The Pentagon's Doomsday Men

Does the Pentagon need 381 stealthy F-22 fighters? Well, that depends on what the risk is that the United States will battle a near equal adversary in a war over the next few years. What is the risk of that potentially catastrophic scenario happening? Unlikely, but how unlikely?

In a a piece appearing online today in Foreign Policy, called "The Pentagon's Doomsday Men," I explore the larger issue of how the Pentagon approaches (or fails to approach) risk management, when weighing the possibility of future threats, and the technologies needed to respond to those threats. It's more a theoretical argument than a criticism of any particular weapon system. The full piece is available here, but here's a small snippet:

*The Pentagon, for its part, frequently speaks about investing in “high-risk, high-payoff” efforts—research that might well fail, but could lead to significant breakthroughs if it pays off. The Pentagon counts stealth aircraft, unmanned aircraft, and the Internet as successful examples of this strategy. Defense officials often employ a similar justification when addressing threats that may have a low probability of occurring, but pose a devastating consequence if they occur. *

*The problem with this approach to risk is not the underlying philosophy, but the frequent lack of willingness to either qualitatively or quantitatively address the actual risks. At the extreme, we know an attack by aliens from outer space is theoretically possible, but improbable. On the more conventional side, we know that a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland is more likely than another country’s sudden development of a fighter that can match the F-22. *

The Foreign Policy article builds off a somewhat related, and longer, policy paper I wrote for the Stanley Foundation, called, Scary Things That Don’t Exist: Separating Myth From Reality in Future WMD.

[Image: Boeing]