Programme OPERA – ENTRETIENS

W. Genieys, Operationalizing Programmatic Elite Research in America, OPERA : ANR-‐08-‐BLAN-‐0032.

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Programme OPERA – ENTRETIENS Entretien – défense n°62 Pour citer cet entretien : Hoeffler, Catherine, Entretien défense n°62, Programme OPERA (Operationalizing Programmatic Elite Research in America), dirigé par W. Genieys (ANR-08-BLAN-0032) (insérer hyperlien). Autorisation préalable obligatoire pour toute citation de cet entretien. Interview 1 November 2011 Washington D.C. Interviewer: So, uh. Actually, so the first part of the research programme was to identify a certain number of key positions, we thought, from totally hypothetical grounds, which were important for the policy-making process. Once we had identified -- I was not part of the program at that time, but I followed it from afar -- so at that time they identified those key positions and then they tracked back all people that were in that position within the last twenty years. And so, in that respect, your name came up quite a lot of times, so… we also then started to focus on people that had stayed a long period of time in the sector, and also had interesting characteristics of specialisation and, expert… having an expertise in that domain instead of… it’s not just, like, the people who have been one-year staffer on the hill on defense. So in that respect, your name came up. So as a first… Responder: Let me first give you that… Actually I have only my old business card because since I only started in December, uh, September, it’s still my… I’m no longer a PhD student, I’m a PhD doctor. So… What I really want to make sure is that I have a phone number that I can reach you. Uh, you know what? The phone number… I should, you should have my US phone number on an email that I wrote you, but I’ll send you… Yep, that’s fine. If it was there I missed it, I’m sorry. No no, it’s me. I should have written it down I can write it down for you if you want to…


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You know you may have had it in your first request from two or three months ago and I just didn’t pick it up… No, no, no. No worries. So my US number… [inaudible… writing down numbers] Thanks. I don’t know it by heart. So that’s the French cellphone, not the US phone. That’s good. Ok. Thank you. Yes, so, uh, in that respect, I have two, sort of two kinds of different questions. First part that is, that are more on your career. And other part that is more an example of policy, that is the revolution in military affairs. So if you don’t mind, we might start with your career. So if you could please tell me about your job, your career, what education you had, and then how you came to work in the defense sector. I went to college at Virginia Tech, which is, I guess, now VPISU, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. And I won a 4-year US Air Force ROTC scholarship for the four years that I was at Virginia Tech. So, when I graduated I would, I owed the Air Force at least four years of active duty. But I graduated in ’69 and as hard as it is to believe, then the Air Force at least had over-recruited second lieutenants, the lowest grade. And I had applied to go to law school, so they offered me the opportunity either to not ever go on active duty and then enter the reserves, or to go on active duty as a JAG after going to law school, or to go on active duty immediately, but they really didn’t need second lieutenants with a general education at that point. So I went to law school. Graduated two and a half years on law school here at George Washington in the city. And I then went on active duty as a lawyer, which in the military here are called JAGs: Judge Advocate General Corps. There’s even a movie, there’s even a TV series called JAG here. Ah, yeah, I know… So I was on active duty four years; I was actually on active duty, I stayed eight years. And ended back in Washington was my last active duty assignment. I then saw a job that was as a civilian attorney for the Air Force, no longer on active duty, as an advisor on legislation. So I left active duty and then worked from 1980 to… I went on active duty in 1972… I went to work in 1980 as a civilian attorney for the department headquarters of the Air Force doing legislative work. And I did that three years and during the course of that three years I came into not daily but quite, contact quite often, with the counsels for the senate armed services committee, which is the Senate Military Oversight Committee. Who are the counsels of the Senate? Senate armed services committee. And their Republican counsel was planning to leave that committee and go to work as the senior counsel on another senate committee, the Senate Veteran Affairs Committee. And he suggested that I be submitted the committee to replace him. So at that point Senator John Tower from Texas was chairman of that committee, so I went to work for that committee as counsel (…).


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Senator Tower retired in 1985 and Senator Goldwater became Chairman. I became General Counsel for that, the same committee under Goldwater. He then retired in… the end of ‘86 and the Republicans lost control of the Senate, so I became a minority counsel for the Republicans working under John Warner. Sorry I didn’t hear… In 1986, the same time Goldwater retired, the Democrats won a majority in the Senate; the Republicans had had the majority from ‘82 to ’87, ‘86, so my title was changed. I was still working for the Republican members, but was now as minority counsel, instead of majority counsel. And I stayed there until 1992, when I left Capitol Hill and went to work for a company called Tenneco which has now been spun apart and doesn’t exist any longer. But it was T-E-N-N-E-C-O, which was a classic American conglomerate. It owned the largest shipyard in the western hemisphere. Ok. Newport News Shipbuilding. It owned a gas company; it owned a paper company; it owned a chemical company… Ok. R: So, uh, in 1995, ’96, Tenneco spun off the shipyard to become a free-standing company. Ok. And when that happened, I then became a corporate officer of Newport News Shipbuilding. (…). The company was headquartered in, and 99% of its personnel, and 99% of its real estate, is all located in Newport, New Virginia, which is about 140 miles South-East of here, right at, right at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, but my office was here in Washington. Ok. In 2001, Newport News Shipbuilding and General Dynamics entered into an agreement to merge, which was ultimately disapproved of by the Department of Justice and with the… upon the advice the Department of Defense, as being anti-competitive. And if it… if it were truly anti-competitive, it would have been then a single company, would have had a complete monopoly on all navy nuclear shipbuilding, ‘cos there presently is – and probably will only ever be -- two shipyards, two shipbuilding companies in the country that are nuclear-qualified, and that is the one in Newport News. And the other one is Electric Boat Corporation, which is in Connecticut, in Rhode Island, owned by General Dynamics. Ok. Later that year Northrop Grumman corporation came in and matched the bid that General Dynamics and Newport News had agreed on as to price. DoD and Justice recommended against the merger of GD and Newport News, but permitted the merger… permitted the


