The Buying and Selling of the Pentagon (Part I)

The Buying and Selling of the Pentagon (Part I)

Wednesday 6 April 2011

by: Dina Rasor, Truthout

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

For the last seven weeks, we have been runn­ing Sol­u­tions col­umns on how to fix the Pen­tagon. With the DoD bud­get bal­loon­ing again and again over the past 40 years and the news yes­terday that we have al­ready spent $600 mill­ion in the first week in de­fend­ing Libya from the air, there ap­pears to fin­al­ly be some move­ment to look into what is wrong with our de­fen­se spend­ing. We have fired 191 cru­ise mis­siles at a cost of $288 mill­ion alone ($1.5 mill­ion per mis­sile) - just one il­lustra­tion on how we have spent too much for our weapons, and the Pen­tagon has ad­mitted that it is un­audit­able and can­not suc­cessful­ly track most of its pro­cure­ment money.

There was story yes­terday by Tony Capac­cio of Bloom­berg Govern­ment that, ac­cord­ing to the Govern­ment Ac­coun­tabil­ity Of­fice (GAO):

About one in three major US De­fen­se De­part­ment weapons pro­grams since 1997 have had cost over­runs of as much as 50 per­cent over their origin­al pro­jec­tions ...

The over­runs, found in 47 of 134 pro­grams in­cluded in a study by the US Govern­ment Ac­coun­tabil­ity Of­fice, were en­ough to tri­gg­er a law that re­quires con­gres­sion­al notifica­tions and poten­ti­al ter­mina­tion. Only a single pro­gram has been ter­minated dur­ing that re­view pro­cess - the Bell Helicopt­er Textron $6.78 bi­ll­ion Army Armed Re­con­nais­sance Helicopt­er, the GAO said.

What the GAO is not say­ing is that these are the over­runs that the govern­ment knows about be­cause there are many contra­ctor and DoD pro­gram man­ag­er ac­count­ing tri­cks that hide over­runs, in­clud­ing putt­ing the extra ex­pen­se in other pro­grams that are not so close­ly monitored. De­fen­se contra­ctors and their budd­ies in the Pen­tagon are as good at hid­ing or de­flect­ing over­runs and manu­fac­tur­ing pro­blems as Gener­al Electric is at dodg­ing taxes.

I could go on for many more para­graphs about the pro­blem and cite years and years of re­ports of fraudulent, was­te­ful and in­ef­fective contra­ct­ing, but most in­for­med rea­d­ers (es­pecial­ly Trut­hout rea­d­ers) have heard of these hor­ror sto­ries for de­cades.

So, I wan­ted to con­centrate and pull back the lay­ers of pro­blems and try to get down to basic in­cen­tives that would allow this to go on for genera­tions of milita­ry and DoD civilian per­son­nel. Each round of ex­poses tri­ggered legis­lative re­forms that were just re­forms on paper, which were ig­nored by the bureauc­ra­cy, or real re­forms that were de­for­med by a bureauc­ra­cy skil­led in loop­holes and slow rolls with few in the Con­gress or vari­ous ad­ministra­tions un­will­ing to com­mit to true over­sight.

I don't be­lieve that the US can make real chan­ges to DoD pro­cure­ment until we chan­ge the fin­an­ci­al in­cen­tives of the in­dividu­als who work in this cor­rupt sys­tem. All other re­forms can be de­for­med, and an­yone who does not go along with this sys­tem, i.e. the Boy Scout types, are pus­hed out and most often have their care­ers de­stroyed if they don't go along with it. In this col­umn, I will de­fine the pro­blem with the in­cen­tives for the peo­ple who work in this DoD/contrac­tor sys­tem, and in next week's col­umn, I will sug­gest tough sol­u­tions to chan­ge the very base of in­cen­tives for DoD per­son­nel and the de­fen­se contra­ctors.

For those who are in­teres­ted in di­gg­ing de­ep­er on how this sys­tem got its start since World War II, I would sug­gest rea­d­ing jour­nal­ist An­drew Co­ckburn's ex­cel­lent essay in the "Pen­tagon Labyrinth" cal­led "Fol­low the Money."

Since I star­ted work­ing on re­form­ing the Pen­tagon in 1979, I have found one of the most cor­rupt­ing pro­blems has been the re­volv­ing door, the in­sidi­ous prac­tice where DoD and Con­gres­sion­al per­son­nel go to work for de­fen­se contra­ctors or start work at de­fen­se contra­ctors and move in and out of the govern­ment posi­tions using their in­flu­ence and in­side know­ledge to maxim­ize the pro­fits of the de­fen­se in­dust­ry. There have been many at­tempts to curb this pro­cess such as mak­ing DoD of­fici­als re­gist­er where they work­ing after leav­ing the DoD and putt­ing in one- or two-year co­ol­ing off per­iods where they can­not at­tempt to in­flu­ence the govern­ment in pro­grams that they wor­ked in, but most of these re­forms have been ig­nored or de­for­med. When Con­gress pas­sed a law re­quir­ing that DoD keep a list of who went through the re­volv­ing door, the DoD de­cided that the list was not to be made pub­lic.

There have been de­cades of re­ports by the GAO on the pro­blems of the re­volv­ing door, hear­ings by Con­gress and re­ports in the media with very lit­tle ef­fect. As I wrote about in a Sol­u­tions col­umn a few weeks ago, the re­volv­ing door with our of­fic­er corps is the worst be­cause when sen­ior of­fic­ers re­tire with their milita­ry pens­ions and sell their souls to a de­fen­se contra­ctor for money, it is de­vas­tat­ing to the morale of the junior of­fic­er corps. The young­er of­fic­ers who don't be­lieve in this cor­rupt­ing prac­tice get out of the ser­vice, and those who stay have to ac­cept the undue in­flu­ence of form­er of­fic­ers to the de­tri­ment of nation­al de­fen­se.

Thomas Amlie, while work­ing with­in the Air Force, wrote the best ex­plana­tion I have seen on the cor­rupt­ing pre­ssures with our of­fic­ers, in a 1983 mem­oran­dum to his super­iors. Dr. Amlie was the in­ven­tor of the Spar­row mis­sile and had been the di­rec­tor of Naval Weapons Laborato­ry at China Lake. I in­cluded part of his mem­oran­dum in my 1985 book, "The Pen­tagon Un­derground":

The major pro­blem with hav­ing a milita­ry of­fic­er in char­ge of pro­cure­ment is his vul­nerabil­ity. It turns out that not every­one can make gener­al or ad­mir­al and our "up or out" poli­cy for­ces peo­ple to re­tire. The average age of an of­fic­er at re­tire­ment is 43 years. Co­unt­ing al­lowan­ces, a col­onel has more take home pay than a US Sen­ator. At the age of 43, he pro­bab­ly has kids in or ready for col­lege and a big mortgage and can't af­ford a large cut in his in­come. Be­sides, he is at the peak of his in­tel­lectu­al pow­ers, is em­otional­ly in­vol­ved and doesn't want to quit. We throw him out an­yway, no matt­er how good a job he is doing. Many of these of­fic­ers, par­ticular­ly the good ones who have spent most of their care­ers fly­ing aircraft, op­erat­ing ships or lead­ing troops, do not have the skills which are rea­di­ly mar­ket­able in the civilian sec­tor. This nice man then comes around and of­f­ers him a job at 50k-75K [1983 dol­lars] per year. If he stands up and makes a fuss about high cost and poor qual­ity, no nice man will come to see him when he re­tires. Even if he has no in­terest in a post-retirement job in the de­fen­se in­dust­ry, he is tak­ing a chan­ce by mak­ing a fuss. The "sys­tem" will, li­ke­ly as not, dis­cov­er a newly open job in Tule, Green­land; Adak Al­as­ka; or some other gard­en spot for which he and only he, is uni­que­ly qualified. Thus, his fami­ly, as well as his care­er, suf­f­ers. To their ever­last­ing credit, many fine of­fic­ers have made a fuss an­yway and suf­fered the con­sequ­ences.

