Pentagon’s Helpers : Inventors: Fresh Ideas for Defense

A Texas inventor approached the Army in the late 1970s with an idea for producing a one-man helicopter, small enough to be folded into a suitcase and powered by hydrogen peroxide, best known as a hair bleach.

Impressed, the Army issued a contract for $409,000 to the inventor’s company, Aerospace General in Odessa, Tex., and bestowed on the program the official name of the “Individual Tactical Air Vehicle.” The bizarre concept was soon abandoned, not surprisingly, because of air safety concerns.

The helicopter was not unusual in one respect, however. In basements and small industrial parks across the nation, thousands of American inventors and small businessmen toil away for endless hours on ideas that they hope will some day win them fat Pentagon contracts. And occasionally they succeed.

‘Unsolicited Proposals’

With more than $100 billion to spend annually on the fruit of American industry, the Pentagon is besieged by thousands of new weaponry ideas, which the military has given the suitably bureaucratic name of “unsolicited proposals.”

Sometimes, brilliant ideas come from maverick scientists who inject a deeply needed dose of innovation into the Pentagon’s arsenal. A number of satellite, aircraft and ordnance programs have resulted from the suggestions of such scientists--whether they are lone inventors or work for weapons contractors.

On the other hand, the military is also deluged by ludicrous submissions of devices--ultimate death weapons in many cases--whose utility is not evident and whose inventors’ competency is not always clear-cut.

“We deal with a lot of nuts but you have to treat them like everybody else because they might be right,” said Charles H. Church, the Army’s chief for systems and technology assessment. “The normal system isn’t used to working with strange ideas.”

‘A Grandiose Failure’

Among one of the stranger ideas that struck the Army’s fancy was a flying platform for a soldier, which would be powered by a jet engine from a cruise missile. The Army sank $1.6 million into the device, which Church now terms “a grandiose failure.”

But other initiatives have led to practical and important developments. The Army successfully financed a steel-belted radial tire for combat vehicles that would continue running when flat--an obviously useful feature on a battlefield.

Sorting out strange ideas is not the only problem the military faces with these outside proposals. When multibillion-dollar contractors want to sell an idea to the Pentagon, they do not write a humble letter. They fly an airplane-load of documents to Washington under armed guard, hire powerful lobbyists and apply political pressure at the highest levels of Congress and the White House.

“You generally have an idea that it’s coming,” said Lawrence A. Skantze, a retired general who commanded the Air Force’s procurement and research organization. “They will blanket the higher levels. They always make sure their supporters in Congress get a copy.”

On more than one occasion, such muscle-flexing by the defense industry has resulted in the military services getting multibillion-dollar systems that they never asked for and often did not want. Lockheed won a $7.8-billion order for C-5B cargo jets in 1982 through an unsolicited proposal that was opposed by many in the Air Force because they were already developing a newer generation cargo aircraft known as the C-17.

Despite such pitfalls, defense officials said they are committed to keeping the military industrial complex open to new ideas from individuals and corporations outside the Pentagon mainstream.

“We are the government and we must be open to the citizenry to help us,” said Joseph Hess, director of the Air Force’s Space Technology Center in El Segundo. “This country was made great by the ideas of individuals.”

Idea for Flying Saucer

But some ideas that Hess receives are clearly not so great. The space center, for example, once received a proposal for a flying saucer, accompanied by a unique prototype--a spinning top. Another individual submitted a proposal that came in installments over a two-year period. One weapon was detailed on a large sheet of meat-wrapping paper.

Proposals that veer into fantasy are easily dismissed, but those that mix common sense and apparent absurdity are more difficult to assess.

Take, for example, the diesel-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile that was offered by inventor James W. Linck, who said he was seeking to apply low-cost automotive technology to provide a new deterrent to a Soviet nuclear attack.

The missile, which Linck code-named “Coffin Nail,” was to be deployed in the thousands and held in reserve in case the United States was ever attacked. After all the high-performance missiles had been used, thousands of Coffin Nails would be launched.

