Authors: Hedrick Smith
“Somebody’s career is made by keeping a program alive—in the contractors, in the military and in Congress, too,” was the way Denny Smith put it. “It’s not just the Army. The Navy designs a weapon and if it doesn’t work, their attitude is get the ship hull in the water and then we’ll fix it later.”
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A three-star Army general agreed. “Divad survived so long because it remained at the level of program managers and staff officers overseeing the program,” the general told me. “These majors and lieutenant colonels thought only of their program, and they drove the generals over the brink.” Actually, it is a vicious circle: The generals ordered weapons built, and the lieutenant colonels felt compelled to deliver weapons, not bad news. Their optimistic reports kept the generals locked into programs such as Divad, for the incentives of the defense game are to build, spend, and appropriate, not to oppose, question, or delay.
On the industrial side, the hierarchy at Ford Aerospace and its
subcontractors fought tenaciously for jobs and profits from Divad. One Ford Aerospace vice president, James Ambrose, became undersecretary of the Army, and though he claimed to have stayed on the sidelines, several Pentagon officials told me Ambrose fought hard to save Divad.
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Plenty of others had a personal stake in the program. Early in the competition for Divad, Ford Aerospace hired four recently retired three-star Army generals. Gregg Easterbrook of
The Atlantic
, who has written several detailed articles on Divad, asserted that having these revolving-door links helped Ford beat out General Dynamics. Ford denied any “improprieties or illegalities.”
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But revolving-door connections do keep programs going and reduce critical questioning. They breed a coziness within the iron triangle that often costs taxpayers money, diminishes real competition, and sometimes perpetuates defective weapons.
In Congress, too, powerful members gain reputations as protectors of certain weapons and contractors. For years, Senator Henry Jackson was known as “the senator from Boeing” because he so openly pushed the interests of Boeing Aircraft, the biggest military contractor in his home state of Washington. Senator Barry Gold water of Arizona, a retired major general in the Air Force Reserve who loved to fly jet fighters, watched over pet air force programs. Senator John Tower of Texas teamed up with another powerful Texan, George Mahon, to keep LTV’s A-7 attack bomber in production at Fort Worth long after the Navy tired of the plane. The most legendary military pork barreler was L. Mendel Rivers; he landed so many bases and contracts for Charleston, South Carolina, during his thirty years in the House that Carl Vinson, another wily practitioner, once teased him: “Mendel, you put anything else down there in your district, and it’s gonna sink.”
Now, after the dispersal of power in Congress in the mid-1970s, such concentrated largesse in the district of a committee chairman is virtually impossible. More players have power, and all want their slices of Pentagon bacon. The Iron Triangle game has been expanded: The Navy, for example, has shipyards and bases on all coasts, insuring allies among senators intent on protecting thousands of jobs at home: John Warner of Virginia, John Stennis of Mississippi, William Cohen of Maine, Chris Dodd of Connecticut, John Chaffee of Rhode Island, Pete Wilson of California. Warner, a former Navy secretary, is perhaps the Navy’s most ardent advocate. His state houses the Atlantic Fleet headquarters at Norfolk and the shipyard that builds aircraft carriers at Newport News.
Charles Bennett, a veteran Florida congressman and chairman of the
House Armed Services Seapower Subcommittee, minces no words about how his politics are influenced by the Navy base just outside Jacksonville. “The Navy brings $1 billion to my home district every year,” he told me. “That’s a big deal. It’s the biggest thing we’ve got commercially. They’ve got some forty-odd ships there and they’re going to get more. Anybody from Jacksonville would want to get onto the Armed Services Committee to protect that.”
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The committee structure of Congress anchors the Iron Triangle. That is true as well for the Agriculture Department, Interior Department, Labor, and so on. For decades, the Armed Services committees in both houses, along with the appropriations subcommittees that oversee military spending, have been the Pentagon’s staunchest partisans. These committees are more promilitary than Congress as a whole, though in recent years they have been infiltrated by a few Pentagon critics. But most members are there for logrolling. Generally, they approach the defense budget, not as a whole but piecemeal, weapon system by weapon system. The committee chairman often operates like a ward politician, parceling out goodies to the members. After the big money is doled out, a defense appropriations subcommittee aide told me: “If you’ve got something you want in your district, you can say, ‘Put this in,’ and no one will argue. Most of them are below $10 million, but sometimes more. If you get over $100 million, people will raise questions.”
