Stevens played devil’s advocate, conducting a mock interrogation so Fitch could get the Marine Corps’ arguments on the record, a way to try to shape opinion on the Hill before staffers and senators formed strong opinions about the consequences of the Army quitting the JVX. “I happen to be personally very much enthused by the JVX tiltrotor,” Stevens told Fitch, “but under the circumstances of the budget . . . why should we proceed with the tiltrotor for the Marines alone?”
“We still have a joint program,” Fitch stoutly insisted. Even if the Army and the Air Force were to drop out, though, “there is adequate justification to go it alone, if that is what it takes,” he declared. “JVX is probably the highest aviation priority that we have in research and development.”
Why not buy Black Hawk helicopters instead, Stevens wondered? The Navy, he noted, was already buying Black Hawks that Sikorsky Aircraft had “marinized”—modified to resist the corrosion of salt spray and other strains of shipboard use.
This was an argument the tiltrotor’s advocates had started hearing only recently, and one they wanted to nip in the bud. It was being raised by one of the most powerful bureaucrats in the Pentagon, David S. C. Chu, director of the Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, known as “P, A and E.” Chu headed a staff of economists and mathematicians whose job was to analyze the cost-effectiveness of major defense programs—figure out how to get more bang for the buck, in the popular phrase. Chu’s staff had done some back-of-the-envelope calculations. A cursory look suggested tiltrotors would be far more costly than Black Hawks, maybe five times as much per aircraft. Stevens was doing Fitch a favor by raising the issue, though, for Magnus had armed the general with a powerful reply.
If the Marines bought Black Hawks instead of tiltrotors “you would have to buy about six additional ships to carry those Black Hawk helicopters,” Fitch warned. Magnus had extrapolated that from the fact that the Black Hawk carried only eleven troops while the JVX was going to carry twenty-four, and an amphibious assault ship deck can hold only so many aircraft. If roughly twice as many Black Hawks as JVX’s would be needed to get an equal number of Marines ashore in the same amount of time, more ships would be needed to launch those Black Hawks, and ships cost a lot more than aircraft.
As the exchange went on, Stevens assumed a new role: the concerned parent obliged to try to talk a headstrong child out of a risky plan, but so proud of the kid’s moxie that, well, shucks, how could you say no?
“You realize it is a forty-one billion dollar program you are embarking on?” Stevens asked, using an estimate of what the Osprey was going to cost over twenty years with inflation.
“Yes, sir, I fully understand that,” Fitch assured him.
“All alone,” Steven admonished. “And if the Congress does not give you the money, you will be without helicopters.”
“We are not alone but with the Department of the Navy, sir,” Fitch answered.
Fitch didn’t need to add that the Department of the Navy was run by Lehman, and Lehman wanted to keep the Army in the JVX program. While the Marines were pleading their case on the Hill and preparing to fight Ambrose, Lehman came up with the winning strategy. He went over Ambrose’s head.
On Army procurement decisions, Ambrose’s word was usually final. Army Secretary John O. Marsh, Jr., was a former Virginia congressman who also had been assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs. Marsh preferred to deal with policy and the Hill and let Ambrose handle technology and procurement issues. Marsh was also friendly with Lehman, however. The two met every few days over lunch or coffee, and one day that summer, Lehman offered Marsh a deal: if the Army would just agree to buy the JVX once it was built, Lehman wouldn’t fight to make them help pay for developing the tiltrotor. “To me, that was the best of all worlds,” Lehman told me, “because that would give us the cover of Army support without having them at the table to muck up the program.” Their deal still had to be ratified, however, by the Defense Resources Board, where Army Chief of Staff Wickham and Marine Commandant Kelley were to conduct their “brief-off ” on the issue.
The DRB met on September 19, 1983, in the secretary of defense’s conference room, a space in the Pentagon’s E-Ring dominated by a long table. After Lehman’s talk with Marsh, the issue had been recast as whether the Army would buy the Marine Corps version of the JVX or drop out of the program altogether. Seventeen top officials, including Lehman, Chu, and Ambrose, were present, but they wouldn’t get a vote. The DRB wasn’t a democratic body, just a forum for debate. As usual, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Thayer was presiding and would make the final decision.
