My test on this is easy: Would George C. Marshall have accepted such payments? I doubt it. (Remember, he declined to write a memoir that would have made him wealthy because he thought it would have been improper to get into the failings of some of his comrades.)

“I don’t know any SEALs,” said Sarosdy, 81, speaking by phone from his home in Pensacola, Fla. “I have no idea who transmitted that.”

Sarosdy said he received the e-mail from a friend – he thinks it was another retired military officer – a few days after the stand-off ended, he said. He thought it was interesting, so he forwarded it to a couple dozen other people.

And so another hoax email about Barack Obama was born.

The USS Bainbridge (Navy photo)

Ironic as it may appear, Naval reformers think the successful rescue of Maersk Alabama captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates may have highlighted structural imbalances in the U.S. Navy’s ability to handle irregular warfare — just as difficulties experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan awakened the U.S. Army to counterinsurgency requirements.

To be sure, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, the liberation of Phillips after five days of captivity by what Defense Secretary Bob Gates called “untrained teenagers” off the Somali coast was an unambiguous victory. Three Navy SEALs parachuted into the region, swam aboard the USS Bainbridge, which U.S. Central Command dispatched to monitor the area after the pirates attacked the Maersk Alabama, and fired three shots at night to kill three pirates and free Phillips. As an example of an irregular challenge to global commerce — pirates in small boats armed with crude weapons have hijacked 18 ships in 2009 alone — the United States deployed a minimum of force and used it effectively. “Three Seals, three shots, three take-downs,” an anonymous U.S. official told The Wall Street Journal with evident pride.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The trouble, experts say, is that beyond the rescue lie warning signs about continued threats from low-tech adversaries operating in shallow waters. The current U.S. Naval strategy, written under then-Navy chief Adm. Mike Mullen — now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — has won plaudits for emphasizing increased international maritime cooperation. But reformers say it hasn’t gone far enough to restructure the Navy around low-intensity operations and support to special operations forces, rather than operations far out at sea. “You have to have a balanced force,” said Eric Wertheim, a columnist for “Proceedings,” the journal of the U.S. Naval Institute, and author of “Combat Fleets of The World,” in an interview.

What Wertheim and like-minded Naval theorists have in mind isn’t a rebalance of the U.S. fleet overwhelmingly for close-encounter anti-piracy missions, but increasing Naval capabilities for such actions alongside traditional Naval priorities like deterring and fighting adversaries far out in the oceans and protecting shipping lanes. In that respect, they sound much like their ground-force counterparts who argue for a place in the U.S. Army to emphasize counterinsurgency operations as well as combat between two traditional states’ armies. The Maersk Alabama incident may have provided public attention to the threats they’ve been warning about. “Before, [the Navy] didn’t see a need for it,” said Raymond Pritchett, a U.S. Naval Institute analyst and blogger, though he cautioned that it still might not. “There’s a maverick community in surface-warfare community that’s pushing for” greater low-intensity conflict efforts.

In the wake of the Phillips hostage situation and rescue — which saturated media coverage last week — the Obama administration and the military have pledged to make anti-piracy efforts a priority. In a Tuesday morning interview with ABC News’ “Good Morning America,” Mullen said the military would think “broadly and widely and deeply” about what to do about piracy. President Obama said that the U.S. had to “continue to be prepared to confront” piracy in collaboration with other nations.

The incident threw into relief an effort that Defense Secretary Bob Gates began earlier last week. On April 6, Gates unveiled a defense budget that accelerated a Navy program to build the Littoral Combat Ship, a light and fast ship capable of operating in coastal waters that are too shallow for other Naval ships. “It is the kind of capability that would have enormous value against fast boats, for example, in the Persian Gulf,” Gates told a blogger conference call on Wednesday. “You don’t need a $5 billion-ship to go after pirates.” Pirates had boarded the Maersk Alabama just that morning.

While the Littoral Combat Ship has been beset by cost problems, the concept of such a vessel has long been embraced by Naval reformers, who see both international maritime cooperation and coastal operations as critical to protecting the freedom of the seas for global commerce. Pritchett noted that the Navy has been slow to embrace the concept. Just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Navy gave many of many of its coastal patrol vessels to the U.S. Coast Guard, “but found it needed them for offshore [operations] in Iraq,” he said.