Political doves join the scramble, too. Senator Alan Cranston, a big advocate of arms control and the nuclear freeze, supports the B-1 bomber whose prime contractor is based in California. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, another Pentagon critic, has added money to Army requests for the M-1 tank which is manufactured in Michigan. Senator Edward Kennedy and House Speaker Tip O’Neill have backed the F-18 fighter and other projects because Massachusetts gets large subcontracts. Mervyn Dymally, a liberal Democratic member of the Black Caucus, normally given to low-cost housing and programs for the poor, has voted for the MX missile because defense plants around his Los Angeles district mean jobs to his constituents. Dick Boiling of Missouri told me of Harry Truman’s warning to him: “Dick, the one thing I’ll tell you, never try to get a military installation in your district. It’ll ruin you.”
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In sum, the first law of the Pentagon’s Iron Triangle is that “the district commands over ideology,” says Gordon Adams, director for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a private group that opposes high defense spending. In Speaker O’Neill’s memorable aphorism, All
politics is local—most emphatically in military procurement. “If your congressional district has dominant economic interests, you go with the people who work at those companies,” Adams asserts. “People forget these guys in Congress are elected from a very small piece of geography every two years, and they can’t afford to buck all the economic interests of their district.”
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Few members of Congress epitomized this basic job protecting role more dramatically than the late Joseph Addabbo, a shrewd veteran with a little brush mustache and a wispy tuft on his bald pate. From 1960 until his death in 1986, Addabbo represented an Archie Bunker district in Queens, New York. As chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, Addabbo was a maverick in the Iron Triangle—a liberal Democrat, an advocate of arms control, and a tough-minded Pentagon critic. He led the 1982 fight against the MX missile; earlier he had opposed the B-1 bomber. As subcommittee chairman, he helped whack $50 billion off President Reagan’s Pentagon budgets. Nonetheless, he fought and finagled for two military contractors within commuting distance of his Long Island district, Grumman and Fairchild Industries. He badgered the Navy to homeport a battleship on Staten Island to help New York City. And he used his leverage to get other military deals for New York State.
As Grumman’s protector, Addabbo was a motive force in getting the Navy to increase its buy of F-14 fighters from 425 to 700. When the Navy wanted to stop production of Grumman’s A-6 attack bomber in 1978, Addabbo just kept pushing funds into the appropriations bills. He went to his deathbed opposing Air Force efforts to kill Fairchild’s T-46 trainer.
But Addabbo’s battle for Fairchild’s A-10 was a case study in protecting pork for the home folks. The A-10 is a slow two-engine fighter used for close air support of ground troops, a mission that bores Air Force jet fighter jockeys. In 1983, the Air Force stopped asking for money for the A-10, but Addabbo put money in. In 1984, John Tower, then Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, did the Pentagon’s bidding and cut all funds for the A-10—violating a logrolling taboo. For a second rule of the Iron Triangle is that members of key committees do not shoot down each others’ favorite projects. Addabbo retaliated by squeezing one of Tower’s homestate projects: production of the Harm missile by Texas Instruments. Because the missile was needed, Addabbo did not kill it; he put in a requirement that the Pentagon buy it from two sources, taking some business away from Texas Instruments. So Tower backed off.
When I asked Addabbo about the inconsistency between his general anti-Pentagon stance and his protection of Long Island defense plants, he shrugged. “I fought for the A-10 and the A-6 because there was nothing around like them, and you needed them,” he asserted. “So why not build them in your own area, the same as everyone else does.”
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Contract Spreading Gets Weapons Built
The third basic rule of the Iron Triangle is for defense contractors and military services to make sure that enough regions get a piece of the pie so that a weapons program develops wide political support. All the services need new technology, and so they have a constant flow of projects at various stages of development. The standard technique is to get a project started by having the prime contractor give a low initial cost estimate to make it seem affordable and wait to add fancy electronics and other gadgets much later through engineering “change orders,” which jack up the price and the profits. Anyone who has been through building or remodeling a house knows the problem.
