Power Game (37 page)

Others contend that the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff operated primarily as heads of their individual services rather than as a joint body with overriding national concerns. Significantly, they keep their main offices in their service areas; only those of the chairman and his deputy are in the Joint Chiefs’ area. The Joint Staff “really doesn’t perform the joint function well,” Jones asserted. It rotates so rapidly that officers lack proper experience in joint planning; moreover, its officers are loyal first to their own services because that is where careers are made and promotions awarded.

Senior Pentagon civilians complain frequently that parochial impulses make the military services averse to joint functions and inclined to slough off common tasks. The list of relative neglect is disturbing: crucial functions of command, control, and joint communications; the Defense Intelligence Agency; large-scale airlift and sealift transportation capacity for Army troops; common operation of special forces to combat terrorism, an area treated so poorly that Congress moved in 1986 to set up a joint agency under the command of a civilian, in a direct slap at the generals and admirals.

The Carter White House used to have to fight to get funds into the Pentagon budget for the vital airborne command and communications planes that maintain contact with the Navy’s nuclear-missile-firing submarines. “We’d get the money put into the budget and then come back on Monday morning and find out that over the weekend someone in the Pentagon had taken the money out,” one former Carter White House official groused to me. A Reagan administration official confirmed six years later that the Navy was “still trying to kill” funding these planes. “The service chiefs don’t like strategic programs because they take money away from them to play with,” another high Reagan Pentagon official told me.

One favorite gambit of John Lehman was to omit funding in his budget for Trident submarines, the undersea arm of the American nuclear deterrent. He did that in 1982, 1983, and 1985. When I asked why, Lehman said he had proposed skipping a few years, stretching the life of old Poseidon submarines and “using that billion and a half dollars for other conventional combatants” such as destroyers or attack submarines that the admirals see as serving the Navy’s prime missions. To others, this was a calculated Lehman ploy, to get more of what the Navy really wanted, knowing that Reagan and Weinberger would insist on adding Trident submarines. One senior Pentagon planner told me: “The Tridents, they’re the gold watch”—meaning the most prized systems—“John knew the president, or the secretary, had his gold watch and they’d always put it back in the budget.”

Lehman, exercising the Navy’s independence, also blocked several joint efficiencies. Transportation is a perennial headache to the Pentagon’s top civilians because each service has a partial network—the Army on land, the Navy at sea—and they do not mesh well. In 1981, Frank Carlucci, then deputy Defense secretary, proposed to set up a joint command to manage the interservice network and reduce bottlenecks. It got approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But before it was fully instituted, Lehman sabotaged it by getting one of the Navy’s friends in Congress, Representative Charles Bennett of Jacksonville, to amend the defense-funding bill to forbid such a command. By the time others woke up, it was too late.

Probably the most egregious example of Air Force reluctance toward joint functions is its long resistance toward the A-10 fighter used for close support of Army troops. The A-10 is a slow-flying, two-engine ugly duckling, well armed and well protected for low-flying ground support. Its mission lacks glamour for would-be jet aces, and it is given short shrift by Air Force generals. The Army would be happy to provide its own air cover, but back in 1948 when the military chiefs met at Key West to carve up their missions, the Air Force—then part of the Army—won all rights to the land-based air mission. By what amounted to a treaty among the services, the Army was denied the right to fly any fixed-wing aircraft weighing over five thousand pounds. Of necessity, the Army has developed massive fleets of helicopters, even though defense planners regard helicopters as more vulnerable to ground fire than fixed-wing fighters.

Duplication is another price of service parochialism. In the early 1960s former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara tried to get the Navy and Air Force to develop a common fighter plane, the TFX, and failed. The Air Force eventually took it as the F-111, but the Navy took
another plane. More recently, the F-16 was originally designed to be used by both services, but the Navy chose a competitor, the F-18. In the missile field, planners have suggested the Air Force adapt the Navy’s Trident missile but the Air Force preferred to develop its own MX missile.

