by Orr Kelly
Spangenberg also spoke for many in the navy who didn’t like the way things were going. He told the committee: “I think, overall, I have been the spokesman of naval aviation, for the man in uniform that couldn’t talk up when I could. I have been in many situations where I could talk and a younger officer in blue could not talk. And I was shoved forward and said, ‘go tell him, George.’ I think, in general, I speak for most of the naval aviation in the statement I made here. I think that there are, obviously, some people that disagree with me. I don’t take issue with their sincerity. I believe that they are wrong.”
Houser, who had long been the most outspoken advocate of an all F-14 carrier navy, came to accept the F/A-18 as a useful complement to the Tomcat. Certainly it was far better than if the navy had been forced to accept a lightweight dogfighter that could do nothing else. In congressional testimony, Houser dutifully supported the navy’s choice of the F/A-18.
Lee, who was in the opposite corner from Houser during the long fight leading up to the choice of the F/A-18, says: “To Houser’s credit, I must say he swallowed his pride and testified as necessary. It was tough for him. In fairness to Houser, I never ran across his going around the corner to bad-mouth the F/A-18. I think he took it like a man.”
Throughout this period, Houser was in a peculiar position. His office was in the Pentagon, whereas Lee was a few miles away in Crystal City. Because of this accident of geography, Clements saw Houser two or three times a week, much more often than he saw Lee. He came to like and respect Houser—“a super guy,” he calls him—and to rely on his advice and judgment. This would seem to have placed Houser in a position to put the F/A-18 in a bad light with Clements, but he didn’t.
Clements, who considered himself a general manager dealing with broad issues rather than details such as whether the new plane should be a fighter or an attack plane, or both, tended to discount whatever bias Houser may have showed for the F-14. He saw that as part of the navy culture:
“They are a culture that believes that everything they have got in hand is the best in the world and cannot be improved upon. Anytime you’re getting ready to change that culture, whether it be in a destroyer or in radar detection or in an airplane, there is immediate resistance. First of all, it wasn’t invented here, and second, we don’t need it. We like what we’ve got.”
If Houser himself was careful to play the honest broker in his relations with Clements, the bureaucracy over which he presided as deputy chief of naval operations for air warfare (OP 05) was, and continued to be long after his retirement, a center of opposition to the F/A-18. After Corky Lenox became program manager for the plane in 1976, he quickly learned to be cautious about what he told anyone in that office.
“I was very fearful …” Lenox says. “I really felt there were not very many one could trust with sensitive information related to procurement strategy or problems. I found many times, things I would say in discussions, in briefings, in dialogue on what’s going on would very quickly find its way to [Grumman headquarters at] Bethpage. I felt there were no secrets in OP 05. … It was a period of the most intense opposition. It was very, very difficult. I always felt the other side had my game plan, had my play book, so to speak.”
Much of the opposition to the F/A-18 within the navy was emotional and to many aviators, especially the more experienced ones, the new plane was seen as a threat. “It was a challenge to a whole lot of different rice bowls,” says Admiral Michaelis.
Although the F/A-18 would come in a two-seat version for training purposes and later, for under-the-weather attack missions, it was basically a single-seat plane. The navy’s two first-line fighters, the F-14 and the F-4, both carried a two-man crew. With a single-seat, dual-mission plane coming into service, there would be far fewer planes with a back seat for a radar intercept officer, known as a RIO, or bombardier-navigator, known as a BN. This not only threatened the job security of the man in the second cockpit, but even those who continued to fly would suffer a loss of prestige.
There was as much or more opposition to the F/A-18 from crew members of the heavy A-6 day-night, all-weather bomber as there was from the crews of the F-4s, which would be replaced by the F/A-18. To the A-6 crews, the navy seemed to be saying that one man in an F/A-18 could do almost as well what it took two men to do in an A-6, and they resented it. They also feared that they would often be called upon to provide fuel for the Hornets—acting as flying fuel trucks rather than doing their real job of ground attack.