“The Navy doesn’t always like to get involved in coastal operations,” said Wertheim. “It’s not always considered a core mission.” As a result, promoting coastal operations doesn’t always provide a Naval officer a steady path to career advancement.

In a November paper on maritime strategy for the Center for a New American Security, a defense think tank that employed many Obama Pentagon officials, retired Marine Lt. Col. Frank Hoffman argued that the Navy needed to invest more in ships that could handle coastal operations.” American security interests will have to be secured and advanced in tomorrow’s ‘contested zones’: the urbanized littorals of the rim lands of Asia and Africa,” Hoffman, who did not return a Tuesday phone call, wrote. “That will require more than a [deep] water fleet that commands the commons from standoff distance. He specifically called for “greater emphasis to smaller craft” beyond the Littoral Combat Ship that can facilitate what he termed “offshore partnering,” for international and commercial security.

The trouble — as Gates will confront when he presents his budget request to Congress when it returns from recess next week — is that “Congress doesn’t consider small ships [part of] shipbuilding,” Pritchett said, and as a result “the Navy doesn’t ask for them” sufficiently. Shipbuilding is a jobs engine in states like Maine and Mississippi.

One way reformers confront the realities of addressing both Congressional pressure and low-intensity conflict is by proposing ships that can take on more than one mission, or by creating new naval formations that provide for a mixture of capabilities. One such proposal, called “Influence Squadrons” in the April issue of “Proceedings,” came from Navy Cmdr. Henry Hendrix. Hendrix envisioned a squadron composed of a panoply of naval assets, including destroyers, Littoral Combat Ships, Coastal Patrol ships “to operate close in” to the land and “an amphibious mother ship.”

Hendrix contended that the Influence Squadrons would provide multiple benefits. “Their understated capabilities would epitomize America’s peaceful, non-aggressive intent, and would carry out the new maritime strategy’s stated purpose of providing positive influence forward,” he wrote. In addition, they’d provide enough weaponry to “either dissuade or destroy pirate networks that might seek to prey upon increasingly vulnerable commercial sea lines of communication.”

Other recent anti-pirate activity lent apparent support to Hoffman’s “offshore partnering” strategy of robust maritime collaboration. Wertheim pointed to the Strait of Malacca, a waterway between Malaysia and Indonesia that is one of the most important commercial maritime traffic areas, as it bridges the Pacific and Indian oceans. Piracy in the area, a traditional problem, shot up in the mid-2000s. “Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia realized they have to coordinate, had to work together,” Wertheim said, and accordingly stepped up patrols in the waterway and shared radar and other intelligence assets. While the International Maritime Bureau still considers the strait to be vulnerable to piracy, it notes on its website that “the number of attacks have dropped due to the increase and aggressive patrols by the littoral states Authorities since July 2005.”

But not every aspect of piracy is exclusively a naval problem. Andrew Exum, a counterinsurgency expert at the Center for a New American Security, noted that the piracy problem resulted from “ungoverned space” in Somalia, and as a result, U.S. efforts at coordinating international responsibilities could mitigate but not eliminate the problem. The new U.S. military command for Africa, known as Africom, is “helpful for an international blessing” in terms of “coordinating states to allow the U.S. Navy and allied navies to use their ports,” but ultimately the problem is “no one has the appetite to go into Somalia and provide governance.”

Whether the “maverick community” Pritchett describes – and identifies with – will prove to be as influential as their counterinsurgent counterparts in the land-warfare community remains to be seen. But “this incident is what gets the American people going,” he said, and there is a robust international consensus – complete with over a dozen countries’ ship deployments to the waters where the Somali pirates operate and U.N. Security Council resolutions to confront piracy – behind the anti-pirate mission.

Maritime shipping “is a $7.8 trillion industry and there are a lot of trickle-down effects,” Pritchett said. “The insurance rate is going up and that’s going to make our goods cost more. That starts affecting global commerce, which is already struggling … none of this is in our interest.”

Update: Cmdr. Hendrix’s article appeared in the April 2009 issue of “Proceedings,” not “Parameters,” which is the Army War College journal, as this article mistakenly reported originally. We regret the error.

