The FCS has been plagued by development problems. An April 10, 2008 GAO report noted that it would be difficult for the Army to show for a 2009 go/no-go review that it had firm requirements and mature technologies for the program, elements which should have been in place back in 2003 when the FCS first entered its development phase. Only 2 of 44 critical technologies for the FCS are currently considered mature by best practice standards. Putting the cart before the horse, requests for funds for production of core systems are scheduled for February 2010 within months of the go/no-go review but before the program’s critical design review. Cost estimates of $160.9 billion for the FCS remain about the same this year as last year but this was accomplished by reducing the number of FCS components from 18 to 14. The information network the core of the FCS is years away from demonstration. Software code (an indicator of cost containment) has increased to 95.1 million lines, triple what was envisioned in 2003. As a result, delays and costs cascade through the program. Contractors are unable to finalize designs because they are unsure what the final requirements will be. Consequently, changes and fixes will have to be made later in the process when it will cost a great deal more to make them.

Rumsfeld (see item 207) said, “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” Well, this is that army for a later time. What is its purpose? What is it designed to do? A fast, light force is good for going in and shooting a place up. A few observations can be made about this. First, we already have such a force. It is called the Marines. Second, such a force would not be good at holding territory or combating an insurgency that can melt into the civilian population. As we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, these require larger and heavier forces. Third, most of the advantages of a highly mobile force would be lost in a conflict with North Korea where the battle space is confined. The same could be said for a conflict involving Taiwan. Fourth, ground wars against nuclear weapons states like China, Russia, or Pakistan are likely to be avoided by all concerned because of their foreseeable and catastrophic consequences. Fifth, FCS forces or even current army forces could be used against Iran, but it is too large a country to occupy and as said above even limited areas would be difficult to hold in the face of a hostile population.

There are only two uses I can see for the FCS. One would be in international peacekeeping in places like Darfur. Somehow I don’t think this is what Rumsfeld had in mind. The other is to defend oil fields of allied states like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE against outside threats. It should be pointed out that this is what we have been doing with our conventional forces for the last few decades in any case.

So foul-ups and cost overruns aside, it looks like we are building another army superfluous at best and ill-suited at worst for the military challenges we are likely to face in the future. In that sense, the FCS is a very Bushian creation indeed.

The report looked at 72 individual programs including the largest in greater detail. It found that none of them had proceeded through system development adhering to best practices standards. 88% began without having critical technologies ready and developed for them. 96% still did not have them or a stable design later when they moved into the demonstration phase. And no program as it entered into production had good controls for monitoring the manufacturing process, and most were not even collecting the data necessary to do so.

There were other problems. 63% had changes in requirements after development began causing cost increases of 72%. Programs that did not experience such changes had cost grow by an average of 11%. There was also significant turnover in program managers so that the average time on the job was 17 months, less than half what the Pentagon’s own policy prescribes. As elsewhere, the DOD relies heavily on contractors (48% of acquisitions staff) to do the work that government employees used to do with all the blurring of management and control that this represents. Finally, in about half the projects using software there was an increase of more than 25% in the lines of expected code, an important indicator of cost and scheduling problems.

For 2008, the top 10 (out of 95) defense acquisition programs accounted for $39.1 billion out of a budget of $72.3 billion or 54% of it. What were these programs? The biggest at $8.9 billion is Bush’s ballistic missile defense shield, you know the one that doesn’t work (see item 73). Then there are the Joint Strike Fighter ($6.7 billion) and the F-22A ($4.4 billion). The Navy has even more goodies: the Virginia Class Submarine ($2.9 billion), another aircraft carrier ($3.1 billion), the DDG 1000 destroyer ($3.5 billion), an F/A-18 upgrade ($2.1 billion), and the P-8A an anti-submarine plane ($0.9 billion). The Marines continue to get funding for the V-22 Osprey, a plane that crashes a lot ($3 billion). The US Army which has been doing most of the heavy lifting in Iraq for the last 5 years really gets the short end of the stick in this military industrial lovefest but does have a suite of programs called Future Combat Systems ($3.6 billion).

In short, the Pentagon continues to spend huge amounts of money on acquisition of new weapons systems and manages to waste most of it. It does so by having no clear idea what it wants and then adding on capabilities later when it is much more expensive to do so. It does so by having no one in charge who knows the program or by passing these functions on to outside contractors who have little or no interest in containing costs. It does so by fostering inter-service rivalries which lead to individual services defending systems that contribute more to the nation’s deficit than to its defense. It does so by tying individual careers to the continuance of programs and so creates vested interests that will protect them for reasons that are more personal than professional. It does so by spreading program spending around to many states and Congressional districts so that there will be built in political support for a program even if it is overbudget, behind schedule, and works poorly or not at all.

Looking at the 10 biggest programs, we should ask ourselves if these programs really represent the military we need. Most of them are gold-plated anachronisms left over from the Cold War. Our biggest military operations during the Bush years have been in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet almost all these systems are irrelevant to such engagements. Indeed while we have been in these countries several years, our experiences in them are not reflected at all in the acquisition budget, a likely legacy of Donald Rumsfeld.

Finally, the 2008 US defense budget is estimated to be $623 billion. This is substantially more than the rest of the world combined. China is second at $65 billion, and Russia third at $50 billion. Whom are we defending ourselves from, and how? Yes, we need an adequate defense both for ourselves and to help defend our allies, but do we truly need to spend 10 times more than our nearest rival and to spend it so poorly? And what are the costs here at home? How many roads and schools are not being built? How much healthcare isn’t being purchased? How much science and technology are not being funded? How much of what makes this country worth defending is being passed over?

