by Orr Kelly
The conflict had actually begun to fester several years earlier when Lee headed the office of program appraisal for the secretary of the navy. Houser had been director of aviation plans and requirements under Vice Adm. Thomas Connolly, then the DCNO for air warfare. The issue was the F-14, named the “Tomcat” to honor both Tom Connolly and Admiral Thomas Moorer, another aviator who was chief of naval operations during the plane’s formative years.
The F-14, built by Grumman in Bethpage, Long Island, was the navy’s answer to the Backfire before the Backfire came into existence. A big fighter-interceptor, it carried a two-man crew, a large, very powerful radar, and six Phoenix missiles capable of knocking down a target as small as a fighter plane more than a hundred miles away. It also had wings that could be moved in flight. When the crew wanted to fly slowly and loiter far from the carrier or when they wanted to slow down for landing, the wings would be fully extended. But if the Tomcat ran into enemy fighters, the wings would automatically swing back close to the fuselage, turning the plane into a formidable dogfighter.
Navy Secretary John Chafee, concerned about reports of cost and technical problems with the F-14—the navy’s biggest aviation program—asked Lee and a civilian official to study the situation for him. They reported to Chafee that the problems were much worse than anyone had acknowledged, that he had “a monster” on his hands. The engines were underpowered and sometimes exploded in flight. Dogfight maneuvers had to be limited because the engines tended to stall. Grumman was in such shaky financial condition that the company’s president even threatened during a congressional hearing to close his doors, and this situation was reflected in poor reliability and discouraging instances of shoddy workmanship.
When Connolly heard about this attack on the plane for which he had fought so hard, he stormed into Lee’s office, read him his charter as the navy’s senior aviator and stomped out.
Houser, who had been involved in the early work on the F-14, thought then, and continued to believe, that the F-14 was the plane the navy needed. He feared growing sentiment on Capitol Hill, and even within the Pentagon, to abandon the Tomcat because of its numerous problems or to supplement it with a cheaper and smaller fighter. Even Houser, the navy’s staunchest defender of the F-14, had to admit that it “wasn’t doing many things well.” But the proper thing to do, he felt, was to fix the problems and keep the F-14 in the fleet.
At the heart of the dispute between Houser and Lee was the threat from the Backfire force. Lee vividly recalls one meeting when he and Houser made their cases before the chief of naval operations. Houser argued that the most serious threat to the fleet was a massive bomber attack, and the only way to handle it was with an all-F-14 force. The plan was that the F- 14s would be able to knock out the Soviet bombers before they launched their missiles. “Shoot at the archer rather than the arrows,” the argument went.
“I didn’t think the bomber threat was all that real,” Lee says. “I felt we could put a bunch of F/A-18s out there and they would do just as well against the bombers. Houser convinced everybody the only way to handle this was with the F-14. We were kind of laughed out of the room.”
Lee was then giving serious thought to a new type of plane for the navy—a plane that would be both a fighter and a light bomber. At that time, of course, the F/A-18 was still little more than a concept in Lee’s imagination. It had not been built, nor flown, nor even given a number. A small group of aviators had begun studies of such a plane in the mid-1960s, but the navy, even more than most tradition-bound organizations, is slow to take to new ideas. Few in the navy took this new idea very seriously. And when they thought about it at all, they tended to see it as a threat to the F-14.
The attachment that officers like Houser and Connolly had to the F-14 is understandable. In the early 1960s, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, in his zeal to rationalize the defense business, decided the country needed one basic airplane—he called it the TFX—that would serve as a fighter and bomber for the air force, and a fighter, long-range interceptor, and bomber for the navy.
The air force actually developed the TFX into the F-111, which is flying today as a fighter-bomber, long-range bomber, and radar jammer. The navy publicly went along with McNamara, even up to the point of carrier trials of the swing-wing plane. But it also quietly worked with Grumman to develop the F-14, which was waiting in the wings when the naval version of the TFX faded away.
