Authors: Hedrick Smith
Thayer was no patsy; like Lehman, he was a pilot and a tough fighter. He was also an experienced executive who brought notions of his own into the Pentagon, from experience in the defense industry. His most fundamental brawl with Lehman, over the six-hundred-ship Navy, reached a climax in August 1983.
Thayer had been forced upon Weinberger by the White House in late 1982, and was never close to the secretary personally. Thayer was also immediately skeptical of the six-hundred-ship Navy. Warned by other high officials that Congress would squeeze future defense budgets, he figured the full naval buildup would never be financed. Moreover, Thayer felt that Lehman’s power grab had left the Army with short shrift, and he wanted to right the balance. Lehman told me that Thayer wanted to cut forty to fifty ships from his buildup. Others said Thayer planned to cut $18 billion from Navy procurement over the five years and to transfer more than half of it to the Army. Lehman told congressional allies he was sick of “senior officials”—meaning Thayer—waging “guerrilla warfare” against him, and Thayer exploded to Weinberger: “The place isn’t big enough for the both of us.”
The showdown came on August 11, 1983. Under Weinberger’s system, the deputy secretary runs the Pentagon inside, while Weinberger takes its case to the president and Congress. Thayer had been putting pressure on the services to tighten their budgets and had summoned the Defense Resources Board, which he headed, to go over
the figures. He was furious at Lehman’s bookkeeping. He had intended for Lehman to cut ships to meet the budget targets; instead, Lehman merely lowered his estimates of what each ship would cost, a paper exercise.
“I don’t believe those cost figures any more than I believe in the tooth fairy,” Thayer boomed at Lehman, according to one participant of the meeting. Then Weinberger walked in and engaged Thayer in a discussion about military contracts.
When Lehman tried to interject, Thayer shouted, “Shut up.”
“Mercy,” muttered Lehman, playing the victim.
The meeting ended in a standoff, with Thayer warning Weinberger that if he protected Lehman’s six hundred ships, “then the other services are going to be in trouble.”
In his no-bull way, Thayer then gave Lehman a written instruction to cut back to one carrier from two, but he did not reckon on Lehman’s guile, his power network, and his speed. That very day, Lehman did an end run. He went to allies in the White House—Robert McFarlane, an ex-Marine who was then deputy national security adviser, and John Poindexter, an active duty Navy rear admiral who was then number three on the national security staff. Through them, he got President Reagan’s approval on
names
for the two new aircraft carriers. The White House, uninformed on the latest fracas inside the Pentagon, issued an innocuous-sounding three-paragraph press release saying that the president had decided to name the two new carriers
George Washington
and
Abraham Lincoln
. That release also contained a routine-sounding statement from President Reagan endorsing the “six-hundred-ship Navy.” Thus armed, Lehman got Weinberger to overrule Thayer. His carriers and his six hundred ships were enshrined anew.
Lehman was occasionally hoist by his own petard: In 1986, the Navy pulled an end run on him, when he tried to name a personal protégé, Vice Admiral Frank Kelso, the Sixth Fleet commander, as the new chief of Naval Operations. Lehman won the acquiescence of Weinberger, who dislikes overruling individual services. But the Navy brass resented Lehman’s move; they felt that Kelso, only a vice admiral, was too junior for the top job. The “old Navy,” I was told, got its message to John Poindexter, by then Reagan’s national security adviser. Poindexter blocked Kelso’s appointment, and got Reagan to demand another choice. With Lehman threatening to resign, Weinberger nominated Admiral Carlisle Trost, the Atlantic Fleet commander and a more senior figure. Trost got the nod and later declared that Lehman,
with his brashness and his playing favorites, was “not a balanced human being.”
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For all his rumblings, Lehman remained for several more months but he resigned shrewdly in early 1987, as Congress grew more resistant to the Navy’s funding requests. Ever the smart politician, Lehman quit while ahead of the game.
The Military Turf Cartel
John Lehman epitomizes a vital truth about the Pentagon power game: that it is driven by the parochialism of the individual military services. From a distance, people treat the Defense Department as one great hulking whole, but it is far from monolithic. It is a confederation of bureaucratic tribes with celebrated rivalries and long established but less well-known patterns of communal collusion. The iron law of bureaucracies is to grow and to control their own fiefdoms, and the military services—being bureaucracies—follow that law.
