PENTAGON POLITIX: The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security by Winslow Wheeler Part 2 of 2
booknotes.org
LAMB: If people pick up your book and look on the back, and I`m trying to find out where you`re coming from here. First of all, they heard Senator Javits a liberal, Senator Kassebaum, a Midwesterner, married to Harold Baker now, Senator Pryor, a Democrat, what, a centrist?
WHEELER: Mostly on the real domestic issues. On defense, I thought he had a pretty independent mind.
LAMB: And then Senator Domenici, a Republican? What...
WHEELER: Mainstream Republican.
LAMB: Mainstream Republican from New Mexico. You work for the Center for Defense Information. I went on the Web site and found the board of advisors, and there`s one name -- two names on there that anybody on the right reads it would want to know why. Paul Newman and John -- Joanne Woodward, his wife.
WHEELER: Yes.
LAMB: And -- but then you go up to the top and you find Anthony Zinni. Help us understand, though, how -- what bedfellows are here in this process and where are you coming from.
WHEELER: I`ve never met Paul Newman or his wife. I never received, even sensed any hint from the people of CDI that they would like me to say X, Y or Z. I -- if you -- if you got them to fess up who they`re going to vote for this election, I bet you the vast majority will vote for Kerry or maybe not vote at all.
LAMB: Of course, they`ve voted by the time people hear this.
WHEELER: Yeah.
LAMB: And election is over.
WHEELER: But I never had any sense that we -- we want you to say the following things, Winslow. One of the senators I talk about in there, Dale Bumpers from Arkansas, was a former president of CDI. I didn`t take it out. That was one of the incidences from that anthology I wrote as my first Spartacus exercise, and I left it in the chapter that steals all the material from my own anthology chapter. Didn`t hear a peep from them.
I wrote a -- a commentary for "Government Executive" magazine, and it was about congressional porking in the form of VIP transports, jets for generals and, what a coincidence, members of Congress, to fly around in. I talked about an incident where General Zinni was the motivating factor behind getting one of those jets. I thought that was a pretty bad decision on his part, and I said so in the commentary. Never heard a peep.
LAMB: Do you know him?
WHEELER: I never met him.
LAMB: So the Center for Defense Information is supported by whose money?
WHEELER: They have a list of contributors. I really don`t know who they are except that they refused to accept money from defense contractors.
LAMB: Do they want to shut -- these people want to shut the Defense Department down?
WHEELER: No.
LAMB: Are you a hawk or a dove? You have a chapter in here against the Iraq war.
WHEELER: Yeah. I -- I don`t feel comfortable with either of those terms. War is a necessity. You have to fight for things that are threatened and that you value. I have real problems with this war, not just with -- with the way it was initiated, but the way it is being fought. I`m extremely happy to see this country react to the soldiers in the field the way they are, rather than the way we did in Vietnam. It`s hard to, you know, put in a sentence where I am on these kinds of things, but I think that I like to have a sense of trying to look at the facts of a situation -- one of the reasons I like C-SPAN is because you have -- you`re the primary sources. I don`t feel comfortable reading articles about reports I can`t go find on the Internet and read the actual report myself.
LAMB: But you say for a moment, though, that we may have done harm by televising the Senate, and what you see is not what you get.
WHEELER: You have to balance two things. You don`t see debates in the United States Senate anymore. You see senators marching down on the Senate floor, most of the time speaking from notes or word-for-word text. Only in the rarest instances are those notes prepared by the member himself. They`ll come down to the chamber floor, hang around, wait for their turn, give their statement, finish and leave. That`s not the way it was done when I started there in the `70s.
LAMB: `71 was your first year?
WHEELER: Yes, sir.
LAMB: Jacob Javits your first boss.
WHEELER: Yes. He was a real good mentor. I mean, he did not take me on his protege or anything of the sort. I was, you know, a lowly guy on his staff. But just observing him and working with him when I got more senior in his staff was a real education for me.
LAMB: You said something that he had...
WHEELER: Can I finish the point?
LAMB: Yes, but I don`t want to forget talking about his code of who could meet with him and who he`d take advice from him. So go ahead.
WHEELER: Sure. He almost never had a prepared text going down there. On rare occasions he would have some points that somebody on his staff might, you know, shove in front of him before he went there. He did his homework. He went home each day with a stack like that, of memos, articles, all kinds of stuff that we thrust at him. And that`s -- the memos, for instance, would come back not just read, but marked up. Don`t want to do that, yes, underlined. He would devour them.
LAMB: Members do that now?
WHEELER: My impression is no. Javits was unique even in his own time. He was -- he had a lot of intellectual horsepower. He was a true workaholic.