‘Cockroach Missiles’

“This is just a clean-up missile that would be used after both sides had exchanged strikes. No matter what they did, they could never stamp out these cockroach missiles. If you had 5,000 or 10,000 of these missiles, you could keep rolling them in there. There wouldn’t be anything left.”

Linck--a former Army engineer, a Vietnam veteran and holder of “piles of patents,” found only indifference in the military to his efforts. He has letters of rejection from the Army, the Navy, the Defense Security Assistance Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Air Force didn’t write back, he said.

The deputy under secretary of defense for strategic and theater nuclear forces, in rejecting his idea in 1981, wrote, “Thank you for your interest in the defense of our country.” In retrospect, Linck said, he thinks it is virtually impossible to sell the Pentagon a new idea.

“You need to find a politician who has a few buddies in the military,” Linck said. “It has to be a full-time job, where you lobby them and go to Palm Springs and play golf with them.”

Linck, who lives in Mechanicsville, Va., has abandoned his nuclear cruise missile idea and is now working on an aerodynamic golf club.

Frustrations Abound

The frustrations that Linck encountered with the often-daunting Pentagon bureaucracy are well recognized by experts who try to help inventors.

“It is a perilous journey to try to get through to the Pentagon with a new weapon or something for our military,” said L. Troy Hall, president of the Inventors Assn. of America in Rancho Cucamonga. “The small inventor doesn’t have those congressional contacts. I don’t know anybody who has climbed that mountain.”

Even the military services acknowledge these problems and operate programs to help inventors and contractors get their ideas heard.

“A small player can easily be submerged,” said James Mulquin, who handles advanced technology for the Naval Air Systems Command. “The Boeings, Douglases and General Dynamics of this world can inundate any area with competent personnel and ex-admirals and ex-generals and ex-congressmen and all the rest. So to give the little guy, who on occasion will have something of real merit, some visibility and opportunity, these special programs are maintained.”

Some Proposals Accepted

Every Pentagon procurement agency has an office to evaluate the hundreds of proposals that come in every year. In 1986, for example, the Air Force Systems Command received 479 unsolicited proposals and accepted 117 of them, issuing $23.3 million in contracts.

Sometimes the Navy merely provides such inventors with letters of introduction, certifying that they are working on technology with potential military applications. The letters help to give some credibility to people who might be working in their basements or garages.

“It is easy to ridicule these individuals,” Mulquin said. “They come in with tattered letters, old stamps. But we have to be careful that the last laugh isn’t going to be on us, because every so often something of quality comes in the most unlikely letter.”

Indeed, some of the Pentagon’s most important breakthroughs in weapons, such as the jet engine and liquid-fueled rockets, have been the result of inventors who doggedly tried to sell their ideas.

The Navy, for instance, fought the introduction of the first practical submarine at the turn of the century and it was only through the decades-long effort by inventor John P. Holland that the service eventually agreed to buy the undersea craft.

One change over the years, however is that most successful proposals nowadays are seldom for entire weapons systems. Rather they are for improvements to an existing product or new components, often electronic.

“We often get proposals for trucks, but a lot of people make trucks,” said C. J. Chatlynne, chief of industrial research and technology at the Army’s Laboratory Command. “If the Army wanted a new truck, we would put out a specification and seek bids.”

The way the Pentagon normally conducts business is based on complex bureaucratic rules that require industry to bid on the military’s own weapons designs. Military leaders rely on dozens of government laboratories to provide them with the latest technology and suggest new weapons. In most cases new weapons and new technology take years to work their way through the government system.

But sometimes a quick-thinking inventor can beat the Pentagon at its own game without spending billions of dollars and without conducting research for a decade.

Location System

A Laguna Niguel firm by the name of Starfind came up with a startling new proposal for a satellite system for geographic location and navigation that would be markedly cheaper than the complex systems now under development by the Air Force.

