THE PENTAGONISTS

When President Dwight David Eisenhower warned, in 1961, against letting "the military-industrial complex" acquire "undue influence in the councils of government" (see page 242), he was being more prophetic than perhaps even he knew. Ernie Fitzgerald has worked in or around the Pentagon since that time. He has seen the military-industrial complex from the inside — seen it feed on the fears it created in the public mind; seen its budgets rise and its efficiency fall as it fed; seen it exploit every political trick in the book to obfuscate its waste of taxpayer money; seen it ostracize (and in some cases destroy) anyone who dared to speak publicly about what was really going on.

Fitzgerald is an industrial engineer and serves as a cost analyst at the Pentagon, mainly overseeing Air Force programs such as the C5-A and B cargo plane. This book describes his career in this position. It is an interrupted career; for in 1969, after informing members of Congress about cost overruns in the C5-A procurement, he was fired by the Nixon administration. He did not regain an equivalent position until after 12 years of legal battling. During those years he was subjected to a smear campaign based on fabricated evidence, was denied access to cost information, and (in addition to being fired) had his job redefined out from under him. Once he was followed home by a car that tried to pull alongside on a lonely northern Virginia road. But he knew the roads better than his pursuers, and managed to reach his home ahead of them. There, he ran inside and grabbed a 30-06 rifle (for which he had no ammunition). Crouching behind a tree, he watched the car approach. The two men conferred, and finally drove off. Such is the life of a man who tells the truth about Pentagon spending.

It is a life entwined with large issues. Fitzgerald has testified frequently on Capitol Hill, has repeatedly influenced legislation, and has tirelessly sought to educate the public on the nature of procurement practices. The Pentagonists, his second book, is an important part of that effort.

The book paints an ugly picture. Not only Nixon, but all the presidents from Johnson through Reagan, their staffers, secretaries of defense, Justice Department officials, and hordes of military officers display both ignorance and cupidity. The behavior Fitzgerald documents is consistent, habitual, across decades of time: weapons-system costs, inflated to begin with, are boosted again as funds are sought to fix problems covered up during the original procurement. Along with this go the bribes, the kickbacks, the lavish entertainments provided by industry contractors, and the revolving-door career changes.

And, while the flow of funding and the profits of the big aerospace companies are very well cared for by this system (while small companies often make convenient sacrificial lambs), the quality of the weapons it produces is not. Witness the IIR Maverick missile, built by Hughes Aircraft at a cost to the Air Force of $3,405 per standard hour of work (page 141). This is 17 to 20 times the usual rate in commercial firms. And what did the Air Force get for this high-priced labor? A missile that could not reliably hit its targets, and in which tear-down technicians found hundreds of defects. (It appeared that Hughes technicians did not know how to solder.) A key point is that, though official reports claimed improvements in the defect rate, it had not really changed much. Comparison with the Sidewinder missile, built by the Navy at its China Lake weapons lab, drives the point home: Sidewinder, a successful air-to-air missile, was created by a staff of 125 people; at Hughes, 4,000 people labored mightily and brought forth a dud. The situation, Fitzgerald reports, caused little alarm among the Air Force officers in charge of the program, and he was admonished not to seem to be "picking on" Hughes. But eventually (after over three years), the potato became too hot, and Hughes plant 442 was closed down until the program could be revamped. (See update, below.)

When a scandal hits the evening news, some of the corruption may be eliminated; but it flows back as public attention wanes. A case in point is the Packard Commission of the 1960s. It was the classic "blue-ribbon panel" approach: appoint high-ranking members of the community under investigation; announce a cosmically broad charter; and, after a year or two, release a noncommittal report that will gather dust on some shelf. And, sad to say, David Packard — viewed as a giant, almost a revered figure in Silicon Valley — comes off as an absolute bastard in this book.

More hopeful is the fact that the complexion of the Congress is changing. Freshmen are displacing the old-boy network that tended to wink at defense boondoggles. Also encouraging is the reaction to Operation Ill Wind, a two-year investigation that indicted 275 military officers and officials of contractor firms (and which was able to do so because the head of the Justice Department did not know about it.)

Fitzgerald writes in a matter-of-fact style, without vainglory or melodrama. Although the book is crammed with facts, and in some places covers rather abstruse technical matters (e.g. the nature of "should-cost" analysis), I found I could not put it down. I noticed no errors, and only two typos: very minor ones like a "the" where "they" should be. There are few illustrations, but those there are complement the text very well. (I especially liked the diagram of the "alignment pin" on page 212.) The book is well-indexed, and three appendices reveal in full significant documents that Fitzgerald quotes from in the text.

The Pentagonists is a fine complement to Dina Rasor's book.1 She shines a spotlight on selected procurement snafus; Fitzgerald comes closer to the sunlight illuminating all the dank corners of an immense dungeon where unspeakable things have flourished for time out of mind. His book closes with the words of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas:

UPDATE: Today (7/28/1998), I read in the Mercury News (page 6C) a story slugged "Lockheed will pay Army up to $75 Million if missile fails again." The upshot of this is that the Theatre High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, a program that was starting up in my last year at Lockheed, has failed a May 12^th test, the fifth failure in a row. (The missile blew up in mid-flight.)

Keith Bickel, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, called the $75 million a "token amount" compared to the $3.2 billion already paid to Lockheed for the program. Major Co Woods, a BMDO spokeswoman, stated "This proposal for cost-sharing, that in itself shows their [Lockheed's] committment to the program. This is a significant amount of money." And Lockheed spokesman Jeff Adams said that the agreement "demonstrates our committment at the highest level of the corporation on the mission success of the program." According to the Mercury News, Adams also disputed the charges of poor quality. But he did say that Lockheed recently "applied additional resources in the area of quality."

Lockheed has five more tests scheduled in the $15 billion program, which runs until 2006. Its missile must work properly in three of those to be counted a success. Think it will make it? Think Lockheed will suffer much if it doesn't?

I used to grumble about "downer" newspaper headlines and stories with costs in them, saying things like "Another delay for the $1.5 billion Space Telescope." Perhaps — just maybe — I'm beginning to understand why reporters write stories that way.

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