Wickham began the discussion of the JVX, arguing that his service had no great need for the big, beefy tiltrotor the Marines wanted but was desperate for a light and versatile helicopter called the LHX, one of Ambrose’s pet projects. Kelley went next, armed with a detailed fifteen-slide briefing that Magnus had created showing how great the tiltrotor would be for hauling troops and cargo and lots of other missions, too. One slide said the Army could use 231 of them to carry troops into battle or casualties out of it. Electronic spying, the Army’s original mission for the JVX, would be done by other aircraft, the slide noted. As Kelley talked, Wickham started deriding the JVX and its huge rotors. “It’s a behemoth!” he scoffed. Kelley strode silently over to where Wickham was seated. At five foot eight and 155 pounds, Wickham wasn’t small, but he was slight. With the six-foot, 200-pound Kelley looming over him, Wickham looked downright puny. “John,” Kelley rasped, “to you, anything would be large.”
The room erupted in laughter. When it subsided, Thayer said: “Okay, let’s go with both.”
That ratified Lehman’s deal with Marsh. The Army would spend no money to help develop the JVX but would agree—in principle—to buy 231 of the Marine Corps version when the tiltrotor was ready. The Navy Department and Air Force would pay all the development bills, but the tiltrotor’s advocates could still tell Congress or anyone else who asked that the Army was in the program; it had a “requirement” for precisely 231. Colonel Glenn Yarborough, a military aide to the assistant secretary of the Army for research and development, had provided the number. “I plucked it out of the air,” Yarborough told me. Yarborough was going to use a round figure at first but decided that 231 sounded more “analytical.”
At the Senate hearing, Stevens had told Fitch: “If you want it that bad, we will do our best to get it for you, but you will have to hold on to your hat on that one, I think.”
Stevens was right. The quest for their dream machine was going to take the Marines on a wild ride—the procurement equivalent of the Fulton Pickup System, the James Bond- style rescue scheme Dick Spivey had worked on in the 1960s. In the Fulton Pickup, a stranded pilot or spy was to be snatched off the ground when an airplane with a fork on its nose snagged a cable attaching the rescuee to a helium balloon. Momentum would fling him into the sky at up to ten times the force of gravity, then the airplane would haul him through the air behind it as a winch reeled him into its belly and safety.
For the Marines, the balloon had just gone up.
* * *
Four months after the DRB meeting, on a cold and soggy January afternoon, Spivey and Magnus were in Greenwich, England. The Bell Helicopter marketer and the Marine Corps action officer were in Britain on business, but this afternoon Spivey had talked Magnus into taking a few minutes to stop by the Royal Observatory, situated atop a grassy hill just southeast of London. Spivey wanted to straddle the Prime Meridian, the imaginary line that runs from the North Pole to the South Pole and divides the Eastern from the Western Hemisphere.
Spivey and Magnus had long been straddling the invisible and often imaginary line between the defense industry and the military. For nearly three years they had been promoting the tiltrotor as a team, a microcosm of the military-industrial complex in action. When Spivey was in Fort Worth and Magnus in Washington, they talked on the phone, trading rumors and information, discussing tactics and strategy, cooking
up new ways to ensure the JVX program’s success. Magnus might call to suggest that Bell invite this general or that government official to fly in the XV-15, or to share impressions he’d picked up while briefing someone on Capitol Hill or in a Pentagon meeting. Spivey would call Magnus with progress reports from the engineers, data Magnus could use in briefings, or to ask what was happening on the program in the Pentagon or at Navair. When Spivey was in Washington, he and Magnus often paired up to give briefings on the JVX to key officials. They also took their “dog and pony show,” as Spivey called it, to aviation conferences around the country. Magnus would use elaborate slides to explain how the Marines planned to use the tiltrotor, how it was going to revive the Corps’ eroding amphibious assault capability, make the Marines vastly more agile on the battlefield, and let them reach anywhere in the world in a hurry. Spivey, drawing on his background as an aeronautical engineer, would talk about the peculiarities of tiltrotor technology, how Bell and Boeing engineers were designing the JVX, what it would be able to do, and how this new way to fly was going to revolutionize aviation, military and civilian alike.