LAMB: Talk about the one thing that you mention in there, about his philosophy about how he would deal with (UNINTELLIGIBLE) lawyer, outside lawyer.
WHEELER: Oh, yes. He had a rule that I think is a great ideal and should be a Senate rule. If you had a constituent with a problem, that you -- called case work for example, got a problem with Social Security, I`ve got a maid who needs a green card, I`ve got -- I`m a defense contractor and we`re looking for help on this program, they`re a constituent, we`re here to help them if we can. One group that we don`t talk to is lawyers. You can bring the lawyer to the meeting if you want, but if you send us a letter, make sure that you sign it, not the lawyer. Our dealing is with you as a constituent. If you want to pay a lawyer to do this stuff, feel free. That`s your privilege, but we`ll do it for you for free.
We know the Senate system better than most lawyers, so we don`t really know why you want to hire a lawyer to help you out. And we would discourage constituents approaching us with a problem from bothering to have a lawyer, but that was their right. We wouldn`t deal with the lawyer, we would only deal with the constituent.
LAMB: Two senators in your book that get criticized. Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican of Alaska, and Senator Dan Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii. Both of them about 80 years old, been there for years in the Appropriations Committee process. Why are you critical of them?
WHEELER: If you did a word content speech on defense bills -- defense appropriations bills, if you search through the documents -- the bill itself and the committee report, the most frequent proper nouns you`d come across are the nouns Alaska and Hawaii. There`s all kinds of stuff in the defense appropriations bill for those states that don`t belong there. It`s not a question of whether it`s a good or a bad defense idea. Lots of them have nothing to do with defense. Brown tree snake programs for Hawaii. They have a problem with brown tree snakes, and you know, killing off the bird population. But that program does not belong in the defense budget.
LAMB: Yeah, but if you`re out there in Hawaii and Alaska, don`t you just love these guys?
WHEELER: One thing they forget to mention in their press releases is how this stuff is being paid for. If you turn to the back of appropriations bills, defense appropriations bills and look in the so-called general provisions section, one of the thickest sections in the bill, you will find all kinds of strange provisions that say for unobligated balances, for management improvements, for cost growth in information technology. Take out the following amounts from the following other titles. And you go figure out what that title is, you find that taking the money out of operations and maintenance, procurement, military personnel accounts to pay for brown tree snakes, museums, all kinds of stuff. This is not a couple of million here and there. This is hundreds of millions of dollars.
LAMB: We have sat and listened to hearings where you hear members say that our armed forces in Iraq don`t have kevlar vests and things like that, and are not provided in the sides -- the humvees aren`t reinforced and all this stuff. Is that fair? I mean, is...
WHEELER: It`s accurate.
LAMB: But is the money going to this other stuff? Is there enough of it going to other stuff that we`d be able to take care of our armed forces better?
WHEELER: We are doing a lousy job paying for the cost of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The requests from presidents come late. The requests -- when they come late are in insufficient amounts. The supplementals that Congress passes for war expenses usually don`t have all this junk added in. They do that in the basic bill.
However, when you`re tapping the operation and maintenance account for a few billion dollars, because you`re paying for all this other stuff, you`re telling the controller at the Defense Department and the controller at the military services, this is your problem. You need to -- you need to find places where you can cut to pay for this stuff, and some places they can`t cut. They`ve got contractual obligations for procurement and research projects, you can`t cut there.
Congress puts instructions in conference reports, the part that accompanies the text of the bill, which in some cases has the force of law, basically. You can mess around with some of these accounts, but one of the things you can`t mess around with, unless you come back and get specific permission from us, is the stuff we have added. So you can`t take $1 out of that brown tree snake program unless you get Senator Inouye`s permission to do that.
In other words, the controllers are left to effect these reductions in accounts where they have flexibility. In the operation and maintenance account, those accounts often end up being training, depot maintenance, things like that, where they can control the outflow of dollars.
LAMB: You tell the story about this time of year where a process begins. There are Christmas parties, telephone calls come in. You mentioned Santa Claus and all this. Can you retell this?
WHEELER: Right. Yes, this year is going to be exceptional, because there`s a lame-duck session in November, starts shortly after this airs. But basically, from the middle of October or middle of November each year, Congress is in recess until early January. During that period, there`s Christmas parties on the Hill. The armed services have celebrations, they invite staffers to. Offices are -- have short hours, 9:00 to 5:00. Some of them only 10:00 to 4:00. People take vacations. It`s a down time.
After the holidays, after all the New Year`s Eve and Christmas parties, for, you know, contractors, lots of parties...
LAMB: Who pays for those?