The TFX did not do well in carrier trials, but what really finished things off was a brief comment by Connolly at the end of a day-long session of the Senate Armed Services Committee. After listening to civilian officials defend the plane, the committee chairman, Sen. John Stennis (D-Miss.), finally asked Connolly whether more powerful engines would make the TFX a suitable plane.
Tired and frustrated after the long session, Connolly gave the kind of candid answer seldom heard from a three-star: “Senator Stennis, there’s not enough thrust in all Christendom to make a fighter out of this airplane.”
That was the background from which the supporters of the F-14 came. After the long fight to protect the navy from what they considered a grievous mistake, many senior admirals had committed so much time and emotional energy to the cause of the F-14 that, as Lee later put it, “they had F-14 religion.”
The feud between Houser and Lee cannot be explained entirely by looking at the issues that divided them. In fact, it can only be understood by a look at internal navy politics and at the personalities of the two men.
Houser was an Annapolis graduate and had risen to his three-star rank through the normal career path followed by a bright young officer, in which candidates are singled out for promotion by review boards of other officers.
Lee, on the other hand, had joined the navy as an enlisted man fresh out of high school in 1940 and earned his commission and his wings in 1944 after a special wartime cadet program was opened to high school graduates. It was not until after the war, when the navy sent him to Columbia University, that he earned his college degree in mathematics and physics. He later went on to graduate school in nuclear engineering and physics. But he never wore the Naval Academy ring.
Many other officers felt that Lee would never have become an admiral if he had not had the help of friends in high places, and there is probably some truth in this. Lee himself credits Navy Secretary Chafee and Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, who was an unorthodox and controversial chief of naval operations, for giving him his third star. And he credits Zumwalt for giving him the job on which he had set his sights: head of the Naval Air Systems Command.
Perhaps because of his earlier brush with Connolly, Lee felt that the office held by Connolly and then by Houser had come to dominate naval aviation, including the Naval Air Systems Command, far more than it should. He was determined to change that by asserting his independence. Under the conditions in the past, that would have been difficult. NAVAIR had traditionally been a two-star billet filled by a rear admiral. The DCNO for air warfare—an office known in naval jargon as OP 05—was a vice admiral, outranking the head of the systems command.
But when Lee was selected to NAVAIR, he was already a three-star, so the rank for that job was raised one notch to permit him to fill it. That would seem to put Lee on the same level as Houser. But in the navy, as in the animal farm, some vice admirals are more equal than others. Although Houser had been awarded his commission from the academy two years before Lee earned his in the wartime cadet program, Lee had become a vice admiral a few months before Houser. He thus outranked Houser, and he did not neglect this modest advantage in his effort to shore up his position at NAVAIR.
Lee said: “We’re going to have no more OP 05 running NAVAIR. I’m running NAVAIR. I’m going to hire and fire the program managers and do business with the contractors. OP 05 can do the financial part and so forth, but I’m running NAVAIR.” And that, he feels, was what led to the hard feelings between him and Houser. There was also a difference in personality between the two men. Houser is, as Lee describes him,
“personable, charming.” Lee, as a colleague recalls, was “a nuts and bolts guy, not a people person, and he threw his weight around a lot.” For the next two or three years, Lee says, he and Houser had “a good wrestling match.”
Perhaps if they had not been so busy grappling, they would have recognized that there were more things on which they agreed than on which they disagreed.
As a result of his experience at sea, Houser was concerned about the proliferation of different types of airplanes on the carrier deck, certainly some of the highest-priced real estate in the world. When he was skipper of the Constellation in 1966, he counted nine different kinds of aircraft on his deck, each designed for a specific purpose and each requiring its own stock of spare parts and its own crew of mechanics. In some cases, two models of the same plane required different engines. It almost seemed as though the navy would have to build a fleet of “caddy carriers” to go along with the big carriers, to carry spare parts and provide room for the maintenance crews to work, eat, and sleep.