I don’t think anyone has accused Condi Rice of being a hands on administrator and it shows. At the same time that Iraq and Afghanistan have put increased demands on the State Department, it has fewer and less well trained personnel to meet them. Given this Administration’s contempt for diplomacy and its general incompetence at managing anything, the disarray at State should come as a surprise to no one, but, as has happened so frequently in this Administration, it represents a hollowing out of yet another of our basic institutions of government.

Bolton has cycled through most of the think tanks of Right wingnuttia and has been the protégé of many of the luminaries of that world, including Jesse Helms, Edwin Meese, Jim Baker III, and Dick Cheney.

In 1986-1987, as Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legislative Affairs, he stonewalled investigations into drug smuggling and arms running by the Contras. In a February 3, 1994 speech, he opined that the UN could lose its top 10 stories without any problem (see item 35). He was a signer of the January 26, 1998 Project for the New American Century letter to Bill Clinton which stated the neocon agenda which served as a blueprint for the Bush Administration:

“The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy”

From 1999-2001, he was a senior vice president at the bastion of neoconservatism the American Enterprise Institute. He participated in the Republican push to stop the 2000 Florida recount under Jim Baker’s direction.

In 2001, he was made Undersecretary for Arms Control over Colin Powell’s objection and at Dick Cheney’s behest.

In 2001, Bolton, a member of the NRA, announced at the U.N. Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons that the US would oppose any regulation in this trade that has caused so much death in the Third World because it would “abrogate the constitutional right to bear arms.”

After the anthrax scare which followed 9/11, he spiked UN efforts for a treaty on bioweapons.

In May 2002, Bolton claimed without any evidence that Cuba not only had a biowarfare capacity but was selling it.

On May 6, 2002, Bolton asked for and received the privilege of communicating to UN Secretary Kofi Annan that the US was withdrawing from the International Criminal Court. (Clinton had given preliminary approval on December 31, 2000 at the very end of his term to the Treaty of Rome which created the court.)

In 2002 and 2003, Bolton accused Libya of aggressively pursuing WMD. Libya had begun talks with Britain and the US in March 2003 as the Iraq war began to eliminate its WMD programs (which, in the event and contrary to Bolton’s charges, were not very advanced). His activities nearly derailed the talks and it was only after Britain requested his removal from them that they were successfully concluded in December 2003.

In June 2003, he enunciated a “rollback” strategy on WMD aimed not just at preventing their spread but eliminating them from “rogue” states which already possessed them, such as Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, Libya, etc.

On July 31, 2003, he again jeopardized arms control negotiations when he gave an unauthorized speech in Seoul. In it, he lambasted Kim Jung Il’s human rights record barely a month before the first round of six party talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program was to begin on August 27, 2003. While such criticisms were justified, they were seen as an attempt to sabotage the arms talks and it took some fast foot work to limit the damage he created.

Also in July 2003, Bolton had to postpone an appearance before Congress in the face of a revolt by intelligence analysts over his exaggeration of Syrian chemical and biological weapons programs which he characterized as destabilizing the Middle East. In June, he had already testified that Syria had much more of a nuclear program than it in fact had. (To date, Syria’s nuclear program has been fairly minimal in nature.)

And there was his treatment of nuclear materials in Russia (see item 91).

In 2005, Bolton led an unsuccessful push to oust Mohammed ElBaradei the head of the UN’s IAEA (see item 122) because he had been right about Iraqi WMD and skeptical of claims that Iran had a nuclear arms program.

You may be beginning to detect a pattern here. Bolton’s job was arms control but his manner and demands were so extreme and his views so wrong that he posed an existential threat to any arms control negotiations he got near. He combined great aggressiveness with equally great ineffectiveness.

Nor was it just that he was a loose cannon. He was a loose cannon with an agenda. He withheld information from his superiors, and it became the job of Colin Powell’s deputy Richard Armitage to muzzle Bolton (as much as that was possible) and encourage those who reported to Bolton to communicate directly with him.

Bolton was consistent about one thing. He was vindictive toward anyone who disagreed with him. In an effort to spy on and embarrass his superiors and coworkers, he requested raw NSA transcripts 10 times (4 times in 2003, 3 times in 2004, and 3 times in 2005, in all containing the names of 18 American individuals). (NSA transcripts are required to have the names of Americans redacted. It says something about Bolton’s pull that he was able to get a hold of the raw transcripts containing the unredacted names. On the other hand, it later came out that the release of unredacted transcripts was much more common than previously thought and that the NSA had released up to 10,000 names to various departments of government.) Bolton was less restrained with subordinates. In these cases, he would go directly to their immediate superiors and seek to have them punished or fired. A former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research Carl Ford said succinctly of Bolton that he was “a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy.”

Although he was more visible and well known as UN Ambassador, his power was greatly diminished in this role. It was limited further by the time constraints of the recess appointment. This was as it was no doubt meant to be. Being Cheney’s man meant he could not be fired, but he could be promoted out of the way, and this is what happened. John Bolton is a stellar example of the Bush/Cheney flair for choosing the absolutely worst person for a job. He did a great deal of damage but could have done much more if he had not alienated everyone around him.

On October 1, 2008, the Senate in an 86-13 vote approved the India nuclear deal clearing away the last legislative hurdle to it. It is difficult to see how the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, already much undercut, will survive.