12-07-2002
NATIONAL SECURITY: High Stakes at the Pentagon Poker Table
President Bush took office pledging to reshape conventional forces into a
higher-technology, faster-moving military. Then, when the United States
attacked Afghanistan and beefed up homeland security after 9/11, the
Pentagon faced heightened demands on current capabilities, from Special
Forces commandos to jet transports to military police. And now the
prospect of a second war with Iraq could add another set of demands on the
military-for heavy-armor brigades and air wings. Amid all this, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has pledged to send the 2004 defense budget in a
bold new direction, and his aides are scrutinizing prized programs,
including Navy aircraft carriers, the Marines' V-22 Osprey aircraft, and
the Air Force's F/A-22 fighter-not to mention pretty much every priority
item in the beleaguered Army budget. That gives the six groups below
plenty to worry and fight about as they compete for defense
dollars.
Association of the United States Army
The Army has a "problem" the other armed services don't have:
Its weapons are cheaper. All but its largest contracts are dwarfed by the
dollars spent on the Pentagon's bigger-ticket items, such as Navy aircraft
carriers and Air Force stealth fighters. That financial fact means that
most Army contractors lack the critical mass to influence Capitol Hill. So
while the sea and air services can count on major corporations in their
corner, the Army relies on its professional association to make its case
to Congress.
Boasting a staff of 85 people and an annual budget of $15 million, the
Association of the United States Army does have corporate sponsors: some
319 "sustaining members," seven of which are different divisions
of General Dynamics, the only top-tier defense contractor at all dependent
on the Army. (The company makes the Stryker lightweight armored vehicle,
which is crucial to the Army's future as a lighter, faster-deploying
service.) But AUSA's real strength is its individual membership, which
tops 100,000. Nearly half of these members are active-duty officers and
soldiers. Similarly, the association's chosen ammunition in the Washington
budget fight is not dollars, but ideas. Legally banned from lobbying, AUSA
wields not one but two in-house think tanks, which can paper Congress with
studies and reports. So even if the Army lacks the corporate influence of
the Navy and Air Force, or the gung-ho self-assertiveness that has served
the Marines so well on Capitol Hill, the association at least gives the
service a voice. AUSA's call to arms this coming year will be to protect
the Army's top programs-the Stryker, the Comanche scout helicopter-and
above all, the Army's manpower levels-from skeptical Rumsfeld
aides.
Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin has 124,000 employees and $24 billion in annual revenue-58
percent of it from defense work-and handles everything from C-130J
tactical cargo planes to next-generation global positioning satellites.
Most important, Lockheed is the prime contractor for two of the Pentagon's
signature programs: the F/A-22 Raptor fighter aircraft and the Joint
Strike Fighter. Both planes are vital to the company's future; Lockheed's
28 in-house lobbyists, plus the 27 lobbying firms it has on retainer, will
be working lawmakers to make sure that Congress buys as many of both
airplanes as possible.
The F/A-22, however, is at risk. It was envisioned 15 years ago as the
world's premier air-to-air fighter. But outside the Air Force, the plane
is viewed today as an extravagance; none of America's enemies possesses
formidable air power, and the Air Force desperately needs to replace air
tankers, cargo planes, and other more-mundane-but-necessary machines.
Because of all this, planners have cut the number of Raptors from the 750
initially envisioned to a maximum of 341. Thanks to spirited lobbying, the
F/A-22 has escaped being cut to a mere 180, but the program is not out of
the woods yet: New questions arose after the November revelations of a
$690 million cost overrun.
The Joint Strike Fighter, meanwhile, is a less elite, more versatile
fighter-bomber designed not only for the Air Force but also for the Navy,
Marine Corps, and European militaries. It has the distinction of being the
biggest defense contract ever, at $225 billion, mainly because of the size
of the order-an expected 3,000-rather than because of the cost per plane,
which is well below the F/A-22's.
Boeing
Although defense work represents a crucial part of Boeing's future-$23
billion of its $58 billion in annual revenue is defense- or
space-related-the world's No. 1 manufacturer of commercial airliners is a
relative latecomer to big-ticket defense contracting.
Boeing and its 167,000 employees currently supply the Navy with the Super
Hornet fighter jet-an interim model that will satisfy the Navy's needs
until the more advanced Joint Strike Fighter is ready to fly. Boeing also
produces the C-17 cargo plane, the EA-18 electronic jamming plane, and an
airborne tanker that is based on the design of the company's civilian
jets. Each of these projects is noted for reliability, not sex appeal.
Selling cargo planes such as the C-17 "is like selling reality TV
shows to Fox," as one defense analyst put it, and those purchases
could continue for decades.
At the same time, Boeing is also pushing the frontiers of technology. It
is heavily involved with ballistic-missile defense; it is developing the
Delta IV launching rocket; and it is designing Unmanned Combat Air
Vehicles for the Air Force and Navy.