So naturally it attracts the attention of the U.S. Naval Institute’s awesomeblog when The New York Times runs a piece about an embarrassing and messy divorce that Mabus and his ex-wife endured. The White House, rightly, tells the paper’s Jim Rutenberg that Mabus’ divorce is irrelevant to his potential service in the administration. But the Naval Institute’s contrib-blogger Springboared wonders:

Airing dirty laundry is, sadly, a tradition for high-level appointees.  But given how orchestrated anti-nominee media campaigns can be, is this New York Times piece a first salvo in a messy nomination drama?

Springboared also finds a 1971 picture of Mabus as a young Naval officer wearing a seriously righteous beard. If the man’s divorce will be an issue in his hearing, why not get on his case about his facial hair? (Not that Springboared is saying that, but still. Honestly. Let’s grow up as a country, shall we?)

Adm. Patrick Walsh reported that based on more than 100 interviews over 13 days, inspections of all the camps at the prison and observation of daily operations, “it was apparent that the chain of command responsible for the detention mission at Guantanamo consistently seeks to go beyond the minimum standard in complying with Common Article 3,” he said. “We found that the chain of command endeavors to enhance conditions in a manner as humane as possible, consistent with security concerns.”

Advocates for the detainees such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, however, were not convinced.

“The men at Guantanamo are deteriorating at a rapid rate due to the harsh conditions that continue to this day, despite a few cosmetic changes to their routines,” said CCR staff attorney Pardiss Kebriaei in a statement released yesterday. “They are caught in a vicious cycle where their isolation causes psychological damage, which causes them to act out, which brings more abuse and keeps them in isolation. If they are going to be there another year or even another day, this has to end.” The advocates have released their own report on conditions at the prison.

Of course, both things could be true. Men who are abducted, beaten, hooded, flown across the world and thrown in a rudimentary cage-like prison, subjected to “extreme” interrogations and held for up to seven years without charge aren’t likely to be all that cooperative after a while. Their captors may well believe that isolating the men will ensure security, even if it contributes to destroying the prisoners’ mental health. And whether isolation, force-feeding someone who’s trying to starve himself to death, or not letting a prisoner out in the sunshine violates the Geneva Conventions’ ban on “humiliating and degrading treatment” is arguable.

But that seems to be missing the point. The controversy over conditions at Guantanamo really raises two key questions.

First, if the Pentagon is so proud of the conditions at Guantanamo, why not let human rights advocates and journalists in to see it, as they’ve requested? So far, access has been extremely limited, and the lawyers have to count on descriptions of conditions and treatment from their clients, who may have an incentive to exaggerate the deficiencies and abuses, or who, after all this time in prison for crimes they may never have committed, may have truly lost their minds. Allowing independent human rights advocates and journalists to see the prison and interview detainees — and maybe even installing an independent human rights monitor at Guantanamo to observe and make recommendation on how to improve it until it’s closed — could go a long way toward both making the prison a more humane and constructive place, and would give the Obama administration some credibility on an issue that it claims to care about.

Second, the administration needs to move quickly to send more of those prisoners home if they don’t have evidence to warrant holding them. Yesterday, the Pentagon released Binyam Mohamed, the Ethiopian-born U.K. resident picked up in Pakistan and flown to Morrocco, where he says he was interrogated under torture before being sent to a CIA prison in Afghanistan and then to Gitmo. Mohamed was held there for more than four years because the Bush administration alleged he was plotting with al Qaeda to set off bombs in the United States. The charges against him, however, were eventually dropped. Almost seven years after his capture, he was allowed to return home.

Compared to some of the other Gitmo prisoners, Mohamed is lucky. Because he was from the United Kingdom, the United States was able to negotiate his release. Many more are still being held, even if the United States has little to no evidence against them — sometimes even after it is determined they’ve done nothing wrong. Just last week, a the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that a federal judge had no authority to release into the United States the 17 Chinese Muslim Uighurs who are stuck at Guantanamo and have never been charged, but can’t return home for fear of persecution by Chinese authorities. Only the executive has the authority to release them into the United States, the court ruled.

The fact that innocent men are still being held in prison weeks after a new administration has taken over with the promise to restore the rule of law is astonishing. Sure, President Obama has a crashing economy to worry about  among other things. But as Obama put it himself on the campaign trail, when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) threatened to cancel a debate to attend congressional negotiations on a bank bailout bill: “Presidents are going to have to deal with more than one thing at a time.”