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purchase of Newport News Shipbuilding by Northrop Grumman Corporation, so on January 1 2002, what had been a free-standing company for ten years once again became a division of a larger company. That’s when I left Newport. I left the company and then joined, what was at that time a boutique law firm, that specialized in government relations, which over the period of three years that I kinda played there, it went from 85 lawyers, all working on government relations, to more than 4000 lawyers worldwide in which government relations was a miniscule thing. It’s now called DLA Piper. DLA at that point when they merged was the largest European, predominantly British, law firm and they’ve expanded now, they’re like, in 43 countries. Just absolutely the wrong organization for me! I mean, it was perfect when we had 85 lawyers. Everybody was doing the same thing. It got so bad; people would be sending emails from 15 feet away from each other. So I just, about 4 years ago I just left; set out, I’ll just go out consult on my own. So I do that; I’ve consulted for several companies in the defense arena. I today only consult… oh, and just this past April Northrop Grumman Corporation spun off the shipbuilding division of Northrop Grumman, which was Newport News, plus the shipyard located in Louisiana in Mississippi, and it was spun off as a single company that encompassed those three shipbuilding locations, called Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc., H-I-I Inc. I had been a consultant at Northrop from the time I left the company. I was then a consultant at Newport News, and I’m now a consultant to HII Inc. [laughs] So that’s kind of where it was. What I say is, y’know, I’m qualified to do congressional relations in Washington on defense, each one of those giving a smaller and smaller and I’ve got a one little tiny area where I am an expert so… Ok. No no, but it’s an impressive path actually. Well, it was fun. At every step, except the huge law firm, I just, I spent my whole life… I did not want to be in a large law firm… and I ended up in one through their mergers and acquisitions. But, I mean, yeah, I was involved in some form but I changed jobs often enough to keep pretty much… to keep pretty interesting. And so at the beginning, when you said that you got this scholarship, is it because… was it…? It was competitively awarded and I don’t know how, I mean there was, there is a, there’s a system and process which may today be different than it was then, but it was a competitive award, based on my academic record, my extra-curricular… kind of like the same kind things schools look at for admittance. Yes. So you were already interested in defense? Well, it was, when I went to, when I began college, it was the fall of 1965, which was, y’know, we were hugely building up forces in Vietnam, and I really didn’t feel like I was ready to go to Vietnam yet and I knew I wanted to be a lawyer so, I thought, y’know, if I can get a scholarship, one, I mean, I came from a working… I mean, every place has got a


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different… a middle-class family, and college was very expensive in this… so, you kept a lot of that away… and I was not disposed against the military. And I also had a career path that could lead to law school that way, so. Sorry? A kind of a pathway that could lead to law school. Yes, ok. And do you think that your path of career, education, is… has helped you, or? Well, yes and no. I mean that as a lawyer in uniform in the Air Force or in the army or anywhere else, you’re not involved in the operational side of what they do. You’re as an advisor; I mean, you may end up going into combat arenas, but it’s a profession inside, inside the military which is a profession on its own. So I was, y’know, I became acquainted with, I knew the Air Force, so that led into me being able to work representing the Air Force, both within the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, on matters relating to legislation, which was, by the way, the most bureaucratic process I have ever encountered, and it still exists. About how, how the federal government formally takes a position on legislation and how it proposes legislation. So. And then, y’know, I really, somewhere, earlier in my life -- high school or college, at some point -- I pretty much decided I would really like to work in the Senate and the job that I took as a civilian attorney for the Air Force had week to week contact with the Senate committees that were important in defense and so that led to that… So you went along well with the people working in the Senate? Yes, yeah. That was the best job in the world. Ok. I’m not sure I would go back and take the same position now, because the Congress has become much more acrimonious, much more partisan. I mean, while I was at the Senate Committee on Armed Services (…), there would likely be one or two major issues that the Republicans and Democrats would agree to disagree on… Ok. But in 99% of all of our work… [Waiter interrupts.] 99% of our work is bipartisan; it just didn’t, whereas today, y’know, and we could take a bill to the floor of the Senate and pass it with 2-3 days of debate. By the time I left the Senate, it was taking 2-3 weeks and now it’s taking them 3-4 months to debate, ‘cos there’s so many, such a tug and pull between the parties even on defense, which historically been one of the


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most bipartisan, bipartisan areas that just begin to break down in the nineties, and…. y’know… According to you, why has this changed? Well, the parties of, the parties… as a whole, in my opinion… there was relatively little difference in reality between the Republican and the Democratic party. Starting with Eisenhower, nobody ever knew what party even though he was Republican, couldn’t tell. But most of the Presidents had set a very bipartisan tone. There was a saying that had been around for fifty years that partisanship ends at the shore, shoreline, this is before foreign relationships matter, that involves overseas things, you don’t openly debate as if it’s a partisan issue with partisanship stops at the shore. [Coughs.] Excuse me. Because the parties have gotten themselves trying to differentiate themselves, the general party difference was there. I personally have a theory that Senator Warner challenged me on a few weeks ago when I brought it up again. I think the Senate became much more partisan in the early… in the late ‘80s, when the traditional pathway to the Senate had been generally governorships, senior CEOs and businessmen; occasionally a member of the House of Representatives would be elected to the Senate; but historically the Senate had kind of been the greybeards, more thoughtful, and that’s why the Senate rules allow you to slow everything down, because that’s what the Senate is supposed to do. Starting in the… ‘84, ‘85, ‘86 timeframe, more and more members of the House of Representatives were running and being elected to the Senate. Ok? And it drove them crazy when they got over there because, in the House, a simple majority plus one, or a majority of one, absolutely can rule the House of Representatives, totally, which is never the case in the Senate. Never, hasn’t been for a hundred years. But more and more house members came over; they’re in a very strict seniority system to move up in the committees, to become the chairman or the senior minority member, and the young guns coming over from the House started demanding that, y’know, that’s where the the six–layer term limit in the Senate that you’re gonna be a chairman for six years; you have to give your seat up even though you’ve gained six years of expertise as chairman of the committee. You now have to bring somebody in who may or may not have any expertise. So the Senate just became much more raucous, much more partisan. And that’s, I don’t know that anybody else identifies it, but I truly sat and watched it happen that House members just… they… I mean they bristled under the Senate rules of: slow down, seniority mattered, you couldn’t do anything… I mean, on the floor of the Senate, you can stand up and offer an amendment to the bill to build a bridge to California in the middle of a forward operations bill, ‘cos there’s no limit, you can’t limit amendments, except by super majority. In the House, the majority, which can be only one, can refuse to allow any amendments happening on a bill, so it just became more and more raucous.