WHEELER: Contractors have real nice parties. They`ll have a big Christmas party at the Hyatt Regency right around the corner from here. There will be champagne and roast beef, frog legs, you know, all kinds of stuff.
LAMB: Paid for by a company?
WHEELER: It`s paid for out of their -- I guess their -- that`s part of their overhead.
LAMB: For a manufacturer of defense.
WHEELER: Boeing, for example. Lockheed, for example. All of them do it. Don`t pick on just one, they all do it. Party season ends early January, so -- and staffers are getting back to, you know, full-time hours and figuring out, you know, so what`s going to happen this year? The phone starts ringing. Sometimes it`s the commander of a military facility. Sometimes it`s a university professor. Sometimes it`s the nice man from Boeing or Lockheed.
LAMB: Do you mean that, nice man, I mean, do you mean that seriously?
WHEELER: Sometimes they`re women.
LAMB: I mean, either way they`re nice people?
WHEELER: Oh, they`re very nice. They`re polite. I`m not trying to infer that they`re being -- acting unethically. They`re polite. They`re lobbyists. And we have got a problem with this project, we`ve got this -- you know, idea that we`d like the senator`s support on.
The process starts over the phone. And what they`re looking for is the -- is money to start a new project, or money to increase an existing project.
If you know the voice, know the guy or the woman, if you know the project, even if you don`t know the project in some staffs, but it`s an ongoing one, you don`t need to go much further than the phone conversation. You arrange to get some materials from them. You take down some data and costs and what exactly it is. And it goes on to what I used to call in Domenici`s office the pork list. These calls would generate -- I would keep tabs. It was just a Word Perfect table. The table had -- it would start with a set of rows. By the time we were finished in June, there would be 80 to 100 items, and it would be things -- information technology programs, medical research, all manner of stuff.
We would collect material on it. The staffer on Domenici`s personal staff, she -- one of the later ones would try hard to understand just what these things were. Virtually all of them would make the grade to get on the list. There were rare cases of ones that this one is, you know, just doesn`t feel right, we`re not going to put it on the list.
But this list would then get translated into a letter, first to Senator Warner at the Armed Services Committee. Dear John, I have the following priorities for New Mexico for this upcoming fiscal year. I`d certainly appreciate your support. And this letter would go on for 20 or 30 pages.
LAMB: How much of a difference would it make in this whole process if the company that`s asking for something has given a contribution?
WHEELER: In my experience, the rules on contributions in the Senate staff are followed pretty strictly. There`s two people on a personal staff that you can even talk to about a contribution. If a lobbyist started talking to me about a contribution, I start killing the project right there.
LAMB: That`s not what I`m getting at. I`m getting at whether the senator knows whether X, Y, Z Corporation is giving him the limit or has bundled a lot of money and given it to the campaign. When the eventual list goes out, does it make any difference that somebody has helped in the campaign?
WHEELER: I don`t have complete -- I never had complete visibility into that process, but I`ll tell you this. Whether a contribution was made or not would be noticed. In New York, when I worked for Senator Javits, it was always noticed whether Grumman, Fairchild and GE and Bell and Buffalo would make a contribution, and to the extent we were able to find out how it compared to the contribution being made to the opposition.
LAMB: Well, you have got a footnote, though, it`s more relevant to today in here, of Senator Stevens going to Seattle for a fund-raiser, Boeing`s there, in the middle of the controversy on 767s and the tankers and whether they should be leased or bought. And you say he collected $22,000 when he got there, but he said he didn`t go there until he already made a decision. What`s that -- I mean, why did you put that in there?
WHEELER: Because it`s part of his -- it`s part of the process. His defense that there`s nothing fishy going on about that contribution was that they gave me the money after I decided to support the tankers. That`s a meaningless distinction. I find it perfectly believable that Boeing and Stevens talked about the tankers and how to finance them without a contribution being breathed about. Both sides, in my understanding of how the system works, would have lots of presence of mind that a contribution is going to be made. But they would not be so crass as to talk about it in those circumstances. It would occur, and it would occur later on in the process, to put a time interval, you know, between the act and the deed.
LAMB: It`s all legal by the way, right?
WHEELER: Oh, sure, absolutely.
LAMB: Let me jump to another thing, because you also described this in your book, that the secretary of defense, you say, tells commanders around the country they can`t call senators for items, but you suggest they get around that somehow.
WHEELER: Sure. Base commanders are told not to initiate conversations with members of Congress for goodies for their base. New gates, new hangars, new pipelines, new roads, whatever. In those cases, most of the time -- not all the time, but most of the time -- the staffer initiates the conversation. To get around that, you know, minor inhibition.
