a human pilot is only viable for nine hours. Also, information technology advances make it possible to modify and improve unmanned systems every 18 months at a relatively low cost. Upgrading Predators from analog to digital systems, for example, cost the Pentagon $300 million, and the program was complete in six months.

“We have to be platform-agnostic,” said retired Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noting the Pentagon soon will field the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter at a price tag of more than $200 million per plane, but it will be vulnerable to cyberattacks and [lasers] that move at the speed of light. “There is a nexus coming between electronics and cyber” that puts even greater emphasis on unmanned systems.

He describes their value this way: “One knocks the door down and the other goes in and does the dirty work . . . The offense always has the advantage.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the percentage of unmanned vehicles in the Air Force’s fleet.

John Grady, retired director of communications for the Association of the United States Army, writes about defense and national security for various organizations and publications.

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Trickle Down Economics

John Grady — Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

The numbers frighten industrialists, depot managers, governors and lawmakers. From the moment President Obama signed the Budget Control Act in 2011, the days of ever rising money to buy weapons, uniforms, armored vehicles, planes and ships to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were over.

To some it was a nightmarish rerun of Lockheed Martin Chief Executive Officer Norman Augustine’s Last Supper account of that fateful Pentagon meeting with federal contractors at the start of the Clinton administration. The good news was the Cold War was over. But then-Defense Department Secretary Les Aspin admitted there wasn’t enough work left to keep all their businesses afloat and plants open.

In 2012, these same contractors likely all want to join in chorus with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who in defending her state’s shipyards said, “At some point quantity has a quality all its own.” Instead, companies should be tracking what is going on in the Army and in their own divisions that are doing business with the service.

Army weapons buying is down by 65 percent since fiscal 2008, when it spent more than $67 billion. The service’s fiscal 2013 budget request for $24.3 billion in modernization and recapitalization funding is lower than the $26 billion it plans to spend this year. It’s an even bigger drop from the previous year’s request for $29 billion.

The sharp decline before the Budget Control Act signaled a congressional push to end the free-wheeling days of “trust us” spending when Donald Rumsfeld was Defense Department chief. Who knew where the money was really going?

Oversight is much easier for lawmakers when they look at the base budget. Take the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle, for example. The philosophy on the Hill is if you really want to keep the MRAP then find a way to pay for it—from factory to field—and, yep, that means the spare parts as well. As wonderful as the Rapid Fielding Initiative and other programs to develop new equipment might seem, few of them are in the base budget. Now they compete for dollars to replace the aging OH-58A Kiowa Warrior reconnaissance helicopter and to fund the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, the replacement for the Humvee.

Army leaders like Lt. Gen. Robert Lennox, deputy chief of staff for G-8, dispute the idea that the service has been living high on the hog.

The Army began the decade with a $56 billion hole in modernization accounts earmarked for acquisition, research and development, and science and technology, Lennox said at a recent Institute of Land Warfare breakfast. As early as 2007, then-Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker predicted it would take the Army 30 years to dig out of such a deep procurement hole.

Slipping Navy ship construction dates and paring back the Air Force’s F-35 purchase drew big headlines even before the fiscal 2013 budget was released. Such measures have been largely accepted in Congress to achieve $489 billion in defense cuts over the next 10 years. But quietly canceling eight Army programs such as the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles, and restructuring or delaying 89 others, including research for a new Ground Combat Vehicle to replace the Bradley, barely drew any media attention.

Perhaps the millions of dollars for those two Army programs pale in comparison to the billions the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps are pouring into Virginia-class submarines and the Joint Strike Fighter, for which allies are ready to pony up $112 million per copy.

In the case of the Ground Combat Vehicle, it could have been simple fatigue—think Future Combat Systems and its 2009 cancellation when billions already had been spent. Soon after, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ ordered military planners back to square one to develop a successor. Been there, done that.

Modernization consumes Army budget talks on the Hill while Air Force hearings focus on the future of the Air National Guard, and Navy and Marine Corps discussions emphasize the new defense strategy in the Pacific and
Middle East.

At a recent Army budget hearing, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, whose district includes Fort Bliss, wondered aloud what will happen when the production lines for Strykers, Abrams tanks and Bradleys start shutting down this year. “How can we be sure that capacity will be able to regenerate itself?” he said.