This is not the pre­cari­ous situa­tion that we should be putt­ing our of­fic­ers in and this prac­tice is worse when our gener­als and ad­mir­als also go through the re­volv­ing door. I have spent many years try­ing to get the pub­lic, the media and mem­b­ers of Con­gress who want to cur­tail this damag­ing prac­tice to un­derstand that the de­fen­se contra­ctors are not neces­sari­ly hir­ing and pay­ing these of­fic­ers and civilian per­son­nel for in­flu­ence peddl­ing that they will do in the fu­ture, but in­stead, are hir­ing and re­ward­ing them for what they did while they were in govern­ment ser­vice for the contra­ctors. The re­wards of the job are for "ser­vices re­ndered" to the contra­ctors, such as help­ing to hide over­runs and han­d­ing out waiv­ers and chan­ge ord­ers to help out mal­function­ing contra­ctors so they don't have to pay the costs to fix their own mis­takes. The pro­blem is that the high-level of­fic­ers begin to see them­selves as on the same team as the contra­ctor and their suc­cess re­l­ies on the contra­ctors' power and in­flu­ence in the sys­tem.

This was re­vealed to me in a very startl­ing way in the early 1980s when I was the di­rec­tor of the Pro­ject on Milita­ry Pro­cure­ment (now Pro­ject on Govern­ment Over­sight, POGO, where I still serve as treasur­er and a mem­b­er of the board of di­rec­tors.) I re­ceived a call from one of my sour­ces that he had some im­por­tant docu­ments for me. He was a sour­ce that was help­ing me with in­ves­tigat­ing the push to buy an­oth­er run of the notori­ous C-5 cargo plane.

The first pro­duc­tion run of the C-5A cargo plane was one of the worst over­run and tech­n­ical failures that the Air Force had ever pro­duced, but now Loc­kheed, the contra­ctor for the C-5A, is push­ing for an­oth­er genera­tion of this plane dis­ast­er, the C-5B. The Air Force had pic­ked an­oth­er plane for the re­place­ment of the C-5A in 1981 to be built by McDon­nell Doug­las, but by 1982, Loc­kheed had pus­hed hard en­ough to chan­ge that de­cis­ion and the DoD and Air Force fell be­hind the idea of mak­ing the C-5B and re­ver­sed their de­cis­ion. It was wide­ly sus­pec­ted that Loc­kheed was able to turn the DoD and the Air Force around from their origin­al de­cis­ion be­cause Loc­kheed needed a bailout be­cause of their past failures. There were other poten­ti­al planes for the job, such as the 747 cargo plane (hated by the Air Force brass be­cause it was a com­mer­ci­al plane, but Boe­ing gave the Air Force an un­solicited pro­pos­al to use 747s for milita­ry cargo) and KC-10. We were ex­amin­ing the tech­n­ical data and the costs of these other opt­ions to the C-5, es­pecial­ly given the his­to­ry of the pro­gram under Loc­kheed.

Once the Air Force fell be­hind the new C-5B, they be­came one with Loc­kheed in push­ing it in the media and the Con­gress. Usual­ly this is done under the radar where the govern­ment helps the contra­ctor lobby the Con­gress, but keeps their fin­gerprints off the dirty work. Howev­er, my sour­ce ner­vous­ly han­ded me a thick docu­ment through the win­dow of my car when I pul­led up to see him on a Was­hington cor­n­er. He, un­charac­teris­tical­ly, said lit­tle and fur­tive­ly wal­ked away. Once I op­ened the docu­ment, I could see why. It was a lobby plan for the C-5B that co­or­dinated the lob­by­ing ef­forts of the DoD, Air Force and Loc­kheed, giv­ing each group as­sign­ments and com­mingl­ing their ef­forts so that they were vir­tual­ly one. We knew that this had hap­pened be­fore, but I never thought an­yone was dumb or ar­rogant en­ough to write it all down. Be­sides show­ing Loc­kheed's hold and power over the DoD and the Air Force, it was and is il­leg­al for the ex­ecutive branch to use approp­riated funds to ac­tual­ly lobby the Con­gress. In the past, the ex­ecutive branch and the DoD would have legis­lative li­aisons, which were a fig leaf cover for lob­by­ing be­cause they claimed that they were just sup­ply­ing needed in­for­ma­tion to the Con­gress. Howev­er, this time the govern­ment was caught as close in bed to the contra­ctor as you can get.

The docu­ment was a 96-page com­puterized prin­tout that gave vari­ous tasks to the DoD, Air Force and Loc­kheed. It was a co­or­dinated ef­fort that plan­ned to use such "heavy hitt­ers" as four-star gener­als, Sen­ate Major­ity Lead­er Howard Baker, the mayor of At­lanta, the sec­reta­ry of the Air Force, the de­puty sec­reta­ry of the DoD and even Pre­sident Rea­gan. There was very lit­tle em­phasis on the sub­stan­tive is­sues of which cargo plane would work best for de­liver­ing sup­pl­ies to the troops, but rath­er, schemes on how to use pork bar­rel and horse trad­ing to in­flu­ence the Con­gress for the be­nefit of Loc­kheed's pro­gram.

One task had Loc­kheed writ­ing up a draft for the sec­reta­ry of de­fen­se to pre­sent to just­ify spend­ing money to buy Loc­kheed's C-5Bs and the sec­reta­ry of de­fen­se sig­ned it and sent it to the top Armed Ser­vices com­mit­tees. An­oth­er task was to have the Air Force and the DoD to get out­side milita­ry or­ganiza­tions such as the American Leg­ion and Nation­al De­fen­se Co­un­cil to lobby for the C-5B. Govern­ment agen­cies are not sup­posed to seek lobby sup­port from out­side groups.