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I mean, the staff… the staff on the Armed Service Committee had been 99% professional; they all worked for the chairman or the ranking member; they didn’t work for the individual members, although they were supposed to support the individual members. That wouldn’t have caused [inaudible]. The newer members coming over from the House started demanding they be allowed to hire their own staff on the Committees, and at that point committee staffers began to owe their allegiance to members who might be a freshman Senator as opposed to the chairman or the ranking of the other parties, so. It just got more and more complicated; got more and more acrimonious. And it still is. I mean, the last, well, even the last, the last term of Bush in which the Democrats had majority in both houses was, y’know, very acrimonious. And now with a Democratic President and a Democratic majority in the Senate, the House keep passing things but they can’t get them through the Senate and neither, and it’s even if it’s something Obama wants, if there’s something Obama wants and the House doesn’t, they won’t pass it. It’s gridlock, which is not in and of itself bad, sometimes, but that’s part of how it happened, so, y’know, I saw kind of each step as I went through; I saw more and more. So, yeah, I think my education… going to law school I mean at one point 80-90% of the Senators were lawyers; it’s still a very high percentage are lawyers; and there’s a pretty high percentage of lawyers in the House, but in the Senate 100 – probably, this is a guess -- but 10-15 at most are not lawyers. Then having worked in the Pentagon before I went to Capitol Hill, y’know, in which I had an opportunity to work with Capitol Hill, but not be on Capitol Hill. So it flowed nicely starting from back when I was got the ROTC scholarship and all of this kind of progressed. Knowing the part of what you’re looking at, it’s interesting to note that foreign military sales are not in the jurisdiction of the Armed Services Committees in either the House or the Senate, it’s foreign affairs. It’s the foreign affairs committee that have jurisdiction over foreign military sales. And that’s a bit of a… that’s a bit of a tug and pull between those committees in both the House and the Senate. Foreign military aid, if it’s true government-to-government aid, is in the foreign affairs, foreign operations committees’ jurisdiction. And that disconnect has been a problem for time. Senator Tower tried to correct it, like the bull that he was, which he passed… he introduced a bill, which simply took away all the jurisdiction, would have put it all on armed services jurisdiction, but it never happened. Because you had two competing chairmen, competing with each other: Bob Gates, as Secretary of Defense, talked about this several times; in fact, he described himself as a first Secretary of Defense who had ever publicly advocated for an increased state department budget, because the Pentagon actually provides a lot of military aid, but the military assistance programs are in the jurisdiction of foreign affairs, foreign operations committees. So that’s a little tension in kind of the international arena that you’re looking at, as well as to who should be in charge of that. Yes. While I’m thinking about it, somewhere just write down a name: Bill Lynn.


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(…) He just left his post as Undersecretary of Defense or Deputy Secretary of Defense. He was the no. 2 person in the Pentagon, and he has just, he he, offered his resignation when Bob Gates offered his. And he’s just left that position, the last couple of weeks. If you don’t have his name anywhere on your list of kind of people… I should… You oughta think about talking to… and let me just give you some quick summary of what he did. When I was on Capitol Hill initially he was a defense assistant to Senator Ted Kennedy. Ok. He then left the Hill and joined a couple of consultant firms. He moved from one to another and I, I can’t tell you the names of them, but he then became a vice president of Raytheon Corporation, one of the top five major defense contractors. Yes. And he was in that position from… 2005 ‘til, ‘til, I guess right up until, ‘til he was nominated by Obama to be the Deputy Secretary, so he’s got, he’s got a, he’s got even a broader understanding of the, the kind of the policy-making that’s done vis-à-vis foreign assistance foreign armaments and all those sorts of things than I do, because the official process of approving or disapproving proposed military assistance to foreign countries is handled not by the armed services committees but by foreign affairs committees. And Newport News Shipbuilding who I represented, the last thing this country is going to let us sell overseas, are nuclear ships. I mean, we even have a hard time working with the British who essentially have Trident submarines, Trident missiles. That’s one of the most closely guarded parts of the industrial base. I mean, it is very, very difficult in fact to take someone who is not an American citizen in the front gates of Newport News Shipbuilding even to visit the shipyard, it’s very difficult. And the navy’s nuclear… navy is extraordinarily protective of that whole thing, so I didn’t have any overseas foreign, foreign military systems issues to deal with when I was at Newport News. Bill did because Raytheon manufactures such a wide variety of missiles, radars… I mean, all, all the things, so I don’t know what he’s decided to do, if he’s announced where he’s going; I don’t know it, but I know he’s staying in Washington. Ok. So if, y’know, if somewhere if somebody didn’t have that name on the list he probably would now be available whereas when he was still the deputy he probably wouldn’t, so, that’s a new availability of somebody that’s got a real broad experience. So you know him, can I say that I come recommended by you?


