Power Game (31 page)

If the press, embodied in Early Bird, and the Pentagon whistle-blowers are two legs of the Dissident Triangle, the third leg is in Congress—not Congress as a whole but individual members with special
slants on the military. Both Democrats and Republicans, some well known, some not, these Pentagon thorns have a streak of political independence—people such as senators William Proxmire of Wisconsin, Charles Grassley of Iowa, David Pryor of Arkansas, Warren Rudman of New Hampshire. Or, in the House, John Dingell of Michigan, Les Aspin of Wisconsin, and Denny Smith of Oregon. They are counter-punchers, jabbing at the ingrained habits of the Pentagon.

Some Pentagon sparring mates fit the maverick mold; others don’t. When I first met Denny Smith, a clean-cut Republican conservative from Oregon, he struck me as a very unlikely Pentagon gadfly. He greeted me one evening in his office, in shirt-sleeves and unbuttoned vest, looking like a hard-working FBI agent. He is an air force veteran of 180 combat missions in Vietnam in an F-4 Phantom jet. He conjures up images of
The Right Stuff
, a Republican John Glenn, a Boy Scout in politics. Denny Smith lacks Glenn’s winning smile, but he projects earnestness and sincerity. He has the close-cropped good looks and coat-and-tie decorum of an airline pilot or a businessman, both of which he has been. He is not a typical Pentagon baiter.

His political credentials match the personal impression. Denny Smith arrived in Congress in 1982; he had no political experience, but his voting quickly established him on the Republican right. The American Conservative Union, an anti-big-government lobby, gave him a one-hundred-percent rating in his first two years in Congress. In short, Denny Smith appeared to be a regular, not a maverick. He was a perfect guy to play ball with the administration—only he was not picked for the team. Even as a veteran, he was not put on the main committees dealing with defense.

For those familiar with the Washington power game, two clues about Denny Smith—besides Boy Scout innocence and integrity—foreshadowed his maverick role. First, he came from one of those rare congressional districts which has
no
military base and
no
major defense contractor. “Oregon ranks forty-ninth out of fifty states in defense spending,” he told me. Lacking vested Pentagon interests, Denny Smith had the luxury of being able to challenge the Pentagon without fear of serious retribution back home. This was the main reason Smith was left off the defense committees. He fit an old pattern; generally the Pentagon’s most dogged critics have come from states with little Pentagon business: Proxmire and Aspin from Wisconsin; Grassley from Iowa, in the 1970s, Iowa’s Democratic senators Dick Clark and John Culver.

Second, Denny Smith had unusually good entrée to the Pentagon;
he had a channel to the anchor leg of the dissident triangle: middle-level military officers and defense civilians dismayed and outraged at what they honestly saw as the waste, rigidity, and cover-ups of the Pentagon hierarchy and military contractors. No sooner had Denny Smith, then in his mid-forties, arrived in Washington than he contacted old military buddies, now well-connected colonels. “They became my kitchen cabinet,” he said, fifteen or twenty strong, telling him about hidden failures of weapons systems on which billions were being spent. Over time, Smith built a network of moles in the Pentagon, who armed him with under-the-table documents.

“It’s surprising how many people down in the ranks don’t buy the line of the top brass of the Pentagon,” Smith told me. “You wouldn’t believe how many of them will come in here in civilian clothes on their day off and tell you that they don’t want their names bandied about, but there’s something wrong with such-and-such program.”
⁵

By now, the pattern is well established. Some whistle-blowers have come out of the closet and deal directly with the press and Congress. Notoriety protects them. The foremost figures in this “Pentagon underground” are:

Most Pentagon dissidents, however, prefer anonymity. These people find a Denny Smith, or they pass their material to intermediaries such as Dina Rasor, a thirty-one-year-old former news assistant for ABC News who now runs the Project on Military Procurement. The project became a major channel for the dissident triangle, gathering and disseminating
inside information—usually documents—on Pentagon weapons. It is passed along by as many as one hundred Pentagon sources, Rasor said to me, “from the airman on the flight line who sees a spare part he thinks is too much, clear up to people who are working very closely with the secretary of Defense.”
⁷

