Lab Opposes ‘Gold Plated’ Systems : China Lake Weapons Center Battling With the Navy Brass

At a secluded Navy base in the California desert, some of the nation’s most talented missile and bomb designers are wearing buttons showing a diagonal red slash across a paisley background.

In the international language of signs, the button is saying “No Paisley.” It is a barb aimed at Assistant Secretary of the Navy Melvyn R. Paisley, a high-level Reagan Administration political appointee and former Boeing executive.

The scientists and others at the base are blaming Paisley for forcing their boss, Burrell Hays, to resign from his job as technical director of the China Lake Naval Weapons Center.

Hays’ resignation, which takes effect Friday, is just the latest clash between China Lake and the Navy hierarchy in Washington. But it has far greater significance than a simple bureaucratic dispute.

China Lake, a vast complex the size of Delaware in the Mojave Desert, is a leading opponent within the Defense Department of “gold plated” weapons--astronomically priced and technologically complex weapons that have come to bedevil the defense procurement system.

In promoting its own weapons designs, which emphasize simplicity and low cost, China Lake has developed a reputation as a maverick within the Navy. It has become a target of some powerful interests in government and the defense industry that seek to preserve the status quo.

“Right now, Mel Paisley is feeling we are too independent, so he is twitching our reins, jerking in the lead rope,” said Marguerite Rogers, a recently retired Ph.D. physicist at China Lake and a leading bomb expert. “The message is ‘Don’t be independent. Obey orders.’ The nation’s defense will suffer for it.”

Doubts About Sincerity

A bureaucratic attack on China Lake raises troubling questions about the future of defense procurement reform, some experts say. If Pentagon leaders attack the few defense institutions that exercise independent thinking, it raises doubts about the sincerity of reform efforts.

“The politics are getting fierce,” said Frank Cartwright, who retired last month as a senior adviser to Hays. “Paisley’s influence is consistent with trying to decapitate the Navy’s leading laboratory to teach a lesson. And the pressure is being felt.”

Indeed, even former uniformed Navy officers say the Pentagon has put protocol ahead of the best interests of the Navy, the only true “customer” that many China Lakers recognize.

“What Washington wants is somebody that agrees with Washington,” says John Jude Lahr, a retired Navy captain who formerly commanded China Lake. “They don’t think original thinking is all that neat.”

Although Hays declined to be interviewed until after he leaves his job, many of his friends and associates depict him as the victim of too many battles within the Navy bureaucracy and against powerful defense contractors.

“Industry doesn’t like China Lake,” said a veteran missile designer who asked not to be quoted by name. “We take their research bucks. With us around, they can’t lock in non-competitive contracts. There’s a marketing lobby in industry trying to put us out of business.”

Indeed, private contractors are winning many of the battles, but China Lake is still the Navy’s principal center for designing bombs and missiles, employing 6,000 people. The base, located in a desolate valley 150 miles north of Los Angeles, is remote physically and politically from the Pentagon.

When the Navy opened the base four decades ago, it considered China Lake the perfect location to test secret weapons in seclusion. But the seclusion also has given birth to independent thinking that often conflicts with the stiff formality of the brass in Washington.

Hays, 52, who likes to chomp on cigars and make friendly wagers, spent his entire career at China Lake and built up a loyal following at the base. Insiders say that the circumstances of his resignation have triggered broad resentment among the staff and seriously damaged morale.

“I don’t look for malice here,” remarked Rogers, the bomb expert. “Stupidity is quite enough to account for what is happening.”

A Navy spokesman said Paisley would have no comment on Hays’ resignation. He added that Hays voluntarily resigned after declining a promotion to be director of Navy laboratories.

But those familiar with the case say that Hays, who was personally decorated by President Reagan several years ago for outstanding achievement, was ordered to take the job in Washington or resign from the government service.

“The director of Navy labs is a housekeeping job,” said Franklin Knemeyer, former deputy technical director at China Lake and a close associate of Hays. “It is a thankless job and in all probability will be dissolved.”

“The Navy wants Hays in Washington where they can control him,” said Lahr, the former China Lake commander. “Director of Navy labs is not much of a job because they are considering abolishing it in the next six months anyway.”

A peripheral issue in Hays’ departure is whether he was obliged to change jobs under the terms of his employment as a member of the government’s so-called senior executive service. But Hays’ friends and associates at China Lake say that he had not served long enough in his present job to be due for a mandatory transfer.

In Congress, Hays’ controversial departure is seen by some experts as an assault on the military laboratory system.

“You don’t have any honest brokers if you don’t have the government labs,” said Anthony Battista, an influential member of the staff of the House Armed Service Committee. “Burrell Hays is one of the best managers we have in our defense procurement system. He did great things out there at China Lake that saved taxpayers money and gave weapons to the fleet that worked. But there are people in the Pentagon who wanted to get rid of him.”

Hays, who will be succeeded by his deputy, has been a tireless supporter of two weapons programs in particular that gained him enemies both in the defense industry and at the Pentagon: the LowCost Seeker, a missile guidance system, and the advanced intercept missile, a very high speed air-to-air defense missile.

Virtual Rebellion

But Navy headquarters has sought to curtail China Lake’s authority in these and other programs, dispatching an increasing number of “rudder orders,” a service term for micromanagement. Such moves are seen at China Lake as Pentagon efforts to rein in the center’s independent-minded scientists.