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Yeah yeah, you can tell him that and I’ll look and see if I can, I mean, I’ll make a couple of phone calls; wouldn’t surprise me to see him go to a place like the CSIS, … of Strategic Studies. Senator Nunn, staffer John Hamre… Yes. Ok, if you don’t have his name, that’s another one. And you probably have his name, because he’s the president. Yeah, I have his name. [Speaking to waiter.] Thank you, sir, yeah. Thank you. He is the President of CSIS and it wouldn’t surprise me to see Bill go there, although Bill might go to Harvard, I don’t know. But Hamre’s very important. Hamre was on the Hill on the Democratic side of the staff when I was there as a Republican and then he became, he was Deputy Secretary of Defense as well, but he’s been available. So. But Bill just left the job, so people may have not gotten him into their sights. Ok, ok. ‘Cos, y’know, for the last three years he would have been involved in everything we’ve done, ‘til the last three years. And… yeas, so you keep… you keep… you kept in touch with former colleagues? Yeah, while they were still on the Hill, my view was that I didn’t go bother… some people when they become lobbyists, think they’re going to hang around all the time. My view was I stayed with them enough. If I needed to go to see them I’d go to see them, but I wasn’t going to waste their time. So I’ve stayed in general touch… I mean, in, but I mean, either one of those if you said I’d recommended, them, they would both know that and I think they would take it favorably. Ok… and… so you did not contemplate at one point changing… No, I mean all the time I was on the Hill, I kept saying, the last thing I want to be is a lobbyist. I just don’t know what I’m going to do when I leave the Hill, but I don’t want to be a lobbyist. Because it, it, it, it used to be a… and I’m not going, no I’m not … I have to be careful… while I was on the Hill I had someone who worked for me and in full accordance with the rules in place in the ‘80s, he was thinking about leaving the Hill to go to work for one of the major defense contractors, and they asked him what was he, what was his, what was his, how much was he making on the Hill. Well, in addition to the salary that he was making on the Hill he included $35,000 worth of meals and travel and entertainment that people had provided him during the last year, which in his mind was part of what he got while working on the Hill. I was, I mean, that just offended the hell out of me, but it was perfectly legal at that point. And that’s the way a lot of


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people did business was, y’know, take you to the ball game, sit in the box seat, say, let’s that sort of thing take you out to $200 dinners. And I just didn’t really want to do that. But when I was asked to go to work for Tenneco but to do representing only Newport News Shipbuilding, that was a company that I knew a lot about; my last boss had been Senator John Warner from Virginia. At that point the shipyard was and had been for twenty years the largest single employer in the state, with between 20 and 30 thousand employees, up and down, depending on the workload, but that was the, and I … and their products were two things: nuclear carriers and nuclear submarines, and I felt really comfortable selling those kind of products. There was no fly-by-night schemes. I mean, you were either going to buy a carrier or you’re not. And so actually, it’s accepted fact in the political science literature that the US political system is much more open to private actors, whatever sorts for… includes policy-making, so to you, what could be the, the, the main… actors outside government and the legislative branch that are involved in policy-making process? In the defense arena? Yes. And the non-government actors? Yes. Uh, well, there are a horde of think-tanks in Washington: CSIS, the Lexington Institute, John Hopkins... and, I mean, there are just dozens of them… Center for Budgetary Analysis, all of which have… many of which have as their primary subject, is defense, either from a budgetary perspective or from a war-fighting perspective, or something. I mean, you’ve got, y’know, retired officers association, Air Force association, Navy League, all those people have some input. You have congressional, well, that’s part of government, but it’s not, the congressional reference service, the general [inaudible] accountability office, that comes closer to being a governmental entity; congressional research service is purely a government entity, but it, it’s, it writes generalized reports about things as opposed to GAO, which is [inaudible]. You then have the companies themselves and the big five still are: Lockheed Martin -- is and has been for some time the largest; Northrop and Boeing go back and forth, and the reason Boeing is there is primarily because of its acquisition of McDonnell Douglas ten years ago, which was for Boeing…never has the core Boeing had had manufactured military, navy craft in fifteen years. [Coughs.] I’m sorry. I get my allergies into the fall from leaf mould. Then you have Raytheon and Northrop, Raytheon… and General Dynamics are… Yes, the…


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And each of them have a major presence in the city. Several of them have a major presence out in the field. Lockheed Martin has got representatives in Burchley [inaudible]. Every military installation where one of its products is installed or used, and it’s probably better at that kind of influence, as that’s a bottom-up influence. Ok. They may have a field rep in the, y’know, at a… an Air Force base whose job is to kinda watch out, certain radars are performing and so forth and they talk to the users, and they get the users suggestions from the bottom up. I think they probably do that better. Raytheon’s not bad at it. Boeing is minor and doesn’t have much of that… Ok. Northrop doesn’t have much of that, and General Dynamics doesn’t have much of that. Ok. But, so you can, there’s ways those companies will do. Then you have a whole myriad of second-tier contractors, and more and more, that group is getting smaller and smaller, but as the group gets smaller, the importance of their defense work becomes more and more. Yes, of course. And I mean facing… I mean, we historically through the seventies and eighties started building a new carrier every four years; it’s not to five; it’s almost to six; and they’re talking about going to seven years. And many of the suppliers that shipyard are the sole source because there’s only company in the country that can do one thing or another. If they have to wait seven years between orders, it’s… no way they can stay in business, so the US industrial base defense industrial base is getting very, very close, very shaky. Yes. That’s also an issue in Europe in the… Well, and y’know, Sam Nunn when he was chairman of the Armed Services Committee starting in eighty… ‘86, was a constant and he called it ‘two-way street’ in which he was… and he was a very big NATO supporter… but his view was that defense trade between Europe and the United States has gotta go both ways. We, in the United States, we can’t expect Europe to buy all of our equipment without us buying any of theirs, and at the same time they had, Europe had no right to expect that we should buy their equipment if they’re not buying any of ours. So he was a very… and that was the phrase… I haven’t heard the phrase ‘two-way street’ used in a few years, but it’s a pretty good kinda generality about what, what goes on. And you think that this has been implemented in the…? Y’know, we’ve done things that have, I mean, we still have a Buy American Act. Governor-wide, which was first introduced in the late thirties when it probably made sense, because the world wasn’t anything near as compacted and y’know, the theory was, why would you be


