War drives innovation. Weapons systems that were cutting edge at the beginning of a great power war often are obsolete by the end because the enemy learns how to counter them. A little-appreciated challenge of the Ukraine war is that it is making many of the United States’ best weapons systems obsolete. As a result, the next president and Congress need to do a major push in defense weapons innovation.

For example, according to a confidential Ukrainian weapons assessment that was leaked to the Washington Post and summarized by Yahoo news:

The assessment said that Ukraine stopped using the Excalibur shells last year after the weapon ‘lost its potential’ and effectiveness fell to just 10 per cent.

The Himars system, hailed early in the war for its ability to destroy targets with a single shot, has now become ‘completely ineffective,’ according to one Ukrainian military source.

The problem is that the Excalibur artillery shells, developed by a U.S. Army research committee, and the Himars system, developed by Lockheed Martin, both depend upon satellite GPS which the Russians have figured out how to disrupt on the battlefield.

The war has also revealed technical problems with the Javelyn missile, developed by Raytheon, which has also been abandoned for battlefield use by the Ukrainians according to Blackwater founder Erik Prince in an interview with Tucker Carlson (03:06 mark):

The Javelyn missile which Raytheon sells to the taxpayers for $200,000 a shot, with a $300,000 command launch unit, the Ukrainians can only use that for the first shot in an ambush because their IR detector – if they shoot the first tank, the tank is very hot, it’s burning. If they try to shoot a second and third missile, the other missiles go for the very hot spot in the battle field (they cannot even discern), so the Ukrainians shift from a $200,000 missile from the Americans to one that they build themselves for $29,000 and it works just as well.

Such debilitating problems are often discovered through the trials of war. What to do? Innovate. For instance, U.S. precision weapons need additional navigational capabilities to overcome or outsmart jamming tactics.

But a critical challenge for such innovation may be our own bureaucracy, defense industry incumbents, and inertia. While progress has been made in recent years towards diversifying the defense industrial and contractor base, much progress is needed. And too much reliance is placed on inefficient firms.

The space domain provides an example of the costs of relying on legacy contractors. Defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing have had contracts since the demise of the Space Shuttle to provide new human flight systems. But these efforts have yet to launch manned rockets into space. Meanwhile, independent entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been launching manned flights since 2020 at about 3/5 of the cost.

How is it that an independent entrepreneur and his start-up company can succeed where experienced and established companies cannot? One possibility is incompetence due to mismanagement and stupidity.

The Peter Principle suggests that in any organization, over time, people rise to the level of their own incompetence. Parkinson’s Law indicates that in any organization, over time, bureaucracy expands at an exponential level so that the people in the organization must spend a higher and higher percentage of their time communicating with their fellow bureaucrats. Another possibility is simple corruption: people spending government money with little focus on delivering excellence and efficiency.

It is easy to waste government money, hard to spend it well. Spending well requires smarts and accountability. Harry S. Truman made an enduring contribution to the U.S. effort to win World War II by heading the Senate investigatory committee that held government contractors responsible for waste, fraud, and abuse. One of the stories related in his oral autobiography (Plain Speaking, p. 177) involved poorly designed bombers:

Glenn Martin was making B-26 bombers and they were crashing and killing kids right and left. So I said to Martin, ‘What’s wrong with these planes?’

He said ‘The wingspread isn’t wide enough.’

So I said, ‘Then why aren’t you making it wider?’

And he said ‘I don’t have to. The plans are too far along, and besides, I’ve got a contract.’

So I said, ‘All right. If that’s the way you feel, I’ll see to it that your contract is canceled and you won’t get another.’

‘Oh,’ he says, ‘if that’s the way it’s going to be, we’ll fix it,’ and he did.

Perhaps the manufacturers of weapons systems that are currently failing in the Ukraine battlefield need to receive similarly blunt ultimatums. In total, Truman estimated that his efforts saved $15 billion (about $270 billion in 2024), and thousands of lives.

In the beginning part of his May 25 speech during his Bronx rally, President Trump told the story of a government inefficiency that he personally rectified when he renovated the Wollman ice skating rink in Central Park (01:12:23 mark):

Almost 20 million dollars was spent over a long period of time. It was an embarrassment to the city. Every day they would be laying the copper pipe and every night that same pipe would be stolen… They poured the concrete in small patches and wrong directions and at different heights…. 

So, I volunteered and I took over the project… And, when I took it over, I said if it costs more than 2 million dollars, I would pay for it, the entire amount, but it cost far less. 

The first thing I did was call the Montreal Canadiens hockey team in Canada… And they told me that you don’t want to use copper tubing and gas, because the gas is very delicate and it leaks…. “You want to use rubber hose (I said, ‘I like that. That’s a lot cheaper!’), water and salt….”

I started the project, laid the rubber hose, mixed the water and the salt, beautifully together. (I was down there when they were doing it. I said, “You gotta do it right.”) And covered the entire rink with concrete…. one contiguous pouring. It was a day and a half of pouring concrete…

The rink was completed in just three months for far less than the 2 million dollars projected. The biggest expense was the demolition. The demolishing of everything that was built so incorrectly, so badly over a 10-year period….

The next administration and the Congress will have to put smart individuals, not bureaucratic committees, in charge of developing new weapon systems. They need to get the best people to design the new systems. Then they should get competitive bids and follow-up, personally, to ensure that those new systems will cost less and be produced in record time.

The result should be systems that will actually work on the battlefield. The lives of American soldiers and the future of American military power depend upon it.

The Richmans co-authored the 2014 book Balanced Trade published by Lexington Books, and the 2008 book Trading Away Our Future published by Ideal Taxes Association.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.