LAMB: Explain how that happens.
WHEELER: The staffer on Senator Domenici`s personal staff picks up the phone and calls the base commander at Kirtland in Albuquerque. I want to talk about what your needs are for military construction this year. Please put the colonel on -- you know, get me the colonel, ask him to call me. You know, and we`ll talk about the projects you`re looking for this year.
LAMB: So let`s say the colonel has something he wants, a new runway or something like that, or whatever, I mean, a new hangar.
WHEELER: New -- sometimes these are a good idea. Sometimes they`re repaving the surface so the foreign objects don`t, you know, (UNINTELLIGIBLE) doesn`t get into jet engines and ruin them.
LAMB: But here is the point, though. If you talk -- if you`re the staffer calling the commander and the commander says, I want X, Y, Z, does the secretary of defense or the secretary of the Army or the chief of staff of the Army have anything to say whether or not that commander gets that?
WHEELER: No. The way the system works, most pork begins and ends with the Defense Department. Even if it`s a contractor calling you to increase by $20 million the research budget for the airborne laser, a missile defense program, that contractor has almost certainly been talking to the project manager at Kirtland Air Force base for that project. How much do you not get from OMB this year? How much more can you burn reasonably this year? If we asked Senator Domenici for $20 million, is -- you know, is that reasonable? Yes, that sounds good.
And so that will go on our list. It will go through a process. It will get into our letter to the Armed Services Committee and to the Appropriations Committee.
The way they -- they get so many of these requests, you know, you can`t possibly pay for all of them. They need some way to figure out which ones to say yes to and which ones to say no to. They need to figure out a way that won`t -- sorry, I was going to use the wrong language, won`t irritate the member who is asking. It`s a very simple process.
They call DOD. They don`t call Rumsfeld, they don`t call the controller, they call the project manager for the airborne laser. The same guy who spoke to the Boeing lobbyists worked out how much is reasonable this year. That`s -- the committee staff will basically call him and say, Domenici wants $20 million more for airborne laser, can you use that money? The answer is yes. The circle is completed.
LAMB: How often do members -- and you say there are 30,000 people who work on Capitol Hill -- how often do they go to work for Boeing or Lockheed Martin or one of these companies, to do the kind of work that you`re talking about?
WHEELER: In defense circles, the prize jobs are not with -- when you leave the Hill, are not with the contractors. Some people go there, but that`s not where the flow is. The flow is -- the status jobs that staffers seek to get are in the Defense Department. And there are no -- there are revolving door inhibitions that take about 30 seconds to get around when you go to the contractors. There are no inhibitions to the Defense Department. At one level, you might think, well, what`s the problem with that? People should go work for the Defense Department. It`s actually a very pernicious process, and if Congress was serious about revolving door issues, they would -- they would address the revolving door to the Pentagon.
There`s two problems. One is that lots of staffers are eager to advance their career. If their ambition is go be a big deal at the Defense Department, you don`t want to -- there`s that word going in my head again -- you don`t want to get them angry at you. You don`t want to be causing so many problems for their programs that you have become a pain in the butt. You want to be a member of the team. That means that your oversight of the cost growth for the F-18 and the degradation of its range performance and the actual measurement of its radar cross-section, you don`t want to get too nasty about those things. Because the Navy`s not going to want to have any part of you if you`re not a team member.
LAMB: Unfortunately, we`re almost out of time.
WHEELER: OK.
LAMB: Your hometown?
WHEELER: Irvington, New York.
LAMB: School that you went to, college?
WHEELER: Union College in Schenectady.
LAMB: Does this -- is what you`re doing hard to do? Would you call yourself courageous?
WHEELER: No. I made a decision when I wrote my essay that got me into trouble in January 2002. When I saw that, I said this isn`t going to cause me a problem. And I decided to go ahead. I was qualified to retire. I was angry enough about Congress` atrocious performance after 9/11 that I felt that something had to be said about it.
LAMB: We didn`t even scratch the surface, but I do want to ask about this cover on your book. You got a little pig up here at the top of the Capitol. Where did you get this?
WHEELER: The design is my wife`s idea. Judy had the idea of the Capitol dome, and that`s the wind vane from our house in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. My son and I took a day, we drove out to West Virginia to the house, took electronic images of the prancing pig. And then we went to Capitol Hill and walked around getting images of the dome, and the Naval Institute Press liked it. And they put together the images in the best possible way, and there it is.
LAMB: Winslow T. Wheeler has been our guest. This is the cover of the book, "The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security." Thirty-one years in government. We thank you very much.
WHEELER: Thank you very much.
END |
