Dick Cheney and David Chu might think they had logic on their side; Curt Weldon knew logic didn’t count in politics. Votes did. To get votes, you had to rally people to your cause. Sometimes, you had to form coalitions. Every chance you got, you had to attract attention to your issue.
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Weldon was a master at attracting attention. One day he was browsing in a hobby shop in his district and saw a one-twenty-fourth scale model of the Osprey. When he picked up the box, the first thing that caught his eye was “Made in South Korea.” Perfect! He bought the model and took it to an Osprey strategy group meeting. A few months later, Bell delivered one to every congressional office, along with a color poster showing a stern-looking Marine in dress blues. Under the photo of retired Marine major and public relations consultant Fred Lash was this caption: “The V-22 is a weapon my troops can’t afford to lose.” Below was a 280-word text touting the tiltrotor’s virtues. With the model and poster went a “Dear Colleague” letter signed by Weldon, Geren, and a congressman from Indiana, where the Osprey’s engines were made. “Today you received a V-22 model which was manufactured in South Korea,” the letter said. “That’s O.K.—as long as the real thing is made here in the United States, where it was developed.” The letter reported that Japan’s minister of trade, Hikaru Matsunaga, had commented during a summer tour of Bell’s tiltrotor factory: “If you build it, we will buy it. If you don’t build it, we will.”
Pete Geren marveled at Weldon’s showmanship. He was a regular P. T. Barnum.
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Capitol Hill often took on a circus atmosphere in those days. In spring, good weather and the eye-catching backdrop of the Capitol dome turned the Hill into a sprawling outdoor stage for demonstrations, news conferences, and grassroots gatherings aimed at attracting attention to issues before Congress. An asphalt parking lot, removed in later years, stretched across the East Front of the Capitol, the side where presidential inaugurations were held until Ronald Reagan took his oath of office on the West Front in 1981. In the 1980s and 1990s, the East Front parking lot often served as an impromptu midway for sideshows of democracy. Gaggles of tourists and schoolchildren mingled with troupes of old soldiers in Veterans of Foreign Wars caps and activists carrying signs and wearing buttons promoting every imaginable cause. The tourists might come across displays of air-bag- equipped cars, tractors fueled by corn, or some other industrial novelty brought to the Hill by interest groups seeking federal help or relief. More often than not, perched on the East Front steps would be some solitary soul with rapturous eyes, dressed as Jesus or Abraham Lincoln and clearly sure that he was. You never knew what you might see outside the Capitol.
Just before noon on April 25, 1990, a mild and partly sunny day in Washington, Pete Geren was walking down the East Front steps behind some other House members when he heard one say, “Wonder what that is?” Sitting on the parking lot was a peculiar aircraft about the size of an executive jet, but with rotors on its two wingtips.
“Looks to me like a defense program in trouble,” quipped Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat known for his wit. Everyone laughed. Geren knew Frank was right.
The XV-15 had been sitting on the parking lot since dawn, when Bell pilots Ron Erhart and Tom Warren had flown the little tiltrotor demonstrator in from an airfield in Manassas, Virginia. Bringing the XV-15 to the Capitol was the sort of idea Curt Weldon or P. T. Barnum might have come up with, but it had occurred to Bell lobbyist George Troutman the previous fall. Troutman had been working on it ever since, for it had taken months of string-pulling. The Federal Aviation Administration had balked. The airspace around the Capitol was tightly restricted. Landing any aircraft on the Capitol grounds was rare; landing an experimental hybrid like the XV-15 was extraordinary, a request beyond anything in living memory. When Troutman went to the FAA to seek permission, he was told there were only three reasons aircraft could land at the Capitol: for law enforcement, to transport government VIPs, or on “official government business.” Troutman got his friend Representative James Oberstar, a Minnesota Democrat and tiltrotor believer who chaired the House Aviation Subcommittee, to ask House Speaker Thomas Foley to declare landing the XV-15 at the Capitol “official government business.” Oberstar was planning a hearing on the tiltrotor’s civil aviation potential; having the XV-15 at the Capitol would help members understand the issue. Foley, whose district in Washington state included a Boeing plant, obliged. At Foley’s request, the FAA agreed the XV-15 could land at the Capitol, but the agency’s bureaucrats wanted assurances the tiltrotor could get in and out of Washington without endangering the populace. Troutman sent for Dick Spivey and Bell pilot Erhart. After hours of discussion, they persuaded a roomful of officials from the FAA, the U.S. Park Police, the Architect of the Capitol office, the Secret Service, and other agencies that there would be no serious risk if the XV-15 entered the District of Columbia flying in helicopter mode over the Anacostia River, went north of the Capitol, then circled back and followed railroad tracks south over Union Station before landing on the East Front parking lot. The FAA also wanted the XV-15 to arrive and depart after dark to minimize the number of people on the streets below. The tiltrotor demonstrator had no lights and wasn’t certified to fly at night, though, so in a compromise, the FAA agreed the XV-15 could arrive as soon after sunup as possible and leave at sunup the next morning. Things had grown complicated since the 1930s, when test pilot James G. Ray landed an Autogiro on the East Front parking lot in an attempt to get Congress to buy that early hybrid for the Army—an event long forgotten by 1990.