An­oth­er task had Loc­kheed putt­ing togeth­er stran­ge polit­ical be­dfel­lows to make sure that Loc­kheed got the C-5B, which was to be built in their plant in Mariet­ta Geor­gia, an At­lanta sub­urb. They got An­drew Young, mayor of At­lanta and form­er civil rights champ­ion, to work the Con­gres­sion­al Black Caucus to vote for the C-5B be­cause he was told that the plane would bring 8,500 jobs to the area. It wor­ked be­cause major mem­b­ers of the Con­gres­sion­al Black Caucus voted for the plane. In the same task, Loc­kheed also had other mem­b­ers of Con­gress, in­clud­ing con­ser­vatives like Newt Gingrich, whose dis­trict was near the plant, lobby for the plane be­cause of the jobs. The Air Force was tas­ked with tak­ing pic­tures of the C-5 hold­ing sever­al helicopt­ers and giv­ing the photos to Loc­kheed so they could use them in full-page ads in major newspap­ers such as The Was­hington Post.

Pro­bab­ly the most griev­ous task that was in the lobby plan was for the Air Force and Loc­kheed to put the squeeze on the gener­al who was in char­ge of the Milita­ry Air­lift Com­mand (MAC). The lobby plan said that the head of MAC, Gen. Jim Allen, pre­pared tes­timony to Con­gress for a hear­ing on air­lift, but it was not strong en­ough for the C-5. It was well known that MAC was re­luc­tant to have more C-5s, so his tes­timony was tem­pered to look at all the poten­ti­al can­didates for the new cargo plane. The Con­gress wan­ted to hear from this gener­al be­cause he was from the com­mand that would be using this plane, yet when he ar­rived in town, his state­ment had to be "purified" - even being a four-star gener­al did not allow him to speak free­ly to the Con­gress. A few years later, after a speech I gave on the C-5B lobby plan, an Air Force major told me that he had been an aide to Gener­al Allen dur­ing the con­trover­sy and that the gener­al was very bi­tt­er about the in­ter­fer­ence with his tes­timony. This is ex­act­ly the pro­blem I am con­cer­ned about: the for­ced cor­rup­tion of a gener­al, who did not have the in­tegr­ity to test­ify truthful­ly, and the im­press­ion of this cor­rupt sys­tem on his junior of­fic­ers. This type of cor­rup­tion of the sys­tem went on for 96 pages in this docu­ment.

After we leaked this lobby plan to the press, the DoD was un­apologetic and claimed it was the norm­al order of busi­ness. One of the ex­cerpts from The Was­hington Post:

Air Force Lt. Gener­al Kelly H. Burke, who is re­spon­sible for the pro­posed C5 pro­gram, said yes­terday: "You're just wrong if you think this is a high­ly un­usu­al hap­pen­ing. An­ytime you get com­pet­ing views, it's cus­toma­ry for the govern­ment to work with those contra­ctors whose views are con­gruent with the pre­sident's ... I do not want to sound platitudin­ous, but all you're see­ing is de­moc­ra­cy in ac­tion. This is the way the sys­tem is sup­posed to work.

In the up­roar over this leaked lobby plan, Con­gress asked the GAO to in­ves­tigate the govern­ment using its fund­ing to lobby the Con­gress in lock step with a contra­ctor. The GAO did a very thorough job and found that laws were brok­en. They sent evi­d­ence to the Rea­gan Just­ice De­part­ment for pos­sible crimin­al and civil cases against vari­ous DoD and Air Force em­ployees, but noth­ing was ever pur­sued.

So, you may be won­der­ing why I dred­ged up all this in­for­ma­tion from the 1980s. One rea­son is that the C-5 lobby plan was a uni­que look into the sys­tem that has not been re­plicated (after this plan leaked, I am sure no contra­ctor was dumb en­ough to ever write down their lobby ef­forts with the DoD again). An­oth­er is that I have spent sever­al weeks ex­plor­ing these same pro­blems of re­volv­ing doors and the power of the de­fen­se contra­ctors' money and in­flu­ence on the DoD civilian per­son­nel and of­fic­er corps, and have found that, in the past 25 years, there has been lit­tle chan­ge and fewer re­med­ies that have cur­bed this sys­tem. In fact, as the DoD bud­get has risen to un­preceden­ted heights since World War II and de­fen­se com­pan­ies have mer­ged to be­come very large en­tit­ies, the cor­rup­tion and undue in­flu­ence on in­dividu­als who work for the DoD has gott­en worse. I be­lieve that until you chan­ge the daily in­cen­tives for the peo­ple who are re­spon­sible for the day-to-day work­ings in the DoD, noth­ing will chan­ge.

So, next week, in part two of this col­umn, I will lay out what I be­lieve are strong chan­ges that need to happ­en. Many may be­lieve that we can't get such tough measures en­ac­ted, but we must get con­trol of a sys­tem that gives us mis­siles that are $1.5 mill­ion a pop and genera­tions of other over­priced weapons that pro­duce money and jobs for de­fen­se contra­ctors and their DoD min­ions, but do not pro­tect our troops or our co­unt­ry.

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The Buying and Selling of the Pentagon (Part I)

Wednesday 6 April 2011

by: Dina Rasor, Truthout

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

For the last seven weeks, we have been running Solutions columns on how to fix the Pentagon. With the DoD budget ballooning again and again over the past 40 years and the news yesterday that we have already spent $600 million in the first week in defending Libya from the air, there appears to finally be some movement to look into what is wrong with our defense spending. We have fired 191 cruise missiles at a cost of $288 million alone ($1.5 million per missile) - just one illustration on how we have spent too much for our weapons, and the Pentagon has admitted that it is unauditable and cannot successfully track most of its procurement money.

There was story yesterday by Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg Government that, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO):

About one in three major US Defense Department weapons programs since 1997 have had cost overruns of as much as 50 percent over their original projections ...

The overruns, found in 47 of 134 programs included in a study by the US Government Accountability Office, were enough to trigger a law that requires congressional notifications and potential termination. Only a single program has been terminated during that review process - the Bell Helicopter Textron $6.78 billion Army Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter, the GAO said.

What the GAO is not saying is that these are the overruns that the government knows about because there are many contractor and DoD program manager accounting tricks that hide overruns, including putting the extra expense in other programs that are not so closely monitored. Defense contractors and their buddies in the Pentagon are as good at hiding or deflecting overruns and manufacturing problems as General Electric is at dodging taxes.

I could go on for many more paragraphs about the problem and cite years and years of reports of fraudulent, wasteful and ineffective contracting, but most informed readers (especially Truthout readers) have heard of these horror stories for decades.

So, I wanted to concentrate and pull back the layers of problems and try to get down to basic incentives that would allow this to go on for generations of military and DoD civilian personnel. Each round of exposes triggered legislative reforms that were just reforms on paper, which were ignored by the bureaucracy, or real reforms that were deformed by a bureaucracy skilled in loopholes and slow rolls with few in the Congress or various administrations unwilling to commit to true oversight.

I don't believe that the US can make real changes to DoD procurement until we change the financial incentives of the individuals who work in this corrupt system. All other reforms can be deformed, and anyone who does not go along with this system, i.e. the Boy Scout types, are pushed out and most often have their careers destroyed if they don't go along with it. In this column, I will define the problem with the incentives for the people who work in this DoD/contractor system, and in next week's column, I will suggest tough solutions to change the very base of incentives for DoD personnel and the defense contractors.