Turf is the prize they protect: Turf, meaning their roles and missions. Turf, meaning their market shares of the budget. Turf, meaning their autonomy, their power to develop their own strategies, their own weapons systems. The military services have been extraordinarily successful, especially in the Reagan era when money was plentiful and when the Defense secretary believed in letting them have their heads.
Almost everyone knows that in the Pentagon turf game, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps each jealously guards and nourishes its own special identity. But they do not engage in unbridled competition. They have reached an accommodation, a pact not to intrude upon each other’s turf or to challenge each other’s missions.
By operating as a cartel, they foil attempts at ruling them, made by outsiders—including the secretary of Defense and his sprawling staff of 1,765 civilians. The service turf cartel does not decide paramount issues of war and peace or determine American policy toward the Soviet Union. But the cartel enables the services to define their own strategies and budgets and pick their own weapons systems. The service military chiefs have a habit of withdrawing into the “tank”—their top-secret meeting area, generally off-limits to civilian officials—to broker their differences before civilian leaders intervene. Then each service uses its own iron triangle to protect its turf and interests.
The rivalry of the military services has caught the public eye. Think of the drama of the annual Army-Navy football game, or the stirring fife-and-drum traditions of the Marines. Take a public tour of the
Pentagon, and service rivalries are imprinted on you. Each tribe owns a pie-shaped wedge of the Pentagon and marks off its territory with symbols and tokens. On the elite E-wing overlooking the Potomac River, each has its own power center, the office of its civilian secretary, and nearby, the quarters of its chief of staff. Its corridors are lined with oil portraits of former secretaries, former chiefs of staff in uniform, and photographs of the special heroes of that service.
In the Air Force wedge, the tour guides point out a portrait of Chappie James, who flew 101 combat missions in Korea and became the first black to achieve four-star rank. Nearby, in glass display cases, are models of Air Force weaponry: models the black SR-71 spy plane, a silver B-1B bomber, white Minuteman II and III missiles, a big KC-135 tanker. The main Navy corridor is marked off by plush nautical paneling and refurbished ship-captain’s doors complete with brass numbers and eagle door knocks. Navy bells chime the hours as on shipboard. Mingled with likenesses of former Navy Secretary Teddy Roosevelt and Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin Roosevelt are oils of famous naval escapades such as the Battle at Coral Sea. The models range from the CSS
Virginia
, commissioned in 1862, to the huge honeycombed facsimile of the aircraft carrier USS
Carl Vinson
, which in real life is twenty-four stories tall and three and a half football fields long. Down another hall are historic recruiting posters including one—of Americans in colonial dress—proclaiming,
MARINES—SINCE
1775. But the Marine commandant is off in another building, the Navy Annex.
In the Army section, you pass models of the Stinger missile, the Pershing II, the M-1 tank, and the AH-1 Cobra Tow helicopter. On my tour, the guide, Army Private, First Class, Lee Edwards, showed off the medals and the famous braided visor cap of General Douglas MacArthur and mementos of MacArthur’s father, who was a colonel in the civil war at nineteen. Edwards stopped by a flag with 168 battle streamers. “This is the Army flag,” Edwards announced. “I’m in the Army so this is my favorite flag. Since you’re in my tour group, it’s your favorite flag, too.”
The services have their own personalities. An Army general told me that the Navy represented old wealth and old aristocracy, the Air Force represented new wealth, and the Army was the populist service representing ordinary people. Defense expert William Kaufman compared the Navy, which has its own air force, fleet, and army (the Marines) to a diversified, integrated modern corporation which competes well for resources under any conditions. He compared the Air Force to a high-tech
electronics firm, which flies high when its weapons and strategy are in fashion. Both the Navy and the Air Force are better at competing for money than the Army, which Kaufman likened to an old, labor-intensive smokestack industry that rises and falls with the business cycle, or in this case, with war and peace. He meant the Army’s share of the Pentagon budget is smaller in peacetime than in wartime. The Navy is the most independent minded, the most prone to separateness, and the most resistant to joint operations and unified, central control.
