Section A
About the Author
Introduction to Unilateral Disarmament
Bombers
Fighter Air-to-Air Missiles

Section B
Fighter Aircraft
Root Causes of Unilateral Disarmament
Resolutions to the Problems

Endnotes

[Figure 1 Unilateral Disarmament By Cost]
[Figure 2 Air-Air Missiles]
[Figure 3 Unit Flyaway Costs]
[Figure 4 Aircraft Procurement]
[Figure 5 F-22 Cost History]
[Figure 6 F-22 Force Size History]

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Colonel Everest E. Riccioni has had an extraordinarily illustrious career. After he began flight training for the United States Army in 1943, he learned to be a test pilot at the knee of Chuck Yeager; was a flight test engineer and experimental test flight pilot instructor in the experimental test pilot school; and taught the most advanced engineering course at the Air Force Academy. He then went on to command both prototype and flight mechanics divisions of the Flight Dynamics Lab at Wright-Patterson and pioneered the first supersonic cruise fighter design conference in history. Riccioni was one of the three legendary "Fighter Mafia" mavericks who forced the Pentagon to produce the F-16 to improve the military's air superiority and completed several stints as a fighter pilot flying 55 different types of military aircraft throughout his career. After retiring from the Air Force in 1976, he worked for Northrop Corporation for 17 years managing aircraft programs, including managing operational studies on the B-2 bomber. Most recently, until his 1997 retirement, Colonel Riccioni consulted with the GAO, the United States Navy, and the Air Force.


Introduction to Unilateral Disarmament

With its ever increasing devotion to complex, high-tech weapons and its willingness to advance the cause of Defense contractors, the Pentagon is embarked upon a policy of unilateral disarmament that threatens the security of the United States.

Shocking as it may seem, the Department of Defense (DOD) is actually degrading America's military capability even as it spends more and the threats we face diminish.

To put the issue in perspective: The Pentagon is spending on the order of $320 billion annually and now accounts for more than 50 percent of the federal discretionary budget. The U.S. military budget is three times greater than the combined military budgets of India, Russia, and China! Yet the result of this enormous expenditure is a severe degradation of the military capability of our nation. The problem here is that the more we spend on new weapons, the fewer we actually acquire. This is not a new phenomenon. While there is little difference in the behavior of the four services, the examples provided are primarily from the service I know best - the United States Air Force (USAF).

As long ago as 1969, in a report to some of the Pentagon's highest military and civilian leaders, Pierre M. Sprey, of the Pentagon's Programs Analysis and Evaluation, concluded that DoD was "opting for unilateral disarmament by purchasing military weapons at unprecedented and prohibitive prices resulting in too few weapons to win our wars." By way of explanation, Sprey suggested that, in seeking to gain a technological edge on our enemies, the Pentagon was committing itself to ever more complex arms whose costs inevitably grew beyond projections, necessitating downward adjustments in the number purchased. Sprey also questioned the edge the new technologies presumably provided, noting that complexity in fact could ensure that high tech weapons would fail to meet their specified battle requirements.

In the same time frame in which Sprey was offering the Pentagon his warnings, Norman Augustine, a DoD official who later became CEO of Lockheed-Martin, plotted the numbers of USAF aircraft purchased as a function of time. Extrapolating the results forward, Augustine predicted that, by 2010, the U.S. Air Force would be able to purchase only one aircraft.

More recently, in a 1975 study, Air Force Col. John R. Boyd showed that the USAF was continually buying new systems that it could not afford, thus creating a constantly increasing bow-wave of future monetary commitments. While the debts incurred caused pain, Congress temporarily alleviated the situation with increased funding. In fact, however, by taking such actions, Congress was simply putting off until tomorrow addressing what is now an enormous financial burden.

