The Better, Cheaper Plane the Pentagon Didn't Want
Hopkins, George E.
The Better, Cheaper Plane the Pentagon Didn't Want by George E. Hopkins Suppose somebody built a warplane that was cheaper, tougher, and better than anything the big aerospace companies could...
...Rep...
...In a special briefing on the budget just before he retired, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made it clear, however, that the plan is to proceed as rapidly as possible with the design and construction of numerous new 40,000-ton and 50,000-ton carriers as an alternative to additional supercarriers...
...The United States, remarks one British admiral, “is putting all her naval eggs in one basket,” and a very expensive basket it is, too...
...But he was so abrasive in stating his case that his superiors made a point of ignoring his demonstrations of proof...
...By a remarkable coincidence, the Navy, several weeks after Carter’s election, announced that a mothballed ocean terminal at Kings Bay, Georgia had just become its preferred location for a new $91-million base to support missile-firing submarines...
...Wars did not, Douhet believed, have to be protracted combats, pitting nations’ birth rates and industrial productivity in the trenches...
...The numerous and costly defense installations that have enriched Carter’s state are tributes to the power of the late Sen.Richard Russell, who was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rep...
...Deputy Secretary of Defense William P. Clements, Jr., who wanted to test the Enforcer, declared: “There is little question that the Enforcer aircraft can meet the general performance claims made by its offerer.’’ But most of the military insisted that those performance claims were exaggerated...
...Lindsay, who was serving as an unpaid consultant during the China Lake tests, was elated...
...and the only Soviet threat we face from the sea...
...and the Soviet Union...
...And when weaponry does work right, it’s often not to the credit of the commanding generals...
...The Spitfire was the real hero of the Battle of Britain...
...control of the seas was being fatally compromised...
...Could a similar weapon be overlooked today...
...During the interwar years, both the Americans and the British accepted Douhet’s theories and molded their aerial priorities accordingly...
...While the propaganda campaign is always some spin-off of The-Russians-Are-Coming, it is not clear what this year’s particular version of this ancient scare theme will be...
...Like Chennault, Sir Hugh Dowding tirelessly argued that accompanying fighter planes were necessary for offensive bomber operations, The Battle of Britain proved Dowding right, but he so irritated British officialdom that he was sacked soon after-a shocking reward for the architect of victory...
...The Better, Cheaper Plane the Pentagon Didn't Want by George E. Hopkins Suppose somebody built a warplane that was cheaper, tougher, and better than anything the big aerospace companies could produce...
...Wouldn’t the Pentagon brass be eager to have a look at this new weaDon...
...We are overseas-oriented economically and politically...
...The budget’s only real surprise was its omission of an expected request for another 90,000-ton supercarrier at a cost of over $2 billion...
...And unless the new President boldly intervenes, the budget will continue to rise ad infinitum, from over $120 billion this year to $1 50 billion or more by the end of Carter’s term in 1980...
...But events proved Douhet’s neat theories wrong...
...They never came...
...He, too, thinks the ability of the Navy to project its military power ashore is “excessive,” and he believes this force could be cut in half, with the resources transferred to counter the Soviet submarine threat...
...A single 106mm shell costing less than $100 can knock out a tank as easily as can a $100,000 missile...
...Such talk, coming from the Pentagon’s hard-nosed boss, was all it took to prod Lindsay into action...
...Moreover, it was followed up by an equally successful attempt to picture the Soviets as turning the U.S...
...This has shriveled the Navy’s fighting ability on the surface until it is now incapable of standing up to Soviet cruisers armed with potent long-range cruise missiles.’, Retiring Sen...
...The Enforcer is too practical and cheap to appeal to them...
...Admiral Rickover said he was “concerned that there has never been anything comparable to the current growth of Russian naval men...
...Our military strategy uses the oceans as barriers in our defense and as avenues extending national influence” (italics added...
...Lindsay knew the Mustang was rugged, reliable, and stable at slow speeds (essential qualities for an aircraft that must withstand enemy ground fire while delivering its own fire accurately in support of ground troops), but he dismissed the idea of up-dating one of his old Mustangs as a pipe dream, the kind in which airplane buffsfrequently indulge...
...Naval forces approaching the U.S.S.R., the study notes, would increasingly become absorbed in selfdefense as they came within range of Soviet land-based air forces...
...These weapons rarely pan out, but the occasional one that does makes testing the weird remainder worthwhile...
...No service is done to the nation by those who portray an exaggerated specter of Soviet power and of American weakness...
