Even as defense spending rises, many investments are still going into high-cost, limited systems, raising questions about whether the U.S. is building the right mix to sustain a prolonged fight. Here to share her analysis is senior defense policy analyst for the Center for Defense Information at POGO, Virginia Burger.<br>See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Pentagon is spending billions on major weapons systems, but there are growing questions

The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton

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**Podcast:** The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton

## Transcript

Federal Drive is presented by GEHA, Government Employees Health Association, proudly providing health and dental benefits to federal employees and their families. Visit GEHA.com. Even as defense spending rises, many investments are still going into high-cost, limited-use systems, raising questions about whether the U.S. is building the right mix to sustain a prolonged fight. Here to share her analysis is Senior Defense Policy Analyst for the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight, Virginia Berger.

Virginia, welcome back to the show. It's great to see you. It's great to see you as well, Terry. You have an interesting new paper out, Exquisite Defense Fails in Practice. Let's start at the top. Define for me what you mean when you say exquisite defense. So exquisite is a term that has been used as a label for specific systems and munitions within the U.S. military for a couple decades now.

Initially, it was used as a term by the establishment, by the leadership within the Pentagon, as a critique of our procurement habits that were left over from the Cold War.

Like looking into the patterns we had built on obtaining and procuring incredibly technologically dense and complex missiles that came out of needs identified during the Cold War, while we were playing nuclear brinksmanship with the Soviets, and all of the sort of patterns and trends that were established in military procurement and acquisition during that period.

And so in the mid-2000s, there was sort of this retrospective going on saying, okay, are those exquisite systems, these incredibly technically complex, incredibly expensive systems going to be what we need in the next fight?

And this question was first raised by the military establishment. Not much was done within the Pentagon to address it. There were a couple initiatives, but no real credible action was taken at a scale that any civilian would be able to notice.

But it became sort of a pejorative term within military policy spaces overall. And exquisite defense turned into this term of critique, saying, hey, when we buy exquisite things, we are buying things that are too expensive, too fancy.

The phrase that always is sort of used in tandem with exquisite is high cost, low density, right? Incredibly expensive, but not very many, right? If you look at the average cost for something like some of these munitions that are often labeled as exquisite, one of them costs $15 million for a single bomb, right?

And like, that's exquisite. It's these huge high costs because of how technically dense they are. All of the process that has to go into developing and making them. That's what we use when, that's what we're referring to when we say exquisite. I really appreciate that articulation of the concept because the paper focuses on two particular systems, air defense systems, Patriot and FAD. Both have been in the military i...

The Pentagon is spending billions on major weapons systems, but there are growing questions

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The Pentagon is spending billions on major weapons systems, but there are growing questions

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.