Houser wrote Tom Connolly to tell him “we’ve got to simplify the deck load; we’ve got to have planes do more things in fewer models.” He later felt that the F-14 had gone part way toward this goal by combining in one plane a long-range interceptor, a dogfighter, and an air combat control center. The F-14 had even been designed as a bomber, but it was never tested in that role because it didn’t make much sense to fly one of the world’s most expensive aircraft down the barrel of a 37-mm gun.
Lee was an even more fervent believer in the multipurpose airplane, although, for him, the expensive, problem-plagued F-14 definitely wasn’t it.
While the two men were close to agreement, in concept, on what the navy needed in its future planes, they also agreed on what it didn’t need: a small, lightweight, cheap fighter to supplement, or even replace, the F-14.
There were many, however, both within the navy and elsewhere in Washington, who thought that was exactly what was needed.
Fighter pilots were, and continue to be, divided on the issue. Drawing on their Vietnam experience, many pilots insisted on a plane with two cockpits. That extra pair of eyes to look for enemy fighters and missiles and that extra pair of hands to operate the plane’s electronic gear, they felt, were the difference between life and death in aerial combat.
But other pilots were equally insistent on a small, single-cockpit plane. They called it a “wrap-around fighter,” and that term had two meanings. It meant the plane was so small that preparing to fly it was more like slipping into a form-fitting suit than climbing into a machine. And, in the air, it was so maneuverable that it could “wrap around” the enemy and shoot him down. In Vietnam, navy pilots often envied the North Vietnamese pilots their sleek, maneuverable little MiGs—at least until the U.S. developed tactics to lengthen the odds against the MiGs.
To many in Washington, the appeal of the lightweight fighter was not so much its fighting abilities as that it was supposedly cheap. Theoretically, this meant the country could afford to buy more of the smaller planes, which would be less expensive but also less capable.
Both Houser and Lee rejected the “wrap-around” fighter, for somewhat different reasons.
For Houser, buying a lightweight fighter to supplement the F-14 would add one more plane to the already overcrowded carrier deck. Furthermore, it would probably be a plane incapable of “shooting the archer” in the event of a massive bomber attack. Also, with money diverted into another production line, the F-14s would be bought at such a slow and expensive rate that there would certainly be pressure to end the F-14 once and for all. In Houser’s view, the new plane not only couldn’t do the job, but it posed a serious threat to the only plane that could. All of his studies showed that the navy should put its money into F-14s and, when the time came, develop a new model to replace the aging A-7 attack planes.
Lee wasted no worries on the fate of the F-14. But he, perhaps even more than Houser, worried about the many different types of planes on the carriers. And he was beginning to see what a true multirole plane might look like and how it might be built. It did not look like the cheap lightweight fighter, but it didn’t look like the F-14 either.
These issues were being debated in 1973 and 1974. At the same time, the navy was facing some very difficult questions whose answers would determine the kinds of ships and aircraft that would put to sea through the end of the century and on into the early years of the next century.
At the height of the Vietnam War, the fleet numbered about 900 ships, but many of them were of World War II vintage. The carriers had taken a fearful beating from the pace of operations during their tours of duty at Yankee Station, off the South Vietnamese coast, even though they had never come under attack. They were tired and in need of major overhaul, if not outright replacement. Zumwalt, as chief of naval operations, saw that the navy could use whatever money was available to keep its ships sailing until they just wore out. Or it could cut back on the number of ships in the fleet and use the money saved to build new ships and weapons.
He chose the latter course. By 1974, the fleet had shrunk in five years from 900 ships to 500, and the decline was expected to continue. The shrinkage in the number of carriers was the most worrisome. During the Vietnam War, the fleet included twenty-four carriers. With the cuts ordered by Zumwalt, the number dropped to fourteen big attack carriers and two smaller anti-submarine carriers. Projections showed that, as the World War II-era ships wore out, the total would drop from sixteen to twelve.
