This week we will look at how a movie featuring John Wayne taking on the Imperial Japanese Navy in a plywood boat changed my thinking about the F-22. Recall that last spring, the Administration moved to cap production on this super stealthy, fifth generation fighter aircraft. While very much in favor of having an aircraft that is so clearly superior to anything on anybody’s drawing boards, at an estimated fly-away cost of $143MM per ship set one wonders if perhaps the presently planned fleet of 187 might be sufficient. After all, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is coming up the development curve. Though not quite as stealthy as the F-22, it is being designed for multiple missions (and foreign participation) that are expected to require thousands of aircraft. These factors result in the F-35 having a significantly (> 40%) lower fly-away cost.
Honest and spirited disagreement can be had over the right mix of aircraft to meet our future needs, especially when the growing role of unmanned aircraft is figured in. These are very long lived programs, intended to meet or deter threats two or three decades from now. Truth be told, I found it easy to acquiesce to what seemed like a high-volume, “budget” approach (cap the F-22 but produce a whole bunch of almost-as-capable JSFs). Blame a value orientation that seeps out into many other facets of life beyond investing, as well as the fact that I enjoy a better than average understanding of what aviation suppliers stand to prosper mightily from high volume production of the JSF (They are on my List.). It’s hard to imagine anyone anywhere coming up with a credible challenge to the F-22 in my lifetime, so maybe having 187 of them waiting in the wings to do the highest priority missions, while hundreds of F-35s and UAVs do whatever dirty work comes along, is a “good enough” solution to prospective threats.
This sort of cost-efficient thinking about defense spending took a bit of hit when I watched the aforementioned movie. They Were Expendable (TWE) was John Ford’s 1945 contribution to the war effort. It was (in Hollywood’s way, loosely) based on the exploits of Motor Torpedo Squadron 3 in the Philippines at the outset of World War Two. The action centered on a couple of Naval officers, one of whom was based on Lt. John D. Bulkeley, whose actions prior to his part in evacuating Gen. MacArthur won him a Congressional Medal of Honor. The great thing about so many of the movies from back then (Hollywood’s “Golden Age”?) was that their creators were all about meeting the audience where it was. Film making may have been more technically limited than today, but one takes away a real connection with what was on the minds and hearts of that broad swath of Americans that was its intended audience. This is because the studios held to the priority of selling tickets rather than preaching or pandering (“If you want to send a message, call Western Union!”). And while some of the actors might have been just as dissolute in their private lives as today’s celebrities, they were all business on the job, rarely preening about in the manner that is all too common today. For example, one gets a clear sense of how wearing ten years of recession had been on the American psyche from watching a circa 1940 Preston Sturges film. On the surface, TWE was a lot of fast boat shoot-em-up, the requisite and somewhat stereotypical array of sailor “characters” and a bit of a love interest between John Wayne and a nurse portrayed by Donna Reed. The feeling it conveyed though was unbearable uncertainty, of dreadful and overwhelming sense of lives disrupted and perhaps devastated by unbidden war being thrust upon them. Everyone seemed to be facing up to hard choices and the cold hand of fate in ways that make so many of today’s “crises” seem lamely trivial.
It also occurred to me that those of us under the age of about 65 find it all too easy to view the outcome of that war as more or less inevitable. Viewed in hindsight through the lens which Hollywood would bankroll for the next couple of decades, it seemed that once the vast industrial might of the U.S. heartland geared up to equip the teeming masses of the English speaking world, the Soviets and what remained of Chinese fighting forces, it was just a matter of grinding the upstarts down. This film reminds us that it did not seem so inevitable at the time, even in 1945 when what we now think of as decisive battles (e.g., Leyte Gulf in 10/44) were in the rear view mirror. In 1942, it was anything but inevitable. Countless lives were being turned upside down by it or by the process of getting up and doing something about it (i.e., mobilizing to fight back against the emergent aggressors). What struck me was that considering the relative stature of the principals, as reckoned in economic potential, it seems ludicrous that the Empire of Japan should have dared to take on the U.S., and yet they did. At the safe remove of a half century plus, it seems insane, but the criminal regime that had taken control of the government (as I understand it, it was as if, say, the “outift” in Chicago had moved in and taken over WA DC. Hmm.) looked at the facts on the ground and decided that they could pull it off. They were wrong, but as depicted, explicitly as well as by inference, innumerable Americans paid all manner of prices to make it so.
