Coming crash, nausée et Pentagone

Il y a eu, les 10 et 11 mars, un séminaire de haute tenue à Washington, organisée conjointement par la National Defense University (NDU) et l’Atlantic Council. L’intitulé de cet événement, tel que nous le rapporte Harlan Ullman, un des intervenants et un distingué chercheur des deux organisations impliquées, est: “Audacity for Change – Transforming How the Pentagon Conducts Its Business”, – ou encore, autre intitulé officiel : “Defense Business Transformation: Audacity for Change”… Bref, il est question d’audace, de changement et du Pentagone.

Le même Ullman, sur UPI (le 11 mars, retransmis par Spacewar.com), nous dit son sentiment sur la chose. L’audace et le changement sont remplacés par ce qu’on pourrait qualifier de “nausée intellectuelle”, que ce soit d’angoisse et de dégoût. C’est l’effet que semblent désormais produire les écuries d’Augias (dito, le système de l’américanisme), rayon Pentagone. Les prévisions vont de pair et concernent un destin apocalyptique: «Underpinning this conference was the proposition that what happened to Wall Street and Main Street – implosion – could well happen to the Pentagon.»

Harlan Ullman prend à son compte la thèse du coming crash du Pentagone, dont nous avons souvent parlé à l’automne dernier. Il s’agit d’un processus semblable au processus financier qui a abouti à l’effondrement du 15 septembre 2008 et la suite.

Ullman rappelle d’abord, rapidement mais non sans nous éveiller l’esprit, la fable qui entoure la puissance militaire des USA, à laquelle la plupart de nos analystes et journalistes bien informés, notamment et essentiellement en Europe, avec une ferveur religieuse du plus heureux effet, croient dur comme fer («After all, the United States has the finest military in the world. […] Its weapons and combat systems are the world's most advanced…»). Puis il enchaîne sur ce qu’il juge être la situation réelle, – et le ciel nous tombe sur la tête, – dans tous les cas sur celle “de nos analystes et journalistes bien informés, notamment et essentiellement en Europe”.

«But the forces that brought Wall Street and Main Street to their collective knees affect the Pentagon in strikingly similar ways. As excessive debt triggered the subprime crisis, the Pentagon has an annual appetite for about $750 billion to $800 billion a year to keep it operating at current levels. With the burgeoning national deficit and debt, defense cannot be immune to cuts, probably drastic. Reductions of a hundred billion dollars a year or more are inevitable, especially as supplemental appropriation spending, which has sustained the department for the past five years, is curtailed or ended.

»Second, profound disagreements over strategy are not easily reconciled. About 80 percent of our forces are being used in non-conventional conditions of combat, in which the enemy has no army, navy or air force, often termed “small wars.” Eighty percent of our procurement programs are designed for “big wars” against some future peer enemy that will have powerful conventional armies and navies. We lack the resources to prepare for both. Yet we have not been able to make the choices that address this strategic impasse.

»Third, the costs of buying virtually everything from major weapons systems to people, healthcare and pensions are skyrocketing. Programs to include F-22 and F-35 jet aircraft, the Army's Future Combat Systems and the Navy's Littoral Combat Ships have at least doubled in costs in real terms, taken twice as long to acquire and with about half as many as originally planned. Unfortunately, these trends cannot be reversed without radical change to how the Pentagon conducts the business side of its operations, and even then Congress and its constituents will make rationalization very difficult by inserting funds for systems the department neither wants nor needs.

»Fourth, as in the private sector, oversight and regulation have been both too strict and too lax. As hedge funds were unregulated, Congress provided virtually no oversight on the trillions of dollars appropriated to defense since Sept. 11, 2001, particularly on the supplemental spending bills. And as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act imposed hugely expensive and intensive regulation over public companies, that oversight pales to the strictures on defense programs.

»Left unchecked, these and other factors will do to the Pentagon what has happened on Main Street and Wall Street…»

Egalement présent à ce séminaire, Anthony Cordesman, du prestigieux CSIS, dont nous avons déjà parlé dans l’exercice de sa nausée anti-pentagonesque. Cordesman s’y est livré, sans surprise puisque la chose se poursuit, avec l'alacrité renforcée par quelques mois de plus de dégradation accélérée du monstre Moby Dick..

Greg Grant, de DoDBuzz.com nous rapporte la chose, le 11 mars. Cordesman est déchaîné. Dans le passage cité par Grant, il s’attache aux processus de planification, de détermination de la stratégie, de prévision, etc. Sa mesure de la situation au Pentagone, c’est le sentiment de Dieu, de haine, de désamour, voire d’indifférence pour le sort des petits hommes en poste au Pentagone. Cordesman juge que la direction est coupable, celle du DoD, celle des USA, – mais il semble exonérer Dieu de toute responsabilité, – et il veut des têtes.

«The crisis befalling DOD is also the product of a complete decoupling of any meaningful strategy and detailed force and procurement plans and honest budgeting. Cordesman had some choice comments on the upcoming QDR, being run on the OSD side by under secretary of defense Michele Flournoy’s policy shop.

»“If God really hates you, you may end up working on a Quadrennial Defense Review: The most pointless and destructive planning effort imaginable. You will waste two years on a document decoupled from a real world force plan, from an honest set of decisions about manpower or procurement, with no clear budget or FYDP, and with no metrics to measure or determine its success. If God merely dislikes you, you may end up helping your service chief or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs draft one of those vague, anodyne strategy documents that is all concepts and no plans or execution. If God is totally indifferent, you will end up working on our national strategy and simply be irrelevant.”

»“Is $533.7 billion in FY2010 and 4.2% of the GNP enough? Enough for what? Our most recent QDR is a morass of half thought-out ideas—many calling for further study or otherwise deferring tangible action. We don’t have a force plan. We don’t have a clearly defined procurement plan. We don’t tie it to end strength goals that are clearly defined and costed. We haven’t provided meaningful budget figures because the FYDP is not tied to the QDR. We haven’t set clear goals to be achieved. We have no metrics.”

»“Would we be where we are today if we forced the department to tie its strategy to plans and budget, if we demanded metrics, if we required a public annual accounting, and if we held our top leadership fully accountable? Can any change in process or business practices make up for this failure? The answer is no.”»

La fureur est donc générale, la nausée collective, désormais, lorsqu’on parle du Pentagone. Dans ce sentiment qui commence à se répandre dans les milieux les plus huppés (Ullman et Cordesman n’ont rien de “dissidents”, de zozo type-dedefensa.org), on distinguerait presque un souhait cathartique d’effondrement du Pentagone. La chose étant si complètement pourrie par les termites, ne serait-il pas préférable qu’elle s’effondrât dans un nuage de poussière toxique? Ce sentiment-là n’est pas si loin.

Mis en ligne le 12 mars 2009 à 09H29