Tally Ho in the Pentagon

Sir: Mr. Walcott, director of the Geological Survey, has just been in to see me, having seen the President. He has shown me some interesting photographs of Professor Langley's flying machine. The machine has worked. It seems to me worth while for this Government to try whether it will not work on a large enough scale to be of use in the event of war.

—Letter to the Secretary of the Navy from Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, March 25, 1898.

Ever since the time of Rickenbacker and Von Richthofen, the Tom Terrifics of the military forces have been found in the tactical fighter wings. These are the dogfighters. When they engage the enemy, it is for all the chips. There is no such thing as finishing second. They lose and they don't go home. A special breed of cat. As the bomber pilots and the missileers jokingly put it, the fighter pilots are great guys to have around in the clutch, but you wouldn't necessarily want your sister to marry one.

During the Korean War, U. S. fighter pilots, flying mainly the F-86 Sabre, shot down Soviet-built Mig-I5s almost at will. But when American and enemy fighters tangled again, nearly a decade and a half later, it was a much different story. The two hottest fighters were the F-4 Phantom and the Mig-21. In Vietnam, the Phantom could be said to have held its own, but that's about all. It handled the Mig-17s and Mig-19s all right. But the Mig-21 was something else. As the war went on, many Phantom pilots, without actually putting the knock on their fighter, expressed the wish that they had a lighter, quicker-turning warplane under their sticks and less cumbersome weapons under their fire-control switches.

A droop-nosed, hulking airplane (its configuration has been likened to that of a big rat), the twin-engine Phantom was designed by McDonnell Douglas in the Fifties primarily as an interceptor and attack bomber. It was a Navy plane. The civilian leaders of the Department of Defense forced the Air Force, against its better judgment, to buy the Phantom as its first-line fighter. Fighter pilots draw a clear distinction between a fighter and an interceptor. A fighter is for going up against other fighters, head to head at close range. An interceptor can serve as a fighter but usually gives away too much in maneuverability. Many fighter pilots will tell you that the last "pure" U. S. fighter planes were the F-86 Sabre and the F-100 Super Sabre.

In Vietnam, the F-4, with its Mach-2 speed (twice the speed of sound, which varies up to 770 miles per hour, depending on air density), could outpace the Mig-21 slightly and outclimb it, too. But the smaller, suppler Mig could make tighter turns in a dogfight, terribly disconcerting—if not fatal—to the other guy. The Mig was designed to stay home and fight, as an "air-superiority" fighter, and its 30-millimeter cannon and small heat-seeking missiles would do quite nicely for that mission.

The Air Force Phantom was equipped with a 20-millimeter cannon, radar-directed, long-range Sparrow missiles and heat-seeking Sidewinders for close-in work. The Navy and Marine versions of the Phantom had Sparrows and Sidewinders but—to the deep regret of its pilots—no gun at all. Once it had unloaded its missiles, all it had left was its speed to flee the fracas. The problem was compounded, early in the air war, by the high percentage of Sparrows that failed to find their targets. A Pentagon-industry team was rushed to Vietnam to find out what was wrong. They later succeeded in making the Sparrow effective most of the time, but it was touch and go for a while. The Sparrow, after all, was supposed to be the Phantom's chief compensation for the extra shot of quicksilver in the Mig-21. The Mig, theoretically, would never get close enough for the fancy maneuvering that might be fatal to the F-4. The F-4 would pick up the Mig on radar, well beyond visual range, and unleash a Sparrow, which would blast off and blow the Mig asunder with its 60-pound proximity-fuse warhead. The trouble was, the Mig's skinny silhouette made radar detection difficult until it had approached within the fighting range of its own choosing. Moreover, those planes out there, showing up on the Phantom's radar screen, were not always Migs. There was a lot of U. S. cargo and passenger traffic in the air over Vietnam, and the Phantom crews could seldom be certain. Nothing was said about it at the Pentagon, but there were at least three instances of Phantoms' shooting each other down with Sparrows before the rules were changed. Visual identification of a bogey was required before a Phantom crew could fire its missiles. This played right into the guns of the Migs. As a result, other planes were used as scouts for the Phantoms. F-104 Starfighters would fly out ahead of the Phantom and verify, visually, that the blip on the Phantom's radar was, indeed, a bogey. Then the Starfighters would veer off and dart clear and the Phantom would fire its Sparrows. An awkward arrangement. On top of this, the Sidewinders, early in the war, also were unreliable. Clouds buffaloed their infrared homing and guidance systems. The Migs, catching on to this, knew where to zag.

