{"id":68200,"date":"2021-10-28T16:21:14","date_gmt":"2021-10-28T16:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/armytimes\/uncategorized\/2021\/10\/28\/risk-aversion-and-secrecy-are-costing-us-its-military-advantage-no-2-general-says\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T12:17:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T12:17:18","slug":"risk-aversion-and-secrecy-are-costing-us-its-military-advantage-no-2-general-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/armytimes\/news\/pentagon-congress\/2021\/10\/28\/risk-aversion-and-secrecy-are-costing-us-its-military-advantage-no-2-general-says\/","title":{"rendered":"Risk aversion and secrecy are costing US its military advantage, No. 2 general says"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Air Force Gen. John Hyten<\/a>, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff<\/a>, is about to retire after four decades in uniform, and the Defense Department is still trying to solve some of the problems it was trying to tackle when he first put on his second lieutenant bar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hyten is due to relinquish responsibility on Nov. 21, then officially retire, though President Joe Biden has not yet nominated a replacement. Like many before him, he laments the Pentagon\u2019s deeply entrenched bureaucracy, he told reporters at a Defense Writers Group event on Thursday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAfter 40 years, I didn\u2019t replace [the Space Defense Operations Center],\u201d he said, despite tours as the head of Space Command and Strategic Command. \u201cI worked on SPADOC<\/a> the first time in 1986… that\u2019s not a current weapon system. And there\u2019s been better ways to do that mission for decades.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To that end, he told Military Times, not being able to implement a resilient space architecture \u2015 one that can recover quickly after an attack or some other break in functionality \u2015 is his biggest regret about his time as the second-highest ranking officer in the military.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve talked about it for over a decade. And we\u2019ve designed it for over a decade. And the design is out there,\u201d Hyten said. \u201cAnd because we haven\u2019t [implemented it], we actually put the president in a tough spot,\u201d with limited options if communications and weapons systems are down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That slow progress has created a situation where U.S. capabilities are concentrated in a handful of locations and systems \u2015 \u201cfat, juicy targets,\u201d he called them \u2015 while an adversary like China has spread its capabilities out over hundreds of small targets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEven though our fat, juicy targets are so much more capable than theirs, they\u2019re still fat, juicy targets. So we\u2019ve actually encouraged the adversary to figure out how to kill fat juicy targets,\u201d he said. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t have done that, and we could have done something different.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of the Pentagon\u2019s hesitancy, he said, is a philosophy in which nothing gets off the ground until everyone working on it is sure it\u2019ll be a success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He referenced a painting in the Pentagon that depicts the launch of Discovery 14, the first in a series of solar system exploration rockets to successfully launch. That the previous 13 were allowed to fail without the program being canceled entirely wouldn\u2019t happen today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hyten pinpoints the 2000 Quadrennial Defense Review as the moment everything changed. That document proclaimed that the U.S. no longer had adversaries, and so would turn focus to development not to meet threats, but to increase capabilities for their own sake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen we did that, one of the implications was, since we\u2019re so far ahead, we can remove all risk from the development process and make sure we only test when everything will work,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because otherwise, he said, if a new system failed the first time \u2015 which is generally to be expected, and sometimes is the goal, because you want to make something fail on purpose to see how far you can push it \u2015 it would make headlines, get lawmakers\u2019 attention and result in an investigation. And if if failed a second time, also generally to be expected, the program could be canceled altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s what happened with the early days of DoD\u2019s foray into hypersonic weapons, roughly a decade go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd then others start building hypersonics, others start testing, they start doing it the way we used to do it and they start moving fast,\u201d Hyten said. \u201cAnd so we start the programs again. And we still won\u2019t test until we\u2019re highly confident they\u2019ll work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\t