A Tale of Two Newspapers

Although this site often highlights articles from The New York Times, The Soup Knife is not a tremendous fan of its military coverage. Nevertheless, the NYT is considered a first-tier national paper for a reason, as The Washington Times demonstrated today.

Alongside its op-ed by John Nagl, the editors of the NYT included a short piece entitled "Wanting and Wasting at the Pentagon". While the MSM does not pay nearly enough attention to military procurement, the recent GAO report prompted a strong condemnation of government practices:

"Figures compiled by the Government Accountability Office showed that 95 major weapons systems — including ballistic missile defense, the Joint Strike Fighter and the Littoral Combat Ship — have exceeded their original budgets by a mind-numbing total of $295 billion in the past seven years. In 2000, new weapons were running 6 percent over initial cost estimates; by 2007, that figure had skyrocketed to 26 percent.

Not only did Mr. Bush and his former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, allow contractors to run amok in Iraq, they let them run amok in the halls of the Pentagon. The G.A.O. cites the Pentagon’s heavy reliance on contractors as one reason for the gross mismanagement of acquisition programs. The Pentagon also let contractors submit unrealistically low cost estimates, rushed development of new systems — causing costly mistakes that had to be fixed — and made too many changes after projects were under way, according to the G.A.O. and other experts."

Compare those words with yesterday's op-ed piece in The Washington Times, where the nostalgia for Rumsfeld-era "Defense Transformation" is almost tangible:

"The Cold War, after all, is over. The fight today is not in established Europe, but in places like Kandahar, Fallujah, Mindanao, and Mogadishu — underdeveloped urban frontiers for which a Cold War military is ill-suited.

That’s why the U.S. military has embarked upon its greatest transformation since the Second World War, some 65 years ago. The “information revolution” of the past quarter-century has transformed the commercial world, but much less so the bureaucratically insular U.S. military. Consequently, 19-year-old teenagers today typically have more technology at their disposal than 19-year-old soldiers and marines."

Other than a token acknowledgment that "it is not necessarily the case that this new money is being well appropriated", the case for even more military funding is presented as if it came from a career Civil Affairs NCO, which in fact it did. The argument is simplistic enough that it could have been delivered by a high school debate team and completely ignorant of the scale of procurement waste currently clogging the corridors of the Pentagon and the offices of Beltway Bandit contractors. If The Washington Times ever wants to carry the same kind of weight as its New York counterpart, it should strive for a little more research and nuance in its op-ed pieces. Pretending that we're still in the heady days of RMA-based transformation merely weakens the case for further investment in our military forces.