For those who are interested in digging deeper on how this system got its start since World War II, I would suggest reading journalist Andrew Cockburn's excellent essay in the "Pentagon Labyrinth" called "Follow the Money."

Since I started working on reforming the Pentagon in 1979, I have found one of the most corrupting problems has been the revolving door, the insidious practice where DoD and Congressional personnel go to work for defense contractors or start work at defense contractors and move in and out of the government positions using their influence and inside knowledge to maximize the profits of the defense industry. There have been many attempts to curb this process such as making DoD officials register where they working after leaving the DoD and putting in one- or two-year cooling off periods where they cannot attempt to influence the government in programs that they worked in, but most of these reforms have been ignored or deformed. When Congress passed a law requiring that DoD keep a list of who went through the revolving door, the DoD decided that the list was not to be made public.

There have been decades of reports by the GAO on the problems of the revolving door, hearings by Congress and reports in the media with very little effect. As I wrote about in a Solutions column a few weeks ago, the revolving door with our officer corps is the worst because when senior officers retire with their military pensions and sell their souls to a defense contractor for money, it is devastating to the morale of the junior officer corps. The younger officers who don't believe in this corrupting practice get out of the service, and those who stay have to accept the undue influence of former officers to the detriment of national defense.

Thomas Amlie, while working within the Air Force, wrote the best explanation I have seen on the corrupting pressures with our officers, in a 1983 memorandum to his superiors. Dr. Amlie was the inventor of the Sparrow missile and had been the director of Naval Weapons Laboratory at China Lake. I included part of his memorandum in my 1985 book, "The Pentagon Underground":

The major problem with having a military officer in charge of procurement is his vulnerability. It turns out that not everyone can make general or admiral and our "up or out" policy forces people to retire. The average age of an officer at retirement is 43 years. Counting allowances, a colonel has more take home pay than a US Senator. At the age of 43, he probably has kids in or ready for college and a big mortgage and can't afford a large cut in his income. Besides, he is at the peak of his intellectual powers, is emotionally involved and doesn't want to quit. We throw him out anyway, no matter how good a job he is doing. Many of these officers, particularly the good ones who have spent most of their careers flying aircraft, operating ships or leading troops, do not have the skills which are readily marketable in the civilian sector. This nice man then comes around and offers him a job at 50k-75K [1983 dollars] per year. If he stands up and makes a fuss about high cost and poor quality, no nice man will come to see him when he retires. Even if he has no interest in a post-retirement job in the defense industry, he is taking a chance by making a fuss. The "system" will, likely as not, discover a newly open job in Tule, Greenland; Adak Alaska; or some other garden spot for which he and only he, is uniquely qualified. Thus, his family, as well as his career, suffers. To their everlasting credit, many fine officers have made a fuss anyway and suffered the consequences.

This is not the precarious situation that we should be putting our officers in and this practice is worse when our generals and admirals also go through the revolving door. I have spent many years trying to get the public, the media and members of Congress who want to curtail this damaging practice to understand that the defense contractors are not necessarily hiring and paying these officers and civilian personnel for influence peddling that they will do in the future, but instead, are hiring and rewarding them for what they did while they were in government service for the contractors. The rewards of the job are for "services rendered" to the contractors, such as helping to hide overruns and handing out waivers and change orders to help out malfunctioning contractors so they don't have to pay the costs to fix their own mistakes. The problem is that the high-level officers begin to see themselves as on the same team as the contractor and their success relies on the contractors' power and influence in the system.

This was revealed to me in a very startling way in the early 1980s when I was the director of the Project on Military Procurement (now Project on Government Oversight, POGO, where I still serve as treasurer and a member of the board of directors.) I received a call from one of my sources that he had some important documents for me. He was a source that was helping me with investigating the push to buy another run of the notorious C-5 cargo plane.

The first production run of the C-5A cargo plane was one of the worst overrun and technical failures that the Air Force had ever produced, but now Lockheed, the contractor for the C-5A, is pushing for another generation of this plane disaster, the C-5B. The Air Force had picked another plane for the replacement of the C-5A in 1981 to be built by McDonnell Douglas, but by 1982, Lockheed had pushed hard enough to change that decision and the DoD and Air Force fell behind the idea of making the C-5B and reversed their decision. It was widely suspected that Lockheed was able to turn the DoD and the Air Force around from their original decision because Lockheed needed a bailout because of their past failures. There were other potential planes for the job, such as the 747 cargo plane (hated by the Air Force brass because it was a commercial plane, but Boeing gave the Air Force an unsolicited proposal to use 747s for military cargo) and KC-10. We were examining the technical data and the costs of these other options to the C-5, especially given the history of the program under Lockheed.

Once the Air Force fell behind the new C-5B, they became one with Lockheed in pushing it in the media and the Congress. Usually this is done under the radar where the government helps the contractor lobby the Congress, but keeps their fingerprints off the dirty work. However, my source nervously handed me a thick document through the window of my car when I pulled up to see him on a Washington corner. He, uncharacteristically, said little and furtively walked away. Once I opened the document, I could see why. It was a lobby plan for the C-5B that coordinated the lobbying efforts of the DoD, Air Force and Lockheed, giving each group assignments and commingling their efforts so that they were virtually one. We knew that this had happened before, but I never thought anyone was dumb or arrogant enough to write it all down. Besides showing Lockheed's hold and power over the DoD and the Air Force, it was and is illegal for the executive branch to use appropriated funds to actually lobby the Congress. In the past, the executive branch and the DoD would have legislative liaisons, which were a fig leaf cover for lobbying because they claimed that they were just supplying needed information to the Congress. However, this time the government was caught as close in bed to the contractor as you can get.

The document was a 96-page computerized printout that gave various tasks to the DoD, Air Force and Lockheed. It was a coordinated effort that planned to use such "heavy hitters" as four-star generals, Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, the mayor of Atlanta, the secretary of the Air Force, the deputy secretary of the DoD and even President Reagan. There was very little emphasis on the substantive issues of which cargo plane would work best for delivering supplies to the troops, but rather, schemes on how to use pork barrel and horse trading to influence the Congress for the benefit of Lockheed's program.

One task had Lockheed writing up a draft for the secretary of defense to present to justify spending money to buy Lockheed's C-5Bs and the secretary of defense signed it and sent it to the top Armed Services committees. Another task was to have the Air Force and the DoD to get outside military organizations such as the American Legion and National Defense Council to lobby for the C-5B. Government agencies are not supposed to seek lobby support from outside groups.

