Adult supervision needed on defense

By: Winslow T. Wheeler
Politico
March 16, 2009

These days, everyone in Washington is a defense reformer.

Shocked — shocked — at the edifice they have helped create over the past decade, the leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), offer new reform legislation: the Weapons Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009.

Meanwhile, top Pentagon managers, who during the Clinton administration presided over serious decay in our forces, promise the munificence of their reform experience. And new to the game —and exercising an important principle the others studiously ignore — President Barack Obama has ordered the Office of Management and Budget, not the Pentagon, to draw up new rules to govern Defense Department contracting.

To understand which reform ideas are real and which are purely cosmetic, it is necessary to understand the problems that plague our defenses.

The defense budget is now larger than at any point since 1946, but the Army has fewer combat divisions than at any point in that period, our Navy has fewer war-fighting ships and the Air Force has fewer fighter and attack aircraft.

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