The Center for Public Integrity

What would average Americans do if they were informed about the level and purposes of U.S. defense spending and had a chance to weigh the arguments that experts make? Would they boost overall funding, or cut it? Would they spend more on air power or sea power?  How much would they say the US should spend on nuclear arms? On major ground forces? On special forces?

Most polls simply ask whether defense spending should be cut or not. But three nonprofit organizations — the Program for Public Consultation (PPC),* the Stimson Center, and the Center for Public Integrity — collaborated on a more useful survey. They provided a representative sample of the American public with neutral information about how funds are currently being spent, and exposed them to various arguments made by advocates in the contemporary debate about defense expenditures. The respondents then said what they wished to spend in key areas.

The results of this innovative survey are now in, and we are inviting you to attend a presentation that will shed new light on the linkages — and gaps — between decisions being made in Washington and what average Americans want. The results will also make clear which arguments in favor of or opposed to current defense spending have the most resonance with members of the public.

Here are the logistics:

Time: Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 10:00-11:30 am

Place: The Stimson Center, 1111 19th Street, NW | 12th Floor, 202 223 5956

Presenters:

Steven Kull, director of the Program for Public Consultation*

Matthew Leatherman,  Analyst, Stimson Center's Budgeting for Foreign Affairs and Defense project

R. Jeffrey Smith, Managing Editor for National Security, Center for Public Integrity

When President Obama signed a formal agreement in Kabul on Tuesday to withdraw the majority of U.S. forces from Afghanistan by 2014, he spoke of a future Afghanistan, able to stand on its own as a respected member of the international community. “We have traveled through more than a decade under the dark cloud of war,” said Obama. “Yet here, in the predawn darkness of Afghanistan, we can see the light of a new day on the horizon.”

A more sobering view of the challenge that lies ahead came in the latest quarterly report published the previous day by the chief government watchdog over the nearly $100 billion the U.S. has spent on reconstruction efforts since 2002. U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction Steven Trent warned that deep corruption persists in the country, and can easily undermine the success of U.S. development efforts there.

“Corruption remains a major threat to the reconstruction effort,” Trent wrote in his introduction to the 176-page report. He added that the problem may worsen as the United States heads for the door: “Afghan reconstruction has reached a critical turning point. The shift in strategy, decline in funding, and persistent violence and corruption underscore the need for aggressive oversight.”

Trent expressed particular concern about continuing thefts of fuel and cash, the shortcomings of local security forces, bribery of local and U.S. officials, and contractors that fail to deliver what they promised.

Update: Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's spokesman announced May 15 that Panetta has ordered all F-22 flights to be restrained within a “proximate distance” of an airfield in case pilots begin to feel sick from the ongoing oxygen problems. He also ordered that plans to install a backup oxygen system in the planes be accelerated. His decision appears to rule out any use of the costly planes in combat situations in the near future.

When officials told reporters a few weeks ago that they had deployed F-22 fighter jets in the Middle East for the first time, it was downplayed as “a very normal deployment.” But when it comes to the F-22, there’s very little “normal” about it.

Gen. Mike Hostage, commander of Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va, told reporters Monday that some pilots have asked that they be reassigned rather than be forced to fly the jet. And while he described the concerned group as “very small,” Hostage made a point of telling reporters he would be flying the plane himself in the future to “check out” his pilot’s concerns and try to bolster their in-flight courage.

“I'm asking these guys to assume some risks that's over and above what everybody else is assuming, and I don't feel like it's right that I ask them to do it and I'm not willing to do it myself," said Hostage. (A spokesman confirmed the General would begin his training at the end of the month.)

South of the border, war is raging with guns mostly supplied by merchants in the United States.

The Government of Mexico has estimated that almost 50,000 people have been killed since 2006, a toll that has made its top officials irate about the persistent flow of weapons south. Some law enforcement officials in the U.S. government share the Mexicans' concern, but their attempts to stanch the flow by obtaining better intelliegence about it have badly singed their fingers.

The notorious “Fast and Furious” operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms — one in a string of attempts over a nearly decade-long period to tag and closely monitor the movement of individual arms — blew up when two of the weapons being tracked were used to kill a U.S. border patrol agent in 2010.

Republicans in Congress seized on the issue, holding multiple hearings last year. Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson was reassigned. The Phoenix U.S. attorney who oversaw the operation also resigned, and Republicans called for the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder. And President Obama has been largely hands off on the gun issue, treating it as the political third rail that is best to be ignored, or at least carefully walked around.

Into this politically-charged environment, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) released a first-of-its-kind report on Thursday that nonetheless attempts to assess the proportional distribution — if not the scope — of the arms flowing to drug cartel operatives.

The raids should have been a gold star for the Navy. A trial run for a newly designed ship turned into a series of successful missions against cocaine smugglers, resulting in the capture of nine smugglers and over five tons of cocaine. But the early 2010 victories were darkened, quite literally, by a power failure on March 6 that left the ship briefly adrift at sea.

