Charles W. King

At the recent National Defense Industry Association Armament Systems Forum in Indianapolis Retired Major General Bob Scales criticized the American defense industry for not producing a new service weapon to replace the M-16, which Scales has been critical of for decades. The Department of Defense has repeatedly looked into replacing the M-16 and its derivatives, as early as the 1990s, but has never done so. The development history of another iconic American service rifle demonstrates why.

When the U.S. entered World War Two in 1941 it did so with arguably the most advanced service rifle in the world, the semi-automatic M1 Garand. Germany and the Soviet Union would both adopt semi-automatic service rifles over the course of the war, the Gewer 43 and SVT-40, but neither saw more than limited issue to their respective services. In addition the Gewer 43 was resource intensive and a significant drain on Germany’s damage industrial capacity late in the war. The Garand on the other hand was ubiquitous, being issued to the majority of American troops and also provided in large numbers to other Allied forces. Today the decision to adopt a semi-automatic rifle in the 1930s is widely seen as progressive and forward thinking on the part of the Army, but the adoption of the M1 was not as radical as it might have been.

Garand designed two versions of his rifle. One in .30-06 and the other in a promising new round; .276 Pedersen. The modern terminology for calibers smaller than “full size” rifle cartridges like the .30-06 and 7.62 NATO is “intermediate” and 5.56 NATO is such a round. Had the .276 Pedersen been adopted it would have been the first adoption of an intermediate caliber round for military use, but that would have to wait until the German army put the StG 44 into limited use late in World War Two. The United States Army has always been good at math, and its analysis of after action reports dating back to the Spanish American War in 1898 told them that high volumes of accurate fire was more important than individual round lethality. Intermediate cartridges provide this. As the 1930s began the clear leader in the joint Army, Navy, and Marine trials was the Garand in .276 for these reasons, but they were not enough.

In 1931 Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur intervened and ordered a halt to all development of service rifles not in .30-06 caliber. This was for a number of reasons, almost exclusively logistical. The .276 Pedersen cartridge had to be lubricated, which the Army had never liked but was willing to deal with. The greater problem was that all of the Army’s light machine guns were in .30-06. One of the fundamental features that makes a light machine gun light is that it fires the same ammunition as the service rifle. Accepting a new rifle caliber in the 1930s would have precipitated a replacement of not only the Army’s rifles but also all of its light machine guns, which it did not have the funds or wherewithal to do.

This is also why the Army’s current Next Generation Weapons program begins with the development of a new cartridge followed by a new light machine gun before either a new rifle or carbine. Rifles and light machine guns are not the only American weapons systems chambered for 5.56 NATO, let alone what is fielded by the U.S.’s NATO allies. It also prompts the question of what the performance gains of phasing the M-16 and its derivatives would be. For some the M-16 should have been ditched years ago, but from a broader policy perspective the question must be asked; what are the larger logistical and even diplomatic costs of that switching to a new weapon system would impose?

Charles W. King

The last time the United States Congress passed a budget on time was 1997. Since then there have been dozens of continuing resolutions, which kick the can down the road anywhere from a few months to a year, and multiple shutdowns of the federal government. These long term budgetary difficulties have significant and damaging effects on the American foreign policy and defense strategy.

The Budget Control Act of 2011 implemented sequestration in 2013. Meant as a sword of Damocles hanging over the collective necks of Congress to force them to pass a budget or suffer cuts to sectors dear to both Democratic and Republican parties that in 2011 were considered to be so harsh as to be unthinkable, since 2013 theses dramatic decreases in federal spending have become the baseline from which American policy-makers must now work.

The United States is now suffering the long term effects of these failed attempts to resolve the budget. This is because the nature of federal spending means that some things are more directly affected by budget sequestration and government shutdowns than others. Shutdowns of the federal government resulting furloughs of indeterminate length for hundreds of thousands of civilian federal employees, but military service people must stay regardless of whether or not they know they are going to be paid. These furloughs, while exempting many positions that are deemed ‘essential to national security’, significantly affect the ability of the United States to conduct foreign policy and geopolitical strategy effectively by sending home anyone whose position isn’t related to crisis response. While this retains the federal government’s ability to react to global events, its ability to plan and strategize for the future suffers.

These budgetary measures also affect different kinds of federal spending differently. It is relatively straightforward to tell federal employees to not come in to work, but for acquisitions and federal contracting the government has agreed to contracts and pays in lump sums rather than weekly paychecks. Contracts for shipbuilding for example are places almost a decade in advance in some cases. Additionally when it comes time to trim the defense budget in particular the nature of large defense acquisitions leads them to be protected by the Representatives and Senators whose states they are being built in. This is part of the reason why the Department of Defense continues to spend large amounts of money on large and expensive pieces of new kit while the budgets for training, maintenance, and readiness have suffered for decades.