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In the Reagan years, service parochialism offend and alarm powerful prodefense members of Congress. “You will be shocked at the serious deficiencies in the organization and procedures of the Department of Defense and the Congress,” Barry Goldwater thundered to the Senate in late 1985. “If we have to fight tomorrow, these problems will cause Americans to die unnecessarily. Even more, they may cause us to lose.… I am saddened that
the services are unable to put the national interest above parochial interest
[emphasis added]. The problem is twofold: first, there is a lack of true unity of command, and second, there is inadequate cooperation among U.S. military services when called upon to perform joint operations. Without true unity, we remain vulnerable to military disasters.… When the rope from the individual services pulls in one direction and the rope from the joint Chiefs pulls in the other direction,
the individual services invariably win the tug-of-war
[emphasis added]. The individual services win, but the country loses.”
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It was a harsh condemnation, coming from a conservative and an old friend of the military finishing thirty-four years in the Senate as chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Goldwater’s House counterpart, Les Aspin of Wisconsin, also damned “servicitis,” giving it the ring of pathology. Other knowledgeable voices added critiques, not just about the peacetime business of buying weapons but about performance in combat.
In
The Pentagon and the Art of War
, Edward Luttwak asserts that in Vietnam, American forces suffered from the “institutional self-indulgence” of various services and their subdivisions, because all wanted a piece of the action to fatten their budgets, get promotions, push careers, and protect their turf. “Even a Napoleon would have been paralyzed by the system,” he contends.
Luttwak, a conservative prodefense academic and consultant to Reagan’s national security staff, argues that rampant parochialism left the services waging five largely separate air wars in Vietnam: a long-range, high altitude B-52 bombing run by the Strategic Air Command from
the Philippines; a naval air war from carriers offshore; a Marine air war around Marine ground units; an Army helicopter war supporting Army units; and Air Force close tactical support run by the Tactical Air Command. According to Luttwak, that left no single commander clearly in charge and no coherent strategy. “The petty politics of interservice rivalry,” he contends, “was in fact the only medium of decision.”
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The ill-fated mission to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980 was damned with similar charges. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser, said that one basic lesson from the mission’s failure was that “interservice interests dictated” how the operation was run and “that did not enhance cohesion and integration.” Others pointed to faulty coordination in training and execution. A special Pentagon panel, led by a retired Navy admiral, suggested that Air Force helicopters and Air Force crews would have been better suited to the long-range mission than Marine crews trained in short-range attack missions. But interservice politics blocked that: The Navy wanted Marine helicopters, not Air Force helicopters, operating from the carriers which launched the mission.
Even in the 1983 operation against Grenada, trumpeted by the Reagan administration as an unalloyed triumph, experts pointed to major deficiencies caused by servicitis. According to one Army general, bickering broke out between Army Ranger units, who landed in the south, and a Marine amphibious unit, who landed in the north, because there was no common ground commander. The services lacked a common radio network, forcing Army officers to fly helicopters to the naval vessels offshore to arrange for naval fire support. The most ludicrous incident, mentioned in the Pentagon’s own assessment, cited an Army officer so frustrated by difficulties in communicating with Navy ships that he used his AT&T Calling Card on an ordinary pay telephone to his office at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to relay his plea for fire support to higher headquarters and finally down to the Navy ships a few miles away from him. Because Grenada was so lightly defended, these and many other interservice problems did not cause defeat. But they were so embarrassing that they fueled congressional pressures for better joint operations.
One former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David C. Jones, told me these problems were merely the latest evidence of a “great cultural gap” deeply imbedded within the military establishment since the Spanish-American War, when the Army would not invite the Navy to the surrender ceremony. The War and Navy Departments,
representing the two main services, have a long separate history, with the Air Force an outgrowth of the Army and the Marines an off-shoot of the Navy. Despite formation of the Defense Department after World War II, Jones contended that two rival “cultures” persisted—Army and Navy; he could have added a third, his own Air Force. Talking with me in early 1986 before Congress enacted some reforms, General Jones asserted that the military services were “terrible at handling crises and initial actions” because they clung steadfastly to separate chains of command.
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With minor variations, he said, most naval forces around the world are under the Navy chain of command except in the European theater, and Army forces are generally under the Army chain of command except in Korea. Jointness, he said, is a facade.