Erhart would have bet four months’ salary he’d never be where he was about noon that day as he strapped into the cockpit of the XV-15, its fuselage painted white with red highlights and xv-?? tiltrotor in blue along its sides. Several hundred congressmen, aides, reporters, and tourists were watching from the Capitol steps, along with Troutman and Spivey, as Erhart and Warren cranked up the engines.
They began their show by doing a few turns while taxiing around the parking lot, then tilting the nacelles backward a couple of degrees to show off how the XV-15 could back up. With the downwash from its rotors kicking up clouds of dust, Erhart then lifted the XV-15 into a hover and climbed vertically to about 100 feet, roughly a third as high as the Capitol dome. The crowd craned their necks as Erhart made the XV-15 perform a quick aerial ballet, flying sideways a little, then back, then pirouetting over the parking lot before coming to a hover over the south end. Now he tilted the nacelles forward 20 degrees. The little tilt-rotor zipped toward the Senate end of the Capitol, the wind from its rotors lashing the leafy branches of oaks and elms on the nearby lawns. Erhart had to bring the nacelles as far aft as he could in a hurry to keep from overshooting the north end of the lot. He hovered over a guard shack there, did a couple of more turns, then set the craft down in the middle of the parking lot. That was it. As the XV-15 taxied back to the south end of the lot, the spectators on the steps applauded.
“This is the most significant contribution to civilian aviation since the dawn of the jet age,” Oberstar told reporters at a news conference afterward on a triangle of lawn next to the parking lot. He, Weldon, and other members declared it vital that Congress keep funding the Osprey. Weldon and Geren realized only later that a lot of their colleagues thought that was what they had just seen fly—the Osprey. So did others. The Los Angeles Times described how “a flashy red-white-and-blue warplane” had won “hearty applause” by landing at the Capitol. “The reception was typical of what has greeted the plane, a V-22 Osprey, since its inception,” the Times mistakenly reported.
As assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs, David Gribbin was Cheney’s eyes and ears on Capitol Hill. His job was to help Cheney get his way with Congress. When Gribbin heard what the Osprey’s supporters had pulled off that day, he thought: “These guys are good.”
The effect was electric. There never had been any strong opposition in Congress to the Osprey as a machine, but
there had been a lot of concern about how much it would cost amid pressure to cut the defense budget. Even General Gray, the commandant, had conceded in congressional testimony that the Osprey was “an expensive airplane, and this is a hell of a time to have an expensive program.” On that point, Dick Cheney and David Chu still had logic on their side. Curt Weldon, though, could have told Cheney and Chu that logic didn’t win political battles. Votes did. One way you got votes was by rallying people to your cause; one way you did that was by attracting attention to your issue and giving people a simple way to understand it. Pete Geren had spent a lot of time since he arrived in Congress the previous fall trying to explain the tiltrotor to busy colleagues and get them to join the Osprey coalition. After the XV-15 flew at the Capitol, it was easy to get to yes. Just as it had captured John Lehman’s imagination at the 1981 Paris Air Show, the XV-15 had sold the tiltrotor on Capitol Hill. That, however, wasn’t going to be enough.
