Center for a New American Security

This may seem a little incongruous today given the terrible news out of Texas. But as our hearts go out to the families of the victims there, maybe this can serve as an antidote to the tragedy for the rest of us. Because this little girl is about to give a report to her fourth-grade class on her father, who she thinks is still serving in Iraq. And I'm not going to lie, gang, you'll want to keep a box of tissues handy for this one... (h/t AS)

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Secretary Gates continues to surprise. (Though his fights with the boys in blue have been well chronicled here.) This is about as close to relief for cause as we're gonna get:

Both the top uniformed officer of the Air Force and its civilian leader were asked Thursday to submit their resignations, FOX News confirms. Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne will resign by the end of the day, two sets of sources tell FOX News.

Defense Secretary Gates has publicly identified a number of problems recently with the Air Force, including last year's accidental flight of nuclear weapons on a B-52 bomber, and Moseley's ties to contract problems over the Air Force Thunderbird air show.

Moseley was not singled out for blame, but the investigation laid out a trail of communications from him and other Air Force leaders that eventually influenced the 2005 contract award. Included in that were friendly e-mails between Moseley and an executive in the company that won the bid, according to The Associated Press.

Last week, Air Force Adm. Kirkland H. Donald presented a report on the nuclear weapons incident to Gates, who had ordered the investigation. The incident took place last August when a nuclear-armed B-52 flew from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. Another nuclear incident just recently discovered was the mistaken shipment of 4 nuclear fuses to Taiwan in the fall of 2006.

Gates is expected to brief reporters on the resignations later Thursday. Gates also recently spoke at the Air Force Academy describing the Air Force's sluggishness to step up its force readiness.

Sources tell FOX News that the Air Force has drawn criticism for back-channel dealings to gain equipment on Capitol Hill that had been denied by Gates.

The resignations were apparently orchestrated by Gates' office, with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen this morning telling Moseley of his option either to resign or to be fired, and Undersecretary of Defense Gordon England giving the same options to Wynne. England traveled to Dayton, Ohio, to deliver the message personally to Wynne.

Update: More from Air Force Times, which originally broke the story.

Update II: Noah writes in to say "Danger Room has USAF resignation news out the [proverbial] ass." Good gouge there...including a suggestion that more heads may roll before this is all done.

Sec. Gates really slapped down the U.S. Air Force today:

Although he praised the U.S. Air Force's contributions to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the defense chief made it clear that more needs to be done. A case in point, he said, is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, as the pilotless drones are known. When he was director of the CIA in 1992, Gates recalled, "the Air Force would not co-fund with CIA a vehicle without a pilot," even though it was a "far less risky and far more versatile means of gathering data."

Saying that drones cost much less and can spend more time in the air than piloted planes, Gates called UAVs "ideal for many of today's tasks" and noted that the United States now has more than 5,000 of them, a 25-fold increase since 2001.

"But in my view, we can do and we should do more to meet the needs of men and women fighting in the current conflicts while their outcome may still be in doubt," Gates said. "My concern is that our services are still not moving aggressively in wartime to provide resources needed now on the battlefield. I've been wrestling for months to get more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets into the theater. Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it's been like pulling teeth."

Abu Muqawama usually jumps at any opportunity to pile on the boys in blue suits, but today he's a little more mellow because he was reading through an article Terry Terriff wrote on U.S. Marine Corps culture an hour or so ago. Terriff writes that “overcoming a deeply rooted, persistent cultural characteristic is neither simple nor easy.”

And that's why Sec. Gates is having so much trouble with the USAF right now. Unmanned aircraft (the strong emphasis being placed on that first word) go against the constitutive norms of the USAF in the same way that an adviser corps runs contrary to the constitutive norms of the U.S. Army. And while Sec. Gates may have some luck in the end, it will only be because he a) finds a way to get congressmen and defense contractors in on the game or b) somehow manages to change the way the USAF officer corps sees itself as a profession. Needless to say, he'll probably have more luck with the former.

Update: The updated article from the Washington Post now portrays the speech as having been more a criticism of the services (plural) than just the Air Force. Reader Pete's first-hand report states this was also the case. You can read the actual speech here. Abu Muqawama likes reading the Q&A sessions at the end of his speeches. Gates is so much more humble -- and thus, likable -- than his predecessor.

Abu Muqawama finally got around to reading Bob Worth's article in today's New York Times on Mudher al-Kharbit.

