The Dream Machine

by Richard Whittle

  Like the real Young Winston, Lehman seethed with ambition and audacity. He set bold goals and went after them boldly, and he ran the Navy like no secretary in memory before or since, bossing around older admirals in ways many found hard to swallow. That endeared him to some top Marine Corps generals, at least those with a permanent chip on their shoulder toward the Navy. They liked Lehman’s swashbuckling style. He was the Reagan administration’s Errol Flynn, outfoxing rivals and sneering in the faces of his foes. His biggest goal was a 600-ship Navy by 1989, up from the 479 vessels in the fleet when he came to office. Once during his tenure, the deputy defense secretary, Paul Thayer, tried to slow the massive growth in the Navy budget that Lehman’s pet project would require. Lehman got allies in the White House to include in a news release naming two new aircraft carriers a seemingly matter-of-fact statement by President Reagan declaring a 600-ship Navy his goal. Argument over.

  Lehman was aware of the XV-15 before he got to the 1981 Paris Air Show, but as he watched it from a VIP box with Monaco’s Prince Rainier and his son, Prince Albert, Lehman had an epiphany. “As opposed to a helicopter, this did not look like a loose confederacy of warring parts,” Lehman recalled. “It looked like an airplane, like a bird. Your impression would be, ‘Gee, yeah, that makes sense. That’s going to work.’ ” He was intrigued by the tiltrotor’s military possibilities. “I was very much taken with the technology,” he said. “I’ve always been a believer, being a helicopter pilot myself, that helicopters are very vulnerable in battle. They’re very vulnerable to ground fire and every other kind of fire.” When he saw how fast the XV-15 could fly, Lehman thought the tiltrotor “offered the prospect of a 300-knot entry into the battle area and a rapid set-down and a rapid departure.”

  Lehman wasn’t the only VIP smitten by the XV-15 at Paris. Another was silver-haired Senator Barry Goldwater, then seventy-two, a World War II pilot, organizer of the Arizona Air National Guard, and an Air Force Reserve major general. First elected to the Senate in 1953, Goldwater had been the cantankerous conservative Republican nominee for president in 1964. Now he was a power on the Senate Armed Services Committee. He showed up at the Bell chalet with the diminutive, sartorially vain Senator Tower of Texas, another conservative Republican. With their party’s takeover of the Senate in the 1980 elections, Tower now chaired the Armed Services Committee. He was also a longtime backer of Bell, one of his home state’s major employers.

  Inside the chalet, there were round tables seating eight to ten people, not far from sliding glass doors that led to a balcony for watching the aerial displays. Other companies were serving French delicacies in their chalets; Bell offered Texas beef barbecue, Lone Star beer in long-neck bottles, American wines. But Tower and Goldwater hadn’t come for food and drink, they’d come to talk tiltrotor. They sat down at one of the tables and spent a long time with some Bell officials and Major Bill Lawrence, the Marine Corps pilot who’d flown the XV-15 for the Naval Air Systems Command a year earlier. It was heady stuff for Lawrence, who had wangled a trip to the air show by calling Spivey a few months earlier. Lawrence asked Spivey to put in a request to Headquarters Marine Corps for Lawrence to join Bell’s contingent in Paris. “Done,” Spivey replied. So here was Bill Lawrence, a thirty-nine-year-old major, answering questions from living legend Barry Goldwater and the powerful John Tower about his XV-15 flights and his opinion of the tiltrotor. They wanted to know how it flew, what military aircraft it might replace, what its future as a civilian aircraft might be, what was dangerous about it, what its best points were.

  “Goldwater was just doing backflips” about the technology, Lawrence recalled. “He was a consummate pilot. He’d flown more airplanes than I have. Goldwater thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.” Lawrence told the senators the military “could do anything with the tiltrotor, and we had already ginned up some scenarios.”

  One night toward the end of the air show, Bell threw a lavish dinner for a couple of hundred VIP guests in one of the elegant rental pavilions in the Bois de Boulogne, a vast, forested park on the west side of Paris. Atkins and other Bell executives were there to hobnob with members of Congress, U.S. and foreign military officers, government officials, and other important customers. No Texas barbecue that night; the party was served an elegant French dinner, preceded by canapés and champagne, accompanied by fine wines and orchestra music and eaten by candlelight. At the end, a parade of smartly dressed waiters came marching in to a jaunty tune, carrying plates of Baked Alaska decorated with lit sparklers—all except the waiter at the head of the line. His plate held a foot-long model of the XV-15, the toast of the 1981 Paris Air Show.