...But the fact is, you do not compare numbers...
...thought when he conceived and built the Enforcer, a low-flying troop-support aircraft...
...The reason for the government’s disinterest lay in the defense theory of the time...
...It wasn’t always that way...
...The new supercarriers cost $2 billion each just to build...
...The CBO estimates that a program geared to enhancing significantly the Navy’s capability to perform this mission would cost about $13.5 billion in ships alone...
...Technical analysis of a warplane is admittedly intricate and arcane, clearly a job for experts...
...Of course a few fighter men like Claire Chennault and Sir Hugh Dowding (who headed Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain), questioned the conventional wisdom, but nobody paid much attention...
...It turned out that the CIA, in assessing a radical increase in Soviet military spending, calculated the Russian budget in terms of the dollar, although the Russians spend rubles, not dollars, and the ruble, being outside international currency markets, has no established rate of exchange...
...Then, in 1971, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, dismayed at the skyrocketing costs of the Fairchild A-10 (which the Air Force had selected, at $4 million apiece, as its primary close-support aircraft), called for cheaper airplanes and indicated that the Pentagon would look favorably on new, innovative offerings from small companies...
...But the principles involved may be the same...
...He developed seven new patented features to strengthen the aircraft’s structure and installed a light-weight, reliable, powerful Lycoming T-55 jetprop engine (a model that the Pentagon already had 300 of in surplus storage...
...The term blackshoe refers to those senior officers who once built the Navy around battleships but since World War I1 have transferred their allegiance to the mammoth carriers...
...The admiral emphasizes that “we’ve got treaties or defense arrangements with 43 other nations, and 41 of them are overseas...
...This question perplexes economy-minded congressmen and has strengthened their suspicion that the Pentagon always opts for the most expensive solution...
...He was an eccentric in the grand English tradition who had no academic training beyond high school...
...He thinks the mission of our Navy should be to prevent these Russian submarines from launching an attack on our homeland, but he says the mission has not been assigned...
...we retain a concept designed to defeat the Imperial Japanese Navy 30 years The future role of carriers, however, is only part of a larger question concerning the relative importance of the Navy’s two major missions: “power projection,” the capability of exerting far-flung, sea-based military force against objectives on hostile shores...
...During World War I1 and the Korean War the Army was top dog...
...we have to have operating fleets that have the ability to conduct offensive operations to forward-deployed forces...
...So Formidable a Threat’ Nevertheless, the protesting voices were largely drowned out by the power and prestige of the administration spokesmen...
...The latest Pentagon budget, at a time when America is not at war or even threatened, is vastly greater than it was at the height of the Vietnam conflict...
...The trouble was that the English government cared little for Mitchell’s speedy single-seaters...
...Moreover, the Defense Department expects a future decline in the number of Soviet submarines and major surface ships...
...To some naval planners, LaRocque says, “it appears as a task of such monumental proportions that it is impossible to accomplish, and hence best ignored...
...While retaining and using combat vessels currently in the fleet,” the study finds, “further procurement of major projection-onented warships such as carriers, strike cruisers, and large destroyers would not be needed...
...None was willing to take the next step-a full-scale test geared to the needs of a specific branch of the armed services...
...Yet the attempt was made, and it succeeded on Capitol Hill...
...It is an unfortunate fact,” said President Kennedy, “that we can secure peace only by preparing for war...
...That’s what David B. Lindsay, Jr...
...certainly that is the view of many respected military strategists, along with a number of non-blackshoe admirals...
...The old Mustang did fine...
...That was less than half the annual delivery rate of 45.5 ships during the 1958-68 period, when the Russians were engaged in a largescale build-up...
...Using his own money (with help from Piper Aircraft Company), Lindsay began tinkering with the Mustang airframe...
...The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General George Brown, showed little patience for those who “evidently think we are still stronger than the Soviets despite what the figures show...
...outspent Russia almost two to one in the construction of major warships...
...Chennault’s accomplishments were less important than Dowding’s, but both men wound up exactly where they began-as maverick outsiders, victims of the rigid conformity that has always characterized military bureaucracies...
...In June 1974, at the China Lake Naval Weapons Test Center in California, an old, unmodified Mustang took off with a 106mm recoilless rifle attached to its wing...
...It was the first privately developed warplane anyone could remember-at least since before World War 11...
...on naval A Library of Congress study found in the 1969-1976 period, an average of 17.4 ships were delivered annually to the Soviet Navy...