Since the early 1980s, Franklin C. Spinney, who worked for Boyd on his landmark 1975 study, has been elaborating on its finding. Spinney, who has appeared on the cover of Time magazine and still works at the Pentagon as a civilian, became something of a bete noire during the Administration of President Reagan by informing Congress that the Pentagon not only could not afford future weapon systems being advocated by then-Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger but also could not afford the military systems for which it already had contracted. In fact, the situation identified by Spinney was largely responsible for the enormous increase in America's national debt during the 1980s.

In the years since, the problems identified by Sprey, Boyd and Spinney have festered and deepened. Despite their warnings, the totally compliant and credulous Congress, urged on by cooperative administrations, managed to provide the Pentagon with virtually all the funding it has sought - even as taxpayers as well as our national security have suffered.

In any discussion of U.S. military spending, it must be noted early and emphatically that, in war, America often has put itself at an advantage by providing its military with a preponderance of numbers; that is to say, overwhelming force. When skillfully applied, such force has a habit of generating victory. Unfortunately, even ironically -- since the end of the Vietnam War - the United States increasingly has been denying itself the advantage of overwhelming force. Today this advantage is being eliminated not for lack of funding, but for lack of insight into the nature of modern war and the failures of our acquisition system.

How has this happened? Largely, perhaps, as an outgrowth of the Cold War and the persistent threat of nuclear annihilation that it has fomented, a system of weapons acquisition has emerged in which the prevailing assumption is that victory in future wars will be obtained by those weapons that are the most technologically complex. The conventional wisdom that "bigger, more expensive fighters are better" is wrong. Forgotten in all this is that fighters aren't to be compared one-to-one, rather, equal-cost fighter fleets should be compared in relative battle effectiveness.

Complexity prolongs the weapons development process, which then encourages military contractors to ingratiate themselves in ever more creative ways with the political system that sustains them economically. The result is as follows: It becomes axiomatic that the time it takes to bring new weapon systems on line as well as their costs always are underestimated in the early going and then grow exponentially thereafter.

At the same time, once the Pentagon bureaucracy is hooked on the overstated potential of a new weapons system, it becomes almost impossible to withdraw from the commitments made to such a system. Why? Because the process quickly invests such a wide array of interests in its success that rising costs are viewed institutionally as inevitable and largely irrelevant.

To date, as the costs of new weapon systems have begun to climb, Congress has approved requests for supplemental funding as if it would be unpatriotic not to do so. Thereafter, as cost increase curves have steepened, the inevitable has also occurred: the number of units to be purchased has been reduced.

Ironically, the time it takes to develop these complex new weapon systems often has been so prolonged that, before these weapons actually enter into production, the threats they are designed to thwart, we discover, have disappeared. More than occasionally, too, we find that the technologies these weapons were intended to exploit cannot be proven.

In addition, in many cases, we learn that, by the time the new weapons in which we have invested either don't work as intended or don't address the real threats we face, we also discover that the weapons these new systems were intended to supplant have worn out.

Finally, when the utility of our latest high tech weaponry is in complete question, the ultimate solution - turning off the faucet that pours good money after bad - rarely is undertaken.

Thus it is that the United States has begun its own unilateral disarmament, eliminating the advantage a preponderance of numbers has always provided us.

In effect, our unilateral disarmament is a self-inflicted wound; one that we cannot afford to keep committing upon ourselves if we want to remain economically robust and thus be able to ensure our security as a
nation.

As long as we keep investing in weapon systems that are highly complex and rely on technologies that are not fully proven, we will find ourselves spending more and more on fewer and fewer weapons that are of questionable relevance to the threats we face.

Reversing this trend is essential, but perhaps not as simple as we would wish. A more detailed look at the experience of the Air Force in developing both new aircraft and missiles will best illuminate the ways in which America is, to its own detriment, unilaterally disarming itself.

As a former Air Force Colonel who has been involved in the engineering of a number of aircraft both within the Air Force and the private sector, I am at once confident and unhappy with the conclusions I have been obliged to draw.

Let us look first at the evolution of America's long-range bomber fleet, and its cost enforced degradation.



