Drums Along the Potomac

Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is an ornery and outspoken conservative. Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, the ranking Democrat on Armed Services, is a cool and circumspect moderate. In one way, the two men are very much alike: throughout their careers they have steadfastly supported the U.S. military.

So when Goldwater and Nunn stood up on the Senate floor last week and joined forces to attack the performance and structure of the military establishment, the shock waves rippled clear across the Potomac to the innermost rings of the Pentagon. In eight sharply worded speeches, the two Senators accused the military of endangering the nation’s defense and squandering its assets with interservice bickering. If the U.S. has to go to war anytime soon, charged Goldwater, “these problems will cause Americans to die unnecessarily. Even more, they may cause us to lose the fight.”

The verbal onslaught was the most dramatic sign yet that the days of free wheeling and free spending by the military are over. In Reagan’s first term, Congress heeded the President’s call to rearm America by giving the Pentagon $1.1 trillion to spend, a 36% increase after inflation. But irked by scandals over $436 hammers and $600 toilet seats and squeezed by the burgeoning budget deficits, Congress has increasingly begun to question whether the U.S. is getting its money’s worth in defense spending.

The swift and sure midair interception of the Achille Lauro hijackers by four Navy fighters provided the armed forces with a much needed victory to boast about. It answers “the cheap-shot artists who try to portray the military as not being able to tie their shoelaces,” exulted Navy Secretary John Lehman. But the Navy’s success at diverting a single civilian airliner is not likely to muffle a drumbeat for military reform that has been swelling throughout Washington. At a session with reporters last week, former Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard, who chairs a presidential commission appointed to look into charges of Pentagon waste and mismanagement, concluded that “fundamental” changes should be made in the way the Pentagon buys weapons. On Capitol Hill, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin launched a series of hearings addressing the question, What have we got for a trillion dollars? Aspin’s answer: not enough. In a 25-page report, the Wisconsin Democrat cited “skimpy improvements in the U.S. defense posture despite the huge increases in defense spending over recent years.”

The Pentagon dismissed Aspin’s charges as “uninformed and inaccurate,” and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger continued to assert that there was nothing basically wrong with the military establishment. “If a thing ain’t broke,” he has repeatedly argued, “don’t fix it.” But the Pentagon chief appears on the defensive. In a speech billed as a major exposition of U.S. defense strategy, Weinberger last week offered little more than vague generalities that failed to quiet his critics.

The coordinated assault by Goldwater and Nunn began two weeks ago, when they holed up at Fort A.P. Hill in the Virginia countryside with a battery of experts and other Senators to discuss what had gone wrong with the military. Among those present: former Defense Secretaries Harold Brown and James Schlesinger and General David Jones, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Drawing from this discussion and two years of study, the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee will release a 600-page report this week calling for sweeping structural changes. The presidential commission chaired by Packard is expected to send its own recommendations for reform to the White House in December.

Among other things, the would-be reformers are taking a critical look at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In theory, the JCS is supposed to allow the Chiefs of the four services (the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines) to come together to shape military strategy. In fact, the Joint Chiefs have been unable to overcome age-old service rivalries. Explains Nunn: “They are called upon to do an almost impossible task–to represent their own services’ viewpoint but simultaneously to sacrifice that view to the greater common good.” Reforming the JCS has gained increasing backing on the Hill and from former top military officials (see box).

In their Senate speeches, Nunn and Goldwater charged that interservice hostility risks defeat in battle. Although the services in each of the six regional commands are supposed to report to a single commander-in-chief (in the Pacific, a Navy admiral; in Europe, an Army general), in practice they remain virtually autonomous. To his colleagues in the Senate, Nunn declared, “I regret to report to you that we have unified commanders but divided commands.”

The Air Force, for instance, is chronically unwilling to provide air cover for ground troops in the field, and the Navy is reluctant to buy ships to transport the Army. Turf battles surface most glaringly in actual combat. The invasion of Grenada in 1983 was a walk-over, said Senator Nunn, but only because the defenders were few and poorly armed. Coordination among the services was abysmal. Nunn cited the case of one Army officer who, unable to reach the Navy because of incompatible communication systems, had to use his AT&T credit card to phone his office in North Carolina to pass along a request for naval bombardment. In an interview with TIME, Goldwater noted that during the Grenada operation “52 top-secret messages were sent to the operational commander and never got there because one service’s radios weren’t operative with the other’s.”

