Authors: Hedrick Smith
This produced guffaws within the Army. One hand-drawn Army cartoon showed two GIs, one pointing to the sky and saying, “The Soviets have come up with a new way to foil the Divad.” It pictured a Soviet helicopter towing an airborne outhouse to distract Divad.
The incident showed that Divad’s radar was still having great difficulty distinguishing the right targets from “ground clutter” (other objects on the terrain). Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire,
another Divad critic, said this problem highlighted a defect in the gun’s basic design. The designers had used a radar system built for jet fighters and for operating against the clutter-free background of the sky, not on the ground. From the outset, Rudman told me, the Army set unrealistic requirements for Divad, dooming it to failure. Nonetheless, the Army stubbornly pressed on, partly out of need, partly out of pride, mostly out of bureaucratic momentum.
“The Divad is a classic example of how the military system keeps alive a weapons program that doesn’t make any sense,” Denny Smith remarked. “Once the system buys onto the program, there’s almost no way you can stop the program. If you try to, you’re either unpatriotic, you don’t understand the situation, or you’re out for publicity. They try to go after you. You can almost tell when they have a bad system because they get so defensive and come after you.”
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Even so, Congress was growing wary of Divad. More awkward disclosures got into the news. Divad flunked cold-weather tests in early 1984. It had to be heated for six hours with the field equivalent of a hair dryer before it was ready to fire. In another test, the Army had to attach four large metal reflectors to an old target helicopter to help Divad’s radar find the target. By late 1984, Ford Aerospace was months behind its production schedule, and Congress had barred further purchase until Divad passed realistic operational field tests. Congressional pressures forced Weinberger to take a personal interest.
In the spring of 1985, the Army ran a massive monthlong mock battle in the California desert with tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, and Divads opposing A-10 and F-4 fighter planes and AH-64 Apache helicopters. The finale was the “live fire” tests at White Sands, New Mexico, in May 1985.
Afterward, the Army brass jubilantly proclaimed that Divad had hit and destroyed its targets. Jack Krings, civilian head of the Pentagon’s new Office of Operational Tests and Evaluation, telephoned Denny Smith. “Boy, really impressive,” Krings said. “Blew those mothers right out of the air.” Army Secretary John Marsh, Undersecretary James Ambrose, and General John A Wickam, Jr., the Army chief of staff, all recommended that Weinberger move ahead with Divad. Ambrose, a former Ford Aerospace vice president who had helped launch the Divad program while still at Ford, told me he felt Divad was a big leap forward, a ten- to twenty-percent improvement on existing antiaircraft weapons.
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But the Dissident Triangle had a very different story: It informed Congressman Smith that the mock battle showed Divad’s range was
inadequate, and the live fire tests were unrealistic; the Army’s claims of success were misleading. What Denny Smith learned, he told me later, was that the target fighter planes were patsies. They were flown right past the Divad guns “at a suicide elevation of four hundred to five hundred feet, flying straight and level at 420 knots with no jinking [pilot talk for no evasive maneuvers]. The helicopters were flown up to a higher elevation than any sane person would ever do in a combat zone. What they set up was a shooting gallery and, even then, there were no direct hits—
none
!”
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If so, I asked, how could the Army be claiming success?
Moles at the test site had tipped off Smith to shenanigans on the firing range. For proof, he went after videotapes. The Army happily supplied tapes showing Divad firing and target drones exploding. “You could see that they had been destroyed almost immediately, and you thought maybe the guns had done that,” Smith told me later. “The picture would be on the airplane. It would show maybe a couple of sparks. And then almost immediately, they’d blow up, looking like they’d been hit. But we knew better. We’d been told. The range-safety officer destroyed every one of the drones from the ground. None of them were destroyed by hits from the guns.”
Others were less categorical than Smith. Two Pentagon skeptics told me that gunbursts showed a few Divad kills but asserted that on the large majority, the range-safety officer had been unusually quick to detonate safety charges on the target planes. Safety measures are routine, but Denny Smith and Lieutenant Colonel Tom Carter, a top Pentagon test analyst and a Vietnam veteran with 408 air missions, told me the safety officer used a fast trigger to make it look as though Divad had scored hits.
