“Aye aye, sir.” They came to attention like plebes at the Naval Academy, did a smart about-face and marched out, Rita leading. Jake Grafton bit his lip and resumed work on his report.
19
Somebody explain how this air- plane is going to be used.” Jake Grafton looked from face to face. He had his staff gathered around while he stood at the office black- board with marker in hand. “Who wants the floor?”
“Captain, there’s been two or three studies on that written dur- ing the last three or four years,” said Smoke Judy.
“I know. Somebody dug them out for me and I read them. I want to hear your ideas.”
“Seems to me,” said Toad Tarkington, “that the first thing it has to do is land and take off from a carrier. Must be carrier-compati- ble.”
Jake wrote that down. Obvious, but often overlooked. Any navy attack plane must have a tailhook, nose tow, strong keel, routinely tolerate a six-hundred foot-per-minute sink rate collision with the deck on landing, fit into allotted deck space and accept electrical power and inertial allignnent information from the ship’s systems. It had to be capable of being launched from existing catapults and arrested with existing machinery. In addition, it would have to be able to fly down a 3.5-degree glide slope carrying enough power to make a wave-off possible, and with a low enough nose attitude so that the pilot could see the carrier’s optical landing system. Amaz- ingly enough, in the late 1960s the navy was almost forced to buy a plane that wasn’t carrier-compatible — the TFX, which the air force called the F-111 and immediately began using as an all- weather tactical bomber with a system identical to the A- 6’s.
“Corrosion-resistant,” Tarkington added as Jake made furious notes. “Has to be able to withstand long exposure to salty environ- ment without a lot of expensive maintenance.”
“Maintenance,” muttered Les Richards. “Got to have easy maintainability designed in. Easy access to engines, black boxes and so forth, without a lot of special equipment.”
The requirements came thick and fast now, as quick as Jake could write. Range, speed, payload and a lot of other parameters. After ten minutes he had filled up most of the board and his staff paused for air.
“How’re we going to use this thing?” he asked again. “What I’m getting at is this: these stealth designs appear to be optimized for high-altitude ingress over heavily defended territory. Presumably at night. Are all our missions going to be at night?”
“W can’t afford to give away the day,” someone said.
“What’s that mean in the way of aircraft capability? Daytime means enemy fighters and optically aimed surface-to-air missiles. They’ll see our plane. Do we have to be able to engage the fighters and dodge the missiles? How much G capability do we need? Sus- tained turning ability? Dash speed? CHmb speed? Will we go in low in the daytime? If so, how about ability to withstand bird strikes and turbulence?”
The staff spent an hour on these questions. There was no consen- sus, nor did Jake expect one. No plane in the world could do everything, but any design must meet most of the major require- ments for its intended employment. Shortcomings due to design trade-offs would have to be overcome or endured.
“Weapons.” The ideal plane would carry and deliver every weapon in the U.S. and NATO inventory, and a lot of them. Was that a realistic goal with the stealth designs under consideration?
After four hours of brainstonning, the staff reexamined the pro- posed test program for the prototypes. In the five nights of each airplane that SECDEF had budgeted money and time for, they needed to acquire as much information as possible to answer real questions. Company test pilots had already flown both planes. These five nights of each plane by the navy would have to produce data that verified or refuted the manufacturers’ claims. More im- portantly, the nights would determine which plane was best suited to fill the navy’s mission requirements, or which could be made so by cost-effective modifications.
“We really need more than five flights per plane. Captain,” Les Richards said.
“Five flights are enough for what we want to find out, if we do it right. This little evolution is just a new car test drive with us doing the driving. Five flights are enough for what we want to find out if we do it right, which is precisely what we’re going to do. Henry and Ludlow and Caplinger want a fast recommendation and a fast decision,”
“Don’t they always? Then the paper pushers in SECDEFs office will spend a couple years mulling it over, sending it from in basket to in basket.”
“Ours is not to reason why…”
The pace accelerated relentlessly in the office. Working days lasted twelve hours now, and Jake ran everyone out and turned off the lights himself at 7 P.M. He insisted that no one work on Satur- day and Sunday, believing that the break would make people more productive during the week.
The weeks slid by, one by one.
Jake spent less than half his time in the office and the rest in an endless series of meetings with people from everywhere in govern- ment: SECNAV, SECDEF, OPNAV, NAVAIR, NAVSEA, the FAA, the EPA. the air force, the marines, and a host of others. Most of the time he attended these conferences with Admiral Dun- edin or Commander Rob Knight.
The meetings went on and on, the paper piled higher and higher. The same subjects kept cropping up in different meetings, where they had to be rehashed again and again. Government by commit- tee is government by consensus, and key players from every office high and low had to be listened to and pacified.
Jake felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice as he tried to pin people down and arrive at final resolutions of issues. Meetings bred more meetings: the final item on every agenda was to set the times and places for follow-up meetings.
He discovered to his horror that no one person had a complete grasp of the tens of thousands of regulations and directives that covered every aspect of procurement. At every meeting, it seemed, someone had another requirement that needed to be at least given lip service. He finally found where all this stuff was stored, a li- brary that at last measurement contained over 1,152 linear feet of statutes, regulations, directives, and case law concerning defense procurement. Jake Grafton looked at this collection in awe and disgust, and never visited the place again.
The silent army of faceless gnomes who spent their working lives writing, interpreting, clarifying, and applying these millions of paragraphs of “thou shalts” and “thou shall nots” took on flesh and substance. They came in all sexes, shapes, and colors, each with his or her own coffee cup and a tiny circle of responsibility, which, no matter how small, of course overlapped with that of three or four others.
The key players were all known to Jake’s staff: “Watch out for the Arachnid,” someone would say before a meeting. Or “Beware of the Sewer Rat. He’ll be there this morning.” “The Gatekeeper will grill you on this.” The staff named these key players in the procurement process because of their resemblance to the charac- ters in the game Dungeons and Dragons. When he returned from battle Jake had to contribute to the office lore by recounting the latest exploits of the evil ones.
“It’s a miracle that the navy even owns a rowboat,” Grafton remarked one day to Admiral Dunedin.
‘True, but the Russians are more screwed up than we are. They manage every single sector of their economy like this, not just the military. You can’t even buy toilet paper in a store over there.”
“The bureaucrat factor is a multiplier,” Jake decided. “The more people there are to do paperwork, the more paper there is to be worked and the slower everything goes, until finally the wheels stop dead and only the paper moves.”
“The crap factor: it’s a law of physics,” Dunedin agreed.
Jake took a briefcase full of unclassified material home every night, and after Callie and Amy were in bed he stayed awake until midnight scribbling notes, answering queries, and reading replies and reports prepared by his staff.
He spent countless hours on the budget, trying to justify every dollar he needed for the next fiscal year. He had to make assump- tions about where the ATA program would be then, and then he had to justify the assumptions. Athena was still buried deep, out- side the normal budgetary process. Still he would need staff and travel money and all the rest of it. He involved everyone he could lay hands on and cajoled Admiral Dunedin into
