Thus far in the current campaign cycle, tea partier Akin has received $91,500 from defense-related interest groups while serving on the House Committee on Armed Services, the House Committee on the Budget and the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, according to data from the Federal Election Commission. That figure puts him in second among members of Congress in amount received from defense interests during this election cycle, after House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.) and nearly $40,000 more than President Obama.

Meanwhile, Akin has started a ‘task force’ to increase federal contracts for defense companies based in Missouri, held numerous defense industry breakfasts and said that defense is a “vital, Constitutional responsibility of the federal government” while questioning the financial viability of Medicare.

Akin is currently campaigning for the Republican nomination to challenge Sen. Claire McCaskill, whose pet issue since being elected in 2006 has been defense contract oversight and promoting transparency in government affairs. McCaskill currently serves as the chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight.

“The atti­tude in the mil­i­tary has been, too many times, ‘I want what I want, when I want it,’” McCaskill told the Kansas Monitor, promising to increase oversight of contracted military spending.

Their race will likely be an interesting microcosm of the role of special interests in elections, as McCaskill and Akin hold opposing positions on many social and fiscal issues, and most of their funding sources are similarly polarized.

Akin, the former Army combat engineer whose Missouri district is home to Boeing Defense, Space and Security, has made no secret of these ties. Of the top ten organizations that have donated to Akin in the past two years, three are defense companies.

After convening the St. Louis Defense Industry Task Force, which would “increase the profile of the importance of the defense industry” in Missouri, he boasted in a press release that he “will call on greater coordination and support between state, federal and local officials in actively supporting the strength of defense manufacturing in the St. Louis region.”

He has also held numerous defense industry fundraising events, eighteen in the past year, and has toured defense companies to show his support for their manufacturing base in Missouri.

Along with large contributions from different corporate interests, Akin is ideologically conservative. He has supported proposals to teach intelligent design in public schools, display the Ten Commandments on public property and retain references to God in the Pledge of Allegiance.

The inevitable push-back from those members is beginning. Yesterday, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) announced that the House will hold hearings to “determine the rationale behind [the] proposal to cut defense contracting by 10 percent per year for three years.” Connolly asked the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to hold hearings asking the Pentagon to “justify this decision and its potential effects,” and the Subcommittee on Government Management, Organization, and Procurement agreed.

Connolly calls Gates’ proposal “arbitrary and capricious,” saying in a statement, “arbitrary cuts never produce the desired results and are frequently proven to be counterproductive. While I applaud the Secretary for looking for internal savings in the Pentagon, I have questions about the justification for his plan. No rationale was given and no analysis was provided to justify such cuts. One trembles at the thought of the disruptions, dislocations, cost overruns, and termination costs associated with such a plan. Generally, when someone says they are going to cut something across the board, it means they have given up on taking a paring knife to strategically look at and cut specific programs that may not be cost effective or working as planned.”

Connolly represents tens of thousands of government contractors in Fairfax, in northern Virginia.

It is also important to consider whether USAID’s growing national security mission is compatible with its development aims. For example, can USAID participate effectively in counterinsurgency and stabilization operations while maintaining a credible humanitarian presence, or do these functions demand a new approach altogether? There is justification for aid programs that have both short-term strategic value and long-term development objectives, but the line between these two goals is often blurred. At a minimum, foreign aid accounts need to be rationalized so that they support U.S. priorities and the missions of the agencies in which they are located.

How to square the circle? Stuart Bowen’s proposal for a U.S. Office of Contingency Operations is one way. Bowen’s so-called USOCO would create an operational structure in crisis situations for integrating defense, diplomacy and development efforts, along with humanitarian relief, reconstruction, rule-of-law advisory and other elements of national power as necessary. That’s what Clinton wants. But it would leave USAID alone to focus on long-term development projects, as Kerry and Lugar want.

Whether Bowen’s proposal will gain traction is a different story. He’s expected to present the USOCO idea to Congress in the coming weeks — probably on Jan. 30, when he presents his next quarterly report on Iraq reconstruction to lawmakers. (The idea recently won support from the respected diplomat Ryan Crocker.) Before he does, however, the various foreign-policy departments are expected to send Bowen their formal perspectives on the merits of USOCO in the next few days — including, naturally, State and USAID.