The day before their visit to Greenwich, Spivey and Magnus had put on their show for some military officers and defense industry officials at Whitehall, the main building of the British Ministry of Defence, in a visit John Lehman had arranged. Spivey wasn’t optimistic about the chances of the British joining the program—they didn’t—but he and other Bell and Boeing marketers, lobbyists, and executives knew they needed to broaden and strengthen the JVX’s base of support.
In Washington, no program is ever truly sold, no issue ever truly settled; the annual budget cycle ensures that. This was why defense companies kept marketers like Spivey, lobbyists like George Troutman, and public relations teams on their payrolls. The marketers would have to keep explaining the JVX to new Pentagon action officers and uniformed military leaders, who rotate to new assignments every three or four years. The lobbyists would need to educate new members of Congress and their aides, new administration officials and others in government, and curry favor with them. The public relations people—“flacks,” as reporters called them, an anglicization of the German abbreviation for air defense artillery, FLAK—would have to try to shape public opinion by periodically firing off encouraging reports of the JVX’s progress in press releases and staying ready to shoot down any incoming attacks on the tiltrotor.
Troutman and Bell’s PR staff often relied on Spivey to do briefings or media interviews. There was no one else at Bell or Boeing who knew the tiltrotor’s history and technology as well as he did and also could talk about it in a way nonengineers could grasp. Spivey was a walking encyclopedia on the technology and where things stood with the JVX, partly because he went to engineering meetings every chance he got. Engineers often viewed marketers with something just short of contempt, Spivey knew, but Bell engineers accepted Spivey. He had been one of them once upon a time. Spivey was as much a hybrid as the tiltrotor: part engineer, part salesman. The engineer understood the technical details of the tilt-rotor; the salesman could convert them into a sales pitch most anyone could understand. Spivey made sure of that by trying out new lines on his elderly mother in Georgia when he could before using them in his briefings.
There was also something else about Spivey that few at Bell and Boeing had, at least not to the same degree. Spivey was a salesman with a dream—a dream that moved him so much, he sometimes sounded more like a prophet with a vision than a marketer with a product. When Spivey went out to spread his gospel, he was a polite pastor, not a fire-breathing evangelist; there was no shouting or arm waving. Often, though, he would hold his elbows to his sides with his forearms and index fingers pointing up and explain that a tiltrotor “takes off like a helicopter,” then rotate his arms forward and add, “flies like an airplane.” When he did, Spivey would smile like a magician who’s just performed a mind-boggling trick. Spivey thought the tiltrotor was amazing, and he was sure it was going to work magic on the world of aviation.
A couple of days after Ambrose dropped his bombshell about the Army’s lack of interest in the JVX, Spivey assured reporter Joe Simnacher of the Dallas Morning News that by the mid-1990s—within a decade—a tiltrotor much like the one Bell and Boeing were developing for the military would be “the workhorse of offshore oil companies.” Civilian versions would be flying forty passengers at a time from downtown Dallas or Fort Worth to the central business district of Houston, he predicted. In the meantime, the military tiltrotor project was going to create at least ten thousand jobs in the Fort Worth area alone. Spivey took the figure from a study done for Bell at Texas A&M University.
Visions like those were why Leonard M. “Jack” Horner, who succeeded Jim Atkins as Bell’s president in 1983, called Spivey “one of the believers.”