In the autumn of 1968, Major General Marion Carl, then the commander of the Second Marine Air Wing, declared at a symposium on fighter aircraft: "We gave up the guns too soon. Visual identification is required before beginning an attack. It takes five seconds to get a missile off. Five seconds is too damn much when you are in a hassle."

At the same symposium, Admiral John S. Thach, father of the famous Thach Weave fighter tactic that dates back to World War Two, said, "The pilot never gets what he wants. He needs guns whether he has missiles or not. Missiles are a fine weapon against bomber formations. Against enemy fighters, traditional fighter tactics must be employed, and the pilots need guns."

As it had become obvious that the Phantom would never outclass the Mig-21, the Russians had threatened to make matters worse. They rolled out several new models of fighter planes at their Domodedovo Air Show near Moscow in 1967. Most ominous of these was the swing-wing Mig-23, capable of Mach 3 in dashes and, even more portentously, of an acceleration on afterburner (a sort of superhigh gear in jets that involves an extra shot of fuel near the engine's exhaust) that came close to matching flying saucers for streaking out of sight. The Mig-23 first was called, by NATO code namers, the Foxbat. This name later was transferred to the Mig-25, when it came along, and the Mig-23 was designated the Flogger. Fortunately, Floggers were never introduced to the skies over Vietnam. The U. S. had nothing that came close to matching them and, operationally, still doesn't. Floggers easily could have checked the bombing of the north and delayed the withdrawal of U. S. forces. Or worse.

Over Vietnam, the Ling-Temco-Vought F-8 Crusader was considered the Navy's second-line fighter. But the Crusader, used more sparingly than the Phantom, accounted for 18 of the 55 Migs that Navy and Marine jets shot down through out the war. The Crusader's kill-per-engagement ratio turned out to be three times that of the Phantom. What did the Crusader have that the Navy and Marine Phantom did not have? A 20-millimeter cannon. Like the F-4, it also had Sidewinders. But no Sparrows. One Crusader victory over a Mig-17, 22 miles southwest of Hanoi on May 23, 1972, was actually a forfeit, and thus not counted among the official kills. The Mig pilot spotted two F-8s from the carrier Hancock coming at him and bailed out.

The F-4 pilots learned from necessity that they could make their planes do things they never were designed to do. Such as pull eight gs (eight times the force of gravity) in turns, without the wings' falling off. Six and a half gs were supposed to be the most they could withstand. The pilots did well with what they had. They also learned that some of the things the planes could do didn't count for much in dogfights. Rarely were they required to power up to anywhere near the 1400 miles per hour they could attain. The publication Armed Forces Journal International told of how Navy lieutenants Randy Cunningham and William Driscoll shot down three Migs in one day and then had to punch out over the Gulf of Tonkin, on their way back to the carrier Constellation, when their F-4J took a hit from a surface-to-air missile. Both were rescued. Lieutenant Commander Ronald McKeown and his weapons officer, Lieutenant Commander Jack C. Ensch, shot down two Migs on May 23, 1972. According to the Journal, McKeown spotted a couple of Migs and called Ensch on the intercom:

"Tally ho on the ridge line, about five miles."

"Let's get 'em," Ensch replied. "I'm right behind you."

McKeown: "This is business. Quit screwing around."

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As McKeown related the encounter to the Journal: "It looked like there were only two Migs and we thought, 'Man, they're really in over their heads.' But after we made that first turn, it started raining Migs on us. Four Mig-17s. Two Mig-19s. And the two of us. Suddenly, we were surrounded.... In the whole hassle, I don't think we ever flew above 5000 feet. Our wingman, Mike Rabb, got one guy off his tail, shooting at him, by flying between some trees."

By mid-1974, McKeown was the commanding officer and Cunningham, Driscoll and Ensch were among the 13 combat-tested instructors of an intensive fighter-pilot training program that the Navy had set up at Miramar Naval Air Station, California, in 1968, during the especially suspenseful months over Vietnam. The Air Force had instituted a comparable program called Aggressor, at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. Ironically, the Navy program was called Top Gun.

In the spring of 1974, the Tactical Air Power Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee held a "Mig killer briefing." The witnesses were Air Force and Navy fighter pilots who had distinguished themselves over Vietnam. Air Force Major Steve Ritchie, an ace who had shot down five Mig-21s, all with Sparrow missiles, spun a spellbinding account for the subcommittee:

The average Mig battle took place between 5000 and 20,000 feet in sub sonic flight.