This cinematic impression of lives overtaken by a war that might not have been was helped along by a couple of other inputs. One was also courtesy of Netflix, that wonderfully cost-effective source of home entertainment option for those of us who are disinclined to pay up so as to drink from the feculent fire hose of cable or satellite. We have been enjoying a series called Foyle’s War. It’s about a small town British police detective, widowed and with a son in the RAF, and does a very nice job, for a BBC production anyway, of depicting how Britain struggled to pull together as war approached and then overtook them. It is highly nuanced with the tensions and epiphanies that occur when members of a class oriented society are thrown together in common cause, though we see that not quite everybody was on board. (Of course, its BBC, so the “bad guy” in the murders he solves is invariably aristocratic, a businessman or a visiting American.) The other input was a few hours I spent last summer in a little museum in Sante Fe, NM. (It was that and go try the green chile cheeseburger voted the best in NM, or spend the whole day with my traveling companion looking at art.) The New Mexico National Guard had a very large contingent in the Philippines in 1941. Many of them were swallowed up in the Bataan Death March. A large proportion of those who managed to survive the March and then internment returned so broken in health that they only lived a short time longer. Many of these men came from towns and villages I had passed through or seen on a map for the first time just that week. This was a people’s shrine to that sacrifice, rife with photographs and letters and memorabilia dragged out of attics in the subsequent decades. It reminded me that war really is something to be deterred, perhaps by almost any means necessary.
This brings us back to the connection between the plywood boats and the F-22. (Actually, it turns out the PT boats were not made out of plywood as we know it. Like today’s cutting edge aircraft, they were made of a composite material, though not of filament and resin. A glue-infused sheet of canvas was sandwiched between 1” mahogany planks, arrayed diagonally and held together by myriad brass screws. This made for a lightweight, durable and relatively easy to repair hull, though hardly able to withstand a direct hit anywhere near the tanks that fed the twin gasoline engines.) The point of defense spending is not simply to be able to overcome existing and prospective threats. If a nation has the means, and the U.S. certainly does, it should also aim to make it unthinkable, even for corrupt gangster states like Imperial Japan or who knows what China will look like in twenty years, to even consider such an encounter. Prudent defense spending has to have an element of “Don’t even think about it”. An on-going commitment to superiority not only provides an objective “edge” in the event of actual hostilities, it should imbue a sense of futility in all but the most insane of prospective adversaries in terms of even considering trying to keep up with us. The war depicted in TWE, and that bottomless well of suffering and sacrifice that went with it, might not have happened if the U.S. defense policy had not been so “on the cheap” in the two decades leading up to it. We see no credible threat today, in the realm of air-to-air combat anyway, but just what did the threat of National Socialism and Imperial Japan look like in 1931 or even 1936? Deterrence does not have to take the form of the Mutually Assured Destruction of the Cold War era. Technology plus will power can produce a much more refined solution. The F-22 embodies the kind of technologies where if we put our minds to it, we can hold an unassailable high ground, so daunting that any party with enough intellectual resources to attempt to match it will think better of even trying. I am still not sure what the “right” number is for the F-22, or any other program for that matter, but I am sure that it is higher than what “analysis” would indicate
Of course, technology and the wealth to develop and produce superior weaponry are not enough. I did mention willpower, didn’t I? Part and parcel with the will to deter threats and so spare our people of what TWE so impressed me with is recognition of reality. Reality 2010 is that we are at war. Perhaps Imperial Japan was getting the same sort of mixed messages about our resoluteness in 1941 as the Taliban et al have been getting of late. It does not serve the cause of deterrence to act and even talk (“manmade disasters”) as if there were no war on. What must they be thinking when we give skivvie-bomber a lawyer? (Talk about wasting a golden opportunity to gather a few facts about his handlers. After flame-broiling his private parts, the guy obviously needed pain medication, which depending on how cooperative he was might have been “hard to find” later that evening. “Oh, Nurse Grabbit, it looks like you need to dress the patient’s wound again!”) I am not perturbed because the enemy almost pulled one off. We are at war, vigilance slips as time wears on, and then you get a wake-up. Wars are sloppy, messy things, often won by the side that screws up the least. From the point of view of waging a war that will not leave us alone, an uglier outcome might have been better, if only because it would have been a louder, more enduring wake-up. No, what fries me is that we have it within our grasp to implement effective and enduring deterrence of that residue of humanity that hates us and wants to kill us, or might someday succumb to dreams of global dominance the way Germany and Japan did, but we choose to pretend that stuff like that doesn’t happen anymore, and even if it did there is nothing we can do about it. This is madness, for which the great grandchildren of the people for whom They Were Expendable was made will likely have to pay.
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