As Hasan’s training progressed, his strident views on Islam became more pronounced as did worries about his competence as a medical professional. Yet his superiors continued to give him positive performance evaluations that kept him moving through the ranks and led to his eventual assignment at Fort Hood.

Recent statistics show the Army rarely blocks junior officers from promotion, especially in the medical corps.

In recent years there’s been a fair amount of grumbling in Army reformist circles that too many underqualified officers are pushed up the ranks. Usually that’s come in the context of wartime exhaustion, as the Army needs to retain its junior-to-mid-level officers to keep functioning, and the way to do that is through de facto automatic promotion. (Or, put differently, you have to seriously mess up not to be bumped upward.) It’s not clear that’s what happened in Hasan’s case, but the problem is nevertheless structural. If the default position of the Army is to promote, particularly in needed specialties like the medical corps, superiors are unlikely to pay sufficient attentions to warning signs like Hasan’s increasingly anti-American rhetoric.

Apparently as many as eight officers could be disciplined over the Hasan case. The Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing about the commission’s report next Thursday.

Mr. Hoyer: …On Thursday we’ll do the Department of Defense Appropriation Act. There are, by the way, over 600 amendments filed to that bill. The rule hasn’t been written yet. The rule is not through yet, is it? No. They’re working on the rule now. We will try to deal with perhaps a large number of those en bloc amendment of some type. There are 540 filed by Flake alone.
Q: 540?
Mr. Hoyer: 540 by Mr. Flake.

I didn’t know a single human being could file that many amendments.

[Defense Secretary Robert Gates] bluntly warned Lockheed Martin that he would slice funding for the more modern F-35 jet if the contracting giant lobbied to build more F-22s. Lockheed Martin’s chief executive, Robert J. Stevens, told employees he supported Gates’s call “to put the interests of the United States first — above the interests of agencies, services and contractors.” That left the powerful lobbyists to sit on their hands.

And who makes the F-35?

Usually state delegations voted in lockstep — a predictable consequence of the plane being constructed in nearly every state in the country — but when they didn’t, a Democrat voted to stop funding and a Republican voted to keep it. There are three exceptions there. In Alabama, Sen. Richard Shelby voted against the plane and Sen. Jeff Sessions voted for it; both are Republicans. Similarly, in Oklahoma, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) voted against the plane while Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) voted for it. And in New Hampshire. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) voted for the plane but her Republican colleague, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), voted against it.

Defense Sec. Robert Gates (WDCpix) and F-22 Raptors (Air Force photo)

On Monday, an Iraq veteran named John Guardiano took to the right-leaning op-ed page of The Washington Examiner, a free daily paper in the district, to inveigh against the “Secret Defense Budget Tribunals” of Pentagon chief Bob Gates. Guardiano, troubled by the unusual steps taken by Gates to hold the details of his fiscal-2010 budget close to the vest, compared Gates’ efforts to the ill-fated efforts of then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to construct a universal health-care regime in secret that ended in 1994. Needless to say, he disapproved. “Democracy can be messy and untidy, noisy and boisterous,” he wrote, “it can disrupt the work of the ruling class, who think they know better than we the people.” After all, Guardiano reminded, “America is not the Soviet Union or China.”

Guardiano’s bio for the paper quickly noted that his views “do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. military or his employer, a defense contractor.” The paper didn’t see fit to name the contractor.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Still, Guardiano’s op-ed was indicative of two facts that remain salient as Gates is expected to deliver the substance of his long-awaited Pentagon budget to the White House next week. First, defense contractors and their Capitol Hill allies are alarmed at how Gates has shut them out of the the decision-making process about the Pentagon budget as he has publicly warned, in vague terms, about making “hard choices” that will place defense systems and weapons programs beloved by the armed services and their contractors on the chopping block. And second, Gates has adopted a strategy for his budget that presumes that most of the defense industry is an obstacle at best and an adversary at worst.

