Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  Air Force and Rockwell officials claim the contract spreading happened naturally—that the B-1 is such a complex, modern system of weaponry and electronics that it naturally tapped a vast and diverse network of parts suppliers all over the country. Practically no one in Congress takes that claim at face value; virtually everyone regards B-1 contract spreading as deliberate. In the mid-1970s Rockwell paid Chase Econometrics $110,000 for a study to help show each senator and representative the impact of the project in his area. Over seven years, Rockwell figured the $30 billion B-1 program meant 192,000 jobs for a total of 5,200 subcontractors and nearby businesses “due to the economic cascade effect.” Its lobbyists worked hundreds of members of Congress, one by one, with specific information about the subcontractors, jobs, and money involved in their districts.

  Bill Gray, the House Budget Committee chairman, told me one computer printout showed subcontractors in more than 400 of the 435 congressional districts, a phenomenonal political spread.27 This big a project activates industrial unions as well as corporate management, especially in key states such as California, Ohio, and Massachusetts. Rockwell also had stockholders and employes writing members of Congress—on company time, which meant at least partly at taxpayers’ expense.

  “That is one of the ways they sell these things to Congress,” protested Representative John Seiberling, an Ohio Democrat. “That is another scandal—that we are allowing this engine of spending taxpayers’ money for defense programs to be used to propagandize and manipulate the Congress.”28

  Seiberling showed me a letter from J. W. Rane, Jr., of Rockwell’s B-1 Division in June 1973 asserting that Seiberling’s fourteenth district of Ohio had “a potential of approximately $60 million new business” from development of the B-1 prototype, mainly to Goodyear Aerospace, for brakes and wheels. But Seiberling was skeptical. His staff calculated that the subcontracts were so small that his district would pay out more in taxes to underwrite the B-1 than it would earn from the B-1. Seiberling argued that was typical for most congressional districts, but he was no match for Rockwell.

  The company’s enormous lobbying effort was so potent that Congress nearly overrode President Carter’s decision in 1977 against B-1 production. Strong congressional support did keep alive research and development for testing four prototype bombers. Rockwell did an uncanny job of keeping together its skilled work force for a quick start-up of B-1 production, banking on a Republican president in 1981. Reagan aides told me of financial contributions to Reagan’s campaign by Rockwell company executives, and the company’s lobbying of the Reagan forces during the 1980 campaign, gaining entrée through Michael Deaver, Reagan’s public relations adviser. When Reagan entered the White House, the B-1 was one of the first military projects revived, a hallmark of Reagan defense policy—and of Rockwell’s success at the Iron Triangle game.

  The B-1 has become a model for other contractors. It has been imitated by the Reagan administration itself with the rapid spread of contracts for its strategic defense initiative (SDI), not only in this country but in Western Europe and possibly Japan and Israel. By 1986, Reagan’s strategic defense program had research contracts in forty-two of the fifty states, covering seventeen of the nineteen states represented on the Senate Armed Services Committee and twenty of the twenty-six on the Appropriations Committee. Paul Warnke, a former Carter administration arms control adviser, suggested that Reagan’s Star Wars proposal was being converted “from Stardust and moonbeams to that great pork barrel in the sky.” Moreover, the initial alarm of West European governments about the SDI program abated as Weinberger worked out agreements for the British, Germans, Japanese, and Israelis, among others, to bid for the project’s research contracts.

  “This is the internationalization of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about,” Gary Hart commented ruefully. “What you’ve got with Star Wars is a unique phenomenon where they’re building not just a national constituency, but an international constituency.”29

  What left the program’s long-term future in doubt was congressional resistance to going beyond the research phase. For the critical point in building political support for any big weapons system, Gordon Adams observed, comes with moving from research into development and production and with the selection of a prime contractor, which, like Rockwell, leads the political campaign. Research involves relatively small teams of white-collar scientists and engineers, but production involves tens of thousands of blue-collar workers. That massive job constituency gives a weapon system almost irresistible momentum.

