Pentagon Wars and Procurement

I recently watched Pentagon Wars, a 1998 comedy that purports to portray the development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. I came away from it extremely irritated. It's a story based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the problems with defense procurement, treating complicated, difficult issues as things that would be simple if not for the interests of those with power. This is entirely contrary to my views on such things, and as a lot of people's best reference for military procurement, I think it has had a corrosive impact on the public discourse.

Now, for those who don't follow this, the Bradley is the US Army's main Infantry Fighting Vehicle, designed to move a small squad of infantrymen about and provide them with the bulk of their firepower in combat. The movie is based on a book by Air Force Colonel James Burton, who during a tour at the Pentagon had gotten into a fight with the Army about appropriate testing methodology for the Bradley. Things got so heated that Burton retired early and took his case to the public.

Now, I will admit to having not read Burton's book, but the movie is almost laughably simplistic. This is perhaps best seen in the scene where they lay out the "development" of the Bradley, which can be found here. As comedy, it's a good scene, but it's built around the fundamental assumption that the original design for a "battle taxi" was what the vehicle was supposed to be. And if that assumption is correct, then the "evolution" of the Bradley¹ is a damning indictment of the US procurement system. But that indictment isn't correct, because while the Bradley is clearly worse at being the M113 than the M113 is, it was never supposed to be an M113, dating all the way back to the origins of the program in the mid-60s.²

So, a quick history lesson is in order. In the years after WWII, the Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) was developed. This was basically a tracked box, designed to carry an infantry squad and be proof against machine gun fire. The assumption was that it would drop off its infantry, and then leave. But soon, someone realized that the vehicle could bring firepower as well as mobility, and the development of the Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV) began, the first in service being the Soviet BMP-1 in the mid-60s. The basic idea is to fit the vehicle with a weapon suitable for engaging targets short of tanks, such as infantry and soft-skin vehicles, although to keep size and weight under control, this is going to mean carrying fewer troops than a similarly-sized APC. And it doesn't seem like a terrible idea. Sure, the Bradley may only bring half the troops to the fight that an M113 would, but it also brings a 25mm chain gun and a couple of anti-tank missiles. That may not be a great option if you're trying to clear houses in a city, but I'd much rather have it if I was defending Germany from a Soviet Motor Rifle Division.

The movie then spends most of its runtime "examining" the debate over survivability testing, although it caricatures Burton's opponents to the point of slander. Burton believed in doing full-scale live-fire testing under conditions as close to reality as possible, which the movie treats as obviously the correct position, while his opponents want to avoid it because it will make the Bradley look bad. The charitable case for their position is that full-scale live-fire testing is both very expensive and a bad way to gather data that can actually be used to improve survivability. There's a scene where Burton discovers that the ammunition inside the Bradley during tests is filled with sand instead of powder. It's treated as something done to fake the tests so the Bradley looks better. But the alternative explanation, that you can conduct separate tests to figure out what it takes to set off secondary explosions, and the results of the sand-filled shell test are a lot cheaper to clean up, seems a lot more likely to me. Maybe it's because I'm an engineer, and used to breaking big things down into small things, and then putting them back together.

Probably the best example of this unfairness to the other side comes in a scene where Burton's main opponent is testifying before Congress, and is asked why the fuel tanks were filled with water. He says that if they had been filled with fuel, the vehicle might have exploded and then they couldn't do more tests. He's then asked how many Bradleys they sunk during testing of the vehicle's amphibious capabilities, and after trying to dodge the question, is eventually forced to admit that the answer is four. It is again a very funny scene, but I was just about shouting at the screen. It's extremely unlikely that even one of the four was left sitting on the bottom of the river/lake/testing facility, and that makes a tremendous difference in how Burton's opponents come off.

In a later scene, the General is again testifying, and says "I am suggesting that Colonel Burton and his tests did not reveal anything we didn't already know. Except his own penchant for theatrics." This is the truest line in the entire movie. Not only is it repeatedly unfair to Burton's opponents³ but it also completely seems to ignore the tradeoffs inherent in delaying a military vehicle to do more testing. Sure, you will get a better vehicle to the troops eventually, but in the meantime, they will be stuck with what they already have.

Now, there's obviously a lot of unethical behavior by Burton's opponents in the film, and if any of that happened, then it is obviously a bad thing and I don't want to defend it. But I definitely don't trust the writers of this movie to be fair to the other side, and I don't think I would trust Burton to, either. The movie as a whole is good as humor, but it commits what I consider one of the worst sins in this area. By offering simple solutions to complex problems, it misinforms viewers about the problems of defense procurement, and as such, should be watched with an extremely large grain of salt.