Of Nervous M.I.C.E., Versailles on the Potomac & the Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone

-- the following is a paraphrased-blog-interpretation of an interview with Chuck Spinney, former Pentagon analyst-turned-writer/pundit on UNCTV. Were I a better blogger, you'd have a convenient link to Spinney's stuff..but I'm not, so ..if you're curious, Google-him.

Inside the Beltway, the "rationale" for decisions in the Defense Department, or MICE - the Military Industrial Congressional Enterprise - are not based on the sort of economic rationale that businesses have to face (though some were putting it off with Enron-esque accounting tactics). The decisions are made on political grounds, not by business "rules".

Every time the DOD budget is raised, the cost of weapons rises (mysteriously?, c'mon...), every time procurement is cut, they find price cuts ...equally mysteriously, of course. "They" is in this case defense contractors (not Bernie Horowitz, as Gary Larson suggested........Far Side Geeks Unite!)

The congressional protectors are fine with this as defense is a huge jobs program for many states. The National Guard are the various Governors' fiefdoms.

Rumsfeld's planned changes to the DOD shake the foundation of the MICE business model (the politically-based self-licking ice cream cone) because it does not call for building a military that is designed to fight state vs. state wars, but Global War on Terrorism (the GWOT, believe it or GNOT) or peace-keeping/making missions. These efforts call for more Special Operations Forces-small numbers of highly trained soldiers -- not the stuff of huge manufacturing contracts for tens of thousands of copies of a weapon system. The program managers and congressional chairmen feel they are acting patriotically when they fudge numbers to get the F-22 or whatever needless program feeds their state. We are sending a brigade of Stryker vehicles to Iraq for experimentation purposes. In other words -- there is no operating concept for the Stryker. It is a budget program being fulfilled, yet searching for a real purpose. It has tires instead of tracks to save weight - yet DOD has run through tires like wildfire in Op Iraqi Freedom.

(For disclosure purposes, I live in a state that gets back much more in tax $$ than it pays...there are 22 such states at last count...) The MICE are nervous......

The distinction between peace-keeping and peace making is huge - you need big numbers of people trained to do very different things. Many are in the guard/reserve and can't be easily changed over to active duty because they are embedded in local communities, who are missing their abilities while the military has use of them.

Essentially, there is no real market in DOD. There is no profit...you are buying military capability, not return on assets expressible in dollars earned. By the way, we are spending over 400 Billion (yes, that's with a "B") every year on defense, and with the now-annual supplemental appropriations, it won't be long before we are spending HALF A TRILLION $$ every year on defense...............

Who is accountable for this? In what way is the current government doing anything to staunch the hemorrhaging ? The DOD has never passed a SINGLE audit attempt as called for in the 1990 Chief Financial Officers Act? In fact, after 13 failures, the embarrassed congressional MICE contingent waived the requirement for DOD in an embarrassingly tacit admission that it has NO IDEA WHERE BILLIONS ARE GOING?

The madness must stop......... Conservatives......where is the outcry against these anti-market practices? Liberals...where is your reputed spine? Sheesh.

When the soldiers on the front lines and taxpayers have to eat the consequences of the MICE's self-licking-ice-cream-cone spending decisions, then we have to ask some fundamental questions about what interests are being served in our democratic republic.