Richard Halavais, a former aerospace engineer who sometimes carries seven cigars in his shirt pocket, established Starfind three years ago after he became convinced of the need for a satellite-based location system.

“I had my car stolen and the police told me to forget it,” he recalled in an interview. “I thought that was ridiculous, so I sat down and listed the ways I could find something.”

That led to a revolutionary concept that enables a single satellite in a stationary orbit to determine the precise location of a receiver on Earth and to transmit that location to a control center. To cover the entire Earth, he plans a three-satellite system.

In Halavais’ system, a satellite 23,000 miles above the Earth can determine a location within 12 feet. All the more notable is that the Air Force is spending more than $1 billion to develop the Navstar Global Positioning System, which will have a “constellation” of 18 to 24 satellites to do most of what three of Halavais’ satellites would do.

Halavais, who invented a rocket engine valve 30 years ago, is now working under Army contract at Starfind and hopes to launch his first satellite in December, 1988. But his idea alone did not open the Pentagon doors.

“I met a lot of skepticism,” he said. “There is a very, very, very slim probability of success. There is no such thing as a successful unsolicited proposal. The successful ones are the ‘solicited unsolicited proposals.’ ”

Small Firm Scores

In his case, the solicitation came from a friend who is a senior official in the Pentagon, he said.

Astron Research and Engineering, an employee-owned company with operations in Mountain View and Santa Monica, is another small contractor that has successfully sold its ideas to the military.

“If you invest your career in the defense community,” John Huntington, company president, said, “you have a standing in that community and your ideas will be taken seriously.”

One recent success that Astron scored was a remarkably simple but insightful solution to a problem in the space shuttle launching pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base. After the Air Force had spent $3.5 billion building the launch complex, it was discovered that potentially explosive amounts of hydrogen gas could collect inside the exhaust ducts of the pad, posing a catastrophic risk to the shuttle.

Modifications to the launch pad itself would have been very costly and some critics said the launch pad should be abandoned.

Steam Squelches Explosion

But Astron determined that simply by heating the water that is ordinarily sprayed on the pad during launch--to cool ground equipment and to suppress acoustic vibration--enough extra steam would be generated to squelch any explosion. The Air Force awarded the company a $2-million contract to develop the concept.

“We were very happy to see that a technical idea originating with somebody in our own staff solved a problem that had become a nationally discussed issue,” Huntington said.

Next on the drawing board at Astron is an innovation in solar power, which the company has just shown to the Air Force. But it is so new that Huntington declined to discuss it.

Even big contractors rely on the creative spark of one mind. Rockwell International recently scored a major coup with an unsolicited proposal that ousted General Electric from a competition to develop a revolutionary new engine that will power the National Aerospace Plane.

“The concept was the creation of a single individual here at Rocketdyne who is an outstanding person in his field,” said Richard Schwartz, president of Rockwell’s Rocketdyne unit in Canoga Park. Schwartz declined to identify the scientist.

Supersonic Engine

The idea, which is classified, was for the supersonic combustion ramjet engine that will power the aerospace plane from a runway into orbit. Schwartz said the Pentagon decision to drop GE and award Rocketdyne an $85-million contract “is going to encourage me and other people in the future if we have a good idea to be willing to invest in it.”

Not all efforts have such a happy ending. The most ambitious unsolicited proposal in history also became the greatest failure only last year.

Los Angeles-based Northrop invested more than $1 billion of its own funds into the development of the F-20 jet fighter. After unsuccessfully trying to sell the aircraft for six years to foreign air forces, the U.S. Navy and then the U.S. Air Force, Northrop finally dropped the project in 1986.

Today, the remaining F-20 prototype aircraft is housed out of sight in a restricted-access hangar at Palmdale.

“Northrop took such a severe licking on that (project) that I would doubt we would ever see anything of that magnitude again,” said Mulquin, the Navy official who examines unsolicited proposals. “You would be insane to do that again. That is going to rank as a classic.”