  Dick Spivey felt especially proud of his company that night. This evening they’d done it up right, he thought, and the XV-15 had flown in Paris like a true dream machine. It felt like a tiltrotor sale to the military might be just around the corner.

  * * *

  Two weeks after the air show, General P. X. Kelley received his fourth star and took over two of the most powerful jobs in the Marine Corps: assistant commandant and chief of staff. Kelley, a red-haired, raspy-voiced Boston native, was an infantry officer, but during his first few weeks in his new post, the most pressing item on his agenda was an aviation matter: how to replace the Corps’ aging CH-46 Sea Knight troop transport helicopters, the “Phrogs” the Marines had bought in the 1960s. The Navy Department had just done a study showing that at the rate the Phrogs were wearing out, within a few years the Corps would be unable to mount a standard amphibious landing—its defining mission. For Marine leaders, that was a horrible vision. If the Corps ever got to the point where it was unable to put troops on a hostile beach, who could say how long it would be before people started talking once again about folding them into the Army? To make sure that didn’t happen, the Marines needed to start getting new troop transport aircraft by 1991 at the latest, the study said. As Kelley saw it, the future of the Marine Corps was riding on it.

  The Marines had been trying for more than a decade to get money for a CH-46 replacement, but defense spending had declined after the Vietnam War and stayed tight under Carter. Every time action officers working on the issue came up with a plan, they lost in the annual budget battles. In 1980, though, as concern about the Soviet Union and the Middle East rose, the Navy had created an office to develop an aircraft for the Marines to replace the Phrog. When Kelley arrived at Headquarters Marine Corps that summer, the plan was to hold a “paper competition”—a comparison of designs—in 1982 and pick a new aircraft in 1983.

  Kelley attended several meetings on the issue that summer. He heard the tiltrotor mentioned maybe once. The commandant, General Robert Barrow, and the deputy chief of staff for aviation, Lieutenant General William White, seemed to be leaning toward the Model 360, a new tandem-rotor helicopter proposed by the Phrog’s maker, Boeing Vertol. Insiders called the 360 the “Plastic Phrog” because it was going to resemble the CH-46 but be made of a relatively new class of lightweight but strong materials called “composites,” such as graphite epoxy. The Plastic Phrog was to carry eighteen to twenty-four troops, and Boeing said it would cruise at 180 knots, about 30 faster than the CH-46’s top speed. Early estimates were that it would cost $1.3 billion to $2 billion to build a couple of Model 360 prototypes. Over the years, Dick Spivey and other Bell reps had gotten a number of lower-ranking officers interested in the tiltrotor, but as far as those wearing stars on their shoulders were concerned, it wasn’t in the running to replace the CH-46.

  Navy Secretary John Lehman was about to give the brass new instructions.

  On September 24, Kelley was scheduled to attend a briefing on the CH-46 situation in Lehman’s fourth-floor office on the E Ring of the Pentagon. White and other top Marine generals and the commander of Navair, Vice Admiral Richard Seymour, were to be there. Kelley rushed to the Pentagon from Capitol Hill and arrived a touch late for the 1:30 P.M. session. Dick Seymour was in the anteroom, alone.

  “Where is everybody?” Kelle
y asked him.

  “The secretary’s canceled the meeting.” Seymour shrugged.

  Lehman heard them talking and stuck his head out of his office door. “Come on in here, you two,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”

  Kelley and Seymour sat down on a sofa opposite Lehman, who got right to the point. “I am not going to spend two billion dollars of non-recurring cost to evaluate a new helicopter,” he told them. The United States was now competing with the Soviet Union not just militarily but also economically and for global leadership in aerospace. “I want to bring the Marine Corps into the twenty-first century on the leading edge of technology, and that leading edge is tiltrotor,” Lehman said.