Time and again, before House and Senate committees, Army Secretary John McHugh has admitted there are no guarantees that foreign military sales, the resetting of equipment from Iraq and Afghanistan, and public-private partnerships at government depots would be enough to keep the trained workforce employed. “We are willing to look at all of them,” he said. But there are only so many dollars for personnel and modernization in a zero-sum game.

For many in state houses and Congress who have followed the Army budget, particularly since 2008, it’s also a jobs bill. Employment at the Lima, Ohio, plant where the M1A1 tank is manufactured has fallen from 1,200 to 1,000 since 2011. The Army estimates it will cost $2.8 billion to keep the line open until 2015.

“We don’t want to be in the position the Army was in in 1939,” Lennox said, referring to the days when funding went to keeping saber and bridle manufacturers in business for the horse cavalry rather than to building tanks. “We’ve tried to focus on things that make a difference. It’s gotten more challenging.”

John Grady, retired communications director for the Association of the United States Army, writes about defense and

national security for various publications.

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Analysis: Busting Defense Budgets

John Grady — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:16:00 -0400

As the Senate Armed Services Airland Subcommittee deliberated the Army’s modernization budget priorities at a hearing earlier this week, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., chairman of the panel, could not help reflecting on how the Pentagon’s challenges are similar to those it faced in early in his Senate career.

As Lieberman pointed out, massive cuts and declining Defense Department budgets leave scant room for modernization -- those were the facts in 1993, and those are the facts now. The Cold War was over then, and it was time to harvest the peace dividend.

The big question is whether the Army’s top brass has learned any lessons from the past.

Lawmakers wanted to know whether a smarter acquisition process has taught the Army not to pour billions of dollars into programs that ultimately are canceled, pointing to the Future Combat System. A recent review of the Army’s acquisition programs noted $3.3 billion to $3.8 billion of the service’s research and development funding has been lost to canceled programs, including FCS, since 2004. The study was led by Gilbert Decker, a former assistant secretary of the Army, and retired Gen. Louis Wagner Jr., former commander of the Army Materiel Command.

“We often do get the strategy wrong. That’s why we’re pursuing an incremental approach” to modernization spending, said Lt. Gen. Robert Lennox, deputy chief of the Army G-8, at the hearing. “I think we’re in better shape.” He assured lawmakers that Army officials know what the fiscal 2013 modernization budget request of $22.9 billion can do for all components, and they understand the risks to the defense industry if programs don’t go as planned.

The Army’s senior acquisition generals made their case for an integrated network and the Ground Combat Systems, saying they would rely heavily on commercial off-the-shelf technology, which holds down costs and allows for necessary changes.

Lennox attributed that approach to the portfolio review process started under Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who recently retired as vice chief of staff. A look at the development program for the Ground Combat Vehicle, for example, took into account the weaknesses of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. “The Bradley has a number of shortfalls,” Lennox told lawmakers, adding that it’s underpowered and can’t carry a full squad of nine soldiers. And Lt. Gen. Keith Walker, director of the Capabilities Integration Center at the Training Doctrine Command, added, “The Bradley does not have the maneuverability or the protection for our rifle squads.”

Requirements for the vehicle have been refined and projected costs have dropped to $9 billion to $10.5 billion per copy, according to Lt. Gen. William Phillips, principal military assistant to the assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology. A similar approach was used for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, a joint acquisition with the Marine Corps, lowering the cost per copy from $450,000 to $225,000.

“We don’t want to paint ourselves into a corner,” Walker told lawmakers. Phillips agreed, saying that in a change from past Army practice “we are listening to industry so we build our requirements appropriately.”

Still, Lieberman wasn’t walking down memory lane when he said the budget situation is presenting “unacceptable levels of strategic risk.” The 2011 Budget Control Act slashed the Army’s active component by 80,000 soldiers, cut back tactical vehicle procurements and shut down M1A1 tank production in Lima, Ohio, putting the jobs of engineers and skilled ballistic armor welders on the line, he noted at the hearing.

So it seems the Pentagon’s choices aren’t any easier now than they were during its last budget crunch.

John Grady, retired director of communications for the Association of the United States Army, writes about defense and national security for various organizations and publications.

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