Fortunately, the president has a large staff of highly capable people to help him out.  It’s time for Obama to make good on his promises.

If we on active duty don’t get engaged effectively with new media, and I don’t mean by “information prevention” methods, then we cede any relevant arguments to whoever actually shows up and is effective. Worse, we could shut down the “forceful backup” we should be getting and wind up with silly decisions that cost a lot or drive the sailors crazy.

Not long ago I had an interesting colloquy with a senior Army officer who was trying to understand how I could consider myself both a reporter and a blogger. A lot of his argument boiled down to noting that I don’t do my job the way The Washington Post does: I aggregate other people’s reporting, add my own, and also add analysis, even opinion. It was frustrating to hear that this was considered somehow illegitimate. But later in the back-and-forth it occurred to me that I didn’t do a very good job making a case for the merits of my style of reporting as a way to inform the public. So it just goes to show you this is a two-way street and people should leave themselves open to new arguments.

The DDG-1000 Zumwalt (navy.mil)

There was tension in the House of Representatives hearing room July 31 as Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) called to order a meeting of the Seapower and Expeditionary Forces subcommittee. “This may very well be the most important hearing this subcommittee has held since our hearing last January on the procurement of Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles,” Taylor said.

The MRAPs he referred to are specialized armored vehicles designed to protect U.S. troops from roadside bombs in Iraq, the biggest killer of Americans. Since 2006, the Pentagon has spent more than $10 billion in a rush to buy the 15-ton vehicles, which have reportedly saved scores of American lives.

The subject of the July hearing — the topic that had Taylor and his fellow committee members on edge — was a multibillion-dollar warship program that was an order of magnitude more complex than MRAP, five times as expensive and potentially as important. It’s called the DDG-1000 Zumwalt, a ship class that the Navy had hailed as the linchpin of a new military strategy.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

But after more than a decade of development at a cost of billions of dollars, the Navy announced in July that it no longer wanted the new ship. Problem was, the sea service couldn’t come up with a coherent reason why.

The decision on DDG-1000 had come out of the blue. And it turned upside down the Navy’s expensive, delicate plans to boost the size of its fleet and improve its ability to operate close to resource-rich, heavily populated shorelines.

The decision sparked protests from shipyards and defense contractors that had started building DDG-1000s. The munitions industry looked to Congress for an explanation — but Congress had none to offer. The decision to kill the new destroyer had been made without consultation with elected representatives. Even now, five months later, the Navy’s rationale for ending the $50-billion DDG-1000 program seems full of contradictions, casting doubt on the Navy’s ability to manage complex weapons buys at a time when the financial crisis and a new administration might force defense budgets to shrink.

A Departure for the Navy

The new destroyer was intended to protect U.S. sailors fighting in the world’s most dangerous sea zones — shallow, rocky, near-shore waters called “littorals.”

The world’s littorals are rich in resources and home to a growing portion of the world’s population. Patrolling and fighting in littorals pose unique dangers. The water is shallow and turbulent, and the proximity to shore means warships can be threatened by land-based weapons and short-range high-speed boats.

Traditionally, the U.S. Navy has kept to deep waters — where big, expensive ships are safe from land-based threats and free to maneuver without risk of running aground. The Navy designed its ships to suit the deep.

That began to change in 1994, when the sea service launched the $10-billion design effort for the DDG-1000 Zumwalt. By 2006, it was time to build the first one, and the Navy had to tell congressional budgeters how many it wanted.

With the per-vessel cost projected to exceed $3 billion — and possibly reach $5 billion, according to one estimate — the Navy decided it could afford only seven DDG-1000s. Congress approved the plans and funded construction of the first two ships.

Then this year the Navy announced it wanted to buy only the two previously funded Zumwalts and cancel the other five. It was the first major shipbuilding decision by the Navy’s new top officer, Adm. Gary Roughead, who had taken command in 2007. It was a big one — an acquisitions program nearly 15 years in the making was scuttled.

Naval shipyards and other defense contractors were out tens of billions of dollars in projected revenue. And Congress — Taylor’s powerful subcommittee, particularly — was caught in the middle, befuddled by the reversal and left holding the purse strings for a Navy strategy that, suddenly, seemed to lack direction.