The Mig-21—compared with the F-4—is about half the size, it leaves very little smoke, it is very hard to see, it has a lower wing loading and it can turn tighter than we can, and that is very important in an air battle. The F-4, in comparison, is large, bulky, leaves two big smoke trails, easy to see; it does not turn as well but has a little more power and a lot better speed and acceleration—particularly at low altitude—and better weapons.

The average Mig tactic was to hit and run. He liked to take off, stay low, get behind, sneak up behind and fire his heat-seeking missiles and dive away. He was normally very closely controlled by his ground radar controller, who was also a pilot. He was told when to jettison his external fuel tanks, when to go full after-burner, when to arm his missiles and where to break off and where to land. In other words, he was not trained to think for himself very much, and I think this is one area where we have always had the advantage over our adversaries. He seemed to have very little appreciation for vertical maneuvering and mutual support. Often he was not very aggressive. However, there were certain exceptions to this, and I would just like to briefly tell you about my most exciting engagement, which took place on the eighth of July in 1972. It was a definite exception to this general nonaggressiveness of the Mig pilot.

I was leading the egress flight, which means I was the last F-4 flight in. Our job was to be there to protect the rest of the force as they came out. Well, most of the action was normally at the beginning of the mission, so I thought it would be a pretty dull, routine day. I am coming inbound, listening to the Mig CAP [Combat Air Patrol] frequency and, sure enough, the Migs are up, and one of the Chaff escorts—Brenda Zero One—has been hit in the left engine by a missile from a Mig. He is head ed out, his left engine is out, fire light on, bleeding fuel and hydraulic fluid, announcing position, heading and altitude on GUARD—the emergency frequency.

Well, about this time, one of the Mig airplanes—Dallas Zero Four—has a fire light. He is headed out, announcing position, heading and altitude.

Historically, the North Vietnamese ground radar controllers would vector other Migs against our people that were in trouble. So I changed my course and headed in the direction of these two guys who were in trouble, dropped down to low altitude—about 5000 feet—and began to receive good information from Red Crown and Disco. Red Crown is the Navy ship off the coast that provides radar and intelligence information on the mission. And Disco, of course, is the Air Force EC-121 orbiting over Laos and providing that same service.

After about five or six 90-degree turns in tactical patrol formation, I was in the vicinity of Banana Valley about 30 miles southwest of Hanoi. I had just made a turn from a heading of south to a heading of east when I received a key call from Disco. Disco said, "They are two miles north of you." I rolled left to a heading of north and picked up a lead Mig-21 coming in at ten o'clock. I called, "I got a Mig-21 left at ten o'clock level, two miles closing." I rolled left and blew off the external fuel tanks and went full afterburner. We passed canopy to canopy about 1000 feet from each other. He was a spit-polished silver Mig-21 with bright-red stars painted on him. Every other Mig that I had seen—a total of 16 Migs—was a dingy silver. This one was highly spit polished.

I did not see the number-two Mig, and from studying their recent tactics, which was one of the most important things we did during our training, I knew that if I did not see number two in a fairly close fighting wing formation—what they called bearing-of-aircraft formation—that it would be somewhere in trail.

Of course, what they wanted us to do was turn on the first Mig and the number-two Mig would then come in and shoot us down.

I did not see the number two, so I rolled out and headed for the ground in full power, unloaded the airplane and waited. That was a little hard to do, because the shiny Mig was either getting away or he was turning to get in behind me.

Sure enough, here came the number-two Mig, about 10,000 feet in trail. I am down below him now. And as he passed, I went into a left 135-degree-bank, nose-down, slicing turn, about six and a half gs. It turns out to be just about the right amount of turn in terms of energy maneuver ability—in other words, trying to get around the turn and yet maintain energy to fight with.

About halfway through my turn, I picked up the number-two Mig in a right turn, level and high. As I completed the turn, I noticed a large angle-off developing—or what we call a large track-crossing angle.

To reduce this angle, I barrel-rolled to the left, put the Mig in the gun sight. I have the radar in bore sight, which means it is looking through my gun sight. What I did was to put the Mig in the gun sight and lock on the radar with a switch on my left throttle called the auto-acquisition switch. It was a good lock-on. Now I have got to wait [classified] seconds to fire the Sparrow radar missile. I waited, squeezed the trigger twice; they are always launched in pairs for better probability of kill—and it is another [classified] seconds if you do everything right. And that is a long time in an air battle.