From 1975 until 1978, Paul Hollandsworth, the former skipper of an A-6 squadron, sat in a small office at the Pentagon as the representative there of the A-6 community in the fleet. Alongside him sat other pilots representing the F-14 and A-7 crews.
Hollandsworth, who was later to play a key role in one of the most controversial episodes in the F/A-18’s history, felt all along that the navy should rely on the F-14 as a fighter and develop a replacement for the A-6 attack plane rather than spend money on a dual-purpose strike-fighter. But in those early days, he recalls, feelings toward the F/A-18 leaned more toward apathy than outright hostility: “Nobody really expected it to fly because we couldn’t see a mission for it. The F-14 seemed to us to meet all the requirements. It didn’t seem like the F/A-18 was going anyplace. In our office, it didn’t get a great deal of attention.”
But as the F/A-18 moved along, it attracted more attention—and more hostility.
An important source of opposition was the pilots of the single-seat A-7 attack planes who would have to learn to fly the Hornet. Many of them honestly doubted that one man could be both a first-rate fighter pilot and a first-rate attack pilot. Others had a sneaking suspicion that the new plane really would make that possible and that made some of them fearful. Senior aviators, even squadron and wing commanders, were faced with the possibility that all the effort they had put into learning to bomb accurately would be washed away when raw “nuggets” just out of flight school showed they could hit their targets just as accurately with the new plane. This generational difference continued even after the plane had gone into service. When a senior aviator took the microphone at one Tailhook gathering and began to bad-mouth the F/A-18, the younger pilots hooted him off the stand.
The fact that the A-6 and F-14 were made by Grumman, and the A-7 by LTV, meant that the two factions in the navy that felt most threatened by the F/A-18 flew planes made by the two companies that also felt most threatened. Together, they formed a network that funneled information to opponents of the F/A-18 on Capitol Hill and fueled a steady stream of critical information to the press.
Politicians on Capitol Hill divided fairly predictably on the navy’s choice. The entire delegation from Texas, where both the F-16 and A-7 were built, lined up against the F-18. Even though his favor had been carefully courted in the letters signed by Clements, George Mahon, a Texan and powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, was still incensed to learn the navy was not going to use the air force plane. Why, he asked Pentagon officials, did you “lead us down the primrose path of commonality and then come up here and tell us it is not possible, you cannot achieve it, and so forth?” Congressmen from California (Northrop), Ohio and Massachusetts (General Electric), and Missouri (McDonnell Douglas) lined up solidly in favor of the plane. And many other congressmen were pointedly reminded that General Electric had 222 plants in thirty-four states.
Mahon complained that he had never seen such fierce lobbying. A Senate staffer told the Wall Street Journal:’ “The F-18 is the biggest candy in our store. There is an amazing matrix of interests who want to eat it.” A House defense expert was quoted in a similar vein: “The employment issue is very strong. Some Congressmen will see the F-18 as spreading joy and happiness, arguing that it is better than food stamps. And that is an argument that people listen to these days.”
The opponents of the F/A-18 found their most sympathetic ears in the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The chairman was the late Joseph P. Addabbo (D-N. Y.), many o
f whose constituents worked at the Grumman plant on Long Island. Much of the contact with the committee by navy people unhappy with the F/A-18 came through two men who, in their earlier years, had also been naval aviators. They were the late Rep. William V. Chappell, Jr. (D-Fla.), whose district included a Grumman plant in St. Augustine, and Burton R. (“Bud”) Otto, an aide to Chappell who had once been the congressman’s squadron commander.
Chappell took to the House floor on 1 October 1975 to condemn the F/A-18 program as “a wild goose chase” and attempt to cut all the funding for the new plane—although money would be available for continued engine development. After a marathon debate that consumed thirty pages of the Congressional Record when it was printed the next day, Chappell lost by a vote of 243 to 173.
