Army-Air Force spat over long range fires exposes policy failures

That was from a Defense News article. And here’s the Navy’s view from Breaking Defense, expressed by Admiral Davidson of INDOPACOM:

“A wider base of long-range precision fires… enabled by all our terrestrial forces —  not just sea and air but by land forces as well — is critically important to stabilizing what is becoming a more unstable environment in the western Pacific,” Davidson told Sen. Tom Cotton. “Long-range precision fires delivered by the ground force, I think, are critically important.”

Basically, the Air Force claims it has priority over the Army for the long-range strike mission, particularly with its B-21 and ARRW hypersonic programs. The Army’s move into that space is simply duplicative, and in an era of flat or declining budgets, should be cut in favor of Air Force investments. First, let’s take a look at the five major efforts in the Army’s portfolio long-range precision fires from a recent CRS report:

• The Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) program plans to develop a system capable of accurately firing at targets more than 70 kilometers away, an improvement over the 30-kilometer target distance of current systems.
  • No program ICE yet, but expected funding is $1.4 billion FY22 – 26
• The Army is examining the feasibility of developing a Strategic Long-Range Cannon (SLRC) that can fire a projectile at hypersonic speeds up to 1,000 miles to engage air defense, artillery, and missile systems and command and control targets.
  • Not a program of record, no estimated costs provided. But Army says it “won’t break the bank”
• The Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) is a surface-to-surface, all weather, precision-strike guided missile fired from the M270A1 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) and the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). PrSM is intended to replace current MLRS and HIMARS missiles and doubles the current rate-of-fire, with two missiles per launch pod.
  • Total program cost is $895M for RDT&E and $2.038B for procurement (51 test articles, 2,422 production units)
• The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Missile Defense Agency (MDA) are developing a Common- Hypersonic Glide Body (C-HGB), which the Army plans to use as part of its Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) program, enabling the C-HGB to be launched from mobile Army ground missile launchers.
  • No figures given, but the GAO recently estimated that total Army hypersonic activities FY15-24 will total $1.5B, while the Army FY21 budget request asked for $3.3B across the FY21-25 FYDP.
• Finally, the Army is attempting to modify existing Navy SM-6 and UGM-109 Land Attack Missiles for ground launch to provide the Army with a mid-range missile capability
  • No estimated costs given.

The first two are are artillery and the last three are missiles. In the Breaking Defense piece, only the missiles were called out as potentially “duplicative,” particularly LRHW and PrSM. However, it seems that total portfolio isn’t far north of a couple billion a year in acquisition costs. Now, that’s a lot of money, but it’s a high-priority mission that needs to be accomplished.

General Ray said during the podcast: “I just think it’s a stupid idea to go and invest that kind of money that recreates something that the service has mastered and that we’re doing already right now.” Yesterday’s failure of the Air Force’s ARRW test flight isn’t a big “setback” in my eyes, but does indicate the wisdom of competition and redundancy.

My natural inclination is that when there is an important mission with high uncertainty, competitive redundancy is often the best thing to create resilience, innovation, and options for future commanders. People like to use the term “duplicative,” but when different technologies or operational concepts are at play, it’s not duplicative at all, but a rational experiment. A “winner-take-all” solution gives you an “n” of one, and you can’t make any inferences from that.

Role of SecDef

The real point I want to make, however, is that we are now more than 70 years on from the creation of the Department of Defense and 60 years on from the Reorg of 1958 and McNamara’s PPBS. All this centralization and focus on eliminating service parochialism has clearly failed in its stated goals!

This is too big a topic to address here, but whole issue made me think of John C. Ries’ must-read book from 1962, The Management of Defense:

Centralization may beget uniformity, but it will never of itself produce unity. Unity is gained, not imposed. The most perfect strategy or defense posture that does not gain the understanding and support of those who must finance it (Congress) and those who must execute it (the services, at least up until 1958) is worthless. The authority of the secretary of defense depends not on the amount of uniformity he can impose within the department, but upon the agreement that he can find hidden beneath the disagreement.

One thing they can agree on is common components and standards for interoperability where possible (e.g., common hypersonic glide bod, Combined JADC2). Here is more for your consideration when thinking about the roles and missions debates:

Secretaries of defense have too often behaved as though defense decisions were completely unrelated to the political process. And they have wondered why their control was subject to constant and frequent successful challenge… The political environment he inhabits forces the secretary of defense to employ political as well as strategic and economic criteria to defense policy.