The Mig-21 can generate a lot of turn in [classified] seconds. So he saw me and started to turn down into me.

I got the lock-on at about zero-degree to ten-degrees angle-off, and about 6000 feet. About the time the first missile came off the airplane, the Mig had turned into me about five degrees, and he was 45 degrees past my nose, about 4000 feet. I am pulling about [classified] gs, which is very close to the limit of the capability of the missile.

The first missile came off the airplane and went through the center of his fuselage. The second missile went through the fireball.

The Mig broke into two big pieces—a big fireball and a lot of (continued on page 198)Tally Ho(continued from page 116) debris. When the missile hit him, he stopped. I kept turning, rolled out and flew over the top of the left corner of the fireball and took a small piece of debris through the leading edge of my left wing.

At that time, I would have disengaged, thinking the other Mig would also disengage, because every other time that I saw two Migs and one Mig came anywhere near getting into trouble, the other Mig would split. In other words, again, they did not seem to appreciate mutual support.

But now, the first Mig, the shiny guy, hung right in the fight and tried to shoot down my number-four man. My number-four man called and said, "Steve, I have got one on me."

So I started another dive for the ground to pick up additional air speed and energy, which I had lost in the first turn. This time I came hard to the right, a 135-degree bank, a nose-down, slicing turn, about six and a half gs. I came out of that turn in a position on the shiny guy similar to the one that I had had on his wingman just a few seconds earlier. And, by the way, from canopy to canopy on the first pass until the first missile impacted on the wingman, it was 47 seconds. Here is the shiny Mig, and here is my number-four man, and he is getting a good position to shoot at him—the Mig against my number-four man. I came across the circle, rolled up, put the Mig in the gun sight and hit the autoacquisition switch. It was a good lock. I waited [classified] seconds and squeezed the trigger. I had time to get one missile off the airplane.

The Mig saw me, forgot about the number-four man and started a hard turn down into me. He was a little better than his wingman. By the time the missile came off the airplane, he had closed to 3000 feet and was almost 60 degrees past my nose. I was pulling [classified] gs, which is at or beyond the limit of capability of the missile. I was reaching down for my master arm switch, which turns on the gun, in the hope of getting a shot at him as he passed by. The missile came off the airplane, headed straight, appeared to do a 90-degree right turn and smashed dead center into the fuselage. The Mig broke into two pieces, a lot of debris and a big fireball.

At that time, there was another flight of Mig-21s being vectored by the North Vietnamese toward the fight. We had gotten this information from Red Crown and Disco. When I called "Splash," which was our code word for a Mig kill, the North Vietnamese vectored the other flight of Migs back to Hanoi. So we got out of the area, hit the post-mission refueling tanker and returned to Udorn [Thailand].

Within weeks after he testified on Capitol Hill, Major Ritchie retired from the Air Force and returned to North Carolina to run for Congress.

Paradoxically, Ritchie, whose F-4 had a gun, never used it in making his kills, while Navy Commander F. S. Teague, whose F-4 did not have a gun, wished it had. At the hearing, after recounting his own Mig kills, Teague said:

I think it should be mentioned that the Air Force, in its F-4, has an internal cannon, and a very good one, the Vulcan. The Navy F-4 fighter does not have an internal cannon. As a consequence, we found ourselves in the battlefield with Sidewinders and Sparrows. The Sidewinder, of course, is independent of the radar system in the airplane, whereas the Sparrow requires that not only the missile and all its links be "up" but the radar be up as well.

I was in a fight at Quan Lang Air Base in March where I found myself alone, thinking I was good, with four Mig-17s. I felt very comfortable, until all of a sudden the circle kept getting smaller and smaller. I knew I could leave any time just by throwing on the afterburners and running. But once you see a Mig, you want one badly. So I stuck around. In that fight, I had two perfect gun opportunities when the Mig had just stopped going up in front of me, where you fly right through them, and I could have hit him with a basketball, but I had nothing to shoot. I finally did get a missile off in that fight that exploded on the Mig. My wingman thought I had hit him. But a bunch of junk came off of him and I got credit only for damaging him.

Why did the Air Force F-4 have a gun and the Navy F-4 not have a gun? Simple: The Navy hadn't dreamed that the Phantoms would be called upon to shoot it out with cannonaders in Migs, in an air corral over a little land mass in Southeast Asia. The F-4 was to be a longer-ranging fleet-defense interceptor and consequently it was fitted with extensive radar equipment that took up all the space in the nose of the plane. When, in the mid-Sixties, the Air Force realized they were going to need a gun, the F-4 was redesigned and by shifting the radar gear (a tedious, expensive job), McDonnell Douglas opened up enough space to stick the cannon in the nose.