Snafus in the field are exacerbated by overlays of bureaucracy, charged Goldwater. When the Marines landed in Beirut in 1982, their orders sifted through no fewer than eight levels of command. The Marines’ failure to dig in properly against terrorist attack–at the cost of 241 lives–was attributed partly to signals lost or mixed up in the endless command chain. Bureaucracies inevitably breed officers who have little better to do than trip over one another. The U.S. fought World War II with 101 three-star generals and admirals; now there are 118. Observed Nunn: “It takes more admirals and generals to wage peace than to run a war.”

At budget time, rather than establish priorities based on strategic needs, each service tries to get as much as it can. “If the Navy had its way,” said Goldwater, “it would have 20 to 30 carriers” instead of the 15 the nation can conceivably afford, “the Air Force would double its 36 air wings, and the Army would order up twice as many active divisions.”

The Senators handed equal blame to their own colleagues. Before voting on the defense budget, Congress invariably debates “how much,” said Goldwater, but rarely “what for, why and how well.” Scoffed Nunn: “We are preoccupied with trivia.” Last year, Nunn dryly noted, “Congress directed the Secretary of Defense to study the feasibility of selling beef, pork and lamb produced in the U.S. in overseas commissaries. We didn’t direct him to evaluate how well DOD could meet our overseas military commitments, however.”

Unwilling to kill weapons systems, Congress prefers to stretch out the cost of buying them, saving money in the short run but increasing the per-unit cost. Thus last year, Nunn pointed out, Congress stretched out 22 weapons systems at an added cost of $3 billion. Congress has always been an easy mark for buy-now, pay-later sales pitches from the Pentagon. In the current budget, Congress is ordering up five new weapons: the Army’s LHX helicopter, the Navy’s tilt-rotor and advanced-tech aircraft, and the Air Force’s C-17 transport and advanced-tech fighter. The cost this year is a mere $1.3 billion. But, as Nunn points out, “these five programs are currently projected to cost from $180 billion to $200 billion. This is like making a down payment of less than 1% on a house for which you know you can’t afford to make monthly payments.”

To pay for the weapons, Congress routinely sacrifices the wherewithal to use them, like ammunition, fuel and spare parts. In the 1985 budget, for instance, Congress funded $2.6 billion for attack submarines but could not find money to give each a full load of torpedoes.

Combat “readiness”–the capacity to mount and sustain a fight–has benefited little from the Reaganauts’ vast arms buildup, Aspin charged last week. As proof, the Wisconsin Congressman cited statistics showing that Air Force and Navy flying hours were unchanged or up only marginally from 1980 to 1984 and the “steaming” days of Navy ships rose only slightly.

Nor has the weapons buildup stocked U.S. arsenals with many more arms, according to Aspin. Though Congress increased procurement funds by 91% in Reagan’s first term, soaring costs forced the military in some cases actually to buy fewer weapons. The Air Force bought 1,757 fixed-wing aircraft between 1981 and 1984, and 2,002 between ’77 and ’80.

The Pentagon disputed Aspin’s report. To back their claims of improved | readiness, Pentagon officials countered Aspin’s statistics with a set of their own. Instead of measuring Navy readiness by flying time, for instance, they cite “mission capable rates,” the percentage of planes ready to fly in combat. That figure increased from 53% in 1980 to 62% in 1984. The Pentagon acknowledged that it was buying fewer weapons in some cases, but argued that they were better ones. The top priority of the Reagan Administration, says a Pentagon spokesman, has been modernizing existing arsenals, not expanding them.

Secretary Weinberger’s speech to the National Press Club had been expected to lay out the Administration’s defense strategy for the future. In essence, Weinberger stated that the Pentagon’s aim is unchanged: to keep up with the Kremlin. The era of U.S. military superiority has “vanished,” he said. “We are now struggling simply to win from Congress the resources to assure that we can deter the Soviet Union from aggression.”

But Weinberger skirted the question of how much is enough and offered no suggestions about the best way to deploy U.S. forces to counter Soviet military might. He failed to address questions that are being asked by military experts, such as whether the U.S. really needs to float a 600-ship Navy or whether it should concentrate more on building up its ground forces against a power that is essentially landlocked.

Such basic issues are not likely to be resolved as long as the system pits rival services against each other in an indiscriminate scramble for more or newer weapons. Shaking up the Pentagon, Washington’s most entrenched bureaucracy, will not be easy. The rumblings of dissatisfaction from longtime Pentagon loyalists like Goldwater will fuel the debate. But it will take a commitment from the Administration–as well as Congress –to bring real reform to the military establishment.