Anzac's Dirty Dozen

by Craig Stockings

  Great scepticism must nonetheless be exercised about claims of alliance benefits in the area of intelligence sharing by the United States, with its structural weaknesses, technological inducements to intelligence failure, penetration and compromise, and actual intelligence disappointments and strategic surprises wrought on it over many years. For Australia, too, the benefit is even more dubious because it creates a syndrome of dependency. And related to this are issues of breaches of sovereignty, the provision of intelligence always being in the interests of the provider, the quantity and quality of intelligence received, the diplomatic costs of membership in an intelligence-sharing network, and the subversion of Australian foreign policy by the intelligence network of a foreign country. Over and above these costs can be added other costs to Australia: dishonesty and deceit, international and national legal transgressions, and breaches of declared national codes of ethics. The price then is as extensive as it is profound, and in Australia’s case they seem to have been incurred for no appreciable advantage to Australian foreign and security policies. Moreover, according to Australian ministerial statements, the arrangements which give rise to them do not appear to be actually necessary for such foreign and security policies.10

  A third assertion often made by those who defend the alliance with the United States is the so-called ‘populist’ case: that Australia is supposedly vulnerable, or even militarily indefensible. Yet this view is not regarded as credible by the more intellectual members of the foreign and defence policy community. In fact, as Paul Dibb demonstrated in the late 1980s in an argument that is still relevant today, Australia is defensible at many levels of threat. Furthermore, earlier works by, among others, Desmond Ball and Robert O’Neill, show that even with the best will in the world, there are scenarios or conditions which might prevent the United States from committing itself to the defence of Australia in times of peril.11 According to this latter analysis, although US assistance might be essential to overcome challenges above the spectrum of relatively low-level conventional conflict, this country would ‘understand’ that the resources of the United States were finite and, ultimately, would be applied in areas of its own more immediate interest.

  Were the United States to provide military support to Australia in a high-level conventional conflict, however, we can reach only a rather pessimistic conclusion about its capabilities. If we examine the period since 1950 – that is, the period punctuated by the Korean War, Vietnam, ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ in Afghanistan and ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ in Iraq – we find that US military efforts have been and remain in serious trouble. The year 1950 is significant here since it was, according to one archetypical study towards the end of the Cold War by two leading US strategic analysts, ‘the last major victory for American arms’.12 This reference was not to the Korean War as such, but to the landings on the mainly undefended Inchon Peninsula which led eventually to the retaking of Seoul. In the next four decades to the end of the Cold War, we find that US military efforts are no model of competence or success. From the record – which includes the debacle in Indo China, and over 120 specifically designated rescue and other missions in that conflict, through still more rescue missions such as those in support of the Mayaguez and the hostages in Teheran, and interventions-cuminvasions such as those in Beirut, Grenada and Panama – the armed forces of the United States have performed in a manner which encourages neither confidence in themselves nor on the part of allies operating with them, or in receipt of a US security guarantee.13

  This record since 1950 is clear, broadly agreed upon, supported by specialists from across the political spectrum, and based on criteria established by the US military itself. For reasons of space, let us take Richard Gabriel’s conclusion to his 1985 study as a representative sample:

  The American military is in serious trouble. Its recent historical record, to say nothing of its disastrous performance in Vietnam, has been marked far more often by failure than success. Its military plans have been unrealistic and unsuccessful. The officer corps by any historical standard is lacking in the spirit and expertise that have characterised the more successful officer corps in history. Worse, it is infected by habits and values which are characteristic of many of the worst officer corps in history. The record is clear that the officer corps has failed the single test of a successful army, the ability to perform well in the field of battle.14