...Robert A. Taft, Jr., put it more sardonically...
...Fleets of high-flying bombers suffered appalling losses to Luftwaffe fighters during the first daylight raids of...
...American commanders reluctantly held back until long-range escort fighters such as the P-51 Mustang were ready and then, during a series of bloody battles early in 1944, defeated the Luftwaffe over Europe and proceeded with the unhampered bombing that did so much to undermine the Third Reich...
...But like thousands of young men born during aviation’s infancy, Mitchell was fascinated with airplanes...
...A graceful, small, beautifully photogenic plane, the Spitfire caught the public’s imagination, and became a popular symbol of Britain’s underdog struggle against the Nazis...
...If that is the case, the proponents of a submarine seacontrol Navy may be on the point of coming into their own...
...is at peace, the more it spends for war...
...And General Daniel Graham, the recently retired director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, says, “Any attempt to measure the efforts of a command economy such as the USSR’s in terms of the currency of a free economy such as ours is doomed to produce misleading results...
...The total defense budget for fiscal 1977 comes to around $114 billion...
...Over the years military men have become inured to the stream of wonder weapons, death rays, and the like that amateurs foist upon them...
...it repelled the Luftwaffe’s huge bombers, which had effortlessly brought the rest of Europe to its knees...
...Senator William Proxmire called it all “an outright distortion of the facts...
...It will be interesting to see what they have to say, especially what they have to say about the carriers...
...Chennault derided the notion that machine-gun fire from massed h e r - ican bomber formations could repel determined enemy fighter assaults...
...Keeping one hand nervously on his parachute, the pilot test-fired the weapon several times with remarkable accuracy...
...It was the weapon nobody wanted, considered by the best military minds of that generation to be superfluous...
...The Spitfire was designed to fight other planes, the Enforcer to protect troops on the ground...
...In a series of limited tests, conducted at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida in 1974, the Enforcer actually outperformed an A-10...
...To protect the pilot and vital aircraft components, Lindsay installed space-age ceramic armor, which is superior to other forms of protective armor...
...Senator William Proxmire, for one, believes that the military’s basic resistance to the Enforcer stems from its low cost...
...Defense Intelligence Agency briefings were arranged for members of Congress, classified “secret” because that usually impresses the legislators...
...Sixty years before Kennedy, George Bernard Shaw enraged England’s generals and admirals when he remarked that military preparation was an endless rehearsal for an event that doesn’t take place, and when it does, is never like the rehearsals...
...and “sea control,” the ability to keep the sea lanes open to friendly shipping in the event of war...
...Mavericks of the ChennaultDowding mode, if they are around tion with career officers...
...Navy...
...That’s why the military’s cold shoulder to the Enforcer stpck many observers as oddly out of character...
...He would particularly curtail attack-aircraft carriers, nuclear strike cruisers, and their smaller escort vessels...
...So the future character of the Navy is still unsettled and unsettling...
...But nobody can ever be precisely sure how a weapon will perform in combat, and this “uncertainty principle,” which the military uses frequently to justify a redundant “mix” of weaponry (this may be the only rational justification for the B-1 bomber), ought to make the Enforcer attractive...
...is not yet an absolutely open-and-shut case of a great plane ignored, there is an earlier case that fits that description perfectly: the British fighter plane, Spitfire...
...Money, though, is only one phase of the Navy problem that Carter has inherited...
...The Air Force Chief of Staff, General David Jones, asserted that “in relative terms the Soviets have been running full speed, while we have been standing still,” and “as you look at what they are doing, it is mind boggling in every respect...
...But in a highly unusual situation, the military, never hesitant about taking money, refused to ask for it...
...In an attempt to stampede Congress into approving a huge shipbuilding program,” Aspin said, “the Pentagon has been painting an opposite picture that the Soviet Union is outspending and outbuilding the U.S...
...The best guess at the moment is that it will be an extension of the stunningly successful 1976 pitch, which intimidated Congress into giving the Pentagon everything it asked for-and more...
...Selected congressional groups were invited to the White House for “national security briefings...
...the administration’s own propaganda to accuse it of letting the country slip into a position of military inferiority...
...Clinging To the Old Strategy Yet as the Pentagon’s new fiscal budget and its annual “posture” statement show, the carrier admirals still cling to their power projection strategy...
...The military discounted the computer study as just paper and relied on what was apparently an intuitive feeling that the Enforcer lacked lethality...