Another task had Lockheed putting together strange political bedfellows to make sure that Lockheed got the C-5B, which was to be built in their plant in Marietta Georgia, an Atlanta suburb. They got Andrew Young, mayor of Atlanta and former civil rights champion, to work the Congressional Black Caucus to vote for the C-5B because he was told that the plane would bring 8,500 jobs to the area. It worked because major members of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the plane. In the same task, Lockheed also had other members of Congress, including conservatives like Newt Gingrich, whose district was near the plant, lobby for the plane because of the jobs. The Air Force was tasked with taking pictures of the C-5 holding several helicopters and giving the photos to Lockheed so they could use them in full-page ads in major newspapers such as The Washington Post.

Probably the most grievous task that was in the lobby plan was for the Air Force and Lockheed to put the squeeze on the general who was in charge of the Military Airlift Command (MAC). The lobby plan said that the head of MAC, Gen. Jim Allen, prepared testimony to Congress for a hearing on airlift, but it was not strong enough for the C-5. It was well known that MAC was reluctant to have more C-5s, so his testimony was tempered to look at all the potential candidates for the new cargo plane. The Congress wanted to hear from this general because he was from the command that would be using this plane, yet when he arrived in town, his statement had to be "purified" - even being a four-star general did not allow him to speak freely to the Congress. A few years later, after a speech I gave on the C-5B lobby plan, an Air Force major told me that he had been an aide to General Allen during the controversy and that the general was very bitter about the interference with his testimony. This is exactly the problem I am concerned about: the forced corruption of a general, who did not have the integrity to testify truthfully, and the impression of this corrupt system on his junior officers. This type of corruption of the system went on for 96 pages in this document.

After we leaked this lobby plan to the press, the DoD was unapologetic and claimed it was the normal order of business. One of the excerpts from The Washington Post:

Air Force Lt. General Kelly H. Burke, who is responsible for the proposed C5 program, said yesterday: "You're just wrong if you think this is a highly unusual happening. Anytime you get competing views, it's customary for the government to work with those contractors whose views are congruent with the president's ... I do not want to sound platitudinous, but all you're seeing is democracy in action. This is the way the system is supposed to work.

In the uproar over this leaked lobby plan, Congress asked the GAO to investigate the government using its funding to lobby the Congress in lock step with a contractor. The GAO did a very thorough job and found that laws were broken. They sent evidence to the Reagan Justice Department for possible criminal and civil cases against various DoD and Air Force employees, but nothing was ever pursued.

So, you may be wondering why I dredged up all this information from the 1980s. One reason is that the C-5 lobby plan was a unique look into the system that has not been replicated (after this plan leaked, I am sure no contractor was dumb enough to ever write down their lobby efforts with the DoD again). Another is that I have spent several weeks exploring these same problems of revolving doors and the power of the defense contractors' money and influence on the DoD civilian personnel and officer corps, and have found that, in the past 25 years, there has been little change and fewer remedies that have curbed this system. In fact, as the DoD budget has risen to unprecedented heights since World War II and defense companies have merged to become very large entities, the corruption and undue influence on individuals who work for the DoD has gotten worse. I believe that until you change the daily incentives for the people who are responsible for the day-to-day workings in the DoD, nothing will change.

So, next week, in part two of this column, I will lay out what I believe are strong changes that need to happen. Many may believe that we can't get such tough measures enacted, but we must get control of a system that gives us missiles that are $1.5 million a pop and generations of other overpriced weapons that produce money and jobs for defense contractors and their DoD minions, but do not protect our troops or our country.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

The Buying and Selling of the Pentagon (Part I)

Wednesday 6 April 2011

by: Dina Rasor, Truthout

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

For the last seven weeks, we have been running Solutions columns on how to fix the Pentagon. With the DoD budget ballooning again and again over the past 40 years and the news yesterday that we have already spent $600 million in the first week in defending Libya from the air, there appears to finally be some movement to look into what is wrong with our defense spending. We have fired 191 cruise missiles at a cost of $288 million alone ($1.5 million per missile) - just one illustration on how we have spent too much for our weapons, and the Pentagon has admitted that it is unauditable and cannot successfully track most of its procurement money.

There was story yesterday by Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg Government that, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO):

About one in three major US Defense Department weapons programs since 1997 have had cost overruns of as much as 50 percent over their original projections ...

The overruns, found in 47 of 134 programs included in a study by the US Government Accountability Office, were enough to trigger a law that requires congressional notifications and potential termination. Only a single program has been terminated during that review process - the Bell Helicopter Textron $6.78 billion Army Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter, the GAO said.

What the GAO is not saying is that these are the overruns that the government knows about because there are many contractor and DoD program manager accounting tricks that hide overruns, including putting the extra expense in other programs that are not so closely monitored. Defense contractors and their buddies in the Pentagon are as good at hiding or deflecting overruns and manufacturing problems as General Electric is at dodging taxes.

I could go on for many more paragraphs about the problem and cite years and years of reports of fraudulent, wasteful and ineffective contracting, but most informed readers (especially Truthout readers) have heard of these horror stories for decades.

So, I wanted to concentrate and pull back the layers of problems and try to get down to basic incentives that would allow this to go on for generations of military and DoD civilian personnel. Each round of exposes triggered legislative reforms that were just reforms on paper, which were ignored by the bureaucracy, or real reforms that were deformed by a bureaucracy skilled in loopholes and slow rolls with few in the Congress or various administrations unwilling to commit to true oversight.

I don't believe that the US can make real changes to DoD procurement until we change the financial incentives of the individuals who work in this corrupt system. All other reforms can be deformed, and anyone who does not go along with this system, i.e. the Boy Scout types, are pushed out and most often have their careers destroyed if they don't go along with it. In this column, I will define the problem with the incentives for the people who work in this DoD/contractor system, and in next week's column, I will suggest tough solutions to change the very base of incentives for DoD personnel and the defense contractors.

For those who are interested in digging deeper on how this system got its start since World War II, I would suggest reading journalist Andrew Cockburn's excellent essay in the "Pentagon Labyrinth" called "Follow the Money."

Since I started working on reforming the Pentagon in 1979, I have found one of the most corrupting problems has been the revolving door, the insidious practice where DoD and Congressional personnel go to work for defense contractors or start work at defense contractors and move in and out of the government positions using their influence and inside knowledge to maximize the profits of the defense industry. There have been many attempts to curb this process such as making DoD officials register where they working after leaving the DoD and putting in one- or two-year cooling off periods where they cannot attempt to influence the government in programs that they worked in, but most of these reforms have been ignored or deformed. When Congress passed a law requiring that DoD keep a list of who went through the revolving door, the DoD decided that the list was not to be made public.

There have been decades of reports by the GAO on the problems of the revolving door, hearings by Congress and reports in the media with very little effect. As I wrote about in a Solutions column a few weeks ago, the revolving door with our officer corps is the worst because when senior officers retire with their military pensions and sell their souls to a defense contractor for money, it is devastating to the morale of the junior officer corps. The younger officers who don't believe in this corrupting practice get out of the service, and those who stay have to accept the undue influence of former officers to the detriment of national defense.