  As far as Kelley was concerned, that was that. “I went back to Headquarters Marine Corps and called the appropriate people into my office as assistant commandant and chief of staff, ” Kelley told me, “and I said, ‘The decision has been made. It’s not going to be another helicopter. It’s going to be the tiltrotor concept.’ ”

  Kelley was already a star in the Pentagon, viewed as the commandant’s heir apparent. When the commandant sneezes, the Marine Corps catches pneumonia, and Kelley’s word carried just as much weight. From then on, as far as the Marines were concerned, they were going to buy a tiltrotor.

  * * *

  Nothing is that simple in the brambly world of defense procurement, a thicket of regulations, bureaucracy, and politics where no path leads in a straight line. Ordinarily, the Marines might have found it next to impossible to get enough money into their budget to develop an expensive, complex, advanced technology aircraft such as the tiltrotor, even with Lehman’s backing. Marine Corps aircraft are funded by the Navy budget, and the admirals who run the Navy have their own priorities. The admirals can’t tell the Marines what to buy, but they have their hand on the spigot. The Marines had struggled for years to get in place the modest CH-46 replacement plan that Lehman had just told them to forget. But as Lehman, Kelley, and Seymour knew, a means was at hand to let the Marines defy the odds and get the tiltrotor they now wanted.

  Ronald Reagan was elected partly on a promise to restore U.S. power and prestige abroad by rebuilding the “hollow” military. He set out to do that by spending vastly more on defense. In 1981, his administration’s first defense budget asked Congress for $222.2 billion in fiscal year 1982—a whopping $26 billion more than President Jimmy Carter had proposed before he left office. In the Pentagon, happy days were here again. The armed services dusted off all kinds of proposals that had languished under Carter—far more, given what it would cost to complete them, than the Pentagon would be able to afford even if the defense budget kept soaring. Even the promilitary members of the defense committees in Congress soon started complaining that the armed services were trying to start too many new programs, especially helicopter and small aircraft projects.

  The Marines wanted to replace the CH-46. The Army wanted a new plane to fly over enemy territory using secret electronic gear to intercept or jam communications. The Navy had been talking for years about replacing several types of helicopters and airplanes with a single type of “VSTOL” aircraft. (The acronym VSTOL, pronounced “VEE-stall,” came into vogue with the Harrier jump jet as a more precise variation of VTOL. It means “vertical or short take off and landing.”) The Navy and Air Force both wanted new combat search-and-rescue aircraft. The Air Force also wanted a new helicopter to carry special operations troops on low-level, nighttime missions like the failed hostage rescue attempt in Iran. Where was the money for all those programs going to come from, critics wanted to know?

  Reagan’s new undersecretary of defense for research and development, Richard D. DeLauer, wondered that, too. DeLauer was a former naval officer with a Ph.D. in aeronautics and mathematics who had been an executive with defense contractor TRW Inc. for the previous thirteen years. One member of the staff he inherited at the Pentagon was Marine Colonel William Scheuren, his “coordinator for rotary wing aircraft issues.” A test pilot and a former commander of the Corps’ first Harrier squadron, Scheuren also had been an action officer in the Marine Corps aviation branch. When he gave DeLauer a briefing on the issues in his area, he told him how the services wanted to buy six or seven new types of helicopters and airplanes. Scheuren suggested it would make more sense, and be cheaper, to get the armed forces to pool their money and develop one common VSTOL aircraft that each service could adapt to its own missions. A joint program like that might get a good reception on the Hill, Scheuren and DeLauer agreed. The Iran mission had revealed how clumsy the services were at working together. One way to make it easier, many defense experts were arguing, would be to make them buy more common equipment. DeLauer told Scheuren to see if he could get them to sign up to such a plan. “Okay, with that kind of guidance, the obvious choice is the tiltrotor or something similar,” Scheuren remembered telling DeLauer.

  Scheuren knew he’d just talked himself into a tall order. Coaxing four services into rewriting their budget plans and starting a joint program would be like turning four ocean liners at once. Joint programs had been in vogue among “defense intellectuals” at least since Robert McNamara, but the services generally didn’t like them, and big ones rarely succeeded. In the 1960s, the Air Force’s F-111 fighter-bomber had begun as a joint program with the Navy to buy a common aircraft, but the Navy dropped out and developed its F-14 Tomcat instead. After Vietnam, the Air Force developed the F-16 and the Navy its F-18 despite pressure from top civilian Pentagon officials to build and buy a common fighter plane. Preliminary meetings between the two services had literally turned into shouting matches. Even when joint programs got started, they were hard to manage to each service’s satisfaction. They tended to bog down in interservice disputes over specifications, budget battles between and within the services, and cultural clashes between institutions with different needs, different priorities, different ways of doing things, and unique internal politics. If Scheuren was going to sell the services on a joint program, he was going to need help drafting memos, studying the services’ needs, writing papers to show how their requirements could be met by one aircraft. He was going to need help briefing—in other words, persuading—the one-stars, two-stars, three-stars, four-stars, and senior civilian officials who would have to approve such a plan in the Army Department, the Air Force Department, the Navy Department, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