In a military service that considers minor infractions of protocol to be insubordination, the Paisley affair qualifies as a virtual rebellion. But it is not the first time that the China Lake technical community has drawn the wrath of the Navy hierarchy, and it is unlikely to be the last, veterans of the base say.

“I know exactly what Burrell Hays is going through right now, because I went through the very same thing,” Lahr said. “But what Washington doesn’t realize is that there are a hundred more people like Burrell Hays at China Lake coming up through the ranks.”

Lahr, a highly decorated combat pilot, retired from the Navy after his tour of duty at China Lake ended in 1983, convinced that the bureaucratic battles that he fought for China Lake weapons had doomed his chances of promotion in the Navy.

What drove Lahr and Hays, among other highly motivated and educated professionals, to ruin their careers at China Lake? Those experienced with military weapons development say powerful institutional forces in the procurement system often favor complex and high-cost weapons.

“I don’t know how to explain the thing without sounding like a lunatic, but the industry owns the Navy, except for a few guys like Burrell Hays,” said Tom Amlie, a former technical director at China Lake in the 1970s who was also forced out of his job.

“I had the same problem as Burrell,” Amlie said. “The industry is against the laboratory system. They have an almost mystical feeling that things have to be done by the industry. Much of the industry hates the China Lake way of doing business.”

Home of Sidewinder

Nevertheless, China Lake has routinely churned out weapons over the last 30 years. Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara once said that 80% of the weapons dropped in Vietnam were developed at China Lake.

China Lake’s proudest achievement has been the Sidewinder missile, now 30 years old and still widely considered the single most effective missile in the U.S. air defense arsenal. Since the Sidewinder was developed, the Shriek, Walleye and Skipper, among others, have followed out of the base.

The weapons are all the products of something known as the “China Lake way of doing business.” Despite its successes in the eyes of proponents of China Lake, the system has gained little favor in the military.

Conventionally, military services describe to contractors a mission and a set of requirements for a weapon, but they leave much of the design up to private contractors. Under the system, weapons contractors often receive production contracts without competitive bidding. The contractor holds significant power over the government because it owns the drawings and technical data package for the weapon.

The China Lake system is to design a weapon, build a large number of prototypes for in-house testing and then submit the design to industry for competitive bidding for production. In the end, the Pentagon owns the design of the weapon.

China Lake takes credit for advocating competition in the production of weapons. “When there is competition, the cost goes down and the quality goes up,” said Lahr, the former China Lake commander. “It’s just like saying you are going to burp after drinking a six-pack of beer. But that lesson is lost on the bureaucrats.”

The system has succeeded at China Lake largely because it is renowned for its scientific capabilities.

“This place is waist deep in technical talent,” said Cartwright, the former technical adviser to Hays. “We have resources that industry doesn’t have.”

The base has an elaborate machine shop and electronics laboratories that can put together almost anything that a technical team wants. Often, major projects are led by a few key scientists who operate free of the red tape that is standard in weapons development elsewhere.

“China Lake weapons are complex in function but simple in hardware,” Cartwright said. “You don’t fight the physics of nature with them. You purloin what’s available in the laws of nature. They are reliable as a consequence. And it brings the price down.”

But, over the years, China Lake’s role has been limited. Civilian leaders of the Navy, who often come from industry backgrounds, have elected to put development of the largest weapons programs in the hands of industry.

AMRAAM Disdained

Hughes Aircraft, for example, is developing or producing the Phoenix and AMRAAM, both air-to-air missiles that are widely disdained at China Lake.

“AMRAAM is the biggest folly ever perpetrated on this country,” Rogers said. “It is too complicated and too expensive. If one round cost a half-million dollars, nobody is ever going to shoot one off.”

“Phoenix is very expensive and very slow,” Lahr said. “It has been (technologically) leapfrogged by the enemy’s ability to put high-speed missiles in the air.”

Hughes officials disputed those assessments but declined to be interviewed more extensively.

Although industry officials generally declined to discuss China Lake on the record, in interviews off the record they said that the weapons center is a politically well-connected and powerful institution.

Richard DeLauer, a former undersecretary of defense, said China Lake has irritated even its supporters in Washington by insisting on hanging on to management of weapons too long.

“They want to run a mail-slot operation,” DeLauer said, referring to China Lake’s system of sending technical data packages to manufacturers for bids. “I told them they weren’t going to run a mail-slot operation. They want to get everything into a tidy package and put it in the mail.”

A marketing executive at one major missile manufacturer added: “China Lake runs contrary to the system. You have a very strong culture at China Lake. There is really no other like it in the world. It takes a special kind of person to live out there in the desert and fight wars with Washington. But they are politically well wired and they market the dickens out of their hardware.

‘Better Mousetrap’

“They are not willing team members with industry. They have been reluctant to pass money through to the industry. They like to keep it in-house so they can go off and build a better mousetrap. But if you are going to build a new missile, why not turn the entire shooting match over to industry and assign them the risk? That’s the free-enterprise system.”

It is that kind of a statement that goes to the heart of the controversy at China Lake.

“Industry would really like to have the scope of China Lake limited,” said Knemeyer, the retired deputy technical director of China Lake. “They complain about the size of the research going on here.”