In mid-November, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), a general in the air force reserve and one of the Senate’s experts on military aviation, made a similar effort in the Senate. “What happened here,” Goldwater told his colleagues, “is that the navy took what it liked out of the F-17, which is a very good airplane, and they took it over to McDonnell Douglas and said, ‘Hey, make this into a navy fighter.’ I want to see them acquire this aircraft through competition, not through merely picking what is best from one airplane, going to a superb aircraft manufacturer, and saying, ‘This is the airplane we want.’ ”
Goldwater’s summary was right on the mark. That is exactly what the navy had done. But he lost, sixty-four to nineteen, to an unusual coalition of conservatives who tended to favor defense spending and liberals who often opposed defense spending but who, in effect, voted for jobs in their districts.
While much of the continuing opposition to the F/A-18 was based on emotion or politics or self-interest, the plane, as it emerged from the competition between the two prototypes, had one very serious deficiency: it simply couldn’t carry enough fuel.
The navy has long had a fairly simple rule of thumb to determine how much fuel a plane must carry to operate effectively from a carrier. The weight of the fuel in a fully loaded plane—the “fuel fraction”—should, according to this rule, be about one-third the total weight. But in the F/A-18, the fuel fraction is only about twenty-three percent. This means it must carry external tanks, which pilots dislike, or be refueled often, or remain in the air a shorter time than normal, or be flown in a manner different from other planes.
How did it happen that the chosen plane could meet all the requirements laid down when the navy asked the manufacturers for proposals on a strike-fighter, and yet not carry enough fuel?
Lee offers this explanation:’ “Those specifications were deficient in two areas. We should have specified internal fuel for certain missions and endurance for a two-hour flight. That, we didn’t do. Why? I don’t know. It didn’t dawn on me that we didn’t have it in in that fashion until the competition was over.”
But if the specifications had called for sufficient internal fuel, that would have caused problems, too. If the navy had required several thousand pounds more internal fuel, it is likely that the designers would have found it very difficult, and perhaps impossible, to turn out a plane that looked like the YF-17—a plausible derivative based on the air force competition. It would have been bigger, with a somewhat different shape, and it would have required extensive new design studies and wind tunnel tests.
Ever since the plane was chosen, thought has been given to ways to increase the amount of fuel it can carry and none of them has proved feasible. A major reason is that, after a certain point, adding more internal fuel becomes self-defeating. Each additional pound of fuel at takeoff requires adding four more pounds to the plane’s weight, quickly making it too heavy to be an agile fighter.
The relatively limited range of the F/A-18 was for a number of years a legitimate complaint of critics, and, for the fleet, operating the Hornet effectively despite its limited fuel capacity is a continuing challenge.
With the LTV protest settled in the navy’s favor, and the failure of critics on Capitol Hill to block the program, the F/A-18 seemed, by the fall of 1975, to have fairly clear sailing. But there was still cause for serious concern. The navy planned to buy about 800 planes. While that was a sizeable number, all of the research and development costs would have to be absorbed by those 800 planes. That guaranteed that the cost of each plane would be far above the $3 million per plane that had once seemed a realistic goal. The F/A-18 was no longer a lightweight fighter and it would certainly not be cheap.
And then the U.S. Marines came to the rescue.
At least since Guadalcanal, when the carriers sailed off and left them, the marines have insisted on owning and controlling the planes that provide close air support for their men on the ground. With a complete wing of aircraft for each of their three divisions, the marine air force is larger than those of most nations, including Britain’s Royal Air Force. With some of their squadrons operating from carriers, the marines add to the punch of naval aviation. But money to buy the marine planes comes from the naval aviation budget—“blue money, not green money,” as one admiral puts it—and this is a source of some resentment within the navy.
