The challenge for the United States is that stories like that of the Blues and Predator, where smart, innovative systems are designed at low costs, are all too rare. The U.S. military is by far the biggest designer and purchaser of weapons in the world. But it is also the most inefficient. As David Walker, the head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), puts it, “We’re number 1 in the world in military capabilities. But on the business side, the Defense Department gets a D-minus, giving them the benefit of the doubt. If they were a business, they wouldn’t be in business.”
The Department of Justice once found that as much as 5 percent of the government’s annual budget is lost to old-fashioned fraud and theft, most of it in the defense realm. This is not helped by the fact that the Pentagon’s own rules and laws for how it should buy weapons are “routinely broken,” as one report in Defense News put it. One 2007 study of 131 Pentagon purchases found that 117 did not meet federal regulation standards. The Pentagon’s own inspector general also reported that not one person had been fired or otherwise held accountable for these violations.
...Whenever any new weapon is contemplated, the military often adds wave after wave of new requirements, gradually creeping the original concept outward. It builds in new design mandates, asks for various improvements and additions, forgetting that each new addition means another delay in delivery (and for robots, at least, forgetting that the systems were meant to be expendable). In turn, the makers are often only too happy to go along with what transforms into a process of gold-plating, as adding more bells, more whistles, and more design time means more money. These sorts of problems are rife in U.S. military robotics today. The MDARS (Mobile Detection Assessment Response System) is a golf-cart-sized robot that was planned as a cheap sentry at Pentagon warehouses and bases. It is now fifty times more expensive than originally projected. The air force’s unmanned bomber design is already projecting out at more than $2 billion a plane, roughly three times the original $737 million cost of the B-2 bomber it is to replace.
These costs weigh not just in dollars and cents. The more expensive the systems are, the fewer can be bought. The U.S. military becomes more heavily invested in those limited numbers of systems, and becomes less likely to change course and develop or buy alternative systems, even if they turn out to be better. The costs also change what doctrines can be used in battle, as the smaller number makes the military less likely to endanger systems in risky operations. Many worry this is defeating the whole purpose of unmanned systems. “We become prisoners of our very expensive purchases,” explains Ralph Peters. He worries that the United States might potentially lose some future war because of what he calls “quantitative incompetence.” Norm Augustine even jokes, all too seriously, that if the present trend continues, “In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one tactical aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy, three and one half days per week, except for the leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.”
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