Denny Smith’s feuds with the army and navy over multibillion-dollar weapons systems are case studies of how the dissident triangle works. They offer insight into the inner politics of the Pentagon, the bunker mentality at the top, the cover-ups of weapons failures, the stubborn inertia, and the ingenious game of the middle echelons to expose, even undercut, their own top brass. These examples are all the more striking because Denny Smith was no Democrat out to score partisan points against a Republican-run Pentagon; nor was he a liberal ideologically opposed to big military budgets. He was largely reacting as a citizen-politician, innocent about the ways of Washington, at first upset and later angered.

His first tangle came with the Navy: In June 1983, he became suspicious of Pentagon claims that the new super-high-tech, guided-missile Aegis cruiser, the
Ticonderoga
, had hit thirteen out of thirteen target planes in a simulated test attack.

From combat experience, Denny Smith was convinced that no defender could have such perfect results in realistic tests. He asked the Navy to see the test report. He also asked his own mole network about the tests. Denny Smith was embarking on a familiar path, for Congress usually tackles the Pentagon’s weapons policy with two major questions: 1. Does the weapon work? and 2. Does it cost too much? The deeper questions of whether it is really needed and how it fits into an overall strategy are rarely addressed in earnest. Few members of Congress have a sure enough grasp to handle those questions. What’s more, questions like that could open a Pandora’s box, a free-for-all debate on national strategy that most military commanders, congressmen, and policymakers want to avoid.

The Pentagon moles provided shocking confirmation of the Oregon congressman’s suspicions about the cruiser’s tests. Later, a press article reported that the
Ticonderoga
had hit only five of twenty-one targets, and Smith indicated that was pretty accurate. The Navy stonewalled for five months on Smith’s request to see the test report. It was a typical bureaucratic reflex: Keep an iron grip on all information so that policy cannot be effectively challenged.

“The reason the Pentagon doesn’t like testing is that testing may interrupt the money flow to its programs,” an Air Force colonel explained
to me. “That’s the strategy in the Pentagon: Don’t interrupt the money flow.”

Denny Smith’s bout with the Navy was a vintage example of the clashing political cultures of Congress and the bureaucracy, typical of their power games. The congressman was trying to open up the policy debate; the Navy was keeping it shut tight. If Smith had been on the Armed Services or Appropriations committees, his vote on military programs would have given him leverage with the Pentagon. But as a freshman who was not on those committees, Smith had no political clout with the Navy. He had to appeal for help from more senior congressmen.

Finally, in December 1983, the Navy sent a six-man delegation to appease and silence Smith by offering him a quick, temporary peek at the voluminous technical report on the
Ticonderoga
’s test results. But they had underestimated their man. Glancing through the report, Smith immediately spotted that page A-29 was missing. From his own secretly obtained copy, Smith knew that
that page
contained the test report.

“Where’s page A-29?” the congressman demanded.

Naval faces blanched white as naval uniforms. “Oh, isn’t it there?” a Navy captain said, simulating innocence.

“Well, I don’t find it here,” Smith insisted.

A civilian engineer with the Navy cadre offered Smith his copy. “Here it is, right here in mine,” he said, and Smith took permanent possession of the damning test report.

“Gosh, it must have been the Xerox,” one of the Navy men said. Later, Denny Smith told me he felt the vital page had been purposefully omitted “because the rest of the report is about as dull as toilet paper.”

Armed with the damning data, Smith called on the Navy to hold more tests of the Aegis cruiser. Fellow Republicans suggested he was out to “get” the military. Trent Lott, the House Republican whip, asked Smith if he knew that killing the Navy’s Aegis cruiser program could affect sixteen thousand jobs at Ingalls Shipyard in Lott’s home state of Mississippi.

“Hey, listen Trent, we’re not trying to cancel the program,” Smith replied. “What we’re trying to do is get the Navy to be honest, number one, and, number two, if there are flaws in that ship, let’s fix them.”
⁸

The stakes were enormous because the Navy planned twenty-six Aegis guided-missile cruisers at $1.25 billion apiece, and sixty destroyers, with similar technology, costing $1 billion each.