In the Pentagon, this is known as the N-I-H syndrome, for “not invented here.” No service wants to take a weapon developed by another service. Anthony Battista, influential staff aide to the House Armed Services Committee, told me of his having developed a laser-guided artillery shell, a smart bullet, for Navy guns while he was working fifteen years ago at the Naval Weapons Laboratory in Virginia. For years, Battista tried to get the Army to adapt the same shell to save money. Once he invited Army officers to a demonstration test, firing the shell out of Army howitzers to prove the feasibility of a joint program.

“You’ve got to be joking,” one green-uniformed Army officer told Battista. “You’ve got the wrong color uniform.”

“Hey, I’m a civilian,” Battista protested.

“But you work for a Navy lab,” the Army man objected.

“But I pay my taxes on April fifteenth like everybody else,” Battista insisted. “Why don’t we just save a lot of money?”

The Army refused.
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More recently, the Navy and Air Force launched separate programs—to cost $3 billion—to develop elaborate radio communications for their jet fighters. These were high-tech systems that would resist enemy electronic jamming and even produce blips on a pilot’s radar screen showing other aircraft.

It was Grenada all over again, each service wanting its own system. The Air Force, starting first, wanted voice communications, and the Navy had a different system for date exchange. The two systems were not compatible; Navy and Air Force pilots could not communicate with each other. The Navy’s allies on the Senate Armed Services Committee wanted to fund its system. Air Force friends on the House Armed Services Committee funded its system. The standard Pentagon approach was to do both, but some House members balked, demanding that Weinberger stop the duplication and pick one system. Instead, he delayed. Finally, in 1985, the House committee blocked all funds for both systems to force a choice. Eventually, because its contractors were in financial trouble, the Navy backed down—a rare event—and the Air Force system was developed for both services.

The Façade of Jointness

To many in Congress and the Pentagon, this story typifies Weinberger’s style of management. Compared with other Defense secretaries, Weinberger did not exercise strong discipline over the military services—unless Congress put heavy pressures on him. His permissive management played into the hands of the turf cartel. For without a tough, critical eye at the top, each branch of service knew there was no one else to challenge it seriously—least of all the other services.

Clearly, the services know the flaws and problems in each other’s strategies and weapons. If rivalry were their guiding principle, interservice critiques would rise constantly. But they do not, because the name of the game for years has been logrolling and mutual accomodation. The way General David Jones and others describe the inner workings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it sounds like the heads of big corporations carving up the market, rather than the nation’s military leaders hammering out the most impartial, argument-tested advice for the president. The operating assumption is that the nation will be properly defended if each service presses its own needs. Obviously that works up to a point. But if one service is pursuing a foolhardy strategy or buying ridiculously costly weapons, the other services do not challenge it. Nor for that matter do they get into a serious clash of ideas about the fundamentals of national strategy.

“It’s a gentleman’s club,” griped Senator Warren Rudman. “You never hear them knock another service’s proposal, even if they don’t think it’s a good idea. One of the chiefs told me, ‘I have all I can do fighting my own bureaucracy, fighting the top Pentagon bureaucracy, and fighting you guys on the Hill. I’m not taking on another fight with someone else in the other services.’ ”
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Similarly, a four-star Air Force general told me that the Air Force and the Army adamantly disapproved of John Lehman’s naval strategy and his six-hundred-ship Navy, but they never seriously challenged Lehman for fear of inviting the Navy to take pot shots at their own pet projects.

“The services did not want to debate whether or not there was a better alternative than buying two aircraft carriers or bringing ships out of mothballs,” General Jones told me.