“This is called the buy-in game,” an experienced Senate defense staff specialist confided. “In conjunction with the contractors, the services give very rosy estimates of what the weapon will cost
per copy
, so Congress will buy in. Their estimates are based on the largest buy and the most efficient production rate—which never materializes.” Once the Pentagon leaders and Congress are on board, costs rise, creating the “bow-wave” effect. Like waves on the bow of the ship, the costs start small, grow gradually as the project picks up speed, then swell for several years during the peak production phase, reach a crest, and subside. That initial commitment—first to research and then to development of a new system—is vital. It rarely bears much relationship to the ultimate cost. The key is to get the program going and keep it alive. Then if the subcontracts are well spread out politically, the weapon system has a secure future in the politics of procurement.
No case better illustrates the politics of contract spreading than Rockwell International’s formidable campaign for the B-1 bomber. Joseph Addabbo told me that at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada in 1983, he had seen a Rockwell display that illustrated the political strings Rockwell had tied to the B-1. It was a blown-up photo of the needle-nosed bomber with colored strings coming out of various components—the fuselage, wings, engine, tail section, cockpit, landing gear, and so on—to the states and districts where the parts were made.
“The whole country was covered with these strings,” Addabbo said.
“Other contractors had done this thing, spreading the subcontracts, but the B-1 was the first time we really saw it in large numbers. This was the biggest of that type of operation by far. People would come to me and say, ‘Joe, I’m not for it, but it’s one of the biggest employers in my district. I’ve got to go with them.’ ”
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Thomas Downey, a Long Island Democrat, told me that when he arrived in Congress in 1975 and landed on the Armed Services Committee, Rockwell International was lobbying aggressively to keep the program going. “Rockwell would show you the B-1 program and bring out that it had forty-eight states of the Union covered—to prevent what they called [political] ‘turbulence’—that was their great term. Translated,
turbulence
meant canceling the contract,” Downey told me.
“They thought I was crazy the first few times Rockwell briefed me,” he went on. “I was one of the leading advocates to kill the B-1. One guy from Airborne Instruments Labs in my district, which makes the electronic countermeasures for the B-1, said to me: This is the third biggest contract we have, congressman. Except for the engine and the airframe, it’s the third biggest. It’s $2 billion just in the first few years.’ I said, ‘I know. I just think the plane’s a bad idea.’ Rockwell had it all worked up in a briefing kit. Defense had a map, showing where the subcontracts were. They said forty-eight states. Conscious decision on their part from day one.”
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Air Force and Rockwell officials claim the contract spreading happened naturally—that the B-1 is such a complex, modern system of weaponry and electronics that it naturally tapped a vast and diverse network of parts suppliers all over the country. Practically no one in Congress takes that claim at face value; virtually everyone regards B-1 contract spreading as deliberate. In the mid-1970s Rockwell paid Chase Econometrics $110,000 for a study to help show each senator and representative the impact of the project in his area. Over seven years, Rockwell figured the $30 billion B-1 program meant 192,000 jobs for a total of 5,200 subcontractors and nearby businesses “due to the economic cascade effect.” Its lobbyists worked hundreds of members of Congress, one by one, with specific information about the subcontractors, jobs, and money involved in their districts.
Bill Gray, the House Budget Committee chairman, told me one computer printout showed subcontractors in more than 400 of the 435 congressional districts, a phenomenonal political spread.
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This big a project activates industrial unions as well as corporate management, especially in key states such as California, Ohio, and Massachusetts.
Rockwell also had stockholders and employes writing members of Congress—on company time, which meant at least partly at taxpayers’ expense.
“That is one of the ways they sell these things to Congress,” protested Representative John Seiberling, an Ohio Democrat. “That is another scandal—that we are allowing this engine of spending taxpayers’ money for defense programs to be used to propagandize and manipulate the Congress.”
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