Thomas Amlie, while working within the Air Force, wrote the best explanation I have seen on the corrupting pressures with our officers, in a 1983 memorandum to his superiors. Dr. Amlie was the inventor of the Sparrow missile and had been the director of Naval Weapons Laboratory at China Lake. I included part of his memorandum in my 1985 book, "The Pentagon Underground":

The major problem with having a military officer in charge of procurement is his vulnerability. It turns out that not everyone can make general or admiral and our "up or out" policy forces people to retire. The average age of an officer at retirement is 43 years. Counting allowances, a colonel has more take home pay than a US Senator. At the age of 43, he probably has kids in or ready for college and a big mortgage and can't afford a large cut in his income. Besides, he is at the peak of his intellectual powers, is emotionally involved and doesn't want to quit. We throw him out anyway, no matter how good a job he is doing. Many of these officers, particularly the good ones who have spent most of their careers flying aircraft, operating ships or leading troops, do not have the skills which are readily marketable in the civilian sector. This nice man then comes around and offers him a job at 50k-75K [1983 dollars] per year. If he stands up and makes a fuss about high cost and poor quality, no nice man will come to see him when he retires. Even if he has no interest in a post-retirement job in the defense industry, he is taking a chance by making a fuss. The "system" will, likely as not, discover a newly open job in Tule, Greenland; Adak Alaska; or some other garden spot for which he and only he, is uniquely qualified. Thus, his family, as well as his career, suffers. To their everlasting credit, many fine officers have made a fuss anyway and suffered the consequences.

This is not the precarious situation that we should be putting our officers in and this practice is worse when our generals and admirals also go through the revolving door. I have spent many years trying to get the public, the media and members of Congress who want to curtail this damaging practice to understand that the defense contractors are not necessarily hiring and paying these officers and civilian personnel for influence peddling that they will do in the future, but instead, are hiring and rewarding them for what they did while they were in government service for the contractors. The rewards of the job are for "services rendered" to the contractors, such as helping to hide overruns and handing out waivers and change orders to help out malfunctioning contractors so they don't have to pay the costs to fix their own mistakes. The problem is that the high-level officers begin to see themselves as on the same team as the contractor and their success relies on the contractors' power and influence in the system.

This was revealed to me in a very startling way in the early 1980s when I was the director of the Project on Military Procurement (now Project on Government Oversight, POGO, where I still serve as treasurer and a member of the board of directors.) I received a call from one of my sources that he had some important documents for me. He was a source that was helping me with investigating the push to buy another run of the notorious C-5 cargo plane.

The first production run of the C-5A cargo plane was one of the worst overrun and technical failures that the Air Force had ever produced, but now Lockheed, the contractor for the C-5A, is pushing for another generation of this plane disaster, the C-5B. The Air Force had picked another plane for the replacement of the C-5A in 1981 to be built by McDonnell Douglas, but by 1982, Lockheed had pushed hard enough to change that decision and the DoD and Air Force fell behind the idea of making the C-5B and reversed their decision. It was widely suspected that Lockheed was able to turn the DoD and the Air Force around from their original decision because Lockheed needed a bailout because of their past failures. There were other potential planes for the job, such as the 747 cargo plane (hated by the Air Force brass because it was a commercial plane, but Boeing gave the Air Force an unsolicited proposal to use 747s for military cargo) and KC-10. We were examining the technical data and the costs of these other options to the C-5, especially given the history of the program under Lockheed.

Once the Air Force fell behind the new C-5B, they became one with Lockheed in pushing it in the media and the Congress. Usually this is done under the radar where the government helps the contractor lobby the Congress, but keeps their fingerprints off the dirty work. However, my source nervously handed me a thick document through the window of my car when I pulled up to see him on a Washington corner. He, uncharacteristically, said little and furtively walked away. Once I opened the document, I could see why. It was a lobby plan for the C-5B that coordinated the lobbying efforts of the DoD, Air Force and Lockheed, giving each group assignments and commingling their efforts so that they were virtually one. We knew that this had happened before, but I never thought anyone was dumb or arrogant enough to write it all down. Besides showing Lockheed's hold and power over the DoD and the Air Force, it was and is illegal for the executive branch to use appropriated funds to actually lobby the Congress. In the past, the executive branch and the DoD would have legislative liaisons, which were a fig leaf cover for lobbying because they claimed that they were just supplying needed information to the Congress. However, this time the government was caught as close in bed to the contractor as you can get.

The document was a 96-page computerized printout that gave various tasks to the DoD, Air Force and Lockheed. It was a coordinated effort that planned to use such "heavy hitters" as four-star generals, Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, the mayor of Atlanta, the secretary of the Air Force, the deputy secretary of the DoD and even President Reagan. There was very little emphasis on the substantive issues of which cargo plane would work best for delivering supplies to the troops, but rather, schemes on how to use pork barrel and horse trading to influence the Congress for the benefit of Lockheed's program.

One task had Lockheed writing up a draft for the secretary of defense to present to justify spending money to buy Lockheed's C-5Bs and the secretary of defense signed it and sent it to the top Armed Services committees. Another task was to have the Air Force and the DoD to get outside military organizations such as the American Legion and National Defense Council to lobby for the C-5B. Government agencies are not supposed to seek lobby support from outside groups.

Another task had Lockheed putting together strange political bedfellows to make sure that Lockheed got the C-5B, which was to be built in their plant in Marietta Georgia, an Atlanta suburb. They got Andrew Young, mayor of Atlanta and former civil rights champion, to work the Congressional Black Caucus to vote for the C-5B because he was told that the plane would bring 8,500 jobs to the area. It worked because major members of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the plane. In the same task, Lockheed also had other members of Congress, including conservatives like Newt Gingrich, whose district was near the plant, lobby for the plane because of the jobs. The Air Force was tasked with taking pictures of the C-5 holding several helicopters and giving the photos to Lockheed so they could use them in full-page ads in major newspapers such as The Washington Post.

Probably the most grievous task that was in the lobby plan was for the Air Force and Lockheed to put the squeeze on the general who was in charge of the Military Airlift Command (MAC). The lobby plan said that the head of MAC, Gen. Jim Allen, prepared testimony to Congress for a hearing on airlift, but it was not strong enough for the C-5. It was well known that MAC was reluctant to have more C-5s, so his testimony was tempered to look at all the potential candidates for the new cargo plane. The Congress wanted to hear from this general because he was from the command that would be using this plane, yet when he arrived in town, his statement had to be "purified" - even being a four-star general did not allow him to speak freely to the Congress. A few years later, after a speech I gave on the C-5B lobby plan, an Air Force major told me that he had been an aide to General Allen during the controversy and that the general was very bitter about the interference with his testimony. This is exactly the problem I am concerned about: the forced corruption of a general, who did not have the integrity to testify truthfully, and the impression of this corrupt system on his junior officers. This type of corruption of the system went on for 96 pages in this document.

After we leaked this lobby plan to the press, the DoD was unapologetic and claimed it was the normal order of business. One of the excerpts from The Washington Post:

Air Force Lt. General Kelly H. Burke, who is responsible for the proposed C5 program, said yesterday: "You're just wrong if you think this is a highly unusual happening. Anytime you get competing views, it's customary for the government to work with those contractors whose views are congruent with the president's ... I do not want to sound platitudinous, but all you're seeing is democracy in action. This is the way the system is supposed to work.