In the early 1970s, as the cost of the F-14 seemed about to price the plane out of the budget, the marines succumbed to navy pressure and reluctantly agreed to buy at least eighty Tomcats. But many marines considered the F-14 too sophisticated and too expensive for marine use. And, even worse, it was not equipped to drop bombs. In July 1975, Gen. Louis Wilson became marine commandant and, as one of his first acts, decided to buy F/A-18s rather than F-14s. The Tomcats on order for the marines would be assigned to the navy, and the marines would get along with their aging F-4 Phantoms until the Hornets came along. This added more than 260 planes and, by increasing the production run by one-third, helped greatly to hold down the price per plane.
As 1975 neared its end, Lee was under growing pressure to move ahead with contracts for full-scale development of the new plane. But Admiral Michaelis, who had recently become chief of naval materiel, and thus Lee’s boss, put the contracts on hold.
Michaelis had come under the influence of Willis (“Will”) Willoughby. A soft-spoken South Carolinian, Willoughby had been responsible during the Apollo program for making sure that NASA’s spaceships worked perfectly all the way to the moon and back. Early in 1975, Adm. Isaac Kidd, Michaelis’s predecessor, arranged to have a reluctant Willoughby transferred to the navy to help improve the reliability and maintainability of navy equipment across the board.
Willoughby was appalled by what he found when he and the score of people he brought along from NASA moved into their new Crystal City offices.
Reports from the fleet showed that planes required repairs after only half to three-quarters of an hour in the air. When everything was working, the planes were superb. But too often they didn’t work long enough to get the job done. It was the same thing that had bothered Kent Lee during his carrier days.
Willoughby was given a civilian ranking corresponding to that of a three-star admiral (which caused a good deal of resentment among many of the admirals, who considered civilians an alien breed, not to be trusted), and he demanded a written charter that gave him extraordinary power, up to the point where he could, single-handedly, close down a production line if the manufacturer wasn’t measuring up to his standards.
The first major program coming down the pike after Willoughby arrived was the F/A-18.
“They said they were getting ready to buy an airplane. I said, ‘Lord a mercy, we can’t buy it that way! If we do, we won’t have anything but another low-reliability plane out there, ’ ” Willoughby says.
Willoughby set to work to make the new plane a model of what he likes to call “big R, small m.” By this, he means that reliability built into a plane or ship or weapon automatically results in reduced problems with maintenance.
Willoughby insisted that the contracts for the F/A-18 contain specifications spelling out reliability. Up till that time, contracts contained specifications for performance but
only goals for reliability. Manufacturers tended to pay a good deal more attention to specifications, which could determine how much money they made, than they did to mere goals.
“I give great credit to this guy Willoughby,” Michaelis says. “He never let up on me. I asked him not to let up on me. I had long talks with Willoughby. God, those were terrible days. The contractors all told us, ‘Okay, if you want to double the cost of the airplane, put all those requirements on us.’ ”
When the contracts were signed, they spelled out for the first time what the contractors agreed to provide in terms of reliability and maintainability as well as performance.
Willoughby was not the only one concerned about building planes so they would be reliable and easy to maintain. That was, of course, one of Lee’s major goals. But Willoughby came to personify the navy’s interest in this issue as he descended on the contractors with all the zeal of a tent show revivalist. At McDonnell Douglas, employees who make significant contributions to the quality of naval planes compete for the “W. J. Willoughby Salty Dog Award.” Winners receive a figurine of a sailor—the Salty Dog—and $1,500.
It was not until the end of January 1976 that contracts for full-scale development and the production of the first eleven planes were issued.
Even as the program moved into high gear, plans called for three distinct versions of the plane. There would be an F-18 fighter and an A-18 attack plane for the navy, and something close to today’s F/A-18 strike-fighter for the Marine Corps. Theoretically, it would be possible to convert back and forth between fighter and attack versions of the plane, but it would be a somewhat cumbersome and time-consuming process. The disaster that befell Admiral Nagumo as he was changing the bomb load on his planes at Midway was not forgotten. And there were still many in the navy who just didn’t think one man, flying alone, could learn to do two jobs traditionally done by four men in two different planes.