...Aided and abetted by dubious new CIA “evidence,” the Ford administration and the Pentagon bombarded Congress and the public with statistics purporting to show that the Russians were outspending the U.S...
...If the Enforcer...
...Navy surface combatants have been subordinated to the defense of the aircraft carrier...
...It must be kept in mind that in an atomic confrontation with the Soviet Union, the U.S., of course, would ultimately rely for real power projection on its incomparable “Triad,” the strategic force composed of thousands of nuclear missiles to be fired from underground silos, from submerged submarines, and from high-flying B-52 bombers-a combination guaranteed to make a wasteland of Russia orany other foe...
...Lindsay thought otherwise...
...Historically it has had good reason to distrust cheap solutions...
...Of course, the military’s business is to know what it needs...
...Lindsay’s Enforcer had cost the taxpayers nothing...
...Much of the increase in Soviet military spending has gone for purposes that do not directly threaten the U.S...
...In a Texas campaign speech he said, “There are those who would seek to raise false alarms-by saying, for example, the Soviet Union has more ships than we do...
...The broader national interest requires something else...
...add all the fixings and escort protection, and the price probably doubles or triples...
...World War 11...
...For years Carter’s predecessors, along with various Defense Secretaries, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Chief of Naval Operations, have been arguing inconclusively over the size, shape, and primary mission of the U.S...
...Perhaps the Enforcer is the Spitfire of the future, but even if it is not, the military’s attitude toward it is very disturbing...
...Poor health prevented his being a pilot (indeed, he completed work on the Spitfire while terminally ill and died in 1937 before the plane could prove itself), so Mitchell devoted himself to aircraft design...
...For fiscal 1977 (ending in October of this year) the Navy gets 38.8 per cent of the Pentagon budget, the Air Force follows with 33.3 per cent, and the Army trails with 27.9 per cent...
...Georgians and other Southerners have long dominated the military committees...
...Although President Carter has repeatedly pledged to reduce the defense budget by $5 billion or more, experience shows that campaign rhetoric should not be taken too literally, so it is not yet clear what he will do now that he is in the White House...
...Unless the White House and Congress intervene, it could climb to over $123 billion in the first budget Carter will have to deal with...
...But experts usually claim missiles are necessary because the blast from 106mm recoilless rifles would literally knock an aircraft out of the sky...
...Outspending the Russians Actuallythe fleets of both superpowers have contracted in recent years...
...It would be reckless and extreme for the Soviet Union to challenge the industrial democracies...
...He now knew he could produce a weapons system that cost less than $700,000 and, as Pentagon officials admitted, seemed to perform as well as a Fairchild A-10...
...The Russians, he said, “have organized their fleet around a concept designed specifically to defeat our fleet...
...George Hqpkins teaches history at Western Illinois University and writes often about a viation...
...Les Aspin, perhaps the best informed member of Congress on defense affairs, said “yesterday’s missile gap is today’s dollar gap...
...Nonetheless, the more the U.S...
...The Spitfire grew out of the technical virtuosity of an English aircraft designer named Reginald Mitchell...
...In the CBO view, other U. S. naval forces would be used primarily to support and defend the anti-submarine forces...
...Air Force pilots visiting the Sarasota, Florida plant of Lindsay’s Cavalier Aircraft Company (which modifies World War I1 P-51 Mustang fighters for airplane buffs) told him the old airplane would probably do a better job than anything they’d flown in combat...
...Early in 1974, with fuel costs rising, civilian Pentagon analysts conducted a full-scale computer study of the Enforcer, judging fuel savings against combat effectiveness...
...Douhet’s vision of cheap and easy victory was irresistible to politicians intent on trimming defense budgets and to the military men who sought to accommodate them...
...instead, cheap victories could result from aerial bombing of an enemy’s vital industries, thereby eliminating the basic ability to field armies...
...The admirals would have to justify not only the building of new ships but the maintenance of the existing ones...
...Even some of the new President’s warmest admirers wonder whether he can make good on this pledge or, for that matter, even hold the line on military spending...
...In the last ten years, it says, the number of Soviet attack submarines has “drastically declined...
...Moreover, unlike his predecessors, Carter also takes office committed to curtailing the defense budget, of which the Navy currently gets the largest slice...
...In self-defense, candidate Ford began contradicting the earlier administration line...
...LaRocque sees the current naval force structure as “badly lopsided,” with too much money and effort expended on perpetuating “an ‘outdated Navy built around the vulnerable and extremely expensive camer forces...
...The U.S...