To be sure, the Navy had an alternate plan. In the place of the axed DDG-1000s, the sea service said it wanted to buy up to 12 more of its older destroyer class, the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke. The Navy has 62 Burkes in service or on order.

While the Navy’s announcement came as a surprise to elected officials and industry representatives, there also were strong arguments to ditch the destroyer. Zumwalt is expensive, with a per-ship price potentially exceeding $4 billion, not counting R&D. The most recent Burkes, by contrast, cost around $2.2 billion apiece, again not counting R&D (most of which was completed in the 1990s).

The Navy now has roughly 280 front-line ships and wants to boost that number to 313 in about 15 years by buying more than a dozen ships a year — double the average rate in the 1990s and early 2000s. Squeezing more ships out of the roughly $20-billion-a-year shipbuilding budget is therefore critical.

In that context, the DDG-1000 costs “a lot of money,” Vice Adm. Barry McCullough, the Navy’s top technologist, testified in March before Taylor’s subcommittee.

A Startling Admission

But when McCullough testified at Taylor’s July hearing, he said little about cost. Now the Navy was killing off its new destroyer project because the ship “cannot perform area air defense; specifically, it cannot successfully employ the Standard Missile-2, SM-3 or SM-6, and is incapable of conducting Ballistic Missile Defense,” McCullough said.

This was a big deal. Recent classified naval studies had found what McCullough called “increased war-fighting gaps, particularly in the area of integrated air- and missile-defense capability,” against ballistic missiles similar to ones that China could fire and against small cruise missiles like those used by the terror group Hezbollah against the Israeli Navy in the 2006 Lebanon war. Both missile types are particularly dangerous in near-shore waters.

As wonky as such technical details might sound, jaws practically dropped when McCullough made the assertion about the Zumwalt and its missile capability. For good reason. As recently as March, the Navy had stated — on the record — that Zumwalt was better at air defense than any other warship and less vulnerable in shallow waters.

McCullough’s pronouncement represented a startling — and, to some, seemingly absurd — 180-degree turn on a program costing as much as $50 billion over two decades.

Bigger Questions

The Zumwalt decision immediately raised questions about the Navy’s ability to plan, execute and rationalize complex weapons programs. There are indications that the shuffle is driven as much by the obscure preferences of the Navy’s top officer as by any careful analysis of U.S. defense needs.

“This whole thing is very strange,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.) said after hearing about the proposed Zumwalt cuts. Collins, a reliable Navy booster, counts one of the nation’s biggest shipyards in her constituency. She said she had not seen any documentation justifying the Navy’s sudden decision.

Neither had the chief Pentagon weapons buyer, John Young. He called the announcement “a little unusual” and said the Navy needed to do more analysis of the potential costs and benefits of a switch.

At least one firm involved in designing and building DDG-1000s is equally perplexed. “It doesn’t make sense,” Dan Smith, a vice president at Raytheon, told The Washington Independent. Raytheon makes Zumwalt’s radars. Smith said that “the pieces were all there” to make the Zumwalt class capable of using all the Navy’s missiles — and even using them better than any other warship, with just a little extra cash.

Smith said that for Zumwalt to fire SM-2s, the Navy needs only to fund the completion of an electronic data-link that allows the missile and the ship’s S-band radar to “talk” to each other. The Navy said that data-link would cost $80 million. With that addition, the DDG-1000 would be as capable as a DDG-51, which also has an S-band radar, Smith said. Indeed, the two ships’ weapons systems would be nearly identical.

With an extra few hundred million — “three times” the cost of the data-link, according to Smith — the Navy could link SM-2 missiles to the DDG-1000’s second radar, a futuristic X-band system, making the vessel an even better “air defender” than the DDG-51.

Smith’s claims weren’t the empty promises of a salesman. As late as March, Capt. Jim Syring, the Navy’s DDG-1000 program manager, was giving briefings that cited DDG-1000’s “significant capability improvements in every warfare area vs. DDG-51” — including air defense using Standard missiles.

As for Ballistic Missile Defense, Smith said it would cost $550 million to do the R&D to give Zumwalt BMD capability, plus $110 million per ship outfitted. That cost is consistent with an Navy plan to add BMD capability to 18 older ships, including DDG-51s, for a total of $1.2 billion, not counting R&D.

