In the world of military spending, the word "reform" is back in vogue.

It's not hard to see why. We have a new administration elected on the promise of change. Two small and unpopular wars are going badly -- at mind-boggling expense, morally and materially -- accompanied by a stream of independent auditors’ reports of war profiteering and corruption as bad as we've ever seen.

The Government Accountability Office tells us the Pentagon has set a new record for cost overruns, $300 billion. Those overruns pay for weapons programs that are years late, perform badly, and have little combat utility in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else.  Even discounting the corrosive effects of the current wars on our military, the Pentagon’s steady decay of the last fifty years continues.

Pentagon spending ratchets up every year, causing our combat forces to grow smaller and smaller. Why? Because the military bureaucracies, with near universal acquiescence, use the extra money to run up the costs of new weapons much faster than their budget grows. The nation is now spending more on defense than in any year since WWII, even after adjusting for inflation. The direct result is fewer Army combat brigades, fewer Navy ships and subs, and fewer Air Force fighters and bombers than at any point since 1946. The baroque complexity and expense of our new weapons constrains us to buy so few that our ship, plane and tank inventories are older, on average, than ever before. Worst of all, to help pay for those few hyper-expensive new weapons, we are sending some troops off to war with even less combat training than in the seventies, dubbed the “hollow decade” for its infamously low combat readiness.

Presiding unchallenged over this growing mess has been a remarkably homogenous coterie of congressional committee members and Pentagon civilian officials, closely tied to the defense industry and persisting through three decades of Democratic and Republican administrations. The Pentagon civilians of either stripe stoutly defended business-as-usual.  Examples abound: Democratic appointees punched loopholes in the 1990 reform law forcing the Pentagon to actually balance the books for the first time. Republicans kept pouring money into a sixty-year-old missile defense program that doesn’t work against Third World intercontinental ballistic missiles that don’t exist.  Civilian appointees of both parties steadfastly undermined a 1983 reform law requiring weapons to be tested in the field before spending piles of money putting them into full production.

In Congress, Republicans and Democrats in the Armed Services Committees and the corresponding Defense Appropriations Subcommittees continue a tradition of strenuous partisan debate, usually over how much to increase each president's defense budget.  Overriding partisan rancor, every year they manage to agree in adding billions of dollars to be spent in their districts for "earmarks," less euphemistically known as pork.

Is It Reform, or Something Else, in the Air?

Now that the mess created by their handiwork of the last thirty years can no longer be hidden, Washington's national security aristocrats have donned the reform crusader's shining armor.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has been lauded by The New York Times for "sweeping reforms" in his April decisions to truncate a few particularly useless and grossly expensive weapons programs.  Looking every bit the crusader, Gates sought to sweep away the F-22 fighter, ludicrous with its $350 million price tag and not a single sortie flown over Iraq or Afghanistan.  Demanding that the Pentagon bureaucracy focus on the wars we are fighting today, he also cancelled a Navy-managed Presidential helicopter even more gold-plated and expensive than the F-22.  Preserving balance among the services, he axed an Army family of Rube Goldberg-inspired, under-armored vehicles bursting with radios and computers but ignoring the lessons of Iraq.

But these breathlessly described "sweeping reforms" have a dark side that undoes them.  A telling example:  When Gates very correctly cancelled Lockheed's F-22, he simultaneously endorsed going ahead full speed with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, built by the same company. With the F-35 already overweight, sluggish-performing, behind schedule, and growing in cost as fast as the F-22 ever did, the Gates-endorsed plan pays for more than 500 of them before the first definitive flight test report lands on his desk. The F-35 program exemplifies why the Pentagon cannot be trusted to reform itself. By doing nothing to fix the obvious problems in this turkey of a program, Gates is ensuring a rerun of the F-22 cost and performance disaster, the antithesis of real reform, and a poster child for business-as-usual.  So much for sweeping reform.

Rushing to put on its own cosmetically polished armor, Congress has passed the "Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009," their nostrum to cure cost growth, delivery delays and the rest of the Pentagon procurement mess. Written by the bipartisan leadership of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, not a single member of Congress voted against the bill. At his May 22 Rose Garden signing ceremony, President Obama officially joined this landslide enthusiasm for the Reform Act, saying "I'm extraordinarily proud to stand here and sign …"

It would surely be something to be proud of if, after decades of decay propelled by their staunch sabotage of every attempt at reform, Congress and the Executive Branch had found the political spine to bring real "change" to the Pentagon. Sadly, barring a few important but isolated events we will discuss below, that spine has not been much in evidence.

Starting at the top, according to his Office of Management and Budget, Obama plans to spend $5.1 trillion between 2010 and 2017, assuming he is elected to two terms.  This will be more than George W. Bush, aided by Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, spent from 2002 to 2009.  In the eight years of his famous defense "spend-up," Ronald Reagan managed to spend just $4.2 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars. In other words, Obama plans to outspend Reagan by 20 percent, a whopping $850 billion more!  To move beyond business-as-usual to meaningful reform, Obama and Gates need to change the vector of misdirected spending that has locked us into the long downward spiral of the last fifty years. Regrettably, if we follow the new Obama spending plan unchanged, Congressional Budget Office analyses show that  the long term shrinking of our forces and the aging of our weapons will continue unchecked, accompanied by still more gutting of our readiness to fight.  These outcomes are not inevitable; clearly, the spending plan needs to be improved in major ways.

Will Old Brooms Sweep Clean?

But wait, today's Pentagon insiders protest.  All of this will change. After all, to implement Gates' "sweeping reforms," Obama's Pentagon officials are conducting a new Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a congressionally mandated appraisal of just about everything in the Pentagon.

This will be the sixth such review; Pentagon observers have been thoroughly jaded by the previous five. Each of these reviews did incorporate a new and different buzz word theme.  For instance, Rumsfeld's "defense transformation" was a policy wonk's smokescreen for shoveling more money into electronics and big ticket weaponry. Word-smithing aside, each of the five reviews resulted in no perceptible change in the trajectory of Pentagon decay. Taken as a whole, the two decades of QDRs read like report cards written by changeless bureaucrats grading their own vision of a future that looks remarkably like the past.

Perhaps it is not reasonable to condemn the sixth QDR...