  Despite its apparent success, ‘Operation Desert Storm’ in Iraq in 1991 provided nothing of substance to improve this assessment. The overwhelming majority of the Iraqi forces in the conflict realised that retreat had proved impossible, resistance futile, and capitulation and surrender wise. So they adopted a military version of what in legal terms is known as the plea of ‘No Contest’. Accordingly, they offered no defence in 1991: a fact that should have been remembered during the long aftermath of the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner being hung from the superstructure of the USS Abraham Lincoln on 1 May 2003 as a backdrop for President George W. Bush’s victory speech. While some commentators began to regard the American generals as, in the words of Newsweek magazine, ‘genius generals’, it should be remembered that they did no more than defeat the qualitatively inferior conventional forces of a Third World country by bringing to bear the largest military alliance of advanced, industrialised (and other) states since World War II.15

  Nor, more recently, have either Operation Enduring Freedom or Operation Iraqi Freedom provided evidence which would challenge such conclusions. Consider again a summary of the evidence: in Afghanistan, a US-led and US-dominated NATO force, acting without United Nations authority, invaded the country with the objectives of not only dismantling the Al-Qaeda terrorist organisation and ending its use of Afghanistan as a base, but also removing the Taliban regime from power and creating a viable democratic state. The operation, in these terms, has largely been a military-strategic failure. In the course of this failure, the United States has deployed over 100 000 troops of its own, but after a decade of fighting has little to show for the overall costs. While it is undoubtedly the case that Al-Qaeda has been seriously and probably permanently disrupted, its legacy and imitators are now well and truly distributed and entrenched throughout Pakistan and North Africa. The Taliban itself, despite the presence of the US, NATO and other international forces, not to mention the considerable presence of private military contractors, appears to be able to indefinitely sustain a strength of 10 000 to 12 000 personnel. Fighting between the Taliban and the occupation forces claims from 1000 to 4000 civilian lives every year, with the Taliban being responsible for only 30–40 per cent of these civilian deaths. In the name of military necessity, the war has extended spatially into Pakistan and acts as another destabilising influence on a country already characterised by civil unrest. As for the benefits of replacing the Taliban, religious minorities are still persecuted; women are still raped, otherwise abused and denied education, including basic literacy; and the country continues to produce 95 per cent of the world’s supply of opium, most of which is processed into heroin to supply a US$65 billion industry for a global population of 15 million addicts, of whom 100 000 die every year. This is a dubious report card.

  Alternatively, in 2003 the United States and its coalition of eager allies invaded Iraq illegally and on thin pretexts that must be considered incredible, if any respect at all is paid to the expert testimony on matters of weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism. The country’s basic infrastructure was destroyed, and under US military oversight was ethnically and religiously cleansed to a greater degree than under the old regime. In addition, the battlefields of this and the earlier US-led invasions were liberally contaminated by the aerosol powder produced during impact and combustion of depleted uranium weapons – essentially a mist of deadly, carcinogenic and mutagenic radioactive particles with a half-life (depending on the isotope) of between 700 million and 4.5 billion years, and which attack the kidney, brain, liver and heart among other organs. By definition, these con
sequences determine that its use constitutes a war crime, not only against the people of Iraq, but also against those who will be affected into the future as the winds scatter where they may the particles of the close to 2000 tons of depleted uranium particles.

  For those with a strategic memory which includes the Vietnam War, the US’s policy of ‘Iraq-ization’ was all too familiar: as US political patience faded, the costs climbed, and the mission seemed not quite ‘accomplished’, US policy-makers announced that the Iraqi forces were now sufficiently competent to take over, and that US forces could withdraw – either from the country entirely, or away from the cities and into the less threatening countryside. And this was not the conscript US Army of the 1960s and 1970s, but an ‘all-volunteer’ force supposedly built on the lessons of that period. But in its lack of success it remained comparable. Unlike Vietnam, however, the United States resists complete withdrawal in Iraq, meaning that its forces of around 40 000 hardly increase Iraqi security but rather act as a lightening rod to those forces which would weaken it further. After more than 1.4 million violent deaths in the period since 2003, and ongoing and bloody civil strife into late 2011, claims of even a purely military victory are impossible to entertain, as are notions of Iraq as an emerging politically democratic (or even democratically tending), geographically unified, religiously and ethnically tolerant, constitutional nation state. Should a reader doubt this, consider why it is that nowhere is there any serious mention of ‘victory’ in the contemporary official discourse on Iraq, or in the foreseeable prospects for Afghanistan in the US, NATO and ISAF projections.