So if DDG-1000 really is as capable as DDG-51, if not more so, why did the Navy use capability as a rationale for axing Zumwalts? Smith said he doesn’t know. “They don’t connect,” he said of the Navy’s tactics for justifying shipbuilding decisions. Reached for comment, a Navy spokesman only repeated the major points of McCollough’s controversial July testimony.

To be sure, even if the upgrades for air- and missile-defense for the DDG-1000 are relatively affordable, the total vessel — including special long-range guns and a radar-deflecting hull — is pricey. For that reason, the Navy’s decision to curtail the program “made perfect sense,” according to Bob Work, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment. But the sea service “kind of gooned up selling” its destroyer plans to Congress, Work told The Washington Independent.

The “gooned-up” salesmanship belies a year-long campaign by Chief of Naval Operations Roughead to end the Zumwalt program, sources say. Roughead apparently opposed the DDG-1000 when he took over the Navy’s top position last September. He soon began chipping away at support for the program. That meant dealing with four key Zumwalt supporters: Dep. Defense Sec. Gordon England;Pentagon acquisitions chief Young; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen; and Rear Adm. Charles Goddard, then the Navy’s top shipbuilder.

England, Young and Mullen are all senior to Roughead: changing their minds was a delicate process. “Behind scenes,” Work says, “Roughead was trying to convince those guys they made a bad decision” regarding plans to buy seven Zumwalts. In time, he succeeded.

The fourth key supporter, Goddard, was relieved of command for allegedly mistreating women while drunk during official travel. The path was clear for Roughead to end the DDG-1000 and switch to a vessel he preferred — the tried-and-true DDG-51.

Does the Navy Have a Littoral Strategy?

But if DDG-1000 is superior to DDG-51 in shallow waters, as the evidence indicates, does the switch to the older warship represent a shift in the Navy’s littoral strategy. In abandoning its potentially most powerful littoral warships, is the Navy actually abandoning littoral warfare?

The consequences of such a move would be enormous. After all, the Navy’s own Maritime Strategy, published last year, emphasized that “lifeblood” global trade “relies on free transit through increasingly urbanized littoral regions.”

The world’s littorals include Iraq’s national waters, a heavily trafficked area where the country’s only two oil terminals are located, and resource-rich Somali waters infested with hundreds of heavily armed pirates riding in speedboats. The Navy currently has only a handful of ships capable of maneuvering around the terminals or chasing pirates close to land. Under plans finalized in 2006, the Navy would have bought more than 60 new littoral warships — 55 lightweight “Littoral Combat Ships” plus seven of the heavier DDG-1000s.

Since the plans were developed, cost overruns on the LCS prompted Congress to cancel three of the first seven. Combined with LCS’s problems, the recent cuts to DDG-1000 might represent a gutting of the future littoral fleet at a time when near-shore threats are growing.

With anti-ship missiles, small gunboats and sea mines proliferating in littoral zones, the Navy seems to have decided to pull back its amphibious vessels, which carry Marines, and keep them at least 25 miles from shore, Gen. James Conway, Marine Corps commandant, said in September. The littorals are just too dangerous for existing Navy ships and their crews.

Without the right warships, the Navy might never “re-take” shallow waters. In that sense, the DDG-1000 perhaps occupies a similar position as other expensive weapons systems — like the bomb-resistant MRAP trucks — whose urgency trumps price.

Nonetheless, under Roughead’s leadership, the Navy does appear to be abandoning its littoral ambitions, as much for cost reasons as anything else. This despite the Maritime Strategy’s promise that “we will not permit conditions under which our maritime forces would be impeded from freedom of maneuver and freedom of access.” The mysterious destroyer shuffle that (publicly) started in July appears to be both a cause and a consequence of the littoral retreat.

But with a new administration about to take office in January, that might change. The Navy can only propose shipbuilding changes: Congress and the president hold the purse strings. Already, Congress has pressured the Navy to add back one of the canceled DDG-1000s, for an eventual total of three. The new administration might restore more.

“Anything could happen,” Work says.

David Axe is the author of “Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War.” He blogs at www.warisboring.com.