In a sense, his predicament can be traced to the night of April 11, 2003, when he arrived back at his family’s palatial compound west of Baghdad to find the main house a heap of burning rubble. The American military had bombed it, having heard that Mr. Hussein was hiding there.

But instead of killing the Iraqi dictator, they had killed Mr. Kharbit’s older brother, Malik al-Kharbit — the very man who had led the family’s negotiations with the C.I.A. to topple Mr. Hussein.

The bombing also killed 21 other people, including children, and the fury it aroused has been widely believed to have helped kick-start the insurgency in western Iraq. That fact may have helped fuel American suspicion toward Mr. Kharbit.

Damn the U.S. Air Force! They caused the insurgency! We knew it!

But until now, Mr. Kharbit has not disclosed another crucial detail about the bombing: Mr. Hussein was, in fact, staying at the Kharbit family compound that night, with his two sons and his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti. They were all in a smaller villa next to the one the bombs struck, and were not harmed.

Uh... [Abu Muqawama scratches his head, paces around the room a few times.] Damn the U.S. Air Force! For, uh, not, er, using a bigger bomb!

All we're saying is that if the U.S. Air Force and its military-industrial complex proxies can wine and dine crooked congressmen with booze and hookers and goodness knows what else (sheep? teenage page boys?), active-duty officer John Nagl should be allowed to write an op-ed in the New York Times asking for an adviser corps.

Doctrine — a standard enumeration of the purpose of a military organization and how it will accomplish its goals — is still nonexistent for the adviser mission. Organization is inconsistent, for example, with most Afghanistan teams consisting of 16 soldiers with no medic, while most Iraq teams contain 11 soldiers, including a medic. The fact is, both types of teams are too small for the tasks they have been assigned, and many consequently have been augmented on the ground by regular troops on an ad hoc basis.

This is simply because not enough advisers are being produced — just 5,000 per year. We are going to need ever more experienced, trained advisers as the size and complexity of the Iraqi and Afghan police forces and armies grow and as the combat burden increasingly shifts to them.

Part of the problem is institutional. The United States military’s ability in battle is unmatched, but we have a spotty history in terms of helping allies fight for themselves. Advisers who live and fight with a struggling “poor cousin” local army often do their dangerous and sometimes frustrating work out of sight of the brass, and it can be a career-killer for ambitious young officers. ...

In the long term, we need to institutionalize our ability to field advisers and provide effective military assistance to allies. As it stands now, the troops we train at Fort Riley do their tour and are then moved back into conventional roles, while the embedded training teams are demobilized. This is as senseless as if in World War II we had decided that the First Infantry Division, which had gone ashore in North Africa and Sicily, was to be disbanded and replaced on D-Day with a division that had no experience landing on hostile ground. What we need, even after the Iraq and Afghanistan missions have ended, is a standing advisory corps of about 20,000 troops that can deploy wherever in the world we need to get our allies up to speed.

The only problem with Nagl's idea is he has yet to figure out how an adviser corps can be built in 48 different states and 200 congressional districts, providing jobs for 10,000 Americans and thus eternally immune to budget cuts.

Update: And while we're on the subject of the military-industrial complex, did everyone see this article?

The Government Accountability Office found that 95 major systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295 billion, bringing their total cost to $1.6 trillion, and are delivered almost two years late on average. In addition, none of the systems that the GAO looked at had met all of the standards for best management practices during their development stages. ... In another case, the initial contract target price of Boeing's program to modernize avionics in the C-130 cargo plane is expected to skyrocket 323 percent, to $2 billion. Another Boeing program, for a radio system, is up 310 percent, to $966 million.

This may not be a reason to vote for Obama over McCain, but it's certainly a reason to vote for Obama over Clinton. It's tough to look at all those generals and admirals up there with her -- and John freaking Murtha -- on the podium and think she's going to be the one to harness this beast. Obama, on the other hand...

From Danger Room:

How bad do they need drones in Iraq and Afghanistan? So bad, the Air Force is yanking pilots out of old-school planes, and sticking them on drone duty, instead.

For the past several years, there's been a "300% annual increase" in battlefield commanders' request in video from robot aircraft. Drone-makers - and military paper-pushers - are struggling to keep up with the demand. Defense Secretary Gates has ordered that the Air Force send all available Predator unmanned aerial vehicles into action. Air Force officials whined about the non-stop 13-hour days their pilots were clocking (in Nevada, not Iraq). But ultimately, the number of Predator flights was doubled.