The mechanical failure was not the last challenge that would face the crew of the USS Freedom, the first of a new breed of Navy vessels meant to become a core part of its fleet over the next decade. A series of test runs caused cracked hulls that forced the ship to limit its speed; engines that simply failed; and over 600 failures of equipment around the ship, leading to a number of dry-dockings at its home base in San Diego, according to data released April 23 by the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight (POGO).

The so-called Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) already had a troubled reputation. The Pentagon’s Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation notoriously concluded in a 2011 report that the Freedom was unlikely to be “survivable in a hostile combat environment.”

But POGO, a Washington-based watchdog group, disclosed new details of the Freedom’s shortcomings in a letter to the Chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate armed services committees accompanying the data. The group also raised concerns about what the group calls the Navy’s “pattern of obfuscation” regarding the achievements of the first ship.

The U.S. government declared victory after prosecuting Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols for the horrific explosion seventeen years ago this week that tore the face off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. But nagging controversy over the completeness of its investigation into the disaster provoked two journalists to write a new book about the bombing that details the bureaucratic dysfunction during the probe.

The book, “Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters,” by Andrew Gumbel and Roger Charles, is due out at the end of the month. It describes missed signals, ignored investigative threads, blown leads, and bureaucratic infighting so counter-productive that it almost defies imagination. Throughout the probe, the FBI and the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms failed to share crucial information and fought bitterly for credit while disparaging the other.

The two groups embraced evidence that pointed to McVeigh and Nichols, but ignored or bad-mouthed evidence that linked those men to others, including at least seven members of the radical right. Many had ties to Elohim City, a 240-acre religious compound in northeast Oklahoma that was home to a community of white supremacists. The ATF and FBI never coordinated their investigations of the group, according to the book, and prosecutors chose to keep things simple for a jury.

The April 19 explosion, which killed 168 people — including 19 infants and toddlers at a day care center in the building, has been eclipsed in notoriety by the World Trade Center’s destruction on 9/11. But some of the connect-the-dots issues and petty rivalries that bedeviled law enforcement both before and after the bombing foreshadowed vulnerabilities that would re-emerge in the wake of 9/11.

The group tasked with preserving the rich history of the U.S. Navy could be putting artifacts, paintings, and documents “at risk” — possibly due to massive spending on the service’s 200th anniversary.

That’s the conclusion of a report by the Navy Inspector General’s office, conducted last August but only released to the public in recent days. The report, an inspection of the Naval History and Heritage Command, is pessimistic about that office’s work.

The report criticizes the Navy for a lack of environmental controls for archived records, including microfilm and CD-ROMs; the “disenfranchisement” of the professional archivist and librarian workforce — which it depicts as having been marginalized; and a tardiness in collecting current information for future archives.

These shortcomings are striking, given the military's tradition of obsessive attention to the history of battles and lesser engagements so that commanders can learn what went right or wrong and how to avoid making similar mistakes. “More than most professions, the military is forced to depend upon intelligent interpretation of the past for signposts charting the future,” Gen. Douglas MacArthur once noted. The French general Antoine-Henri Jomini, added that "Military History, accompanied by sound criticism, is indeed the true school of war.”

Whether the Navy’s agency can change its path on its paltry budget — $38 million to manage the archives, museums and the most notable artifact of all, the U.S.S. Constitution floating in Boston harbor — is uncertain. But a number of historians interviewed for the report said they worried the leadership at the Command is too focused on big ceremonies, such as a series of bicentennial events celebrating the War of 1812.

In the central March 2008 negotiations over the delivery of weapons by Russian arms merchant Viktor Bout to a Columbian terrorist group, the key players were two men identified as Carlos and Ricardo. They cunningly presented themselves as representatives of FARC, or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, a group known for kidnappings, drug smuggling, and access to lots of cash.

They did not hide their intentions. “We want to start … start killing American pilots,” Carlos bluntly told Bout, while asking for assault weapons, sniper rifles, and surface-to-air missiles.

As Bout abruptly learned when the deal-making sessions at the Bangkok Sofitel Hotel ended with his arrest, neither of the two men were actually with FARC. They were instead paid agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who once again had successfully posed as members of a group that has waged a brutal war against the Colombian government.

Lost in the attention surrounding Bout’s sentencing last week to a 25-year prison term is the fact that the DEA has conducted not just one major FARC-related sting, but at least four in the past six years alone. That they have successfully used the same strategy over and over again suggests one of two possibilities: Those in the drug trafficking and arms smuggling world are less well-informed and more careless than their pop-culture images suggest, or the DEA is particularly good at fooling its victims with the convincing patter of anti-imperialist revolutionaries bent on hobbling a U.S. ally.

A judge in New York sentenced arms dealer Victor Bout Thursday to 25 years in prison, permanently ending his run as perhaps the world’s most notorious weapons-dealing kingpin.
 
Bout was convicted on charges of conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens, conspiracy to kill U.S. employees, conspiracy to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles, and conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist group.
 
U.S. agents posing as members of the FARC terrorist group captured him in Thailand during a 2008 sting operation. It took over two years for Bout, a Russian, to be extradited to stand trial in New York.
 
In 2002, the Center for Public Integrity and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published “The merchant of death,” a massive exposé on Bout’s activities throughout the world. For more, read the full series, Making a Killing, here.