  In The Defense Game, a book drawing on his nineteen years experience as a defense specialist for the Office of Management and Budget through six presidential administrations, Richard Stubbings bluntly summarized the workings of the Iron Triangle:

  At stake in our defense program is not only our national security, but also large opportunities for personal and economic success. Congressmen favor programs and facilities in their states and districts regardless of efficiency. Industry officials seek to boost their sales and profits, ofttimes at the expense of the government and the taxpayer. Military officers seek promotion and advancement under accepted standards of performance which often conflict with hard-nosed business practices. And the service hierarchies see close working relations with the other services as not in their interest. Thus, not only is the defense budget the vehicle by which our nation plans how to fight the battles of tomorrow, but it is also a battleground itself, where politicians, corporations, and military officers seek to serve their personal and parochial interests.30

  Army Lobby: Tropical Troops for Alaska

  The military services have their own gambits in the Iron Triangle game. They not only spread subcontractors; they spread military bases. Generally, the Army is considered less crafty at politics than the Navy and the Air Force, but from time to time it shows creativity. Take, for example, its decision in late 1983 to form three new light-infantry divisions, an idea that Weinberger snapped up despite advice from his own staff that American divisions in Europe were still undermanned and filling them should take first priority. In the 1970s, the Army had “heavied up” its divisions for war in Europe with tanks and armor. But with the rising threat in the third world in the early 1980s, Army generals decided to “go light,” that is, to have divisions without heavy armor that could hop easily to world trouble spots. The Army plan was to pare down two existing divisions and to create one new light division.

  “Primarily, they wanted to get in on the action,” I was told by Larry Korb, who was an assistant secretary of Defense at the time. “In other words, the hot spots in Central America and Africa were certainly not susceptible to M-1 tanks. The light division was an attempt to create a marine corps within the Army. The Army was anxious to add a new division because the internal pressures within the Army were furious. The Air Force was adding wings; the Navy was adding ships—what the hell’s the Army doing? You know, why are these other guys growing and the Army has the smallest share of the budget?”31

  Creating a new division, of course, meant finding a home for it. The Army put out the word on Capitol Hill and set up a political auction for this nice little military-patronage plum. Six states showed interest; four already had Army posts: California, Georgia, Kentucky, and Washington; two did not: New York and Alaska. The lure was obvious. The Army reckoned that building facilities for a division of ten thousand soldiers would involve from $500 million to $1 billion in construction costs, fifteen hundred permanent jobs for civilians, and $4.5 million in annual purchasing power pumped into the local economy. New York made a heavy pitch. Governor Mario Cuomo, senators Pat Moynihan and Al D’Amato, congressmen Joe Addabbo, Sam Stratton, and Dave Martin all lobbied for Fort Drum, an old and largely unused military reservation about seventy-five miles north of Syracuse in a severely depressed part of the state.

  Not that Fort Drum was ideal from a military standpoint. For one thing, the temperature averages about twenty-four degrees in January,
with snowfall from late October to April; hardly the right environment to train troops for combat in the Persian Gulf, Central America, or Southeast Asia. Moreover, Fort Drum’s existing airstrips could not accommodate a fully loaded C-141 transport, meaning that until a new airfield was completed, troops would have to be trucked to air bases at Rome or Syracuse, a minimum of fifty-five miles, a considerable nuisance in wintertime. Nonetheless, the Army settled on Fort Drum.

  “The Army did a smart thing,” said Larry Korb, sizing up the Army’s political game. “At Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, they already had stuff. I mean they already had support in that part of the country to the extent they needed it. They didn’t have it in New York.”

  But the Army did not reckon properly on Ted Stevens, then chairman of the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and, as a Pentagon power-game player, probably the Senate’s single most influential voice on military spending. Repeatedly, he has worked billions cut by others back into the defense budget. Stevens wanted the light division for Alaska. When he heard it was going to New York, he was outraged; he pressed Alaska’s case with Weinberger. Stevens sent the Defense secretary a chart showing how little defense money was being spent in Alaska and attached a handwritten note, obtained by Michael Gordon, then a reporter for the National Journal which read:

  Dear Cap,

  When you examine the enclosed and realize that Alaska’s votes in Congress have been consistently pro-defense, the request for consideration of Alaska as the place to deploy the light division just doesn’t seem unreasonable.