“Leaks are used by people opposed to the changes being considered,” said one Pentagon official supportive of Gates’ effort. “It’s about opposition [to the budget] mobilizing on outside and stopping that, from certain members of Congress, the [armed services] committees, the news media, what have you.”

Gates has taken extraordinary steps to keep the details of the fiscal 2010 budget to himself. First, he announced that he would withhold the substance of the budget from the Obama administration’s overall budget, delivered in February, and just divulge the overall spending request of $534 billion. ($663.7 billion when counting the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the year, which will be funded through a supplemental budget request later this year.) Then he announced that he would empanel a review to determine what defense systems needed to be scaled back in funding or were no longer relevant for national security. He went so far as to insist that defense officials and military officers consulted by the review sign non-disclosure agreements to prevent them from leaking. “In principle, you’re not supposed to talk about this thing outside of the building, or share it within,” said an official who requested anonymity and who was one of several dozen officials asked to sign the non-disclosure agreement.

The agreement, first disclosed by DefenseNews in February, requires signatories to affirm “I recognize that a significant factor in the successful and proper presentation and completion of the President’s budget is the strict confidentiality that must be observed by all government participants.” That includes all discussions about “planning, programming and budget system documents and databases, and any other information … concerning the Administration’s deliberation of the nature and amounts of the President’s budget for Fiscal Year 2010.” The agreement placed into conflict two values that the Obama administration espoused during last year’s campaign: openness and reform.

The budget effort, according to insiders, had two main phases: first, solicitation of perspectives and advice from a variety of officials and servicemembers; and second, final decision-making by a comparative few officials. While Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Vickers was part of a “small group” of Pentagon officials leading the review, officials influential during the final phase were Gates; Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman; and Brad Berkson, director of program analysis and evaluation.

Gates’ allies say that keeping the decision-making process open would have empowered defense contractors to lobby Congress to protect beloved — and expensive — defense programs at a time when the economy is forcing the closure of what Gates has called the “spigot” of defense cash opened by the 9/11 attacks. While the budget still represents an increase over last year’s defense spending, Gates testified to Congress in January about restricting Cold War-era systems or those of uncertain value to irregular conflicts like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. “This budget going to involve very significant shifts and changes from what was done in past,” the Pentagon official said, but declined to characterize how the budget would change.

Defense reformers look at such claims with skepticism. Winslow Wheeler, a three-decade veteran of defense budget fights as a Capitol Hill staffer who now works for the Center for Defense Information, expected the budget to cut “low-hanging fruit” and leave many sacred-cow programs intact. But he said that the secrecy-centric approach to the budget would only delay the inevitable fight when it gets delivered to Congress. “They’re delaying the services running around behind their backs and [asking] Congress to please rescue” favored defense programs. “But it’s not question of if, it’s a question of when that happens. The service representatives — colonels, whomever — will come over to Congress to complain about the decisions — if Gates make some good ones.”

Even in the absence of specific information about the budget, defense lobbyists have wasted little time mobilizing to guard against cuts. In January, Lockheed Martin unveiled a Website called Preserve Raptor Jobs, arguing that the F-22 fighter jet it produces for the Air Force was a jobs engine during trying economic times. A spokesman for Lockheed told TWI last month that the site was merely intended to “provide information” primarily to the jet’s “supplier base,” but lawmakers from F-22-producing states warned Gates against cutting funding for the jet — which costs approximately $143 million per plane, of which there are currently 183 — using talking points that sounded much like text on the site. Similarly, defenders of the Army’s Future Combat Systems program for tech-enabled land warfare — the target of a Government Accountability Office report this week that criticized its “staggering” cost-overruns of $300 million — have argued in recent days that the program is crucial to soldier safety against insurgent attacks, even though it has yet to be deployed in full. The Politico reported this week that Boeing has deployed 100 lobbyists to Washington to push back against potential cuts.

The Pentagon official acknowledged that secrecy over the budget could hardly last forever. Lobbyists “have a sense of where the trajectory is going” in terms of prospective budget cuts,” the official said. “What usually happens is happening. But at least [the secrecy] is something that mitigates it somewhat.”