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spending US taxpayers’ dollars overseas to support business, when you could spend the money right here to get the same product. There is also something called the Berry Amendment which applies only to the Department of Defense, although there are now members who are also trying to apply it to Homeland Security. That… on a much, that is much tighter requirements: the Buy America vision has a 51% rule, kind of if 51% of the parts and labor are American you’ve complied with Buy American; Berry: it’s a zero rule, but what happened during the eighties and nineties is we have given the Secretary of Defense the authority to go outside of that zero percent rule with allied nations, which include all of NATO, Israel is included, Canada is now considered for the purposed of the Berry Amendment as if Canada and the United States are a single entity for the purposes of that. So there has, there’s been some efforts to not continue to force the Department of Defense to buy more expensive equipment from the United States, while at the same time not being able to implement any kind of bilateral European-US trade in the defense arena. And that, that, when you get down to [inaudible] military sales or commercial sales of military equipment and foreign military sales is a term of [inaudible] which means that it is the government that’s actually selling overseas but it’s the company the government equipment is selling. So on a foreign military sale, you’ve got the financing and the agreements and so forth between countries with the companies in the US being, y’know, far more active normally in lobbying Capitol Hill in support of foreign military sales. The government, the US executive branch will send a message up saying we intend to do the following and then Congress has got x number [of days] and I think it’s 90 but I’m not sure, to disapprove any or part of that but they rarely do it. But they can. But it’s much more likely to be the companies whose equipment is involved that is more actively working and pressing to get decisions made through the process. (…) so, I mean, it takes a long time to get it to the point where the executive branch will even propose a foreign military sale, and then Congress can stretch it out, tear it apart and so, that’s very difficult: when you have equipment that is not otherwise restricted, which might only be available through foreign military sales, and you can make commercial sales. Early when I was at Newport News Shipbuilding we had been forced by Tenneco to get back into commercial shipbuilding, which is crazy for a shipyard whose whole infrastructure is based on nuclear operations, because it’s a huge overhead. But we were going to build frigates for the UAE. We spent six years chasing the UAE’s frigates. It’s now ten years later and they’ve still not bought any frigates or built any frigates, so it can go on forever. It’s US government policy not to support a particular competitor, if more than one US competitor is involved in any sort of commercial sale. When we were, when Newport News was trying… trying to be awarded a contract to build the frigates for the UAE, Ron Brown who was Secretary of Commerce, who was killed in an air crash while he was still Secretary, but he actively supported Newport News Shipbuilding because there were no other competing US companies that was competing


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for that. But if two companies are attempting to sell, to meet a need from an overseas government, then it’s US policy generally to, to, to lobby on behalf of American products, but not pick a winner between the two or more US guns. Yes. (…) Now, that involves the state department, department of commerce; involves the defense department; it may involve homeland security and so those decisions are not easily made, and although there’s a process for them, at virtually every step of the process there’s a way for some other government entity or some outside entity in some cases, to be able to bring the process to a halt, or set it back, or start it over. So many of these armament sales, and I think you’re looking at things broader than just that, but many of them take years to go from, y’know, from agreeing that the foreign government’s requirement is valid and, I mean, the F16 issue is really: do they need, y’know, brand new F16s? And when we agreed to modify but not sell them new, basically we’ve challenged their requirement process, and we challenge it because we have a slightly different foreign policy interest or a substantial different foreign policy. Yeah but also for the purchase of foreign arms or the, the.. for instance, the EADS tanker case, has polarized… Yeah, it… [laughs] and I almost worked for both sides at one point for that one. Y’know, I mean, yeah, let’s go back. It would have been 19… this is 2011. It must have been about 2005 that John McCain first started raising questions about how this competition was going to be conducted. He accidentally, in my opinion, fell into the fact that you had a senior Air Force official, Mrs Druyun, who was having negotiations with Boeing to go to work for them whilst she was attempting to award the contract to Boeing. Who? She was the… Diane… she was the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for acquisition. Ok. She went to jail, as did the… either a CEO or President of Boeing went to jail over this. They were conducting negotiations with Boeing to hire her, while she was sitting in the Air Force as the final procurement authority, and attempted to award the first tanker contract to Boeing. And I don’t believe John McCain had any inkling about that until about a year into complaining about how it was being done. And so they’ve now done it three times, and I’m still not sure that there’s a final decision. How so? Well, what happens if the Congress now says, yeah, you’re right; you’re probably going to need some tankers, but we don’t have any money for them right now, so let’s put this whole program on hold. Now, they haven’t done that yet, but in the kind of budget crunch the way right now that Congress is attempting to deal with it -- you’re taking hundreds of billions of


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dollars’ worth out of the next ten years -- I don’t know how the Air Force is going to afford any new tankers, even though the ones we’re flying are 50 years old, but if, if what you do is stop this program and then all of the kind of the requirements will start to change, because passage of time, if for no other reason. Cost estimates will change dramatically, because if nothing else the delay of time; the supply chain costs, inflation costs. You go back to us trying to acquire the B2, which was not an international issue, but the B2 program was, initial program, was going to acquire 120 B2s. At the end of six years, Congress allowed the Air Force to procure 20 B2s. Now, the result of that was that each of those 20 B2s cost more than $1 billion a piece, whereas when the program, excuse me, the program was to buy 120, which happened to be six years earlier, they weren’t able to afford [inaudible] dollars: the price doubled because of all the changes. I, I don’t know… that, I just don’t feel confident that we’ve seen the end of the debate on how to acquire tankers for the Air Force. (…) Ok? And that’s not confidential, because they weren’t my clients. I recommended to EADS very early on that what they do is pursue a split/bi approach in which -- the classic compromise -- you know, we’ll have a head-to-head competition. The winner will get the first lot of five or ten, and the second party will get the second lot of five or ten, if it agrees to build an identical aircraft for the identical cost. And that wouldn’t be your going-in position, but that would be the position you were working to obtain. They were very interested, they, the Vice President of Government Relations, who happened to have been on the Hill when I was there (…) (…) It takes 10-15 years to get a program actually going, y’know, a major program like that. I mean, the F22: I mean, they were going to buy 780 aircraft; it’s down now to 240. The F35 is gonna end up same way; y’know, the Marine Corps is about to… Congress is talking about stopping working on the Marine Corps variant of the F35. The F35 is interesting, though, as well and that would be a Lockheed issue, because, what they did there, they went out and sold the program internationally as partners, in which the partners that they brought in, would have to become equity partners, essentially, in the program. And I’m sure that’s been done before, but I don’t think that’s ever been done with a program as big as the F35, and part of the economy of scale that was used to sell the program initially, the scales expanded because of foreign partners. So, if you’re gonna a total of this for the United States, but you’re also going to be able to sell these to France, and so forth, and then you can hold the overall individual unit cost down. And if you’re getting contributions from overseas towards the program, it makes it more attractive. Again, that’s just another one of those huge, huge… y’know, $75 billion program. Yeah. Before… just, we go back to another sort of question, but just because it’s really interesting… how, I mean, when you said you also talked to Boeing in the EADS case,