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David Chu was a mysterious character to many of those trying to defeat his logic on the Osprey. The Osprey camp often groused about him and speculated on his motives. One senior Marine general referred to Chu privately as a “Chinese Communist,” adding an alliterative vulgar epithet. Others in the Osprey camp suggested Chu was in Sikorsky’s pocket. Bell president Jack Horner knew Sikorsky too well to buy that. Horn-er’s father had run Sikorsky’s parent corporation, United Technologies Corporation. Jack Horner himself, after serving in the Marine Corps, had worked at Sikorsky for eighteen years before joining Bell. Besides, Horner had met Chu and even heard a version of the briefing Chu had given Cheney urging him to cancel the Osprey. Horner had to admit that, if he had been Cheney, he probably would have killed the Osprey, too, after hearing Chu’s arguments. Horner still thought Chu was wrong, of course, but something he’d seen in the Pentagon parking lot also told him there was no hope of changing Chu’s mind. “I saw his little sports car out there with his name on the bottom of it,” Horner told me two decades later. “I said, ‘He’s got an ego. Nobody drives a car like that and parks it at the Pentagon.’” The car, usually parked right by the steps to the Pentagon’s River Entrance, was a fancy red Porsche Carrera with a vanity license plate that read “DC PA&E.” Marines had seen and commented on the Porsche, too, unaware that it actually belonged to PA&E analyst Deborah Christie. Chu always said “yes” when young officers asked him, “Is that your red car out there, sir?” For years, he puzzled over why they were so intrigued by his red Oldsmobile sedan.
Spivey just had to be there when he heard Chu was going to testify to the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in July 1990. This was Spivey’s first chance to actually see the Osprey’s chief antagonist, the man trying to kill his dream. Chu had been called to testify on the study Congress had ordered the Pentagon to do the previous year to help members decide whether to fund Osprey production. A few days earlier, Cheney had rejected the study’s results. Spivey wanted to see Chu explain why.
In Washington, information is a weapon, and big studies are heavy artillery. The classified, 1,200-page study compared the Osprey’s cost and effectiveness in military missions to the Black Hawk and various other kinds of helicopters. It had been done by the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally funded think tank created to do independent research for the Pentagon. IDA, pronounced like the woman’s name, had spent months on the effort, and its study was a potential turning point in the fight with Cheney over production money. If IDA agreed with Chu and PA&E that the tiltrotor was too expensive for what it would bring the Marines, that might explode any chance of getting the Senate to agree to fund production.
In theory, studies by think tanks such as IDA take a cold, hard look at facts and reach unbiased conclusions, but in the analytical world, there’s an old saw: “Tell me the assumptions and I’ll tell you what the study is going to conclude.” Spivey and others in the Osprey camp had been nervous about what assumptions IDA would use, especially after they saw a memo to the study team by the project leader as it began. In his memo, IDA analyst L. Dean Simmons included a white paper “provided by Sikorsky Aircraft that identifies some of the issues that we will need to resolve.” Sikorsky’s paper laid out “major claims” for the Osprey and offered conclusions. “The true costs of the V-22 have been significantly understated,” was one. A second was that the “V-22 is not more survivable”—no less vulnerable to enemy fire—than the Black Hawk. A final one said the Osprey “is perhaps useful technology. However, as a troubled full scale development program with near term production decisions to be made, and given the availability of proven alternatives, the V-22 is not very affordable.”
When Bell and Boeing got wind of the Sikorsky memo, they commissioned a study of their own by the U.S. Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which agreed to do it on the condition that its study be published no matter the results. Spivey flew to Washington to observe a war game the lab ran. Role players in different rooms—experienced military officers—fought out a fictional assault on terrorists in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, sending in imaginary Marines aboard imaginary Ospreys or helicopters. Computers calculated the results, and Spivey was happy with them. The Livermore study found that the tiltrotor’s speed could make a critical difference in battle.