The United States maritime fleet amounts to the oldest in the world. (David Axe)

It was August 2003 when a fellow engineer at Lockheed Martin’s Moorestown, N.J., facility dropped by Mike DeKort’s office with a seemingly absurd complaint.

He said that Lockheed, the nation’s No. 1 defense contractor, had been buying non-waterproof radios from a subcontractor to install on some 15-year-old patrol boats that Lockheed was upgrading for the U.S. Coast Guard. “My initial reaction,” DeKort said, five years later, “was that was crazy.”

DeKort’s reaction is understandable. Lockheed’s Moorestown team had built its reputation designing “Aegis” radars for the Navy that can track scores of targets hundreds of miles away with amazing precision. On the strength of its Aegis work, Lockheed, along with its shipbuilding partner Northrop Grumman, just a year earlier had won a contract to manage a wide range of “plug-and-play” Coast Guard equipment projects collectively nicknamed “Deepwater.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

They were aimed at replacing what amounts to one of the world’s oldest maritime fleets. The typical Navy warship is around 20 years old. After years of under-funding, Coast Guard vessels average 35 years.

The Deepwater projects included new airplanes, upgraded helicopters and patrol boats and huge, powerful new ocean-going cutters the size of Navy warships, all linked by an electronic network.

But it didn’t work. In addition to the non-waterproof radios, there were boats and ships with leaky, faulty hulls plus computers that seeped secret data. As DeKort quickly discovered in the course of his own informal investigation, Lockheed and Northrop had botched much of Deepwater, and no one in the government knew anything about it.

When DeKort complained to his bosses, he was fired — making him one of the earliest casualties of a controversial new way of military contracting.

Traditionally, the Pentagon — or, in the Coast Guard’s case, the Dept. of Homeland Security — itself issued separate contracts for each of its major pieces of equipment, say, a tank, a ship or a fighter jet. It would then assign government acquisitions officials to oversee the contract — from beginning to end.

But that was before today’s sophisticated “systems of systems,” where several different vehicles share common electronics, enabling them to swap data and automatically coordinate their actions.

It was also before government budget cuts in the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, forced the Pentagon acquisitions workforce to shrink by 50 percent, according to a Pentagon panel that convened in January. This atrophied workforce was overwhelmed when defense spending doubled after Sept. 11.

A new way of designing weapons -– and the new manpower shortages -– has given rise to a new way of buying weapons. Industry teams called “Lead Systems Integrators” would take a vague military requirement and a large pot of money — like Deepwater’s projected $25 billion over 20 years — and go to town.

Lead Systems Integrators were responsible for writing many of the detailed requirements and then for doing most of the contracting for actual design and production. Government managers would be thin on the ground, if not absent.

In other words, an industry team would dole out the taxpayer’s money as only the team saw fit, “perform[ing] functions that are usually performed by the contracting officer and other officials on the government’s acquisition team,” according to a March 2007 report from the Congressional Research Service. Systems integrators could even award government-funded contracts to themselves.

Northrop, for example, assigned most of Deepwater’s shipbuilding to Northrop shipyards. Lockheed gave itself much of the electronics work.

Private companies doling out taxpayer dollars on government’s behalf, sometimes to themselves, obviously represents a major oversight problem.

“It is the equivalent of putting a very juicy steak in front of a very hungry dog, and expecting the steak to still be there the next day,” said Jim Atkinson, one of a handful of engineers cleared by the National Security Agency to inspect complex communications systems like those in Deepwater.

Still, for years, no one really questioned the wisdom of those choices. Lead Systems Integrator, or LSI, deals spread like weeds. LSIs now account for the many of the biggest programs in the Army, Air Force and Coast Guard – to the tune of some $300 billion.

Occasional attempts to reign in the contractors were foiled by semantics. Only now is Congress even beginning to recognize the problem. The result in 2008 is a “coming crisis” in the Pentagon, according to a July report by the Defense Science Board, an independent advisory panel. “Much of the responsibility for managing … complex systems has shifted to industry … without effective government oversight.”

Reform “must begin now,” the report concluded. “The nation’s security depends on it.”

David Axe is the author of “Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War.” He blogs at www.warisboring.com.

Part 2 of this series looks more closely at some of the LSIs, and at Congress’ attempts to reign them in.