Why Test the Weapons? Pentagon Just Grades Itself : Defense: Only recently, after 10 years and $30 billion, has the Defense Department admitted there might be some problems with the B-2.
Ideally, if you want to find out if an assumption is true or if a machine works, you test it, using people knowledgeable enough to read the test results and impartial enough not to care how they come out. The Pentagon does things differently, though. Whenever possible, it prefers not testing its weapons, but, when forced to do so, it will sacrifice knowledge to ensure the tests remain in biased hands.
This game was afoot once again when, a decade into the B-2 program, the Pentagon admitted, for the first time, that there were, well, problems with the B-2’s stealthiness and its structural soundness.
An even more central question than A) “Is the plane worthwhile?” is B) “How is it that the government still doesn’t know the answer to A?” Thinking about B gets at the moral of the great stealth-bomber disaster: The Department of Defense keeps serving up extravagant, unnecessary and shoddy weapons because it consistently fails to subject them to independent evaluation.
One device the government relies on to keep evaluation in-house and under control is excessive secrecy. The suppression of information about the B-2 has gone way beyond the legitimate need to protect national security and proprietary technology. The Air Force has never publicly discussed when the B-2 will first be flown at night; it has never publicly admitted that the bomber’s ability to meet minimal requirements for radar survivability or basic flying qualities won’t be known until late 1993, at the earliest.
The Air Force did put out something called a “B-2 Maturity Matrix” that’s a general description of the plane’s testing schedule, but only those cleared for the program are allowed to see it--even though the Air Force admits that every sentence of the document is unclassified. Similarly, the Air Force says it first learned about the plane’s disappointing level of stealthiness in July, but didn’t disclose it until mid-September. Only in Washington does this count as candor.
Here are two ways to pass a test: Learn the material or pay someone to give you a good grade. The Pentagon prefers the latter, because, with a little effort, it can be made to look like the former. For example, the budget authorization for the B-2 makes the plane’s funding dependent on favorable evaluations from the DOD’s director of Operational Test and Evaluation (OT&E;) and from its Defense Science Board (DSB). Sounds formidable, huh? Sure--until you find out that, for example, John E. Krings, the director of OT&E; during some of the most crucial years of B-2 development, now pulls down a nice piece of change as a consultant for the B-2’s prime contractor, Northrop Corp.
The DSB, which has signed off on the B-2 thus far, isn’t exactly Nader’s Raiders either. James G. Roche was on the DSB in the middle ‘80s, at the same time he was a Northrop vice president. A retired two-star Air Force general, Jasper Welch, was also on the board then--while serving as a Northrop consultant.
The current DSB includes representatives from Boeing, Hughes, BDM International and General Electric--all substantial subcontractors on the B-2. One active member, Sol Love of BASLE Corp., made several hundred thousand dollars a year working in Northrop’s B-2 headquarters throughout the 1980s. Another, Donald A. Hicks, is a retired senior vice president of Northrop who, as part of his pension, received company stock worth around a half-million dollars--provided the B-2 keeps getting approved. Small wonder, then, that it does.
If you were hoping that higher levels of the defense bureaucracy might supply some effective counterweight to this built-in bias, hope again. Sen. J. James Exon (D-Neb.), a B-2 proponent since the plane’s earliest days and the chairman of a key Senate Armed Services subcommittee, was recently asked by a caller on C-SPAN if he had ever taken any PAC funds from a B-2 contractor. Exon proudly said he hadn’t--for the past two years. A follow-up call to Exon’s office revealed the situation was more compromised than that. “The senator misspoke,” an Exon aide explained. “He thought the caller was talking about honoraria from Northrop. Yes, he has received PAC money from Northrop within the past two years.”
When Gen. John T. Chain, the previous head of the Strategic Air Command--the part of the Air Force that so desperately wants the B-2--retired from the Air Force, do you know what corporation’s board he joined? That’s right--Northrop’s. Gee, do you think that might have sent a little message to the current head of SAC about how he should shade his account of the latest B-2 revelations?
The problem infects the White House, too: Before coming to work for President Bush as his national- security adviser, Brent Scowcroft was a Northrop consultant. Does this help explain how the B-2 program survived Bush’s dramatic nuclear-disarmament announcement intact?
There is an upside to the recent bad news about the B-2. Since we know what evaluation structures were used to “certify” the B-2’s performance, we know what evaluation structures to overhaul. Four specific reforms are called for:
1) Transfer weapons testing from the direct and indirect control of defense contractors to independent outside evaluators. Taking matters out of the hands of such bodies as the DSB does not mean cutting experts out of the process. Surely, there must be disinterested academic experts who would be glad to serve the money-saving, nation-strengthening cause of weapons evaluation. Instead of slamming doors marked “Top Secret” in their faces, let’s invite them in to help do some of the nation’s most important work.
There should only be one requirement binding on them besides expertise: They must have no financial ties to DOD or the defense contractor they are evaluating.
2) Have more service cross-pollination in weapons testing . In college football, Air Force’s big games aren’t intramural scrimmages--they’re against Army and Navy. Try that with weapons: Let the Navy and the Army say how they would attack the Air Force and vice versa. There are plenty of experts in uniform who can help do weapons assessments. The trick is to abide by one simple rule: No service member can evaluate his own service’s weapon.
3) For once and for all, shut the revolving door. Civilian and uniformed employees of DOD must be banned from the defense industries--at least for 10 years or so, the life-span of a typical procurement contract.
4) Allow more press coverage of weapons tests. Yes, this would mean potential enemies could keep better track of our failures. But if the Pentagon knew its weapons tests were covered, it wouldn’t be so willing to coddle losers--so loosening press restrictions would strengthen the U.S. arsenal.
If we enact these reforms, we could still salvage something worthwhile from the $30 billion already blown on the B-2--something far more valuable than a bomber that works. A Department of Defense that works.