Wheeler said the ultimate decision when the budget is fully unveiled will be Obama’s. “The president will have to decide if he’s going to fight for his own budget and the decisions that Gates makes, assuming Gates makes good ones,” he said, “or whether to engage in the slippery-slope compromises with Congress. And the everyone-gets-happy route just makes everything worse in terms of an aging, shrinking and less ready to fight” military.

But Obama might have actually taken a significant step today to take on that entrenched apparatus.

Obama today issued a memorandum to the heads of all the executive departments agencies directing them to restrict no-bid contracts; to rein in outsourcing of “inherently governmental activities”; and to, if necessary, cancel wasteful contracts outright. The crucial paragraph, even if it’s written in bureaucratese, particularly calls out the Defense Department:

I hereby direct the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in collaboration with the Secretary of Defense, the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Administrator of General Services, the Director of the Office of Personnel Management, and the heads of such other agencies as the Director of OMB determines to be appropriate, and with the participation of appropriate management councils and program management officials, to develop and issue by July 1, 2009, Government-wide guidance to assist agencies in reviewing, and creating processes for ongoing review of, existing contracts in order to identify contracts that are wasteful, inefficient, or not otherwise likely to meet the agency’s needs, and to formulate appropriate corrective action in a timely manner.  Such corrective action may include modifying or canceling such contracts in a manner and to the extent consistent with applicable laws, regulations, and policy. [My emphasis]

Clearly, this has applications far beyond the Pentagon. But the list of big-ticket defense items that have experienced huge cost overruns is a long one. Future Combat Systems in the Army; the Littoral Combat Ship in the Navy; the Joint Strike Fighter in the Air Force — all of these programs, near and dear to the services, have run massively over budget. If I was a lobbyist for Lockheed or Boeing, I’d be dialing my contacts in the Pentagon and the Hill to figure out what the prospective damage to my company was. And then I’d come up with a strategy to fight this forthcoming Office of Management and Budget review.

Obama went further in remarks at the White House, calling it a “false choice” to say that protecting the country requires acquiescence to Pentagon waste. “In this time of great challenges,” he said, “I recognize the real choice between investments that are designed to keep the American people safe and those that are designed to make a defense contractor rich.” He also lent support to Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and former presidential rival John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) legislation to create new procurement oversight positions at the Pentagon. “The days of giving defense contractors a blank check are over,” Obama said.

This effort hardly seems perfect. One of the people Obama specifically tasked to work with OMB for procurement reform is Bill Lynn, the deputy secretary of defense whose last job was lobbying for defense giant Raytheon. Perhaps Lynn is here because he knows how defense lobbyists work, and can come up with strategies to beat them at their own game. Or perhaps Lynn will find it difficult to overcome his background — and the sure-fire job waiting for him in the defense-lobby sector when he leaves government. And, of course, the defense lobby is one of the most powerful in Washington.

But Obama has now placed defense-contracting reform at the center of his efforts at cutting wasteful spending, and he’s put cutting wasteful spending at the core of his deficit-reduction approach; and both the press and the Republican Party will watch that deficit-reduction approach as a test of his presidency. That line from his YouTube address on Saturday about being ready for a fight with lobbyists over his budget? He might mean it.

…that 95,000 number counts indirect employment at firms for whom the F-22 program is just one of many clients. And it also counts Lockheed assembly workers who are in high demand for other aviation projects. In fact, ending Raptor production today might not result in a single unemployed aerospace worker. …

A year ago the industry was worried about huge labor shortages. Shutting down the Raptor line would see thousands of workers snapped up for active production lines churning out F-16s, F-35s, C-130s and modernized C-5s for Lockheed, not to mention the prospect that industry rivals Boeing and Northrop might lure Lockheed workers for their own active production lines for the F-15, F/A-18 and others.

David doesn’t necessarily think the F-22 should face program cuts — “There are good reason to keep buying F-22s,” he writes — just that the stimulus argument against the cuts is dubious.