“I decided to go after them to prove that the ship could survive,” Smith explained. “If we were going to spend $90 billion on this huge armada of radar ships to go out there and try to protect the fleet, let’s be sure they work. The MX missile program is known by everybody in the country; it’s about a $20 billion program. It’s peanuts alongside of this thing.”

Grudgingly, the Navy called the
Ticonderoga
home from the Mediterranean for further testing, in April 1984. This time, the Navy reported ten out of eleven hits, but the mole network passed word that the tests were too easy because there had been no low-level attackers and no saturation attacks by several planes at one time. Once again, Smith asked the Navy for the test report but never got it. The moles shifted him to another target.

Divad: The Gun with Nine Lives

In the Aegis cruiser episode, Denny Smith had been a green congressman who did not know how to gain political leverage through the press and allies in Congress. But by the time he went after the Army’s Divad antiaircraft gun, Smith had political allies. He had become one of four cochairmen of the Military Reform Caucus, a bipartisan group of more than fifty senators and House members, ranging from Senator Gary Hart on the Democratic left to Representative Newt Gingrich on the Republican right. This group was pressing questions about military strategy, not to oppose defense but to make it more efficient. Linked to the caucus, Denny Smith’s voice had more weight.

Divad, moreover, was a more vulnerable target. By mid-1984, it was deep in trouble, plagued by technical snafus, facing some high-level opposition within the Pentagon, and wounded by news leaks of rigged tests and embarrassing failures. Still, the Army top brass clung to it, and Weinberger sided with the Army.

Divad (short for division air defense) had been conceived in the mid-1970s to provide antiaircraft protection for Army tank divisions against Soviet fighters and helicopters. By most estimates, more modern air protection was needed. But Denny Smith, as an old fighter pilot, thought an expensive high-tech gun such as Divad was unnecessary and ill conceived. Flyers, he told me, have greater fear of traditional antiaircraft batteries, which are harder to evade.

With all its gear and ammunition, Divad cost upward of $6.3 million per gun, more than three times the cost of the M-1 tank it was supposed to protect. The Army ultimately intended spending $4.5 billion for 618
Divads. To speed up Divad’s development, the Army combined several proven components: the chassis of an M-48 tank, two Swedish forty-millimeter cannons, radar adapted from the F-16 jet fighter, plus a one-million-dollar computer and other fancy electronics. But the real speed-up, and one major cause of Divad’s problems, was the Army’s policy of building and producing Divad
while
it was being tested, rather than testing it first.

Some strange decisions were made along the way. In a shoot-off competition between Ford Aerospace and General Dynamics in November 1980, Ford Aerospace scored worse but got the contract. General Dynamics hit nineteen targets and Ford only nine. The Army later said that Ford had a lot of near-misses which were counted. High Pentagon civilians on Weinberger’s staff such as David Chu, director of Program Analysis and Evaluation, and Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of Defense for Manpower, Installations and Logistics, opposed Divad. They warned that future Soviet helicopters would be able to stand outside Divad’s best theoretical range of four thousand meters and fire at American tanks. Chu’s staff also pointed out that Divad’s reaction time was too slow, and its odds of killing Soviet planes only one half to one third of what the Army claimed.
⁹
Nonetheless, Frank Carlucci, who was Weinberger’s deputy at the time, signed a $1.5 billion contract in May 1982 to buy 276 Divads.

Any new weapon has kinks, but Divad’s were comic omens: In one check-out test in February 1982, top American and British Army brass went to Fort Bliss, Texas, to see Divad perform. Suddenly, Divad’s turret swerved away from a target drone back toward the reviewing stand. The brass all ducked for cover. The gun did not fire at them, but it spent the rest of the day missing targets and lobbing shells into the weeds. Then in January 1984, the first full-fledged production model that Ford was proudly preparing to turn over to the Army made an embarrassing test debut: The radar-guided, computer-operated fire-control system focused on a false target—a rotating latrine fan in a nearby building—which the computer singled out as the closest threatening target.