In the uproar over this leaked lobby plan, Congress asked the GAO to investigate the government using its funding to lobby the Congress in lock step with a contractor. The GAO did a very thorough job and found that laws were broken. They sent evidence to the Reagan Justice Department for possible criminal and civil cases against various DoD and Air Force employees, but nothing was ever pursued.

So, you may be wondering why I dredged up all this information from the 1980s. One reason is that the C-5 lobby plan was a unique look into the system that has not been replicated (after this plan leaked, I am sure no contractor was dumb enough to ever write down their lobby efforts with the DoD again). Another is that I have spent several weeks exploring these same problems of revolving doors and the power of the defense contractors' money and influence on the DoD civilian personnel and officer corps, and have found that, in the past 25 years, there has been little change and fewer remedies that have curbed this system. In fact, as the DoD budget has risen to unprecedented heights since World War II and defense companies have merged to become very large entities, the corruption and undue influence on individuals who work for the DoD has gotten worse. I believe that until you change the daily incentives for the people who are responsible for the day-to-day workings in the DoD, nothing will change.

So, next week, in part two of this column, I will lay out what I believe are strong changes that need to happen. Many may believe that we can't get such tough measures enacted, but we must get control of a system that gives us missiles that are $1.5 million a pop and generations of other overpriced weapons that produce money and jobs for defense contractors and their DoD minions, but do not protect our troops or our country.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

The Buying and Selling of the Pentagon (Part I)

Wednesday 6 April 2011

by: Dina Rasor, Truthout

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

For the last seven weeks, we have been running Solutions columns on how to fix the Pentagon. With the DoD budget ballooning again and again over the past 40 years and the news yesterday that we have already spent $600 million in the first week in defending Libya from the air, there appears to finally be some movement to look into what is wrong with our defense spending. We have fired 191 cruise missiles at a cost of $288 million alone ($1.5 million per missile) - just one illustration on how we have spent too much for our weapons, and the Pentagon has admitted that it is unauditable and cannot successfully track most of its procurement money.

There was story yesterday by Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg Government that, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO):

About one in three major US Defense Department weapons programs since 1997 have had cost overruns of as much as 50 percent over their original projections ...

The overruns, found in 47 of 134 programs included in a study by the US Government Accountability Office, were enough to trigger a law that requires congressional notifications and potential termination. Only a single program has been terminated during that review process - the Bell Helicopter Textron $6.78 billion Army Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter, the GAO said.

What the GAO is not saying is that these are the overruns that the government knows about because there are many contractor and DoD program manager accounting tricks that hide overruns, including putting the extra expense in other programs that are not so closely monitored. Defense contractors and their buddies in the Pentagon are as good at hiding or deflecting overruns and manufacturing problems as General Electric is at dodging taxes.

I could go on for many more paragraphs about the problem and cite years and years of reports of fraudulent, wasteful and ineffective contracting, but most informed readers (especially Truthout readers) have heard of these horror stories for decades.

So, I wanted to concentrate and pull back the layers of problems and try to get down to basic incentives that would allow this to go on for generations of military and DoD civilian personnel. Each round of exposes triggered legislative reforms that were just reforms on paper, which were ignored by the bureaucracy, or real reforms that were deformed by a bureaucracy skilled in loopholes and slow rolls with few in the Congress or various administrations unwilling to commit to true oversight.

I don't believe that the US can make real changes to DoD procurement until we change the financial incentives of the individuals who work in this corrupt system. All other reforms can be deformed, and anyone who does not go along with this system, i.e. the Boy Scout types, are pushed out and most often have their careers destroyed if they don't go along with it. In this column, I will define the problem with the incentives for the people who work in this DoD/contractor system, and in next week's column, I will suggest tough solutions to change the very base of incentives for DoD personnel and the defense contractors.

For those who are interested in digging deeper on how this system got its start since World War II, I would suggest reading journalist Andrew Cockburn's excellent essay in the "Pentagon Labyrinth" called "Follow the Money."

Since I started working on reforming the Pentagon in 1979, I have found one of the most corrupting problems has been the revolving door, the insidious practice where DoD and Congressional personnel go to work for defense contractors or start work at defense contractors and move in and out of the government positions using their influence and inside knowledge to maximize the profits of the defense industry. There have been many attempts to curb this process such as making DoD officials register where they working after leaving the DoD and putting in one- or two-year cooling off periods where they cannot attempt to influence the government in programs that they worked in, but most of these reforms have been ignored or deformed. When Congress passed a law requiring that DoD keep a list of who went through the revolving door, the DoD decided that the list was not to be made public.

There have been decades of reports by the GAO on the problems of the revolving door, hearings by Congress and reports in the media with very little effect. As I wrote about in a Solutions column a few weeks ago, the revolving door with our officer corps is the worst because when senior officers retire with their military pensions and sell their souls to a defense contractor for money, it is devastating to the morale of the junior officer corps. The younger officers who don't believe in this corrupting practice get out of the service, and those who stay have to accept the undue influence of former officers to the detriment of national defense.

Thomas Amlie, while working within the Air Force, wrote the best explanation I have seen on the corrupting pressures with our officers, in a 1983 memorandum to his superiors. Dr. Amlie was the inventor of the Sparrow missile and had been the director of Naval Weapons Laboratory at China Lake. I included part of his memorandum in my 1985 book, "The Pentagon Underground":

The major problem with having a military officer in charge of procurement is his vulnerability. It turns out that not everyone can make general or admiral and our "up or out" policy forces people to retire. The average age of an officer at retirement is 43 years. Counting allowances, a colonel has more take home pay than a US Senator. At the age of 43, he probably has kids in or ready for college and a big mortgage and can't afford a large cut in his income. Besides, he is at the peak of his intellectual powers, is emotionally involved and doesn't want to quit. We throw him out anyway, no matter how good a job he is doing. Many of these officers, particularly the good ones who have spent most of their careers flying aircraft, operating ships or leading troops, do not have the skills which are readily marketable in the civilian sector. This nice man then comes around and offers him a job at 50k-75K [1983 dollars] per year. If he stands up and makes a fuss about high cost and poor quality, no nice man will come to see him when he retires. Even if he has no interest in a post-retirement job in the defense industry, he is taking a chance by making a fuss. The "system" will, likely as not, discover a newly open job in Tule, Greenland; Adak Alaska; or some other garden spot for which he and only he, is uniquely qualified. Thus, his family, as well as his career, suffers. To their everlasting credit, many fine officers have made a fuss anyway and suffered the consequences.