  Another major assertion made by those who champion the Australia–United States alliance is that Australia gains access to US-manufactured state-of-the-art defence equipment and weapons systems. At the outset, let it be conceded that defence projects in general are notorious for running over time, over budget and, even then, producing weapons and technologies that fail to meet the performance criteria expected. The questions that arise, then, are why this problem for US industry continues; and why, moreover, is it effectively indulged by Australia in its alliance relationship? The former is more easily approached because there is an extensive historical public record. For sceptics of this assertion, the point is not that access as such is denied (although in some cases it is); rather, that the access is compromised by the incompetency, inefficiencies, excesses and questionable (even criminal) practices of the American military procurement processes.16

  Between 1960 and 1987, a range of investigating authorities undertook twelve major, independent studies of the US defence acquisition process. These studies are backed up by many inquiries conducted by the General Accounting Office and, since 2004, the Government Accountability Office (both conveniently GAO), an independent non-partisan agency which investigates how the US government spends taxpayer dollars. Of these twelve major, independent studies, this chapter touches on one conducted by Ronald Fox and James Field of the Harvard Business School. In 1974 Fox, as sole investigator and author, had written Arming America: How the US Buys Weapons, but in 1984 he began a second study which led to his joint work. The initial Fox–Field finding was that most of the problems reported in Fox’s earlier work not only still existed, but in some cases had worsened. Moreover, the relationship between government and industry had deteriorated, and weapons costs had increased at a rate far greater than costs in the rest of the economy. Despite the large number of studies and the similarity of their findings, virtually all attempts to implement improvements had failed. The magnitude of just the criminal aspect of this malaise can be gauged by extracts from some 32 reports cited by Fox and Field:

  Procurement fraud is derived from essentially three corrupt practices – product substitution, cost mischarging and defective pricing.

  At any given time, according to the sworn testimony before Congress given by Joseph Sherick, Inspector General for the Department of Defense, in 1985, about 1000 cases were under way.

  Sherick also testified that he had 45 of the Department of Defense’s top 100 contractors under investigation for possible criminal activities, and that these 45 included 9 out of the top 10 of DoD’s contractors. The particular forms of wrongdoing included overcharging, kickbacks, bribery, bid-rigging and false claims.17

  Perhaps all of this might even be acceptable if the weapons systems produced were of a high quality, but that too is dubious. Indeed such practices are notorious for producing some of the worst and/or over-priced weapons of the post-World War II age: the F-15E fighter, the B1 and B2 bombers, the Ballistic Missile Defense program, the Maverick anti-tank missile, the Aegis tracking system, the C-17 transport aircraft, the Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, the Black Hawk helicopter, the C-130J Transport aircraft, the C-5A and C-5B transport aircraft, the C-17 Airlifter, the Comanche Helicopter, the Crusader Howitzer, the FA-22 fighter aircraft, the Joint Strike Fighter ( JSF), the Marine Expeditionary Force Fighting Vehicle, the Patriot missile system, the Stryker Armoured Vehicle, the V-22 Osprey aircraft, the Global Hawk drone aircraft (Block 30), coffee machines and pilots’ arm-rests that were charged out by Lockheed at US$7600 and US$670 respectively, and so on. Even Australia’s own F/A-18 aircraft was not without reproach, being both deprived of important components by their US manufacturer, and having experienced a 58 per cent cost increase over the period 1981 to 1986. More recent Australian weapons procurement experience – the Joint Strike Fighter and the Wedgetail airborne early warning and control aircraft – has been little different.