“We felt they were certainly flawed tests if they destroyed the drones that quickly,” Smith told me. “Why didn’t they let them go on for twenty more seconds?” Smith fired off protest letters to top Pentagon officials. The Army brass fought back, defending its weapon.
Smith’s blast that Divad had not made “a single direct hit” touched off a firestorm in the media. The Early Bird gave hot running coverage to the charges of the maverick network for Weinberger’s ride-to-work reading. The Schattschneider dynamic was at work: Television networks and news weeklies became seized with Divad. The videotapes of the live fire tests, and Smith’s charges about how the targets were destroyed, gave the whiff of scandal and rigged tests to Divad.
Inside the Pentagon, the final test evaluations were being drafted for Weinberger in mid-August. One of them, done in the Office of Developmental
Testing and Evaluation by Colonel Tom Carter, was a blistering and fatal indictment of Divad. “My worst suspicions were confirmed,” Carter later told me. “The Divad gun couldn’t detect and track and engage and shoot down enemy aircraft, unless the enemy’s aircraft were using unrealistic tactics which no pilot—Russian or American—in his right mind will fly. The weapon failed miserably to perform.”
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What happened to Carter’s official report was an amusing wrinkle of the Dissident Triangle operations—not leaking, but flooding. My sources told me that the original draft of the second report, prepared by Jack Krings, director of the Office of Operational (as opposed to “Developmental”) Testing and Analysis, was nowhere near as harsh as Carter’s. On August 22, nine copies of Carter’s no-nonsense report were circulated to top Pentagon officials. The next day, the top Pentagon echelon tried to squelch it.
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Orders were given to retrieve every copy, but it was too late. Instead of nine copies, thirteen copies came back.
“That’s what we call the flood strategy,” one Pentagon gadfly told me with a grin. “Never leak anything yourself, but make plenty of copies. Flood the building. God will take care of the rest. As soon as Krings’s people saw those thirteen copies, they knew they had a P.R. disaster on their hands, because the test results had gotten out of the building.”
It was Friday afternoon, and Weinberger had already headed for a weekend in Maine. Krings’s office spent the weekend redrafting its report to toughen it, more in line with Carter’s.
The “flooder” was right. On August 22, Denny Smith wrote Weinberger a letter to say that he had “obtained and reviewed” the test reports on the Divad which “verify the same criticisms of the weapons flaws leveled over and over again since the inception of the program.” He urged Weinberger to cancel the program, and on Monday, from his home in Oregon, Smith telephoned Weinberger to underscore the fact that he had the damaging report in his possession. “I hope you’ve seen that report, Mr. Secretary, and I just urge you to read that before you make your decision,” he said with an implicit threat to go public if Weinberger did not act on the negative report.
The next day, Weinberger announced that he was canceling Divad because “operational tests have demonstrated that the system’s performance does not effectively meet the growing military threat.” What Divad would offer over existing weapons, he said, was “not worth the additional cost.” He identified its main problems as “the lack of range
and the lack of reliability.… The system didn’t work well enough.”
At that point, the Pentagon had sunk $1.8 billion into the program. Weinberger’s decision to kill Divad marked a rare victory for the dissident triangle—one case in hundreds. I have heard many tales of other weapons systems having serious flaws, but they roll on. A few get stopped in the research-and-testing phase. Senator Warren Rudman, a combat infantry captain in the Korean War, fought three years to block production funds for the Viper, a defective antitank weapon with skyrocketing costs. He finally won before production was started.
But it is almost unheard of for the Pentagon to kill a weapon, such as Divad, once it is in production. Only pressure from the Dissident Triangle did that, by forcing the issue into the open and then hawking Weinberger relentlessly.
The Iron Triangle at Work
Far more powerful than the Dissident Triangle is the Iron Triangle—the symbiotic partnership of military services, defense contractors, and members of Congress from states and districts where military spending is heavy and visible.