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I’m just really interested, because for me it’s the case that it polarizes many problems of the policy. Yeah, it does. At the time, the Vice President of Government Relations at Boeing was a man named Rudy De Leon, and Rudy had been the Staff Director of the House Armed Services Committee, while I was the… and he was working for the Democratic chairmanship, while I was the Republican Staff Director of the Senate Armed Services Committee, so we met in conference four or five years back, when Congress was really going to conference and fighting out differences between the bills, so. And, plus, another person, Andy Ellis, who had been a Republican Staff Director of the House Armed Services Committee, worked for Rudy. So I chatted with him briefly about the tanker program and it was about this time that D-U-R-N-Y-N… whatever that woman’s name was… Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Procurement… I think it was Diane… D-U-R-N-Y…N-Y,A-N? Durny. Ok. Something very close to that; somebody will know. She went to jail for it; she went to jail… for she was prohibited by law once she began to discuss the position. She had to disqualify herself; she did not acknowledge she was in negotiations, she was in negotiations with the CEO of Boeing directly. Yes. And he lost his job and I think he even served a few months, but and… shortly after I talked to Boeing. And Boeing had some other big issues in the defense arena, in the classified arena, that were in trouble and so, we were talking about a number of things. (…) EADS was initially interested. Yes. They would have been very interested in having half of that program, in splitting it up, but then they teamed with Northrop, Northrop Grumman on… I guess it was the second round… and Northrop was the big boy on the team, and Northrop wanted all or nothing, which I thought was a flawed strategy. But that, that’s why that never got put on the table very seriously, but when Northrop came on I just didn’t have anything else to do with them, but. But then at the second round, if I’m correct -- but please correct me if I’m wrong -- they got actually the bid? Yeah. And I’m wrong, because there’s been four times… Four times? Four times? The second they got it was when they were teamed with Northrop.


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I thought they got it when they teamed with Northrop. No, there was a second… Boeing won the first one; that was the one that was overturned initially, because ultimately they found out about these decision-makers, then EADS won the second one, is my memory. Ok? And the third one was when they teamed with Norfolk… with Northrop. There were only three, I think, and they did not win. I think EADS won the second, I think, maybe there were only three. Ok. They didn’t win when they teamed with Northrop. Ok. But then at one point they won? Or it was said that they won the bid… Yeah… But then when it was overturned? There was an immediate protest by Boeing; the comptroller general, part of the GAO, overturned that process on the grounds that the decision-makers hadn’t given appropriate weight to certain of the requirements that were in the decision documents, and so forth. The claim was that the Air Force requirement was badly made, so that… Yeah, I mean, they had four or five hundred requirements. They ultimately, I think, dropped or were forced to come down to about forty actual requirements. If you could do more, that was great, but you had to meet that forty, or whatever it was. Ok. But there was a substantial reduction in the individual requirements between the second and the third one, and that’s when Boeing… It was the occasion of many, many debates. I mean, at the time was, I happened to be in the US, so, and I just saw a TV screen at the airport: a politician that I can’t remember who that was, speaking about it, and then I was about to take a flight to Europe, so I sort of had the day-to-day impressions of both parts of the Atlantic, and… Well, Norm Dicks, who is from Seattle, and who now is the Senior Democratic member of the House on the Defense Appropriations Sub-Committee, has been the most vocal, because he is more vocal as an individual. Patty Murray has been somewhat supportive openly of Boeing. See, at EADS, EADS tried to create a political sponsor by their, by their plan to build a huge manufacture facility in


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Alabama, and they did get Senator Richard Shelby. He’s from Alabama, was a very vocal supporter of EADS in this process. What was the first name that the Senior Democratic of the Defense Appropriations Sub-committee you said that he was the most vocal? Yeah, Norm Dicks. D-I-C-K-S. And he’s the Democratic, he’s the Senior Democrat on Defence Appropriations Sub-Committee. Yes. And, to me, one of the issues that I tackled in my PhD, was to, to, to what extent, I mean, in a more or less liberalized world, more free trade, more or less, national identity was still an issue, I mean, and how? Because I think that the criteria of what is national today has changed, because to some extent stakeholders are different: there are cross-memberships; so, to what extent you just mentioned earlier -- that was really interesting that -- for instance, BAE has played the role of being a global player, having real… Creating national identities in the various places. So EADS did not try to… No, they tried to, and I don’t want… short of creating a separate American company, firewalled from control... It’s not a prohibition that they be owned by, they can still be owned by the foreign corporation, but they cannot be under the foreign corporation. Yes. EADS has not been willing to take that step. Now, I have not been involved but I have no question that that has had to have been discussed, and it certainly would make life easier for EADS North America if it were a non-foreign-controlled corporation. Yes. So I have to assume it is, it is, the French owner of the corporation, that has not agreed to that, whereas, whereas BAE has at least in the United States has created an American identity. So EADS did one of the best things it could do to try to create this attachment: this promise of 8000 jobs in Alabama, and build a huge multi-million dollar assembly facility and manufacturing facility. I mean, in the shipbuilding world, at one point, when I was lobbying for the carrier no. 76 which was the Reagan… which was in the early ‘90s, we had suppliers for that program in all fifty states, and about 350 of the 435 congressional districts. And I can tell you to the dollar and the name of the company and its address, and if I needed to, I could have the President on the ‘phone with a member of Congress in 30 minutes. EADS tried to do that, but unlike Boeing, that’s been part of the United States in government research for years, you can’t create that kind of constituency overnight. I mean, I think their attempt to do so was probably the only avenue they had, and they made a good faith attempt