  Nor has the situation changed for the better in the past quarter century. In 2008, the GAO reviewed the Pentagon’s major procurement programs and concluded that ‘95 major systems had exceeded their original budgets by a total of US$295 billion … were delivered almost two years late on average [and] none had met all of the standards for best management practices during their development stages’.18 Moreover, auditors stated that the Defense Department showed few signs of improvement since the GAO began. In 2011, the GAO audit found that one-third of US Defense Department weapons programs since 1997 had cost overruns by as much as 50 per cent over their original projections.19 Yet, because of what is known as the ‘termination liability cost’ for cancelling a contract, vested interests argue that it should be maintained because the actual payout to the company in question would be so high that it makes economic sense to continue.20

  In Australia, there is a partial, concealed and an accommodating understanding of these phenomena. Andrew Davies and Peter Layton provide what is probably the typical response from mainstream defence and strategic studies analysts:

  Defence projects the world over have a history of running over budget, behind schedule, or both. And the more research and development required, the longer the schedule delays and the greater the cost overruns. Accurately estimating the capability, cost and delivery timetable of a new piece of equipment is as much art as science, especially if novel technologies or manufacturing techniques are involved.21

  The problem here is compounded by various further factors: confidential settlements which hide dangerous corporate behaviour; bureaucratic infighting; the pretense, as opposed to the reality, of oversight; the ‘revolving door’ syndrome whereby some former government officials and retired military officers move into highly paid consultancies for the Pentagon even while they are also working for companies seeking Defense Department contracts; the pervasive and corrosive influence of money in the decision-making process and the consequent division between careerists and ethical professionals in the senior military and civilian ranks; the US government’s refusal to make a legislatively mandated database of the personnel involved in the revolving door arrangements; the drastic reduction in the oversight of contracts by the Defense Contract Audit Agency; and the resort to ‘budget games, lies, halftruths and misrepresentations’ in testimony to Congress during hearings on the Defense Authorization and Appropriation Bills. Added to these must be the same patterns of corporate behaviour seen in the Project f
or Government Oversight’s 2009 Federal Contractor Misconduct Database: the top five corporations with the highest misconduct rate – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon – were all leading defence contractors.22

  It is fundamentally important to note that none of this finds a place in the alliance debate in Australia, or even in the specialist analyses of the government-funded, policy-oriented think-tanks. Moreover, given the Lockheed bribery scandals of the 1970s, the Savings and Loan scandals of the 1980s and 1990s, and the endemic criminal behaviour which led to the current Global Financial Crisis, it is surely reasonable to wonder whether the defence industries of the United States share the excesses of Wall Street.

  Alarmingly, using only examples since 2006, there is a body of evidence which suggests that the United States is acting as a role model for Australia in this regard. In that year, the extremely important $400 million electronic warfare self-protection system for the RAAF’s F/A 18 fleet, being built by BAE Systems at the Royal Australian Air Force Base, Edinburgh, was scrapped after being shown to be an expensive failure. Significantly, the decision to proceed with it in the first place in a politically sensitive state for the government of the day had been taken against expert advice.23 Three years later, the Australian National Audit Office tabled its report on the Super Seasprite helicopters for the RAN, which established not only that defence planners had wasted at least $1.4 billion on the project to buy eleven of the aircraft, but had ‘failed to properly inform their minister about concerns the project should be scrapped’.24 Then, in 2010 it came to light that private firms which had been allocated thousands of dollars by the Defence Department for ‘hotel accommodation, horseback trail rides, and use of an executive jet’ reported they had no knowledge of such contracts. This was followed by a report that a crucial Defence Department information system upgrade for keeping track of billions of dollars worth of assets was not only late and $30 million over budget, but that a company that the government had excluded from it on the grounds of conflict of interest in 2005 – KPMG – was now involved to the extent of at least 41 contracts.25 Three months later it was revealed that Australian government aviation contracts had been awarded to ‘companies that secured their bids with inside information about tenders provided by senior public servants’.26 It would be easy, of course, to continue citing more examples to the extent that they would almost become an end in themselves. While there is little to be gained from this there is doubt, however, that there is a proliferation of such cases in the United States, and a growing incidence of them in Australia.