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President Eisenhower called it the military-industrial complex. Others have called it an incestuous family network, where political, economic, and bureaucratic interests mesh and where cozy relations are nurtured not only by mutual back scratching, but also by a flow of corporate executives crisscrossing between high Pentagon jobs and the defense industry and a steady stream of retiring colonels, admirals, and generals moving right into jobs with Pentagon contractors. In 1983, for example, 13,682 Pentagon civilians and officers cashed in on their Pentagon connections by taking jobs in the defense industry.
To those two legs of the Iron Triangle, add the congressional defense committees. For Pentagon procurement is driven by what Anthony Battista, for years an influential senior staffer for the House Armed Services Committee, calls the “unholy alliance between congressional pork barrel and Pentagon wish lists.”
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In fairness, the Iron Triangle is not unique to the Defense Department. That paradigm operates for virtually every department in the executive branch, for every major interest group, for every major region of the country. The Iron Triangle is a powerful force in the nation’s farm policy, forging links between the Agriculture Department, farm organizations and farm-state senators and congressmen, usually concentrated on the agriculture committees of Congress. Basically, they unite
to protect farm interests against competing demands for urban development or industrial bailouts. Ditto for the Labor Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, and so on. Rocky Mountain politicians gravitate toward the interior committees to watch over water and land use. Coastal representatives, like salmon instinctively swimming upstream to spawn, head for the maritime and fisheries committees. All form their own iron triangles—iron, because the partners want an unbreakable lock on the policies most vital to them and they want to shut out outsiders. The object of the Iron Triangle is a closed power game, just as the object of the Dissident Triangle is to open up the power game.
What gives the Pentagon’s Iron Triangle extraordinary importance is its great influence on national security policy and the enormous sums of money at stake. In the five-year period from late 1981 into 1986, military spending was close to
$1.3 trillion
. With domestic programs largely held in check, the Pentagon budget was the one whopping federal cornucopia left for private contractors, the best remaining source of patronage for Congress. A local chunk of some big defense contract dwarfs any other government grant a congressman can deliver. The Pentagon budget is the last really big barrel of pork; its sheer volume feeds economic appetites.
“The military services want more money than they can afford, and the Pentagon wants more money than the country can afford,” a longtime prodefense Senate committee staffer observed to me. “The senator or House member wants more for his district than the budget can afford. Each party is motivated by greed. The interests of the service and the contractors is to start new programs and not to worry about efficiency. Contractors like to stretch out production of weapons because they can employ more people for more years. And congressmen like to stretch out programs in their districts for the same reason and because Congress hates to take the responsibility for killing any weapons system.”
One reason Divad survived so long was the protection of its own iron triangle. In 1983, when a wildcat effort was made on the House floor to kill Divad, its five most vociferous defenders had political and economic links to Divad:
• Robert Badham, a California Republican and a member of the House Armed Services Committee from the district where Divad was assembled;
• Marjorie Holt, another Republican on the Armed Services Committee
from a Maryland district where Westinghouse Electric built Divad’s radar;
• Bill Nichols, an Alabama Democrat from Anniston, where Divad’s chassis was made;
• Ronald Coleman, a Texas Democrat whose district held the Army base where Divad was conceived, fostered and tested; and
• Samuel Stratton, a New York Democrat and chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Procurement, who had a working relationship with the Army and saw his political role as buying weapons systems.
“The way the game is played now is one word:
jobs
,” asserted New Hampshire Senator Warren Rudman, an evangelical skinflint. By jobs, Rudman meant jobs for the contractor and jobs back home for which senators and congressmen could claim credit—but also the careers of the third leg of the Iron Triangle: the layers of Army brass from the Divad program officers up to General John Wickham, then Army chief of staff, who felt their careers were riding on its success.
“The Army’s strategy is to keep you going and keep you going and delay you, until they are so far into you in terms of money that you can’t afford to abandon the weapons program,” Rudman complained. “They’ll admit to you that the weapon may not work as well as it was supposed to, but they’ll say it works pretty well. I don’t think people in the Army thought the Divad was such a good weapon; it’s just that too many careers were involved. The Army was committed to it because the top brass felt naked without a new air defense gun.”
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