  Hope to see you soon.

  Regards,

  Ted.32

  Within no time, the Army brass was talking about the need to provide for “theater defense,” or regional protection, of Alaska and the Aleutian Island chain. Somehow the Alaskan trouble spot had been omitted from the Army’s original rationale for its light divisions. It had never been mentioned in testimony to Congress. But Weinberger obviously felt Stevens had to be appeased, and the Army saw the chance for yet another light division with such attendant goodies as a juicy two-star billet for some Army general. So, timed for maximum political impact a few weeks before the 1984 elections, the Army announced in mid-September that it was forming not one but two new light divisions, one for New York and one for Alaska. Oddly, one third of each division was to be drawn from existing reserve units located in other states; this would save money though it would slow deployment.

  Assistant Defense Secretary Larry Korb could not contain his laughter. “The whole light division thing is hilarious,” Korb clucked to me. “Training for hot-weather action at cold-weather bases. Taking buses from Fort Drum to the airfields in winter.” As for Alaska, Korb said, “It’s a political thing, pure and simple. Ted Stevens made no bones about it’s being pure politics. Cap and the Army realized they couldn’t tell Stevens, ‘Well, you lost.’ So they gave the other division to him. People had been giving lip service for years to defending the Aleutians. Once it was decided to give Stevens his division, people said, ‘Aha, there’s our rationale. We’ll defend the Aleutians.’ Never mind that the proposed light division is supposed to be mobile.”33

  The Alaska division underscores another rule of military lobbying in the Iron Triangle game: Take care of friends; play hard ball with critics. The military flatters members of Congress with courtesies and perquisites, courting them with guided tours of military bases or rides on aircraft carriers, arranging foreign trips, assigning escort officers, providing the aircraft.

  “It’s slightly incestuous,” said Senator Warren Rudman. “I’m three months in office, and I get invited to the Pentagon. An Army car picks me up. I arrive, and I’m taken to a nice office and order my breakfast. Well-dressed stewards, a four-star general on my right, the secretary of the Army to my left, one- and two-star generals around the table. I told General Wickam, the Army chief of staff, ‘If my battalion commander in Korea could see me now, he’d never believe it.’ Wickam laughed. He told me, ‘There is a kind of awe, and I hope you’ll get over it. But there is a close relationship between Congress and the military.’ ”34

  If angered, the military can turn off the faucet. John Dingell, the powerful, prying chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who called General Dynamics Corporation and the Navy on the carpet for month after month of embarrassing exposures about cost overruns and contract shenanigans, was told in July 1985 that the Defense Department could not provide the normal courtesy plane for his committee’s proposed trip to Eastern Europe. Later, in early 1986, the Pentagon rapped other critics on the knuckles. In a tried-and-true political gambit, it announced plans to close some domestic military installations. Just three were selected, all in the backyards of Pentagon critics: a large section of Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, home turf of then-Senator Gary Hart and Representative Patricia Schroeder; the Army Materials Technology Laboratory in Watertown, Massachusetts, not far from the home of House Speaker Tip O’Neill; and the naval hospital in Philadelphia, home of House Budget Committee Chairman Bill Gray, a key figure in trimming Pentagon budgets.

  Unabashedly, the military services lobby senators and House members, occasionally creating an uproar when the arm-twisting goes too far. In July 1982, for example, the Navy got caught red-handed compiling and circulating political box scores on members of the Military Reform Caucus, whose views on defense strategy and priorities differ from the Pentagon. Caucus members contend they are not antidefense; they simply have their own ideas. But the Navy regarded them as intrusive. Its box score on selected votes, compiled by its legislative liaison staff under Rear Admiral A. K. Knoizen, gave each senator or congressman a “national security index.” Knoizen’s June 16 memo to Navy Secretary John Lehman, the chief of Naval Operations, the Marine commandant, and twenty other high Navy officials, was leaked to Defense Week and touched off an uproar in Congress.35