There were other believers. An important one was Hans Mark, the deputy administrator of NASA in 1983, who had been trying to help Bell perfect and promote the tiltrotor for years. The son of a renowned chemist who had fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1940, Mark was an MIT-educated nuclear physicist who had worked at top labs and taught at top schools before becoming director of NASA’s Ames Research Center in 1969 at age forty. One of the first projects that caught Mark’s eye at Ames was the tiltrotor. The idea of a flying machine that didn’t need airports intrigued him. In 1973, when lower-level officials at Bell and NASA couldn’t agree on a contract to build the XV-15, Mark flew to Fort Worth and made the deal himself with Bell president Jim Atkins. In 1979, Mark joined the Carter administration as undersecretary of the Air Force, then became secretary when his predecessor resigned. The next year, when Bell was looking for transportation to take the XV-15 to the Paris Air Show, Mark arranged for the Air Force to put two big cargo aircraft at the company’s disposal. When Reagan became president in 1981, Mark went back to NASA as deputy administrator, but he was at the Paris Air Show that summer when Lehman saw the XV-15 fly for the first time. When they got back to Washington, Lehman asked Mark’s view of the tiltrotor. Mark told him it held extraordinary promise.
Two years later, with the Ambrose crisis just resolved, Bell sought Mark’s advice on how to shore up the JVX politically. “Dr. Mark said make it into a national program,” Spivey recorded in his work diary. At a November 22, 1983, marketing meeting, Bell’s JVX team decided on their strategy. They dubbed it “Keep the Program Sold.” Horner would visit the editorial boards of the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers to talk up the tiltrotor. Bell would send the XV-15 out into the country to make flight demonstrations. Spivey also would rev up the XV-15 “guest pilot” program, which had flown nearly fifty government officials and military officers in 1981–82 but only nine in 1983. Bell would convene a symposium for potential Osprey subcontractors to school them on the tiltrotor and urge them to tell their members of Congress how important it could be to their company, their local economy, and the nation. Spivey would travel with Horner to visit larger potential suppliers—avionics contractors, engine makers, and the like—to “convince them that the program was real,” as Spivey put it, so they would pitch in on the lobbying. Everywhere they went, Horner, Spivey, and others would emphasize that the tiltrotor wasn’t just another aircraft but a “national asset.” The goal, Spivey wrote in his notebook, was to brand that idea into the public and political consciousness within six to nine months: “national asset.”
The next year, Bell sent its XV-15 on a 3,500-mile, fifty-five-flight “Eastern U.S. Tour.” The tour concluded October 2 with the XV-15 picking Horner up at the New York Port Authority heliport near the World Trade Center and flying him to Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., to show off the tiltrotor’s potential as an executive transport. The 200-mile trip took sixty-six minutes. The same year, thirty-nine guest pilots flew the XV-15. The engineers were still just designing the Osprey, but Spivey had no doubt it would make its first flight in 1987 as planned and be in production by 1989. On June 12, 1984, he wrote in his wor
k diary: “Get DOT [the U.S. Department of Transportation] to borrow a few JVX from DoD [Department of Defense] in ’89 to set up a city-center to city-center transportation pilot system.”
* * *
One of Lehman’s big ideas for the Osprey program was to use it as a test case for his belief that free market competition could cure the ills of military procurement. Four years into the Reagan administration, it was clear to everyone paying attention that the defense procurement system was riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse. Stories of $640 toilet seats and $7,622 coffee pots sold to the military, indictments of defense contractors for bilking the government out of millions, cost overruns in the billions were standard journalistic fare—one outrage after another topping the last. Lehman wasn’t the only one who thought competition was the cure for this cancer. In 1985, Congress passed a range of defense procurement reforms largely aimed at injecting more competition into military contracting. More competition between defense companies, Lehman and the reformers in Congress were sure, would keep contractors honest, hold prices down, and stop cost overruns. This was why, after no one but the Bell-Boeing team bid on the JVX in 1983, Lehman decided to split the companies up after they had designed and built a dozen or so Ospreys and make them compete with each other for production contracts. This was a variation on what Lehman called his “leader-follower” policy, in which the winner of a design competition was forced to give enough information to the loser for the loser to produce the item according to the winner’s design. The resulting dual sources would then duel for production contracts, with each guaranteed a share big enough to keep both interested. That way, Lehman reasoned, there would be competition every year on big contracts, rather than just at the start of a big program, which would give the Defense Department a tool to hold prices down. “You had no leverage with a contractor if you had no place to go,” Lehman said. “If you don’t have an annual competition, everybody gets lazy.” Defense contractors despised the idea.
The Dream Machine Page 19