...But in the view of outside experts, buying a larger number of smaller carriers would neither save money nor improve the survivability of these surface forces...
...History is littered with disastrous examples of soldiers sent to fight with weapons ill-suited to the purpose at hand...
...Their outlook is well articulated by the current Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral James Holloway 111...
...An Expensive Basket While the blackshoe admirals still have the balance of power within the naval establishment, they are under strong and increasing challenge from fellow officers both here and abroad, who believe the advent of nuclear power, modern attack submarines, and cruise missiles have made the lumbering carriers obsolete...
...Aspin has produced a CIA analysis showing that in the last five years the U.S...
...It would depend primarily on the capability of U. S. anti-submarine forces to defeat the Soviet submarine force, which, of course, is the main threat to American control of the sea lanes...
...For years now, he says, Soviet strategic submarines have been patrolling the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans carrying missiles capable of reaching all American cities...
...militarily by 50 per cent, and that we were in dire danger of becoming an inferior military power...
...It is a propitious moment for a determined new President, savvy and experienced in naval affairs, to step in and give the service the direction it needs...
...Under President Carter there is good reason to believe that the contraction of our world policeman role will become more marked as time goes on...
...The 106mm recoilless rifle, the principal anti-tank weapon of ground forces, is cheap, reliable, and effective...
...The Biggest Piece of the Pie There is little in the new fiscal 1978 Navy budget, however, to appease the carrier critics or to encourage the Carter administration’s hopes of reducing the defense budget, which again gives the Navy the biggest piece of the pie-$41 billion, a jump of $4 billion...
...The Center for Defense Information found also that the Pentagon’s high estimates of Soviet military spending were based “on the incorrect premise that the Soviets pay their soldiers American wages...
...The Navy even spent a considerable chunk of money testing out the military uses of the frisbee (it didn’t have any...
...Finally, Lindsay outfitted his airplane with simple, no-nonsense weapons delivery systems-the kind favored by pilots with recent combat experience...
...On the other hand, a power projection Navy would require the procurement of more carriers and supporting vessels to attack land-based military objectives...
...If Shaw were alive today he no doubt would cite the Navy’s long line of aircraft carriers as the best contemporary example of Maginot thinking...
...The collapse of the French Maginot line in World War I1 was a testament to Shaw’s dictum, but many others could be cited...
...You compare total firepower, you compare tonnage and combat capability-and you find we are on top...
...It also indicates the Navy is not very impressed by the trend toward pulling back some of our troops from overextended positions overseas, nor with the growing disposition in Congress to curtail far-flung commitments...
...There are serious doubts,” it reports, “that even self-defense would be successful, given the intensity of attacks that Soviet short and medium range defenses can mount...
...Finally, it concludes, attack of such Soviet targets as can be reached from the sea would not be likely to affect the outcome of a war over Europe...
...In a curious way, the Spitfire haunts the Pentagon today...
...In the end the effort to scare Congress into passing a record defense budget boomeranged on President Ford when Ronald Reagan seized on ships...
...Besides the enormous cost, there remains the problem of vulnerability...
...But what kind of a war...
...It’s possible that tomorrow’s Spitfire may languish unwanted in some remote hangar or obscure scientist’s workshop because of the incompetence or cupidity of the military bureaucracy...
...The savings would run into many billions of dollars...
...Donald Rumsfeld, Schlesinger’s successor at the Pentagon, said that “we are not number one if one looks at the basic military capabilities as between the U.S...
...All this suggests that the Navy leadership either has failed to note or has not taken seriously statements by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger disavowing a Pax America future for the U.S...
...The Enforcer looked good, and a series of comparisons with the Fairchild A-1 0 made it look even better...
...Their cause has been advanced not only by the CBO study, but by other authoritative, disinterested observers as well, notably the experts at the Center for Defense Information, headed by Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque (USN, Ret...
...But the service chiefs expressed no interest in the Enforcer...
...Aware that the weapons closesupport aircraft use are a major caus of high costs (some anti-tank missiles run over $100,000 each), Lindsay began experimenting with an airborne recoilless rifle...
...The only thing that has changed since then is that military conformity is worse...
...Lockheed was so impressed that it signed on with Lindsay for the right to manufacture his wonder plane when the inevitable orders started pouring in...
...If Carter is serious about cracking down on the armed forces, he will have to begin with the Navy, for that’s where most of the money goes...
...Other naval planners, he contends, “are too engrossed in plans for offensive operations against the Soviet Union and Third World countries...