But now, the UAVs are in such high demand, "the Air Force is being forced to pull manned-aircraft pilots from deployments around the world and bring them to Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, to pilot the drones," Air Combat Command’s top general tells Inside the Air Force.

This is interesting for all kinds of reasons related to organizational culture, institutional learning, and Charlie's well-documented Schadenfreude. (Glad to see USAF personnel management is as screwed up as the Army and Marine Corps.)

Question: If the F-22 has yet to fly a mission in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a way cheaper more effective platform was fulfilling the mission, what would you do in response?

Answer: Declare a (budget) war on the other services and insist that 300+ F-22s are your God given right, of course!

Stay tuned to see how the blue-suiters (and their fighter-jock leadership) deal with UAVs over the long-term...

So John McCain scuttled an Air Force scheme to lease tankers from Boeing in a sweetheart deal. And then he pressured the Air Force to open a competitive bid on its new tanker contract.

So far, so fair.

But then EADS won the bid over Boeing. And although Abu Muqawama approves of the deal, several of this blog's readers do not. Abu Muqawama is anxious, then, to hear the dissenters' opinions on the roles played by senior advisers to John McCain in the EADS bid.

The New York Times reports:

WASHINGTON — A co-chairman of Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign and other top campaign advisers and supporters were lobbyists for the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, part of a group that beat out Boeing for a $35 billion contract to build aerial refueling tankers for the Air Force.

More from the Washington Post.

Abu Muqawama is no politician and knows less than nothing about political campaigns, but it doesn't take a James Carville to guess that given the already protectionist tone struck by both Democrats in the campaign so far, they are going to hammer McCain on this. Thoughts from the peanut gallery?

Boeing, the heavy favorite to win the contract, having built earlier tankers, promised a new boom but did not build a prototype. One analyst who followed the contest said that Boeing, based in Chicago, seemed arrogant and offered a plan that Air Force officials thought would deliver only 19 tankers by 2013 compared with 49 by the Airbus team.

“The Boeing team was not responsive and often was not even polite,” said Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., based on conversations he said he had with defense officials. “Somehow that all eluded senior management,” Mr. Thompson said. “They were not even aware there was a problem.”

It doesn't happen very often, but the New York Times has a defense-related staff editorial today with which Abu Muqawama heartily agrees (comments below):

According to Air Force officials, the refueler developed by the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, or EADS, the parent company of Airbus, in partnership with Northrop Grumman will perform better than Boeing’s in many ways. Based on the Airbus A330, it is bigger and can transport more fuel, cargo and people than Boeing’s 767. Boeing’s delays in delivering tanker planes to Italy and Japan likely also hurt its bid.

Defense procurement is a global business. Boeing sells military aircraft and other defense systems all over the world. It and other American companies could suffer if a move to wrest the tanker contract from EADS and Northrop provoked a protectionist backlash in European capitals. American allies are already dismayed by the protectionist tone of this year’s presidential campaign.

[snip]

For Congress to reverse the decision on “Buy America” grounds would be bad for taxpayers: requiring them to pay for aircraft that provide less value for the money. It would also be bad diplomacy and bad business. And that can’t be good for the country.

The real issue here is that this was an enormous contract. No one opens their mouth to complain when U.S. infantrymen go to war with an M-249 SAW made by Belgian arms giant Fabrique Nationale. That's because small arms contracts are smaller and fly under the radar. (Yes, Fabrique Nationale has a long-standing partnership with Winchester and Browning, but EADS submitted their bid for the new USAF tanker with Northrop Grumman.) So that's Abu Muqawama's question for the gallery: U.S. infantryman fight in Iraq every day with foreign-made equipment. Why no clamor about that?

The Air Force, in a stunning upset against the Boeing Company, awarded a $40 billion contract for aerial refueling tankers on Friday to a partnership between Northrop Grumman and the European parent of Airbus, putting a critical military contract partly into the hands of a foreign company.

Abu Muqawama knows next to nothing about the way the U.S. Air Force buys airplanes, but he knows enough from reading the Economist that this is huge. The KC-30, virtually everyone agreed, was the better aircraft. But did anyone honestly see Boeing not getting this contract? This gives us at Abu Muqawama hope in the ongoing war against ridiculous F-22 appropriations. If a large domestic lobby can be rejected in favor of common sense in one case...

Update: "The Captain" has an intelligent response here.