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to do it. I don’t know what, I don’t know where that plan now stands, as… I know they had a ground-breaking… I don’t know whether they’ve put a roof on it or not yet. Yes, I will, I will try to I think, um, I mean, maybe try to dig a little bit deeper and maybe, if you don’t mind, if I can send you follow-up questions on shipbuilding, because actually I am also interested… I mean, some parts of my PhD were on a new regulation in Europe, more protective of firms that actually emerged because of cases in the shipbuilding sector: for instance, Germany was… So I may go back to that, but maybe another time if I can send you another questions? Ok. Yes, because I’m going to be in California for at least three months between mid-November and mid-February, but I’ll be reachable… and everything. And the interesting thing… have you heard the Greek Prime Minister today announced he’s going to submit the austerity package to a referendum? Yes. Ok. When I got out of the car, the DOW was down 342 points. Ok? After that announcement. Ok. And it was up, y’know, 400 points last week, in which the only factor you could look at was the announcement that the Europeans had reached an agreement. And a referendum was never part of that agreement, so he announced unilaterally that he was going to submit it to a referendum… if that all falls apart, it’s gonna make it even harder to figure out where national interests lie in this government. I mean, just as the US economy can, y’know, drag down the European, the European can drag down the US. That ought to be a recognition of even greater interdependence, but the easy political response is to firewall around every thing and say, well, if that’s where they are we just ain’t gonna deal with them anymore. I don’t know, I don’t know where that’s going to go. I can’t imagine if that goes to a referendum that there’s any chance of the Greek populace approving it. I mean, it’s negatively affecting 70-80% of the population. It will be interesting to see how something in purely financial and budgetary management… what that… I mean, because, y’know, there’s so much shifting of the lines going on. I mean, most of it’s down in North Africa, but now you’ve got Syria, Turkey, their closest ally, is now barely harbouring the rebel Syrian army forces -- I don’t know if…if… y’know, if this European bail-out fails, Sarkozy is going to be in trouble. Merkel is clearly going to be in trouble, because she went way-out on a limb in her country. So, I just think that there may be a big sea-change coming in international relationships. I don’t know where that goes, and


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maybe we’ll get through it, I hope we do, but I think the economic issues could drive a wedge in all cooperation because it’s such a knee-jerk reaction. Yes. But knee-jerk reactions can really screw things up. Wait. I am not sure, what was the word you used before reaction. Knee-jerk. Knee-jerk? Knee-jerk, like… Ah yes, yes, ok. I didn’t know that word [laughs]. Yes. It’s kind of like an immediate… without thinking it through… you just, well, y’know, to hell with them! Kind of response, so. Yes. Just to… did you still have…? I’ve got 15 minutes. Ok, great. So, now, actually a bit… much more focused on the revolution of military affairs if that means anything… This is a personal opinion only. As kind of an outsider… by the time that became a, y’know, a cliché or cachet, I guess, maybe, is what it became first,… I was, I had already left Newport News. Well, I guess they were starting it; that’s not true. The revolution in military affairs was just a name given… to a process pursued by people who kept losing the debates. Ok! That’s a great definition… Admiral Mike Boorda, who was the Chief of Naval Operations. This must have been ’88, ’89, ’90. Excuse me? It’s B-O-R-… B-O-O-R-D-A. Now, he committed suicide while he was still in the position as Chief of Naval Operations. Ok He proposed something called an arsenal ship, which was one of the first, quote, ‘ideas’ to come out of the revolution in military affairs. And what the arsenal ship was going to be: it was going to be an on-the-water, as opposed to underwater, reasonably small ship, with 500-


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700 cruise missiles on it, and it was going to be built very low in the water and built with stealth technology, so it couldn’t be found. And I was still working for Newport News at the time. And my kinda knee-jerk… but I decided that it was going to be something… a phrase I used over and over again… was we already have an arsenal ship: it’s called a submarine! And the difference is: you can’t see the submarine after it fires its missiles any better than you can see it before. With the arsenal ship, you’ve got a crew of 50-70 people, sitting on a boat floating in the water that have no armaments left because they fired all 500 missiles, and everybody knows where they are. Y’know, so, basically it’s a sacrifice ship. Ok. Well, we succeeded in killing that. And so very few million dollars ever went into that. At the same time, there was these floating airports that another admiral, who was a big proponent of the RMA, a… pre-positioning ships, but he wanted to build them big enough to, y’know, like cattle, like, hundreds of troops and hundreds of aircraft and float them out in the China Sea and the… y’know, in the Indian ocean, and again the theory was you could launch aircraft; you could launch helicopters; you could launch this and… y’know, our contention was that’s what you call the target ship. Because, unlike the arsenal ship, it’s not even moving. I mean we had already figured out that one of the biggest targets back in the Cold War with, against the Soviet Union… the Soviet Union had very explicit plans how to take out all of our NATO pre-positioning equipment as their very first strike. Our war plan was we had all that equipment sitting in Europe; they’d get the guys out real fast and they’d move out, but the first thing the attacker did was to destroy all that equipment, then what was the guys you brought over going to do? So here you’re going to have a pre-positioned ship that’s… you can be tugged, you can put literally tugs around it and move it 5 or 10 miles in a week, but otherwise it’s just sitting there: fly over with a, y’know, one-man aircraft and drop gas on top of it, and you’ve wiped the whole thing out. So that story ran a little bit, but those were the things. Y’know, there ought to be always an on-going revolution in military affairs, in which there’s gotta be some people that are always looking for alternatives that don’t seem to fit the common thing, but I didn’t see anything happening in the mid-to-late ‘80s or early ‘90s, that was really any more than that, other than a couple of people that were in reasonably high positions, who were willing to buck, kind, like, the common knowledge or the common wisdom to say, well how about? But that’s what we oughta be doing all the time. And a revolution has a beginning and an end, so it’s not, it’s just being more open, y’know, more free-thinking is all it is, and that’s why my phrase, y’know, it was a process created by people that kept losing the debate. Y’know, so they were looking for some way to get outside of the way that decisions were made and claim, and then call it revolution in military affairs. Do you see any revolution in the European arena? I don’t either. I mean, there was a period of people who started to appoint red teams, like, on major issues. The CIA, y’know, back in the ‘60s and the ‘70s,