...Navy, however, is beginning to grow while the Soviet Navy is continuing to shrink...
...Henry Kissinger followed up by saying, “Despite the inevitable increase in Soviet power, it remains behind us and our allies in any overall assessment of military, economic, and technological strength...
...The Center for Defense Information reports that the U.S...
...The military,” he says, “is simply unwilling to explore ways for reducing COS~S.~’ An expert on the Senate Armed Services Committee staff agrees: “The services are closing every door they can...
...David Lindsay disputes this, and he has a series of favorable tests to support him...
...An imposing array of support for an Enforcer flight test developed, including civilian Pentagon officials and congressional leaders...
...To implement a forward strategy, he argues, “we need a certain kind of Navy-a Navy that has carriers to provide air power overseas where we don’t have bases...
...Other questionable evidence was dredged up to scare the country into believing that the Soviets were engaged in such a superior naval ship-building program that U.S...
...William Colby, former CIA director, acknowledged that “we do this because of the demand for it,” adding, “our estimates probably tend to overstate the costs of the Soviet design...
...Our country,” he says, “has a forward strategy...
...While their numbers continue to increase, ours continue to decline...
...Perhaps even more important than the sum of the naval budget is the question of how it is to be spent and for what...
...Senator John Stennis indicated that there would be no problem getting the money for a test-if the military requested it...
...And yet it turned out to be crucial in stemming the Nazi tide...
...Of course no historical analogy is absolute...
...In the Dustbin of History An entrenched, careerist military bureaucracy tied to financial groups with an interest in certain weapons can be dangerous...
...Lindsay, a wealthy newspaper publisher whose hobby is antique airplanes, began thinking seriously about designing such an aircraft after hearing Vietnam pilots complain about the shortcomings of their suDersophisticated jets...
...Why doesn’t the military need the Enforcer...
...In the case of the Enforcer, the range of special interest groups opposing a fair test is a broad one, encompassing everything from military men looki,ig toward postretirement defense employment to labor unions fearful of lost jobs...
...The end result was the nation’s first $100-billion defense budget, which, with supplementary authorization, finally came to around $1 14 billion...
...Then it was the Air Force, but now it is definitely the Navy, and more so every year...
...Navy “is substantially superior to the Soviet Navy...
...Vice Admiral George P. Steele, Ret., former commander of the Seventh Fleet, major U.S...
...As for the Navy alone, it does seem prudent to spend enough money to make sure that our submarine and anti-submarine forces are superior to the Russians...
...The CIA itself later indicated that it did not put much stock in the “dollarization” of Soviet military effort...
...Carl Vinson, who presided for many years over the House committees that controlled naval expenditures...
...Russia, it noted, maintains a large land army in part because of its long history of being invaded and because it confronts China, which has the largest army in the world...
...The result was the Supermarine Schneider Cup racing planes, which swept all international competition from 1927 to 1931 and became the prototype for the Spitfire...
...Sir Hugh Trenchard, the father of the Royal Air Force, accepted the ideas of an obscure Italian named Guilio Douhet, who in the early 1920s began arguing that armadas of high-flying bombers could make wars like the 1914-18 affair obsolete...
...Beyond that, however, the Navy’s projected expenditures seem a logical candidate for the honor of being the first to undergo the zero-based budgeting that Jimmy Carter has promised for the government as a whole...
...Former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger warned that “at no point since the 1930s has the western world faced so formidable a threat to its survival...
...He has yet to face that awesome barrage the’Navy and the other services lay down on Capitol Hill about this time every year, just before the appropriations hearings begin on the next defense budget...
...The power of the Pentagon lobby is awesome, especially the Navy branch, because the Navy has always been the favorite service on Capitol Hill...
...Light, protective planes like the Spitfire didn’t fit into the scheme...
...The Pentagon charts, virtually all showing a rising slope for Russia and a downward slope for the U.S., were circulated widely on Capitol Hill...
...The doctrine of the overwhelming bomber offensive held that purely defensive expenditures, such as the development of fighter aircraft, were a waste of money because the bombers would always get through...
...into a second-rate naval power...
...This, Rumsfeld said, is in line with the recommendation of a recent National Security Council study...
...He sees these submarines as “an obvious military threat to the U.S...
...Admiral LaRocque’s interest goes beyond just keeping the sea lanes open...
...A general-purpose fleet geared to sea control, a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report asserts, would forgo any attempt at power projection against the Soviet Union...
Vol. 9 • March 1977 • No. 1
