Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  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.53 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.

  “Of course, if you haven’t got any strategic rationale for dividing the money, you go to ‘fairness,’ ” an Army general blurted out in frustration. “That means you stick with tradition. In other words, you go with what you got before.”

  Weinberger: Softball and Stonewall

  For the turf cartel, Caspar Weinberger was an ideal chairman of the board. His basic notion—following Reagan—was: Spend more; buy more; build more. The assumption was that all the services had massively neglected needs and that the national security would be improved by taking care of them all. In Washington jargon, it was an input-oriented strategy, as if simply pouring in lots more money were the cure.

  Like Reagan, moreover, Weinberger believed in delegating authority. He deliberately gave the services ample leeway. When his own staff tried to impose central discipline, Weinberger often stopped them. His handling of Lehman’s six-hundred-ship Navy, and the Army’s Divad and light-division programs, are cases in point. Early on, one senior official told me, he warned Weinberger that the “services are such powerful bureaucracies that any time you give them any more advantages, it’s going to be almost impossible to control them.” But Weinberger waved him off, saying that was how he had run the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

  In the Pentagon, his laissez-faire management style let the turf cartel decide what it wanted and made him their salesman. Indeed, he acted less as the architect than as the advocate of the military buildup. He was a loyal servant of a big-defense-spending president and a tireless attorney for the military services. In short, Weinberger played Softball inside the Pentagon and stonewall on the outside with Congress. Much of the top military brass were delighted. I have heard Navy officers, and others, applaud Weinberger’s track record as the best among recent Defense secretaries; “a golden era of defense,” one said to me—because Weinberger got the most weaponry and funding. To his credit, Weinberger worked hard to keep them out of war, again reflecting the views of his top military brass, who were still gun-shy from Vietnam.

  In some ways, Weinberger followed a Republican pattern. Typically, Democratic Defense secretaries such as Robert S. McNamara in the Kennedy administration and Harold Brown in the Carter administration have ridden herd on the military services. They have empowered the massive staffs of the office of the secretary of Defense to assert centralized control and to challenge the weapons decisions of the services. Normally, Republican Defense secretaries apply looser reins on the services. Weinberger has been a more extreme decentralizer than other Republican Defense secretaries. He is at the opposite end from McNamara, the most ardent centralizes In between, Melvin Laird in the Nixon administration used his deputy, industrialist David Packard, to press efficiencies and hard choices on the military. Weinberger and his deputies were considerably less demanding, especially in their early years, though under pressure from Congress, Weinberger began to tighten a bit in 1986 and 1987.

  Weinberger’s approach sprang largely from his lack of direct Pentagon experience. In California, he had been Governor Reagan’s director of finance, and later he was budget director and a domestic cabinet secretary in the Nixon-Ford years. He entered the Pentagon considerably less prepared than James Schlesinger, who had been chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and director of Central Intelligence; than Harold Brown, a former secretary of the Air Force and Pentagon research and development boss; than Melvin Laird, who had dealt with the Pentagon as a veteran congressman; or than Robert McNamara, who had been a captain of industry, as president of the Ford Motor Company. Weinberger’s one connection was as budget director, where he had been known as Cap the Knife because he had used a scalpel on agency budgets for Nixon. Initially, that reputation scared Republican hawks who feared he would be tough on the Pentagon.

  Weinberger’s record justified their fears. During the Nixon years, he had publicly defended the sharp drop in military spending during the gradual pull out from Vietnam, and he had been a foe of the B-1 bomber. Even in 1980, when it looked as though he might be secretary of State, Weinberger seemed wary of excessive defense spending. Right after Reagan’s victory, Mel Laird wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post headlined NOT A BINGE, BUT A BUILDUP.54 It urged an additiona
l $10 billion a year for Defense appropriations, to build to a level of $240 billion in three years. I was told that privately Weinberger informed Laird he thought that was too much, too fast.

  But once picked to head the Pentagon, Weinberger turned around. Within two months, he was proposing an immediate $33 billion jump on defense appropriations and, on top of that, a far steeper climb than Laird proposed. He had gotten Reagan’s marching orders for a whopping buildup and was leaning on advice from ardent hawks such as John Lehman and William Schneider, who had written an ambitious defense blueprint for the right-wing Heritage Foundation. Weinberger’s trademark became hoarding money for the Pentagon. Knowing that military spending goes through up and down cycles, he charged through the political window of opportunity to push military spending up to a much higher plateau. He got David Stockman, unknowing at that time about defense, to agree to a $1.5 billion, five-year spending program, and he clung tenaciously to his money.