The Osprey camp was ecstatic when IDA’s study reached similar conclusions. The institute found that while the Osprey would cost more than helicopters to buy, the costs would even out over twenty years because the Osprey was expected to be more reliable and cheaper to maintain than existing helicopters. The Osprey also would be much more effective than helicopters in most military missions because of its speed and range, IDA concluded, though only slightly better in an opposed amphibious assault. Ospreys would be harder to shoot down than helicopters, the IDA study said, but the tiltrotor’s speed would be less of an advantage in an amphibious assault because heavy-lift helicopters would be needed to haul artillery and trucks to shore. This meant the entire force would have to start within helicopter range of the objective.
Chu told the subcommittee he questioned IDA’s assumptions. IDA’s estimate of how much the Osprey would cost was probably low, Chu said, and its assumption on how many CH-53E heavy-lift helicopters would be needed in an amphibious assault ignored a “promising” idea called the “dual-sling option.” Chu said the Marines could use half as many CH-53Es in an amphibious assault if each of the behemoth helicopters carried two Humvees slung under its belly in cargo netting. That would make their air fleet cheaper. To make the dual-sling option work, though, the Humvees would have to be bolted together so they wouldn’t swing in different directions and cause the helicopter carrying them to crash. Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, reminded Chu that in a recent House hearing, Commandant Gray had derided the idea of dual-slinging Humvees as “totally ridiculous.” Chu said he “respectfully” disagreed with Gray.
Specter let Chu have it. The Defense Department was being “misleading, if not disingenuous,” he told him. Specter said he didn’t understand Chu’s answers to various questions. He scolded him for interrupting when Chu hadn’t, saying, “Excuse me, wait until I finish my question.” Chu remained Spock-like: polite, unemotional, unyielding. The dual-sling option, he insisted, was logical.
When the three-hour hearing was over, Spivey and his colleagues were glowing. Specter had really raked Chu over the coals, they agreed. Bell and Boeing bought hundreds of copies of the hearing transcript from the Government Printing Office and sent them to subcontractors, members of the Tilt-Rotor Technology Coalition, members of Congress, reporters covering the Osprey battle—anyone they could think of.
Chu asked a Cheney aide who had accompanied him to the hearing how he’d done. He’d testified so little in his career, Chu had no feel for such things. “After that hearing, there’ll be no more hearings,” the aide told him. Chu, he said, had made a great case for Cheney’s position that the Osprey was simply too expensive.
When the defense bi
lls were done that year, though, they included $238 million to continue work on the six Osprey prototypes and another $165 million to start gearing up for production. Cheney was losing his confrontation with Congress, but the Marines and their allies on the Hill had no illusions. He wasn’t giving up.
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The Osprey’s iffy future and curtailed budget were making things sticky for Bell-Boeing and Colonel Jim Schaefer’s V-22 program office at Navair. By early 1990, the companies had built four of the six prototypes planned and the fifth and sixth were in their early stages. The companies were flight-testing the prototypes, too, though money for that was short and they were way behind schedule. Schaefer had instructions from Cheney’s office: the program could do anything that fell within the rubric of Full Scale Development but nothing more. No money was to be spent on getting ready to make production model Ospreys or building facilities for them. There weren’t going to be any, as far as Cheney was concerned.
Schaefer knew from personal experience that Cheney meant that. One day the defense secretary paid a visit to Anacostia Naval Station, a small facility on the Potomac River in Washington used by HMX-1, the Marine Corps squadron that flies the white-topped helicopters known as “Marine One” when the president is aboard. As Cheney toured a new hangar under construction there, the squadron commander proudly pointed out that it was designed to accommodate the Osprey, with its peculiar blade-folding and wing stow mechanisms, if the tiltrotor ever became the presidential aircraft. Unofficially, the Marines had been figuring on that before Cheney took over the Pentagon.
The next morning, Schaefer was summoned to Cheney’s office. Cheney was sitting at his desk as Schaefer entered. Sean O’Keefe, the top Pentagon budget official at the time, was also in the room. As he came in, Schaefer looked out the window wistfully at the sunshine glinting off the Potomac. I could be out there playing golf instead of getting my ass chewed off, he thought as he stood before Cheney’s big desk.
The Dream Machine Page 25