This is not the precarious situation that we should be putting our officers in and this practice is worse when our generals and admirals also go through the revolving door. I have spent many years trying to get the public, the media and members of Congress who want to curtail this damaging practice to understand that the defense contractors are not necessarily hiring and paying these officers and civilian personnel for influence peddling that they will do in the future, but instead, are hiring and rewarding them for what they did while they were in government service for the contractors. The rewards of the job are for "services rendered" to the contractors, such as helping to hide overruns and handing out waivers and change orders to help out malfunctioning contractors so they don't have to pay the costs to fix their own mistakes. The problem is that the high-level officers begin to see themselves as on the same team as the contractor and their success relies on the contractors' power and influence in the system.

This was revealed to me in a very startling way in the early 1980s when I was the director of the Project on Military Procurement (now Project on Government Oversight, POGO, where I still serve as treasurer and a member of the board of directors.) I received a call from one of my sources that he had some important documents for me. He was a source that was helping me with investigating the push to buy another run of the notorious C-5 cargo plane.

The first production run of the C-5A cargo plane was one of the worst overrun and technical failures that the Air Force had ever produced, but now Lockheed, the contractor for the C-5A, is pushing for another generation of this plane disaster, the C-5B. The Air Force had picked another plane for the replacement of the C-5A in 1981 to be built by McDonnell Douglas, but by 1982, Lockheed had pushed hard enough to change that decision and the DoD and Air Force fell behind the idea of making the C-5B and reversed their decision. It was widely suspected that Lockheed was able to turn the DoD and the Air Force around from their original decision because Lockheed needed a bailout because of their past failures. There were other potential planes for the job, such as the 747 cargo plane (hated by the Air Force brass because it was a commercial plane, but Boeing gave the Air Force an unsolicited proposal to use 747s for military cargo) and KC-10. We were examining the technical data and the costs of these other options to the C-5, especially given the history of the program under Lockheed.

Once the Air Force fell behind the new C-5B, they became one with Lockheed in pushing it in the media and the Congress. Usually this is done under the radar where the government helps the contractor lobby the Congress, but keeps their fingerprints off the dirty work. However, my source nervously handed me a thick document through the window of my car when I pulled up to see him on a Washington corner. He, uncharacteristically, said little and furtively walked away. Once I opened the document, I could see why. It was a lobby plan for the C-5B that coordinated the lobbying efforts of the DoD, Air Force and Lockheed, giving each group assignments and commingling their efforts so that they were virtually one. We knew that this had happened before, but I never thought anyone was dumb or arrogant enough to write it all down. Besides showing Lockheed's hold and power over the DoD and the Air Force, it was and is illegal for the executive branch to use appropriated funds to actually lobby the Congress. In the past, the executive branch and the DoD would have legislative liaisons, which were a fig leaf cover for lobbying because they claimed that they were just supplying needed information to the Congress. However, this time the government was caught as close in bed to the contractor as you can get.

The document was a 96-page computerized printout that gave various tasks to the DoD, Air Force and Lockheed. It was a coordinated effort that planned to use such "heavy hitters" as four-star generals, Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, the mayor of Atlanta, the secretary of the Air Force, the deputy secretary of the DoD and even President Reagan. There was very little emphasis on the substantive issues of which cargo plane would work best for delivering supplies to the troops, but rather, schemes on how to use pork barrel and horse trading to influence the Congress for the benefit of Lockheed's program.

One task had Lockheed writing up a draft for the secretary of defense to present to justify spending money to buy Lockheed's C-5Bs and the secretary of defense signed it and sent it to the top Armed Services committees. Another task was to have the Air Force and the DoD to get outside military organizations such as the American Legion and National Defense Council to lobby for the C-5B. Government agencies are not supposed to seek lobby support from outside groups.

Another task had Lockheed putting together strange political bedfellows to make sure that Lockheed got the C-5B, which was to be built in their plant in Marietta Georgia, an Atlanta suburb. They got Andrew Young, mayor of Atlanta and former civil rights champion, to work the Congressional Black Caucus to vote for the C-5B because he was told that the plane would bring 8,500 jobs to the area. It worked because major members of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the plane. In the same task, Lockheed also had other members of Congress, including conservatives like Newt Gingrich, whose district was near the plant, lobby for the plane because of the jobs. The Air Force was tasked with taking pictures of the C-5 holding several helicopters and giving the photos to Lockheed so they could use them in full-page ads in major newspapers such as The Washington Post.

Probably the most grievous task that was in the lobby plan was for the Air Force and Lockheed to put the squeeze on the general who was in charge of the Military Airlift Command (MAC). The lobby plan said that the head of MAC, Gen. Jim Allen, prepared testimony to Congress for a hearing on airlift, but it was not strong enough for the C-5. It was well known that MAC was reluctant to have more C-5s, so his testimony was tempered to look at all the potential candidates for the new cargo plane. The Congress wanted to hear from this general because he was from the command that would be using this plane, yet when he arrived in town, his statement had to be "purified" - even being a four-star general did not allow him to speak freely to the Congress. A few years later, after a speech I gave on the C-5B lobby plan, an Air Force major told me that he had been an aide to General Allen during the controversy and that the general was very bitter about the interference with his testimony. This is exactly the problem I am concerned about: the forced corruption of a general, who did not have the integrity to testify truthfully, and the impression of this corrupt system on his junior officers. This type of corruption of the system went on for 96 pages in this document.

After we leaked this lobby plan to the press, the DoD was unapologetic and claimed it was the normal order of business. One of the excerpts from The Washington Post:

Air Force Lt. General Kelly H. Burke, who is responsible for the proposed C5 program, said yesterday: "You're just wrong if you think this is a highly unusual happening. Anytime you get competing views, it's customary for the government to work with those contractors whose views are congruent with the president's ... I do not want to sound platitudinous, but all you're seeing is democracy in action. This is the way the system is supposed to work.

In the uproar over this leaked lobby plan, Congress asked the GAO to investigate the government using its funding to lobby the Congress in lock step with a contractor. The GAO did a very thorough job and found that laws were broken. They sent evidence to the Reagan Justice Department for possible criminal and civil cases against various DoD and Air Force employees, but nothing was ever pursued.

So, you may be wondering why I dredged up all this information from the 1980s. One reason is that the C-5 lobby plan was a unique look into the system that has not been replicated (after this plan leaked, I am sure no contractor was dumb enough to ever write down their lobby efforts with the DoD again). Another is that I have spent several weeks exploring these same problems of revolving doors and the power of the defense contractors' money and influence on the DoD civilian personnel and officer corps, and have found that, in the past 25 years, there has been little change and fewer remedies that have curbed this system. In fact, as the DoD budget has risen to unprecedented heights since World War II and defense companies have merged to become very large entities, the corruption and undue influence on individuals who work for the DoD has gotten worse. I believe that until you change the daily incentives for the people who are responsible for the day-to-day workings in the DoD, nothing will change.

So, next week, in part two of this column, I will lay out what I believe are strong changes that need to happen. Many may believe that we can't get such tough measures enacted, but we must get control of a system that gives us missiles that are $1.5 million a pop and generations of other overpriced weapons that produce money and jobs for defense contractors and their DoD minions, but do not protect our troops or our country.

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