  Scheuren had a couple of friends in the Army and Air Force he could ask to help, but for the heavy lifting he turned to his own tribe, the Marine Corps. Going back to his time in the Marine aviation branch, he was buddies with a cadre of Marine colonels and lieutenant colonels there, at Navair, and elsewhere who had worked on replacing the CH-46. Scheuren was sure they would see his new project as a golden opportunity to solve the Marine Corps’ Phrog problem. One of those he turned to was Lieutenant Colonel Joe Moody, who had been working on the CH-46 issue for the aviation branch for a couple of years. Moody assigned his assistant, Major Bob Magnus, to work with Scheuren as well.

  In August, Scheuren and Magnus wrote a memo making the argument for a joint VSTOL program for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines. It said their requirements “could best be met with a single, advanced but mature technology, rotary wing aircraft such as an operational derivative of the XV-15 tilt rotor.” They left out the Army—the XV-15’s first military sponsor—by design, correctly calculating that this would get its leadership’s competitive juices flowing. With help from his “bit of a Marine Corps mafia,” as he called it, Scheuren started circulating the document around the Pentagon. Before long, Army leaders weren’t just demanding to be part of the new joint program, they were demanding to lead it. Magnus, meanwhile, got the memo to General Kelley, who in turn sent a memo to Lehman saying the proposed joint program could solve the CH-46 problem for the Marines. Kelley also said that, given the urgency of the problem, he was declaring it “Marine Aviation’s Number One development priority.”

  Two weeks later was when Lehman called K
elley and Seymour into his office and told them to get the Marines a tiltrotor. Word of that quickly got back down to Magnus and the others in the Marine Corps mafia. Officially and publicly, the Marines were still just supporting an effort by DeLauer’s office to get a joint program going that might end up buying the services of any kind of VSTOL aircraft. For many reasons, including defense procurement regulations and the danger of stirring up opposition, it would be impolitic for the Marines to advertise that they’d already decided—or Lehman had for them—that the joint program should produce a tiltrotor. Kelley didn’t even mention the tiltrotor in a Memorandum for Record he wrote about the decisive September 24 conversation in Lehman’s office. The joint program was the horse the Marines were going ride into the budget battles as they fought for their CH-46 replacement. In the beginning, it was a Trojan horse.

  * * *

  Before a big-ticket program gets started, the service that wants to buy the gear or weapon or machine in question has to write an Operational Requirements Document setting out why the item is needed, how it fits into the service’s warfighting doctrine, what it has to be able to do, and a host of other details. If more than one service wants it, the services have to write a Joint Operational Requirements Document. This JORD—pronounced the way it looks—then has to be approved by a long list of service and Pentagon officials. Separately, the new item has to win a place in long-term Pentagon spending plans, which two-star and three-star budget officers within each service and senior civilian officials of the Defense Department study, argue over, and revise each year. After a program passes that hurdle, it also has to survive periodic reviews by a top-level Pentagon committee that must approve major programs before they can pass various official “milestones” in their development. The bureaucratic maze doesn’t end there. Once the civilian leadership in the Pentagon approves a program, it still has to go through much the same process each year to be included in the defense budget, which gets reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget, a White House agency. Then Congress takes its turn, starting with hearings throughout the spring and summer where members take testimony from top military and Pentagon officials and often debate the details of specific programs with them. By summer or fall, in a good year, members of the House and Senate have voted in committees and on the floor of each chamber on two major defense budget bills, one authorizing each program in the Pentagon’s budget, another actually appropriating money for it in the coming fiscal year. A program can get cut, “plussed up,” “zeroed out,” or revised beyond recognition at any stage.