Damage Control (cont'd)
The Big Picture
Next time you gripe about writing your yearly income tax check to Uncle Sam, you might want to thank Jonathan Tumin '73 for saving American taxpayers from investing in a $1.6 billion boondoggle. Early in his career with the federal government, Tumin, now a senior evaluator for the federal government's General Accounting Office (GAO), discovered that a highly touted nerve gas bomb that had been proposed to Congress amounted to an expensive mass of hot air.
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Jonathan Tumin '73 |
Politics aside, Tumin's efforts make a significant difference in how the U.S. government invests its taxpayers' money when it comes to military and defense spending. Like auditors keeping an eye out for those who like to cook the books, Tumin and his staff make sure ordnance claims made by the Pentagon and the Department of Defense really are true. "Fundamentally, we see if the American government is getting what it pays for," explains Tumin. Although not an activist in the Ralph Nader mold, he is a believer in amassing all of the facts -- even if they butt up against established practices. Because of analyses done by his office, the country has abandoned costly and ineffective projects like the Midget Man, and realigned various defense efforts, including the Gulf-War-inspired switch from land-based missiles to submarine-based missiles to increase effectiveness and cut down on duplication of services.
Tumin's branch of the GAO gained prominence after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The winding down of the Cold War and the diminished focus and reliance on military weapons production prompted the government to assess the need for and effectiveness of its various ordnance programs. Figuring out what to cut and how to do it, however, required "outsiders" like Tumin to look at the system and see what weapons were efficient (i.e., cost effective and best serving the needs of our defense and the safety of our military) and which weren't. "It became apparent that no one had done an extensive comparison between the classified [weapons] data and what was being spoken publicly," says Tumin. "Basically no one we could find had ever done that before, especially in terms of cost-effectiveness, comparative statistics, time involved in a project and the ability for [a weapon] to do what it was said it was supposed to do."
Tumin quickly discovered that the government needed to be looking at the picture in a broader way that de-emphasized research and development of the technological capabilities of weapons. What was needed, he realized, was an approach that utilized the social sciences and accounted for the final outcomes and costs of these projects in their broader social context. A political science major at Haverford, Tumin is a believer in letting his strong ability to analyze all the facts -- economic, logistical and psychological -- determine the validity of a project financed by American taxpayers. "We basically employ a social science methodology to try to look across systems as a way of figuring out complex issues," he explains.
In doing such analyses Tumin has been privy to hundreds of top-secret documents that will never be made public. He is also well-versed in lingo that utilizes phrases such as "actual kill" and "strike ratio" -- statistics that might lead one to view his vocation as problematic to the American taxpayers rather than protective. But Tumin points to the success of nuclear weapons in deterring aggression on the planet, and claims that neither he, nor the country, can afford the luxury of the view that weaponry is, at root, counterproductive.
Nowhere is there a better example of how Tumin and his staff work than in the release of a three-year report last July in which he acted as the project manager. The report, entitled, "Operation Desert Storm: Evaluation of the Air War," received international media coverage after it concluded that claims made by the Department of Defense and various weapons manufacturers about weaponry effectiveness during the conflict were "overstated, misleading and inconsistent with the best available data or unverifiable."
The report was most critical of performance claims made about cruise missiles and laser-guided bombs, particularly the F-117, or Stealth, bomber. "Initial claims for the Stealth had 80 or 90 percent as its accuracy of getting one bomb to one target," Tumin explains. "What we found was that because of the way the Pentagon counted actual accuracy, it was not over 40 percent." Tumin's team discovered the discrepancy when it compared the number of planes that left the airfield some 600 miles away versus the number that had actually made it close enough to the intended target to drop their bombs. "They didn't count the number that had turned back in flight," says Tumin. "The normal way to trace probability ratio to kill ratios is to ask how many do you actually have that take off from the airfield."
What Tumin's team discovered was that roughly half of the planes had turned back. Instead of achieving a near one-bomb to one-target ratio as initially claimed, the ratio amounted to four bombs to one target. This new ratio has tremendous implications regarding the financial and economic impact of such a weapons delivery system, and, most important, the human risk factor. "With this ratio you have to ask how many more people are you going to put in danger so that you make sure that you are actually going to reach the target," Tumin says.
In the past year Tumin has shifted his focus and is examining real property maintenance on U.S. military installations. He points to the whole picture, and, as usual, sees a problem that impacts American taxpayers in a big way. "Since the end of the Cold War America has cut military personnel by 33 percent, yet it has only reduced the square footage of military property it owns and operates by about 11 percent," says Tumin. "You're getting a tremendous amount of property that they may not need that they're maintaining at a great cost."