Bombers

At the start of the cold war, America's Strategic Air Command, which was led by General Curtis LeMay, consisted of 1,380 long-range B-47 jet bombers. They were replaced by some 680 B-52s which carried many more bombs over a longer distance. The B-52 strato-bomber was a magnificent weapon and deterrent during the Cold War. The bomber meant to replace the aging B–52 fleet was the B-1. An initial plan -- to purchase 250 of the bombers -- foundered as the number and size of the aircraft's cost overruns grew. Finally, only 100 of the B-1 were produced. Making matters worse, B-1 was the worst designed bomber in U.S. history. It was known to be falsely and inadequately flight-tested yet still was declared "available" for three campaigns. Finally, however, the aircraft flew fewer than 20 combat sorties, accomplishing essentially nothing of military significance. In effect, the B-1 represents a zero return on a large investment and still consumes a $1 billion a year for maintenance.

Following on the B-1, the B-2 stealth bomber overran its cost so badly that a mere 20 aircraft finally were built out of a $40 billion program aimed at the purchase of 135 to 150 aircraft. In fact, the calculable cost of the B-2 -- $2 billion per aircraft -- is understood by Pentagon "Insiders" to be an understatement because the aircraft was the beneficiary of "Black Program" funding, which is hidden from the view of the public. It also is known that much more will need to be spent on the B-2 to resolve a host of problems the aircraft is still experiencing; most notably, with maintaining its stealth and resolving its battle system difficulties.

As has been shown, the number of U.S. bombers acquisitions has fallen precipitously -- from 1380 B-47s in 1950 to only 20 B-2s in 1995 - and provides a clear picture of unilateral disarmament - [Click here to see Figure 1]. The declining numbers of bombers purchased by the United States is a sad testimonial to the Pentagon acquisition system, which is fraught with over-optimism, misinformation, and misguided efforts.

At best our bomber fleet is a motley affair. The B-1 is so dysfunctional that 56 old B–52s have been retained to shore it up. The B-2 fleet is so tiny that the dysfunctional B-1 had to be retained -- though it also must be noted that DoD actually considered retiring the entire fleet of B-1 in 1995 before it became fully operational.




Fighter Air-to-Air Missiles

The development of Fighter air-to-air missiles has followed a similar path to that of America's bombers. Dramatically increasing costs have spurred dramatic decreases in the number of missiles.

As ambitions for air-to-air missiles have grown so too has their complexity and costs. Unfortunately, the greater these missiles alleged domain of relevance, the less effective they seem to become in combat.

In Figure 2, the unit cost of various means for "killing" an enemy is portrayed together with their relative effectiveness in combat. The cost of these so-called expendables is a weak parameter since the system support costs to destroy aircraft with missiles is enormous and ever increasing with missile complexity.

Now, examine Figure 2 closely. The cost of killing an enemy aircraft has gone from hundreds of dollars (when only guns were involved) to $15,000 for an AIM-9B/D to $90,000 for the AIM-4 to $190,000 for an AIM-7D to a precipitous ten-fold increase to $1.9 million for the Phoenix. Clearly, now we cannot even afford an air war or even one kill with the Phoenix.

In effect, the greater the sophistication, the greater the claims, the greater the expense, the less effective the military result! ¹ At these prices the constant complaint of theater commanders is that we lack sufficient missiles for a war - small wonder. One example is the cruise missile. Almost the entire NATO/US inventory of cruise missiles was expended in the Kosovo engagement, with questionable political/military results.

[See Figure 2]

Figure 2 reveals the story of U.S. air-to-air missile over a time span of four decades. Even though the AIM-7 Sparrow missile, in its fifth stage of development, has finally become reasonably effective, the most useful air-to-air missile remains the simplest - the short ranged AIM-9. Even it has been made increasingly complex over the years and does little to refute what is becoming obvious: That firing air-to-air missiles has become so expensive that it's as if we are firing unmanned fighter aircraft at manned fighter aircraft.

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