In recent years the U.S. military has run in to multiple shortages of spare parts and required emergency funding for their purchase. The Seventh Fleet has experienced a number of deadly collisions that have been directly attributed to a lack of adequate training time due to lack of funding and personnel. The Department of Defense is tasked with training and equipping military forces with a vision to what new threats and military innovations may occur decades in the future. Large military assets like bombers and aircraft carriers have lifespans of forty years or more, the best of military personnel spend decades in uniform. The long term nature of defense assets and forward thinking requirements of effective foreign and defense policy is put under tremendous strain when it is unclear year-to-year or even month-to-month whether or not the Department of Defense is going to be able to train and equip its soldiers and sailors in the field. Compounded by the ease of protecting bulk expenditures than ongoing spending, the past two decades have seriously distorted the spending of the Department of Defense in ways that has been deleterious to national security. The United States desperately needs a budget process that ensures both fiscal responsibility and strategic thinking by the Department of Defense.

Charles W. King

The upcoming Block V and later versions of the Virginia-class attack submarine (SSN) will eventually replace all of the guided missile capacity lost by the retirement of the Navy’s four guided missile submarines (SSGNs), but each SSN will possess less than a third of the missile tubes of an Ohio-class SSGN. The Navy's Tactical Submarine Evolution Plan, released this week, will take advantage of existing production pipelines and produce a vessel with a similar capacity to the Ohio-class SSGNs, which were retrofitted from aging Ohio-class SSBNs. The Plan calls for the purchase of four brand new SSGNs based on the Columbia-class. Using the existing production lines of the upcoming Columbia-class of ballistic missile submarines will save the significant expense and delays of standing up new production lines to construct new or retrofit old boats.

The nature of naval vessels, in size and complication, means that the production of the first vessel in a class can be orders of magnitude slower and more expensive than the final vessel. The cost savings typical of high volume production of smaller products like cars, tanks, or jet planes is difficult to achieve constructing naval vessels, especially with the size of orders typical of many classes of vessel. The USS Columbia will be the first SSBN laid down for the U.S. Navy since 1997 when it begins construction in 2021. The Navy plans to begin decommissioning the Ohio-class in 2029. Between 2021 and 2035 Electric Boat and Newport News will construct only twelve Columbia-class SSBNs, which along with the remaining Ohio-class boats will fulfill the Navy’s SSBN needs for decades. When the Navy starts construction of new vessels to replace the Columbia-class decades in the future is will incur significant costs and delays doing so. Extending the lifetime of the Columbia’s production lines preserves that experience and efficiency.

There are some vessels for which the loss of that expertise and efficiency is too significant for the Navy to be able to afford to ever cease construction of vessels of that class. Aircraft carriers are so large and complex that while it is possible to reasonably argue that the United States does not need eleven active supercarriers the costs incurred by attempting to start production of such a vessel from scratch demonstrates that it is more cost effective to maintain more active supercarriers than for it to ever stop building them. The Royal Navy’s first supercarrier, the H.M.S. Queen Elizabeth, began sea trials earlier this year. The Queen Elizabeth-class is slated to consist of only two ships, but has taken up a significant portion of the Royal Navy’s shipbuilding budget for a decade, and the Royal Navy’s capacity in other classes has suffered as a result. If the U.S. Navy were to cease building supercarriers it might be reasonable to expect that it might not begin constructing another for fifty years, which would be nearing the end of the operational lifespan of the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, commissioned this year.

The requirements of maintaining a navy that can credibly project force and intervene globally is a complex strategic problem. It requires not only the logistical capacity to supply and base fleets all over the world, but it requires looking decades in to the future to assess shipbuilding needs. The U.S. Navy’s recent decisions to prioritize Virginia and Columbia class submarines may make its stated goal of a 350 ship fleet further away, but it represents a decision to maintain capabilities that will otherwise atrophy and to leverage benefits of existing successful and promising platforms over untested ones. What to do about future classes of Cruisers and Destroyers is a difficult question that must be addressed with the same forward looking and production-conscious approach.

Charles W. King

President Trump is expected to decertify the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly referred to as the Iran Nuclear Deal, this week. He intendeds to do this despite statements from the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Association, who is responsible for monitoring Iran’s compliance, and the United States Departments of Defense and State stating that Iran is complying with the deal. This past week in testimony before Congress Secretary of Defense James Mattis said that he believed it was in the national interest of the United States to continue the JCPOA.

Given these conditions, the Trump administration is finding it hard to completely scuttle the deal. It is unlikely that any of the other signatories to the deal would agree to re-impose sanctions. The White House has found a work around. For weeks a trial balloon has been floating inside the Beltway; the administration will declare that the JCPOA is not in the “national interest” of the United States, and make Congress responsible for determining its future. This is a shrewd move for the administration domestically. It allows Trump to claim victory against the deal without dangerously escalating the situations as Mattis and Tillerson understand unilateral decertification would.