All of the calculations of the number of carriers needed for a major war indicated that a minimum of sixteen was required. In peacetime, that number would permit deployments of reasonable length to ease the burden of separation on the crews and their families. It also allowed time in port and drydock for adequate maintenance. The navy thus faced a carrier gap that could be expected to continue for years, perhaps decades. The problem was complicated by the retirement of most of the anti-submarine carriers. This meant the attack carriers had to take on the added responsibility of providing their own protection against submarines, crowding the decks even more with different types of planes and helicopters. The navy was moving in exactly the opposite direction from that in which both Houser and Lee felt it should be headed.
One obvious answer to this dilemma was to build smaller carriers and to build more of them for the same money the navy proposed to spend on its favored 95,000-ton supercarriers. Zumwalt, in fact, proposed a fleet of small sea control ships to carry helicopters and so-called jump jets capable of taking off and landing vertically.
Zumwalt is the only surface warfare officer, part of the “black shoe” navy as distinguished from the “brown shoe” aviators, to serve as chief of naval operations between 1961 and the present. It is not surprising that his proposals were greeted with some suspicion by the carrier advocates, especially after the concept of smaller ships was adopted by critics as a substitute for the big carriers. Zumwalt himself saw the sea control ships as a move toward a more balanced navy, and not as a rival to the carriers. His first priority, in fact, was to purchase the navy’s fourth nuclear-powered supercarrier, and the keel for that ship, the U.S.S. Vinson, was laid in November 1973.
To those who had “F-14 religion,” the argument over big versus small carriers had special significance. The Tomcat was designed to operate from and protect the big carriers built in the 1960s and 1970s. It certainly could not take off from or land on anything as small as a sea control ship, and it could operate only inefficiently and with difficulty from the ships of 50,000 to 60,000 tons advocated by the critics of the behemoths. The arguments over carrier aircraft thus involved not only the qualities of the planes themselves, but the size and qualities of the carriers from which they would operate.
It was against this background that the navy found itself looking at a variety of different kinds of planes that might someday operate from the ships that would emerge from the debate over carrier size. But it should not be forgotten that few in the navy felt
a great sense of urgency to move ahead quickly on the design and production of a new plane. With the planes then in service—the F-14 interceptor backed by the older F-4 Phantom fighter, plus the A-6 all-weather bomber and the A-7 light attack plane—the navy could get along fairly comfortably for the next few years.
But there were pressures for haste, and most of them came from outside the navy.
A good deal of the pressure stemmed from the problems with the F-14. William H. Clements, Jr., who was later to serve twice as governor of Texas, was then deputy defense secretary, responsible for development and procurement of new weapons. Responding to urging from Congress, he ordered the navy to come up with proposals for a smaller, lower-cost alternative to the F-14. The admirals proposed a modified F-14, taking out some of the expensive hardware. Clements said, “No, that’s not what I want.” They tried again, and again it looked like an F-14. Clements sent them away once more with stern instructions: “Don’t come back with another F-14!”
Reluctantly, the navy did some work with a navalized version of the F-15 Eagle, then coming into service with the air force. The twin-engined F-15 was already a big, complex, expensive plane. To modify it for carrier service would add to both weight and cost. The only advantage to adapting the air force plane for carrier service would be to increase the number of F-15s to be purchased and thus to lower the price per plane.
The navy rightly concluded that navalizing the F-15 wouldn’t save money and probably would result in a plane less useful than the F-14. It had little difficulty justifying its rejection of the F-15.
Largely due to Lee’s prodding, Clements gave the navy permission to have several aircraft companies do studies of what was known as a VFAX. In this case, “V” stood for fixed wing; “F” stood for fighter; “A” stood for attack, and “X” stood for experimental, although no actual plane would be flown. In other words, the study focused on a carrier plane that would do both the fighter and attack tasks. Except for Lee and a small group of colleagues in NAVAIR, the VFAX concept had little support. Most of the other admirals considered it impractical—“Lee’s pipe dream.”
