On The Importance Of Accounting For Waste In American Military Procurement When Using Military Expenditures As Proxy For Power, Capabilities
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Military expenditures, whether for a single year or for multiple years, are a poor indicator of military capabilities for any number of reasons. One reason is that many militaries regularly waste money on procurement projects that, at the very least, do not play out as envisaged. No military is more “guilty” of such waste than the American military. This reflects not only the immense size of the United States’ annual military procurement budget but also some of the American military’s quite unique characteristics, which are neither inherently good nor bad but both good and bad at once—these are trade-offs.
The American military’s inter- and intra-service rivalries, which are ultimately manifested in battles over Congressional appropriations by way of the executive branch, regularly result in the pursuit of new procurement programs and the funding of new research and development efforts that go nowhere. These dynamics, of course, take place amid the pursuit of what typically amount to fads about the “future of war,” a dynamic diplomatic environment, and, of course, technological change, but nevertheless result in a situation in which a non-trivial portion of prior years’ American military expenditures are, in effect, sent down the proverbial drain.
The above images, which are from the X/Twitter account WarshipCam, show the USNS Burlington, a Spearhead-class expeditionary fast transport, under towed to enter reserve status. The Burlington, which only entered service in 2018, is one of 15 completed Spearhead-class vessels. When developed over the first decade of the 2000s, this class of vessels were regularly touted to be a key enabler of the American military’s overseas logistics and, importantly, the American military presence across the Western Pacific. Instead, multiple fairly new vessels of this class have been stricken or scrapped, with others entering reserve status.
A decade ago, the Spearhead-class was touted as one of the many examples of American “military innovation.” In an important, if narrow, sense, it undoubtedly was, and it goes without saying that many, even most, areas of American military innovation are successful and (positively) consequential. The key issue for observers to keep in mind is that this is not always the case. For every group of successful and (positively) consequential American procurement and/or research and development efforts, there exists a similar number of unsuccessful and inconsequential (beyond the resource allocations) undertakings that cost many billions of dollars in procurement as well as research and development spending. A holistic accounting of the efficiency with which the United States converts the dollars in its much-discussed annual military expenditures into military capabilities must take the inefficiency and waste into account.