Putting a decision like the continuation of the JCPOA in the hands of Congress is inherently dangerous. Despite the extensive support of congressional staffers, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and Congressional Research Service (CRS), Congress does not have the resources and expertise that the executive branch does. The foremost asset for the executive branch in these matters is the National Security Council (NSC). Established by the 1947 National Security Act, signed by President Harry S. Truman, the NSC truly came into its own under his successor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. As Supreme Allied Commander Europe Eisenhower was known for the importance he placed on staff work and planning, and is quoted as saying, “Plans are useless, planning is essential.” Eisenhower continued this as president, and used the NSC’s staff to create comprehensive assessments of global events that reflected military, diplomatic, intelligence, and economic perspectives.

In the decades since 1947 the NSC has been an unqualified success, bureaucratically speaking. President after president have imbued it with more and more power as they have steadily eroded the authority of older parts of the executive branch, the State Department in particular. In the twenty first century the most important presidential appointment is the National Security Advisor (NSA). Unlike the Secretaries of State and Defense and their Undersecretaries and staffs, the NSA and the staff of the NSC do not have to be approved by Congress. The need to select compromise candidates for head the Departments of State and Defense has slowly increased their role as bureaucratic managers and decreased their policy influence, a trend that can be seen in the administrations of George W. Bush and Barak Obama especially.

In the twenty first century the government body with the resources and expertise effectively assess and make policy recommendations on important policies like the JCPOA is the National Security Council. The Constitution invests the executive branch with responsibility for foreign policy for a multitude of reasons; the Senate is responsible only for the ratification of treaties. Making Congress responsible for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is both reckless and could herald a new era in American foreign policy making; Quarterback by Committee.

Charles W. King

A letter from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to Senator Robert Corker (R-Tennessee), the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, published by Foreign Policy today outlines changes to 66 of the 70 current Special Envoy positions at the State Department. Organizational and personnel changes at Foggy Bottom are the subject of current headlines, for good reason, but reform to proliferation of special envoy positions may not be as detrimental to the Department as other new policies. It provides an opportunity to examine how the conduct of diplomatic relations has changed over the years.

Prior to World War One the United States’ Department of State owned five overseas properties. In the nineteenth century being an American ambassador or consul required independent sources of wealth, as they were responsible for both their own expenses and the salaries of their staffs. Consuls in particular were frequently American business-people trading abroad. They became representatives of the United States after establishing themselves in foreign centers of trade. In the nineteenth century the State Department followed Americans abroad, following missionaries as well as entrepreneurs. This system would begin to see reform after the assassination of President Garfield over a State Department posting. It was not until after World War Two that the State Department and the Foreign Service would become the extensive bureaucracy that we recognize today.

Communications is the other major factor in the history of the U.S. Foreign Service. American Ambassadors were empowered to act with a large degree of autonomy. Even after the first transatlantic telegraph cable was completed in 1858 the seventeen hour transmission time, and relative lack of security in early cables meant that the Foreign Service continued to need to act without detailed instruction from Washington. Nonetheless by the turn of the century, the diplomatic cable was one of the most rapid and secure methods of communication. A hundred years later its relative lethargy would be the object of scorn. The absurdity of reliance on diplomatic cables in the era of modern telecommunications is a recurring joke in Abel Lanzac’s Quai d’Orsay which recounts the months of lead up to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq from inside the French Foreign Ministry.

Modern transportation is another field where advances in technology may not have provided American diplomatic efforts with all the benefits possible. It is now possible to travel long distances in very short amounts of time. Six hours to cross the Atlantic, let alone how easy it is to travel quickly within Europe. Yet the State Department maintains individual Ambassadors for each European capital, with limited purviews. The ubiquity of air travel shows why Special Envoy positions have proliferated in the past four decades. Combined with modern communications it has become possible to select diplomats with expertise and dispatch them to travel between foreign capitals with a specific task. This raises questions about the effectiveness of the proposed reforms. Will the under-secretaries, assistant secretaries, and deputy assistant secretaries who are receiving the staff and budgets of the eliminated envoy positions be empowered to communicate and travel like the envoys were? Given the speed and security telecommunications is the independence of Foreign Service officials abroad receding? Is the importance of the United States’ Ambassadors abroad declining as Washington based officials have increased communications and access to their foreign counterparts?

Further Reading

Colum Lynch, Robbie Gramer, "State Department Reorganization Eliminates Climate, Muslim and Syria Envoys." Foreign Policy, August 29, 2017, Accessed August 29, 2017, http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/29/state-department-reorganization-eliminates-climate-muslim-and-syria-envoys/

Abel Lanzac, Christophe Blain, Quai d'Orsay, (Paris, France: Dargaud, 2013)

Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion 1890-1945, (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1982).