  But unlike Brown and Schlesinger who had thought about national security issues for years, Weinberger entered office without a clear strategy, except to build more of everything—which sounded all right at first, but which created problems when, predictably, the money ran short. Concepts like the six-hundred-ship Navy, reviving the B-1 bomber, and scrapping Carter’s plan for mobile basing of the MX missile were handed to Weinberger from the Reagan 1980 campaign. Reagan’s point was to strike a difference with Carter. In 1981, Weinberger had no alternative plan for basing the MX missile that would satisfy even pro-MX hawks such as senators John Tower of Texas and Scoop Jackson of Washington; six years later, he was still struggling to devise one. Reluctantly he reversed his old opposition to the B-1 bomber and got a hundred of them, but only fifty MX missiles (instead of Carter’s two hundred), leaving the American strategic nuclear arsenal with about the same strength that Carter had planned.

  Other important strategic weapons, like the Trident D-5 submarine missile and the Stealth bomber, were put on track by previous administrations. In the Reagan years, the initiative for the mobile Midgetman missile came from Congress, not from Weinberger’s Pentagon, and the Strategic Defense Initiative, while floated by Admiral James Watkins, chief of Naval Operations, was really the creature of President Reagan and was mainly developed in the White House, with the Pentagon surprised by Reagan’s announcement.

  What came to frustrate many key members of Congress, including strongly prodefense Republicans and Democrats, is that Weinberger steadfastly refused their pleas to set priorities among service requests and to help them cut budgets intelligently. Instead, they saw him trying to satisfy all the Pentagon constituencies rather than showing firm leadership. Indeed, by the start of Reagan’s second term, congressional frustration with Weinberger’s management of the Pentagon boiled over in the drive to force more centralized leadership on the military hierarchy, despite Weinberger’s open resistance.

  “This secretary of Defense sets no priorities,” complained Dave McCurdy, an Oklahoma Democrat who has become a respected spokesman on defense issues. “He plays a budget game with us and it gives more power to the bureaucratic forces [in the Pentagon]. So you get more logrolling, more bureaucratic input. He doesn’t instill any discipline in the Department of Defense itself to make the choices between the Navy and the Air Force and the Army, or even within the branches of one service. So the bureaucrats have their field day. He’s elevated each of these bureaucracies to the level of individual fiefdoms. And there’s no king!”55

  I have heard Army and Air Force generals and Republican Senators echo McCurdy’s judgment. “There’s nobody involved in centralized planning,” was the curt complaint of Sam Nunn, who became Senate Armed Services Committee chairman in 1987.56 In the Pentagon, Weinberger was seen by his civilian lieutenants as a weak manager who pressured the services only when Congress or public controversy forced his hand, as on the Divad or the MX. Several of Weinberger’s top subordinates complained to me that he was no executive. Richard DeLauer, the undersecretary for research, complained to me: “We’d tell Cap, ‘You know, we’re gonna have a destroyer that’s gonna cost a billion dollars,’ and Cap says, ‘Oh, we can’t have that.’ But then nothing else would happen. He didn’t apply the damn leadership. That’s the problem.”57

  Weinberger bristled at such talk. In several sessions with me, he insisted the criticism was unfair and inaccurate. He pointed out—accurately—that he presided over the greatest spending in Defense Department history. And he claimed—properly—that sometimes the services, especially the Navy, got contractors to trim their prices. He had no apologies for tackling everything at once rather than picking priorities.

