Tough Guys
By Pete Hegseth just said that he wants the Pentagon acquisition process to “operate on a wartime footing.” This is, of course, nonsense.
Does this mean that he wants an unlimited budget for Pentagon acquisitions? Conversion of the automobile and hard goods industries to tanks and war vehicles and ammunition? Conscription? All of those things kind of go together if we’re on “a wartime footing.”
“Shift our resources from the bureaucracy to the battlefield.” First, what battlefield? Venezuela because we need one to shift resources to? And I won’t even mention the chain of “bureaucrats” sitting at desks and passing paper to move materiel during wartime. I won’t mention the word “logistics.”
But it sounds tough, suited to a guy with lots of tattoos and fond of push-ups. I’ve seen it mentioned that Hegseth sounds like a junior officer, worried about things like personal grooming rather than what a Secretary of Defense should be thinking about, like global strategy.
But the tough-guy administration permeates the thinkers about global strategy too. I’ve finally made myself read the Heritage Foundation’s paper on nuclear testing. Robert Peters is the author. His bio at Heritage sounds okay.
Prior to joining Heritage, Peters served as the lead strategist at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, where he oversaw the office that developed the Agency’s five-year strategy, conducted the Agency’s research and tabletop exercise program, and executed Agency-level program evaluations. Leading a team of forty-two people, Peters revamped the research function within the Agency and oversaw the Department of Defense’s Track 1.5 and Track 2 strategic dialogues with allies and partners.
“America must prepare to test nuclear weapons,” the report shouts. Peters is quite explicit about why.
Nuclear explosive testing may be necessary to convince America’s adversaries that it has the necessary resolve and a credible nuclear arsenal.
Ah, resolve! Didn’t Farley talk about the Resolve Fairy some long time ago? I thought that was a great term for something that can’t be defined or measured. Vice President Mike Pence (remember him?) demonstrated it, for some values of “demonstrate,” when he glared across the Demilitarized Zone at North Korea. A manly glare.
As to the credibility of the nuclear arsenal, what happens, Robert Peters, if the weapon you have chosen for the demonstration fails to detonate? It’s possible for more reasons than ineffectiveness of the arsenal. The test could have been set up badly, for example. A failure, for whatever reason, would certainly tell our adversaries something.
But these guys don’t ever have a plan B. They have big talk, which apparently is enough for them.