In the Air Force wedge, the tour guides point out a portrait of Chappie James, who flew 101 combat missions in Korea and became the first black to achieve four-star rank. Nearby, in glass display cases, are models of Air Force weaponry: models the black SR-71 spy plane, a silver B-1B bomber, white Minuteman II and III missiles, a big KC-135 tanker. The main Navy corridor is marked off by plush nautical paneling and refurbished ship-captain’s doors complete with brass numbers and eagle door knocks. Navy bells chime the hours as on shipboard. Mingled with likenesses of former Navy Secretary Teddy Roosevelt and Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin Roosevelt are oils of famous naval escapades such as the Battle at Coral Sea. The models range from the CSS Virginia, commissioned in 1862, to the huge honeycombed facsimile of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, which in real life is twenty-four stories tall and three and a half football fields long. Down another hall are historic recruiting posters including one—of Americans in colonial dress—proclaiming, MARINES—SINCE 1775. But the Marine commandant is off in another building, the Navy Annex.
In the Army section, you pass models of the Stinger missile, the Pershing II, the M-1 tank, and the AH-1 Cobra Tow helicopter. On my tour, the guide, Army Private, First Class, Lee Edwards, showed off the medals and the famous braided visor cap of General Douglas MacArthur and mementos of MacArthur’s father, who was a colonel in the civil war at nineteen. Edwards stopped by a flag with 168 battle streamers. “This is the Army flag,” Edwards announced. “I’m in the Army so this is my favorite flag. Since you’re in my tour group, it’s your favorite flag, too.”
The services have their own personalities. An Army general told me that the Navy represented old wealth and old aristocracy, the Air Force represented new wealth, and the Army was the populist service representing ordinary people. Defense expert William Kaufman compared the Navy, which has its own air force, fleet, and army (the Marines) to a diversified, integrated modern corporation which competes well for resources under any conditions. He compared the Air Force to a high-tech electronics firm, which flies high when its weapons and strategy are in fashion. Both the Navy and the Air Force are better at competing for money than the Army, which Kaufman likened to an old, labor-intensive smokestack industry that rises and falls with the business cycle, or in this case, with war and peace. He meant the Army’s share of the Pentagon budget is smaller in peacetime than in wartime. The Navy is the most independent minded, the most prone to separateness, and the most resistant to joint operations and unified, central control.44
In the Reagan years, service parochialism offend and alarm powerful prodefense members of Congress. “You will be shocked at the serious deficiencies in the organization and procedures of the Department of Defense and the Congress,” Barry Goldwater thundered to the Senate in late 1985. “If we have to fight tomorrow, these problems will cause Americans to die unnecessarily. Even more, they may cause us to lose.… I am saddened that the services are unable to put the national interest above parochial interest [emphasis added]. The problem is twofold: first, there is a lack of true unity of command, and second, there is inadequate cooperation among U.S. military services when called upon to perform joint operations. Without true unity, we remain vulnerable to military disasters.… When the rope from the individual services pulls in one direction and the rope from the joint Chiefs pulls in the other direction, the individual services invariably win the tug-of-war [emphasis added]. The individual services win, but the country loses.”45
It was a harsh condemnation, coming from a conservative and an old friend of the military finishing thirty-four years in the Senate as chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Goldwater’s House counterpart, Les Aspin of Wisconsin, also damned “servicitis,” giving it the ring of pathology. Other knowledgeable voices added critiques, not just about the peacetime business of buying weapons but about performance in combat.
In The Pentagon and the Art of War, Edward Luttwak asserts that in Vietnam, American forces suffered from the “institutional self-indulgence” of various services and their subdivisions, because all wanted a piece of the action to fatten their budgets, get promotions, push careers, and protect their turf. “Even a Napoleon would have been paralyzed by the system,” he contends.
Luttwak, a conservative prodefense academic and consultant to Reagan’s national security staff, argues that rampant parochialism left the services waging five largely separate air wars in Vietnam: a long-range, high altitude B-52 bombing run by the Strategic Air Command from the Philippines; a naval air war from carriers offshore; a Marine air war around Marine ground units; an Army helicopter war supporting Army units; and Air Force close tactical support run by the Tactical Air Command. According to Luttwak, that left no single commander clearly in charge and no coherent strategy. “The petty politics of interservice rivalry,” he contends, “was in fact the only medium of decision.”46
The ill-fated mission to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980 was damned with similar charges. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser, said that one basic lesson from the mission’s failure was that “interservice interests dictated” how the operation was run and “that did not enhance cohesion and integration.” Others pointed to faulty coordination in training and execution. A special Pentagon panel, led by a retired Navy admiral, suggested that Air Force helicopters and Air Force crews would have been better suited to the long-range mission than Marine crews trained in short-range attack missions. But interservice politics blocked that: The Navy wanted Marine helicopters, not Air Force helicopters, operating from the carriers which launched the mission.
Even in the 1983 operation against Grenada, trumpeted by the Reagan administration as an unalloyed triumph, experts pointed to major deficiencies caused by servicitis. According to one Army general, bickering broke out between Army Ranger units, who landed in the south, and a Marine amphibious unit, who landed in the north, because there was no common ground commander. The services lacked a common radio network, forcing Army officers to fly helicopters to the naval vessels offshore to arrange for naval fire support. The most ludicrous incident, mentioned in the Pentagon’s own assessment, cited an Army officer so frustrated by difficulties in communicating with Navy ships that he used his AT&T Calling Card on an ordinary pay telephone to his office at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to relay his plea for fire support to higher headquarters and finally down to the Navy ships a few miles away from him. Because Grenada was so lightly defended, these and many other interservice problems did not cause defeat. But they were so embarrassing that they fueled congressional pressures for better joint operations.
One former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David C. Jones, told me these problems were merely the latest evidence of a “great cultural gap” deeply imbedded within the military establishment since the Spanish-American War, when the Army would not invite the Navy to the surrender ceremony. The War and Navy Departments, representing the two main services, have a long separate history, with the Air Force an outgrowth of the Army and the Marines an off-shoot of the Navy. Despite formation of the Defense Department after World War II, Jones contended that two rival “cultures” persisted—Army and Navy; he could have added a third, his own Air Force. Talking with me in early 1986 before Congress enacted some reforms, General Jones asserted that the military services were “terrible at handling crises and initial actions” because they clung steadfastly to separate chains of command.47 With minor variations, he said, most naval forces around the world are under the Navy chain of command except in the European theater, and Army forces are generally under the Army chain of command except in Korea. Jointness, he said, is a facade.
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.48
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 fig
ht with someone else in the other services.’ ”49 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.”50 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.”51
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.’ ”52
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