The company's 34 in-house lobbyists, and 29 lobbying firms on retainer,
should be up to the job of keeping the government checks coming. Like
other contractors, Boeing has played the "political engineering"
game skillfully. Members of Congress from California, Georgia, Illinois,
New Jersey, South Carolina, and Washington state are strongly in Boeing's
corner, because their districts contain major Boeing facilities.
Northrop Grumman
A decade ago, Northrop Grumman was struggling. Its premier program, the
B-2 stealth bomber, had become a byword for cost overruns, and the whole
defense industry was convulsed with mergers. "We were quite sure, at
the end of the Cold War in 1989, that Northrop Grumman, as just a small
manufacturer of airplanes, was not going to be able to survive," said
Bob Haffa, director of the company's Analysis Center. But by 2001,
Northrop had reinvented itself.
With more than 95,000 employees and $13 billion in annual sales, today's
Northrop Grumman has staked its fate not on making planes, but on
engineering the electronics that give them their cutting edge. The company
integrates the complex electronic systems inside several airframes,
including the Navy's nimble F/A-18 Hornet fighter-bomber, the Air Force's
lumbering E-8C Joint Stars flying command post, and the prototype Joint
Strike Fighter. And in the program Northrop vaunts most, it makes the
Global Hawk drone, a robotic spy plane with about a 14,000-mile
range.
Despite this high-tech thrust, Northrop has also bought its way into a
dominant position in one of the most labor-intensive, Industrial Age
businesses around: Navy shipbuilding. An April 2001 acquisition brought
the company two shipyards, Mississippi's Ingalls and Louisiana's Avondale.
And that November, Northrop stunned observers with its successful bid to
purchase Virginia's Newport News Shipbuilding-the nation's only builder of
nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, whose future seems assured now that the
Navy's next-generation "CVNX" carrier program scraped through a
recent Pentagon review.
Heritage Foundation
As a nonprofit think tank and educational organization, the conservative
Heritage Foundation is prohibited from lobbying. But that doesn't mean it
hasn't been influential in shaping Pentagon spending priorities and, in
particular, pushing the cause of national missile defense.
That Heritage was key to getting missile defense back on the national
agenda is indisputable. Its March 1999 report, "Defending America: A
Plan to Meet the Urgent Missile Threat," was exquisitely timed: It
came soon after North Korea's surprise firing of a three-stage rocket over
the heads of the Japanese, and after India's and Pakistan's dueling
detonations of nuclear warheads. The Heritage report's key findings were
that the United States needed to accelerate its fielding of a missile
defense system; abrogate the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Russia; and
focus on sea-based defenses as the most viable first stage in a layered
missile defense. In varying degrees, those findings are now official U.S.
government policy.
Heritage has a staff of 185, an annual budget of about $30 million, and
continual inflows of money from donors large and small. It will use those
resources to hold meetings with lawmakers, give briefings to reporters,
and organize conferences for interested Washington players. At an April
2001 conference in Colorado, for example, Heritage brought in more than 20
editorial writers and reporters who covered missile defense to talk with
top missile experts. Shortly thereafter, The Washington Post editorial
page dropped its long opposition to missile defense.
U.S. Marine Corps
The fate of the $40 billion V-22 Osprey aircraft program is hanging by a
sinuous string of support from an unusual interest group: the Marine
Corps. Designed to take off and land like a helicopter, yet to cruise with
the speed and range of an airplane, the Osprey has been buffeted by
controversy throughout its decade-plus development. Costing an estimated
$89.7 million per copy, the Osprey is considered by some critics as too
expensive for a medium-lift aircraft, and the plane was grounded in
December 2000 after two crashes killed 23 Marines. The aircraft is
currently undergoing a reworked testing program. Pentagon acquisition
chief Pete Aldridge has expressed deep skepticism over the safety and
reliability of the Osprey's unique tilt-rotor technology.
Yet throughout its travails, the Osprey has survived, largely on the
strength of the Marine Corps' rock-solid commitment to the program. That
dedication reveals the potency of one of Washington's least understood and
most underrated lobbying forces. Unlike the other armed services, which
have multiple subcommunities and numerous competing programs, the Marine
Corps has focused like a laser on the Osprey as its No. 1 weapons
program.
"While the other services are larger and more divided in terms of
their goals, the Marine Corps makes an attribute of its small size by
combining it with great passion and focus," said Loren Thompson of
the Lexington Institute, a defense consulting group. "The Marine
Corps is also expert at tasking its veteran alumni almost as a grassroots
political organization that is very effective in lobbying for the Corps'
interests. In my mind, the Marine Corps is almost the institutional
equivalent of Israel: It's small, impassioned, and it never takes its
survival for granted."
Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., Louis Jacobson, and James Kitfield
National Journal