  “We needed to do a great deal to regain military strength very quickly,” he asserted, recalling 1981. “We didn’t have much time, and we had to do a lot in a lot of different areas at once. When we came, there were huge backlogs, a lot of maintenance backlogs, a lot of repair, a lot of ammunition shortages, and then we needed modernization of the strategic systems and the strategic triad. We needed to improve our conventional strength. We needed to do a great deal about manpower and morale.… This point [about letting the services have their way] goes along with the criticism that we didn’t have any priorities, that we just got a lot of money and threw it at the problems, and I don’t think either of those is correct.”58

  As yardsticks of successes, Weinberger and his supporters point to the skyrocketing growth of the military budget. In the first two years, it jumped twenty-five percent above inflation. That set in motion the doubling of the Pentagon budget in five years. Even when Congress tried to apply restraint, actual defense outlays kept rolling upward, for two reasons: One was that the inflation assumptions in Pentagon budgets were excessive. In 1986, the General Accounting Office reported that over five years inflationary cost increases were $44 billion less than the Pentagon had predicted. Weinberger simply pocketed the inflation savings, using them to offset congressional cuts, which robbed those cuts of real impact. The other cause is the delay between congressional authorization of funds and the actual spending on weapons systems. For example, the $7.3 billion set aside in 1983 for two aircraft carriers will not be entirely spent until 1991. In effect, Congress gives the Pentagon a huge line of credit every year to spend over several years. That backlog had reached the enormous sum of $270 billion in early 1987, assuring that no downturn in actual spending would occur until the 1990s—because the system was awash with money.

  Weinberger entered office with real power, and he kept it with Reagan because he was loyally doing Reagan’s bidding on defense. But over time he lost influence with Congress because he exercised his early power too rashly. As former Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole quipped, “Cap Weinberger is the first person in history to overdraw a blank check.”59

  In his first eighteen months as Defense secretary, Weinberger enjoyed a honeymoon because Congress was so prodefense that, except for the MX missile, it did not look closely at the particulars of the military buildup. But Weinberger’s very success with mammoth early funding, coupled with the huge deficits created by the 1981 Reagan tax cuts, set in train the public’s—and Congress’s—urge to moderate the military buildup. Weinberger was too rigid to bend in 1983 and thereby missed an opportunity to solidify support for the long haul. With Congress, he was a lonesome end, not a team player. He played a stonewalling game, without the subtlety and guile of John Lehman, and it cost him dearly over the years.

  In an odd way, Weinberger was like McNamara. Although they were opposites as managers of the Pentagon, they were similar in disdaining partnership with Congress or even a few key leaders. McNamara was infuriated by the protective alliances forged by the military services with friendly members of Congress. Weinberger resented the seemingly endless wickets of the congressional budget process. Both were messianic. They treated their own budgets and prescriptions for defense as inviolate gospel. It was a matter of style. McNamara became a defense intellectual and argued his doctrine passionately. Weinber
ger took his brief from Reagan and the military brass and never wavered. Both were unsuccessful as Iron Triangle players. Either they failed to understand that running the Pentagon requires alliances with Congress, or they could not crack the code of the Iron Triangle game. For it is axiomatic that no president and no secretary of Defense can control the military services, build durable support for his budget, or contain his critics without powerful alliances on Capitol Hill.

  Weinberger’s problems were especially ironic. Like Melvin Laird, he cast himself as the public defender of the Pentagon. But Laird, as a veteran member of Congress, arrived at the Pentagon with important networks on Capitol Hill. Schlesinger and Donald Rumsfeld, another Republican Defense secretary, also had ties in Congress. Yet Weinberger, who is amiable in manner, never really built the essential political networks. He was tireless in testifying and in after-hours socializing, forever arguing his case. But his geniality could not overcome his rigidity.

  In the first two years, Weinberger leaned on his deputy, Frank Carlucci, who had political savvy, and on Senator John Tower of Texas. But Carlucci resigned in 1982, and Tower left the Senate in 1984. Weinberger’s later deputies could not woo Congress effectively, and Barry Goldwater, Tower’s replacement as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, took an independent course and finally became the spearhead for reforms reacting against Weinberger’s Pentagon. In short, Weinberger lacked allies to fight reform and the backlash against the Pentagon budget.

  Les Aspin, Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told me that in a private conversation he had once burst out at Weinberger, “Jesus, Cap, negotiating with you is like negotiating with the Russians. All you do is keep repeating your position.”60 Sam Nunn was offended that Weinberger was so partisan, so quick to condemn all that went before Reagan. “Some of his statements are just preposterous,” Senator Nunn told me with some heat. “In an open hearing, he said that all the strategic modernization programs started in 1981, and I went back and named the systems that started under either Ford or Carter or Nixon. He never did back off of it. I think that’s hurt Weinberger up here with an awful lot of prodefense Democrats and with some Republicans, too.”61