The Chesapeake Bay goose hunt, the beautiful secretary, and other ways the defense lobby got the B-1.

• Author: Kotz, Nick
• Position: Controversial B-1 bombers procurement

The Chesapeake Bay Goose Hunt, the Beautiful Secretary, and Other Ways the Defense Lobby Got the B- 1 by Nick Kotz

After a 30-year struggle that overcame the opposition of several presidents, the Air Force finally getting a new strategic bomber. In April, Rockwell International well deliver the last of 100 B- 1 bombers to the Air Force.

The $28 billion project has been fraught with controversy throughout its long history. The Air Force has touted the sophisticated bomber, designed to fly at near supersonic speed at treetop level and penetrate deep into Soviet territory, as an essential part of the U.S. strategic nuclear deterrent. But critics have long contended that other weapons -- such as planes firing long-range cruise missiles -- make the B- 1 unnecessary. Furthermore, technological flows in B-1 have cast doubts on the plane's ability to perform its mission.

The history of this costly and perhaps unneeded weapon illustrates the political, military, and economic forces that extend throughout our system of national defense. Too often, military decisions are based not on objective considerations of our national security needs but for reasons -- contracts for campaign contributions, jobs for constiuents, or the parochial self-interest of one of the competing armed services.

The $28 billion spent on the B- 1 and billions more spent earlier on research and development provided contracts to 5,200 companies in 48 states. As congressional skepticism toward the B- 1 grew in the mid-1970s, the military and defense contractors grew expert at promoting the project on economic terms, froming a secret lobbying coalition run from the Pentagon.

While Congress debated the 1975 defense budget, a tight-knit group of Air Force officers and Rockwell International officials secretly plotted the battle tactics of defense politics. Working together from a Pentagon headquarters, they coordinated a sophisticated lobbying campaign designed to win continued approval of the B- 1 bomber from an increasingly reluctant Congress. The meticulous, secretive -- and ethically dubious -- campaign became a model for future defense lobbying efforts to secure support for the C-5B transport plane and the MX missile.

In the trade, they called it "who's on who". It was a kind of matchmaking, pairing each member of Congress with the individual or groups most likely to persuade that legislator to vote for continued funding of the bomber. The contact might be made by the chief Rockwell lobbyist in Washington, Ralph, J. (Doc) Watson, by an Air Force officer such as Colonel Grant Miller, who worked full-time on the B-1's safe passage through Congress, by the president of the United Automobile Workers -- or even by the president of the United States.

Conversations at the Pentagon meetings followed a predictable pattern:

"Who's on Baker?" Miller would ask. Howard Baker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, though not yet his party's Senate leader, needed lobbying.

"Kelley's got Baker," Watson would reply. Jack Kelly, a retired Air Force colonel, was the Washington lobbyist for Avco Corporation, which had a subcontract potentially worth $1 billion to build the B- 1's wings at its Nashville plant. Avco officials were lobbying the entire Tennessee congressional delegation, whose members understood the importance the B- 1 held for their state's economy.

A 150-member Pentagon staff answered queries for members of Congress, kept a file on their voting records and statements, supplied them with transportation for "official trips," kept them informed of projects in their districts -- and of course worked assiduously to gain their votes for Air Force programs.

As lobbying assignments were made at the Pentagon meetings, the participants made careful notations on tally sheets spread out on the conference table. These scorecards also showed how each of 100 senators and 435 representatives has voted on the B-1 in the past and how he or she was expected to vote in 1975. Special attention was focused on "swing votes" -- uncommitted members whose votes might be swayed by the right argument on person. The "who's on who" assignments were recorded in code, lest the tally sheets fall into unfriendly hands. What emerged from the strategy meetings was an intricate -- and highly questionable -- lobbying network.

Sharing the wealth

Lobbying coalitions have long been an integral part of the Washington political system. What was unusual about the B-1 strategy meetings at the Pentagon was not only their sophistication but the participants themselves. Military officers are forbidden by law from lobbying Congress, not to mention doing so in coordination with the defense industry.

The Air Force worked with the defense contractors with cavalier disregard for Title 18 of the U.S. Code, the statue that specifically prohibits officials of the executive branch from lobbying the Congress. Title 18 is often ignored by members of the executibe branch, which is worrisome in itself. But when

military officers ignore it, the offense is compounded; the military is supposed to obey civilian authority and stay out of politics.

The Air Force-Rockwell coalition developed into a formal apparatus in direct reaction -- and direction proportion -- to the growing congressional threat during the early 1970s. On August 3, 1973, the Senate Armed Service Committee cut $100 million from the B-1 funds requested by the Air Force expressly to indicate "the committee's dissatisfaction and serious concern regarding the management of this program."

The Air Force and industry regarded the congressional slap as the worst kind of "micromanagement." Without warning, a multibillion-dollar weapon program could be thrown off track by politics changed in the annual congressional authorization and appropriation process.

Congressional opposition grew more vocal and better organized in 1974. In the Senate, George McGovern won 31 votes for an amendment that would have cut the B-1's development appropriation by 50 percent. A House amendment to kill the plane outright, though, was defeated 309 to 94. Although those were wide margins of defeat for the opponents, the Air Force-Rockwell coalition perceived them as ominous challenges to the Safe establishment that had conducted defense business in Congress up until then.

After the Vietnam war and the disgrace of Watergate, Congress more strongly asserted its will on defense issues against the presidency and the Pentagon. Antiwar sentiment and antimilitary bias swelled into powerful currents in the country during the middle 1970s.

Institional change also had overtaken some old congressional procedures. Powerful, autocratic committee chairmen (mostly southern conservatives who had been generous to the military) could no longer automotically impose their will on a military contract. Reformers in the Democratic party had punctured the seniority system and managed to oust several committee chairmen, including Democratic Rep. F. Edward Hebert, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

These reforms made it harder for the defense industry to gain approval for its programs. Once the power of committee chairmen was curbed, defense contractors and military services needed the support of many more members of Congress. As power in Congress fragmented, many members scrambled to get a share of defense contracts and bases for their constituents, just as they had traditionally sought dams and highways. The national interest was served no better in this made scramble for military assets than it has been when one autocrat called the shots.

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