  Senator Ted Stevens, then the Republican whip, was furious. He got a fifty-seven-percent Navy rating, though he was not even a member of the Military Reform Caucus. Despite his ardent prodefense record, Stevens had been graded down, in part, for opposing Secretary Lehman’s plans to take battleships out of mothballs. “Some admirals just wanted a battleship under their feet again,” the blunt-spoken Stevens groused. He was so irate that he warned the Navy to stop wasting tax money on such “misguided” and “unethical” activities. Other senators were also outraged at the blatant political ratings, which they considered a reversal of the doctrine of civilian control of the military.

  “Congress is getting tired of the Defense Department winking at the law forbidding the use of public funds to lobby Congress,” Stevens declared in a Senate speech.36 “I think Congress is tired of the Department viewing Congressional relations as a license to maneuver and manipulate those of us who are elected to oversee the use of taxpayer support of the Government.” Lehman and his top brass took cover by blaming it on an overzealous legislative team. Admiral Knoizen became the fall guy. Within a month, he was retired from active duty.

  But the practice did not stop. In 1983, Senator David Pryor of Arkansas found himself being scolded face-to-face by an Air Force general for his voting record on military issues.

  Pryor, a longtime foe of chemical weapons, had irked the Pentagon and defied the pork-barrel norms by offering to cut funds for making nerve gas at a small factory in his home state. In addition, he was a target of Air Force pressure on the C-17 transport plane. An Air Force general and a colonel, trying to swing Pryor into line, suggested that if the C-17 were built, it might be based in Little Rock. Pryor was not immediately persuaded, and the general shifted from soft sell to hard sell. In his gentle, curling Arkansas drawl, barely containing his anger at the memory of crass political pressure from a uniformed officer, Pryor recounted the event as I sat across from his desk:

  “That general looks me in the eye and says, ‘You know, Senator, you’re not considered very pro-defense.’ And I say, ‘Let’s go into that a little bit.’ He turns to th
is colonel and says, ‘Let’s see Senator Pryor’s sheet.’ And literally, I thought the colonel was going to choke. He pulls it out and hands it to the general, sitting in that rocking chair right there where you are. The general opens it up and starts readin’ it. Every vote that I passed up: aid to the contras, aid to this, statements on Reagan, statements on defense, votes on nerve gas.”

  Pryor fell silent, visualizing the scene. Then I asked him, “Do you want to say who that general was?”

  “I’d rather not,” he said. “And you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because right now he has been promoted,” Pryor answered. “He’s very high in the Strategic Air Command, and what that general does really has life-or-death over our SAC base in Blytheville, Arkansas. Then you say, ‘Well, are you cowed by this?’ I don’t want to say cowed. But you know, why would I go out and whip up a fight knowin’ what the detrimental effect might be to my own constituents? The fact is they have denied that they keep sheets on people, but they do. I saw mine. In fact, I asked him for it. They sent it to me the next day.”

  We were talking more than two years after the incident, but it still roiled Pryor. “The idea that some defense policy might be based on whether or not a senator or congressman supports the Pentagon position or not,” he simmered, “that’s dangerous.”37

  John Lehman, Cocky Operator

  If any single Pentagon figure personifies the Iron Triangle game, it is John Lehman, for six years Reagan’s secretary of the Navy. No one in the Pentagon in recent years has played the Iron Triangle game more successfully than Lehman. He is a slick, cocky, rough-and-tumble operator, a self-proclaimed naval strategist and a showboater who enjoys making waves, thrives on controversy, knows his stuff, and has few peers as a bureaucratic infighter. Normally, a military service secretary is a figurehead position. It is generally an honorific bestowed on a campaign benefactor or some political ally of the president who becomes the easy captive of his own military brass or is overrun by the tiers of civilian staff of the secretary of Defense. But Lehman’s combination of brilliance, brazenness, and guile gave him real power and won him more of what he was after than any other major figure in the Pentagon, including Weinberger.