Who’s in Charge There?

Now and again taxpayers catch a glimpse of what happens to their money after it disappears into the Pentagon. In the case of the Orion, a Navy patrol plane used in anti-submarine warfare, it is not a pretty sight.

Lockheed Corp. built the first Orion--also known as the P-3--in 1962, packing sonar gear for locating submarines, and torpedoes and bombs for blowing them up, into what is essentially a 1950s turbo-prop airliner. The Navy apparently thinks that time and technology have caught up with the Orion. It is planning to replace it with a newer submarine hunter in 1990 or 1991, and did not ask for any new Orions in this year’s budget.

But about two weeks ago William H. Taft IV, deputy secretary of defense, went to Capitol Hill to ask Congress to keep Lockheed’s Orion production line open long enough to build nine more. According to Times writer Ralph Vartabedian, the Navy had no idea until last Friday that it might get a shipment of airplanes that it didn’t particularly want. It could have been worse. It will get only six Orions, at a cost of $193.8 million, because there was not enough money to buy nine.

The country’s taxpayers have deposited more than $1 trillion in the Pentagon’s account in the past six years, with a minimum of grumbling. They did so in expectation that they were buying a bigger, more effective force that would be put together according to some overall plan for the way it would be used, however rough the plan might be. Taft’s end run around the Navy is no sign that all weapons decisions have been made that way, nor is the episode unique in the annals of Pentagon acquisition. But it takes only a few such decisions to make you wonder how many other times it has happened, and how it is possible to stick with a plan when Defense Department officials who are generally hired for their management skills and not for their fighting ability feel free to scratch out parts of a plan and pencil in something completely different.

For all taxpayers know, the decision has merit. The Army, Navy and Air Force have all chosen, and fought the Pentagon’s civilian leadership to keep, technological lemons, and the Orion’s successor could be another, for all Americans know. Because the new sub hunter that the Navy had in mind would be more advanced, it probably would be more expensive, but it might do the job better than the Orion, for all taxpayers know.

But all taxpayers know for certain is that the chairman of the House committee that approves appropriations for defense is partial to the Orion, that a member of his staff is a former Orion pilot and that Taft put the deal for the Orion together behind the Navy’s back.

They also know that big defense contractors do not pay their lobbyists to prowl the corridors of Capitol Hill and the Pentagon as part of a physical-fitness program. The lobbyists do all that walking in order to influence decisions, and obviously they are--as President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned they would be in his message about the military-industrial complex three decades ago--quite good at what they do.