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would make major intelligence estimates, and some of the directors back then would go out and find a red team to pick them apart. Y’know, and that was really what I thought the revolution in military affairs was about, you just say, here’s your normal decision process: let’s bring a bunch of people in who are real smart, that haven’t been part of the decision process and have them tear it apart, and see if there’s a hole out there; that’s fine, but to me that’s management, maybe revolution in management affairs is what it oughta have been, because I, y’know, you can have revolutionary weapons, revolutionary strategy or tactics, but I just never, I never liked the term, ‘cos I never felt it meant anything other than people that hadn’t been listened to suddenly thought they oughta be listened to, because they declared a revolution in military affairs. I mean, but did you see, I mean, you’re in this, did you see any kind of…? No, I… Serious policy changes or strategic policy changes? [Laughs.] I try not to interfere with what I think, with what people think, but actually indeed, so to say, what I have seen so far is that you have this larger questions that all countries have dealt with since the end of the Cold War, even a little bit before, actually, even in the ‘80s, that is changing military needs plus declining budgets, so what do we do now? And how do we do that? But then, so, this is the larger framework of change, and then you have more specifically the, the projects proposed and promoted by Andy Marshall and then Rumsfeld. Well, y’know, both Andy Marshall, I’ve known Andy Marshall for thirty years, he’s had good ideas. But they were good because they weren’t exactly the same as what was being proposed, so it’s always good to look at alternatives. He rarely, he had an idea that turned into the outcome, but that’s as it should be. There oughta always be somebody said, wait a minute. Rumsfeld: I think he was the right guy for the job for the first 2-3 years. Then it probably should have been… he should have left, because he just pissed off so many people; that bright people just didn’t want to have to deal with him: why take crap from him, just because he felt that way? I mean, to me the biggest revolution in military affairs is, short of shooting people as they crawl up your beach so that they don’t get on your land, not much has changed except for cybersphere. I mean, the cyberspace. Oh yes. The fact that virtually everything we do in the military, short of the last guy face-to-face with bayonets, is somehow controlled in cyberspace. I mean, that’s the revolution I see. And I think I think we’ve… John Hamre, when he was Deputy Secretary of Defense, first, as a matter of national priority and requirements, identified cyberspace as, as the new threat, y’know, I mean… Ok. You’ve got right-wingers like Frank Gaffney…


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I: Frank who? R: G-A-F-F-N-E-Y, who was… he was a staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee when Tower, when Senator Tower was there. He then in the Reagan administration was an Assistant Secretary… a nominated Assistant Secretary of Defense, and he now has his own think-tank, but I’ll have to… I’m drawing a blank on… I know it, it’ll come to the tip of my… he writes… he’s very ultr- [Interruption by waiter.] No, bring the bill please. He runs a very, very, very conservative defense think-tank and he now publishes weekly in the Washington Examiner, which is, in my opinion, becoming a pretty good alternative paper in Washington. It’s still free. The Washington Times used to be kinda like the contra paper against the Post. Let me get this; it’s $6. Thank you very much. The Washington Examiner is becoming a pretty strong voice in many of these areas, but, I mean, Frank has been screaming for the last eight or ten years about the fact that, y’know… you create an electromagnetic pulse around New York and Washington with a small hyper cub airplane that size, atomic piece of equipment, and you could wipe out every electric grid for a thousand miles: everything, anything that depends on the grid, or on the space or on anything, is gone. And you just… we proved that on the second A-test we did back in the ‘40s and they dropped and it exploded a mile high. There was no electric grid to wipe out, but they know what would happen. We’ve got no answers to that, other than nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear, y’know… [Waiter.] No, Keep that… But I just see how everything is so dependent on Internet communications. There’s going to be a… I think it’s the November 9th, that at 2pm, the federal government is going to take over every broadcast station in the country -- TV and radio and, and internet providers, networks, I think -- for an 8 minute test of the new national emergency alert system. Really? That was created 5-6 years ago, but they’ve never done a national test on it. Now, the real right-wing crazies say, this is how Obama essentially shuts off all information sources in one fell swoop, so that the only source of news comes from the White House. I don’t, I don’t go into that level of conspiracy thinking, but it’s going to be an interesting thing to see what happens, to see if there’s a system in place where our government can seize control of every radio, television and Internet providers network, with one system, then there’s gotta be a


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system somewhere else that can do the same thing. I mean, we’ve created a system which a, y’know, foreign entity could utilize that shut the country down, so. I just think that’s the area that... I mean, I know people are thinking about it. They’ve created a cyber command in the Department of Defense. It’s a dual-hatted… I can’t… I guess, the commander of northern command is dual-hatted right now. He wears both hats as commander of northern command and I think he’s the same, same officer is commander of the new cyber command. So we’re thinking about it, but I don’t think anybody’s got an idea. I mean you look at stuxnet. I don’t know whether it was us or the Germans or the French or the Israelis that shut down the Iranian nuclear accelerators, but somebody did, with a bug, with a worm. Yes, indeed. [Laughter.] I’m going to have to run. Please don’t hesitate, don’t worry in the least bit about sending me questions. If you decide to you want to try to get any of these interviews, if I can help you get them, I’ll be glad, I’ll be glad, let me know who. Thank you. (…)

Programme OPERA – ENTRETIENS

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Transcript of Programme OPERA – ENTRETIENS