“Basically it’s hands-off,” said Senator Sam Nunn. “Everybody scratches everybody else’s back. I’d say it’s very similar to the congressional system of pork-barrel projects in the appropriations committee: ‘You let my project alone and I’ll let yours alone. You start callin’ mine
a dog, and here we go.’ But there’s a difference. I think the last thing we want in the military is to handle the business like a pork barrel bill.”
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Richard Boiling, recalling warnings from Harry Truman, asserted that the military services have “made deals with each other to control the budget and a president has a limited amount of power to control them unless he’s got friends on the Hill. It’s like antitrust. You can’t ever catch ’em doing it, but obviously they work it out.”
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The roots of brokered politics among the services lie in painful history. “In 1948, there was a very bitter fight between the Air Force and the Navy over the B-36 strategic bomber versus aircraft carriers,” General Jones recalled. “The Air Force was saying the carriers are very vulnerable and they weren’t needed and they cost too much money, and the Navy was saying the B-36’s were vulnerable and they couldn’t do the mission. There was a very bitter fight. People resigned, and it made it very tough to work, service to service. And so now, we don’t have the Navy saying there’s a better way to spend $25 billion than buying one hundred B-1 bombers or the Air Force saying, rather than pulling the battleships out of mothballs, that money would be better spent on airlift or on munitions. The real tough issues—roles and missions, unified command plan, distribution of forces—I call the ‘too-hard box.’ ”
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In other words, the military services simply find it too hard to take on the toughest, most crucial choices of national strategy: Just how large should the Navy be? What’s the best strategy for defending Europe? Which missiles and bombers fit the future threat best? Which divisions, Army or Marine, are better suited for a Persian Gulf crisis? That is what brings cries of protest from the Military Reform Caucus in Congress. One expert, James Woolsey, a former undersecretary of the Navy who served on two major Reagan commissions on defense issues, asserts there is too little service rivalry, not too much. “I would far more favor having a good deal more competition and more overlap even between the services’ roles and mission to get new and different approaches to things,” Woolsey told me.
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But the services want to avoid upsetting well-established arrangements.

The political nonaggression pact among the services was embodied in the Key West Agreement of 1948, a thirty-three-page top-secret document with fine print and subsequent codicils that settled the B-36-versus-carrier fight. The Air Force got the strategic-bombing role, though the Navy later got some strategic targets for its carrier bombers. Another bruising brawl occurred in the 1950s between the Air Force and the Army over control of land-based missile systems; again the Air
Force won. Those rare and painful donnybrooks left the services wary of further battles.

For self-preservation, their operating principle for years has been a de facto veto allowing each service to protect its turf. That produced a standoff in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Each service chief represented his own service. The chairman, the fifth member, was a token “façade of jointness,” in General Jones’s phrase. As one Pentagon civilian put it: “There isn’t any Joint Chiefs of Staff. It’s a holding company for the services.” A three-star Army general agreed: “That committee is the basis of paralysis in the Pentagon. Any position by the military leadership has to be agreed upon by five people, and they won’t agree unless their service interest is taken care of.”

Joint military budget documents and procurement plans emerge as intricately balanced bureaucratic mosaics which allocate shares of money not only to each service tribe but to all the subtribes. The Navy has its carrier admirals, its surface fleet, its submariners, and its aviators to satisfy, all wanting new weapons, new units, new symbols of modernization and expansion. The Army has the infantry, armor, artillery, airborne units, and helicopter units. The Air Force has bomber wings, tactical air wings, missile commands, and so on. Inevitably, a Pentagon budget is a negotiated treaty to satisfy all these constituencies, like a politically balanced ticket in Los Angeles or Chicago. The list of “priority” weapons is terribly long because each weapon has its own constituency. So when Congress asks Weinberger for guidance on where to cut, his inclination is to resist rather than alienating some constituency. Congress is forced to make an overall cut and then have the services do what is least effective for national strategy: cut programs across the board from everyone, so that market shares are not disturbed. Hard choices are not made. Nothing is killed. Programs are stretched out. Costs rise because of inefficiency. The taxpayer gets less bang for the buck.

Service collusion has irked even such prodefense Republicans as Georgia’s Representative Newt Gingrich. One evening, he groaned that despite the sudden infusion of spending pumped into the Pentagon budget by the Reagan administration in 1981 and 1982, the budget shares of the various services changed little: the Navy got just under thirty-three percent, the Air Force thirty percent, the Army twenty-four percent, and thirteen percent went to defensewide spending. A fresh look at national strategy should have produced some reordering of priorities and some shift in spending patterns, he declared. But the long-established service missions perpetuated the market cartel.