This did not, however, explain the absence of cannons in the F-4s of the Flying Leathernecks. The traditional role of the fighter plane in the Marine wings has been one of clearing and controlling the air over beachheads. This means dog-fights—like those between the Zeros and the Hellcats of World War Two, the Sabres and Migs of the Korean War. What it comes down to is that the Marine Corps buys whatever first-line fighter plane the Navy brass tells it to buy. And in the case of the F-4, it was not the Air Force version but the Navy version that had begun coming off the production lines first. The Navy likes the Marine Corps to share the research-and-development costs of its fighters and help pay the price of their procurement, off the same production lines. Bigger production volume means lower unit prices, better public relations and Congressional relations and Navy budgets that seem lower. This Navy tactic of force-feeding fighters into the Marine squadrons was to appear again, as we shall see, in the stormy developments of the two fighters that were chosen to replace the Navy and Air Force Phantom in the mid-Seventies: the Grumman F-14 Tomcat and the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle. Their development is an outstanding example of the Services' politicking and parochialism, under the same Pentagon roof, all carried out under the banner of a strong national defense. The setting is, of course, the Pentagon.

• • •

Take a tour. Don't begin at the river entrance or at the mall entrance on the adjoining side. Instead, get off the bus from Washington in one of the three lanes that slice under one side of the building. Mount the 27 steps to the Pentagon concourse, an arcade long enough to contain five basketball courts, end to end. Along its length, on any given day, are easel-mounted posters announcing a reunion of the Red River Valley Fighter Pilots Association, or the Eighth Tactical Fighter Wing, or a company of the Green Berets. At lunchtime, now and then, the Singing Sergeants of the Air Force or some other military music group will set up at one end of the concourse to entertain the strolling secretaries and their bosses. In warm weather, the noontime entertainment moves outdoors to the center court, a vast greensward laced with walkways, nestled within the Pentagon's inner walls. Here, the brown-baggers bring lunches from home or from one of the nine snack bars inside the building. Others patronize the luncheon bar, sporting carnival colors, at the hub of the courtyard. Pleasant. Lunch in the park. But not quite. Pentagonians call the center court Ground Zero.

The man usually in charge of the business side of the Pentagon is the Deputy Secretary of Defense. He is the systems man, the hardware man. Save for Robert McNamara, the secretaries themselves have stuck to high policy. This division of duties was especially striking in the first Nixon Administration, when Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird concentrated on getting out of Vietnam, pressing the flesh on Capitol Hill, reassuring our NATO allies and working up the beginnings of the Volunteer Army. He delegated the thorny task of coordinating the Services and their contractors to his deputy, David Packard, the "Mr. Inside" of the two. Packard would show how a man who could cofound and develop a giant West Coast electronics company such as Hewlett-Packard, and make $300,000,000 for himself while at it, could also square away the Pentagon.

Packard tried to do two things that turned out to be mutually incompatible: reform the Services' practices of procuring weapons systems and, at the same time, give the Services more leeway and responsibility in the procurement; impose on them much less than McNamara had the decisions of the civilians. He introduced the concepts of competitive prototyping, fly before buy and design to cost. Taken all together, these boiled down, at a time of severe budgetary constraints, to forcing the Services and their contractors to think ahead more about the cost of a weapon in relation to its performance; to build and test prototypes of weapons, such as airplanes, before the Defense Department would approve their production; and, in general, to quit adding gimmicks and gadgets to weaponry just because some engineer thought it would be dandy to do so.

"What we're trying to do," Packard said, "is get these professional military people—and the Service secretaries—a larger say in the decisions that have to be made. It is difficult for anyone to carry out a decision that has been imposed from above. The F-111 is an example. The Navy was never very enthusiastic about the F-111. It wasn't a Navy decision."

But for all his good intentions, Packard failed to go far enough. He gave the Services too much rope and they hanged him. The denouement was the development of the new fighter planes.

In the Navy's lack of enthusiasm for the F-111—and in the Air Force's resentment, too, at having the Navy F-4 forced upon it by McNamara—lay the seeds of the Great Fighter Plane Battle of the early and middle Seventies. Among the wounded were to be Packard, William P. Clements, Jr., who became Deputy Secretary of Defense in the second Nixon Administration, a whole raft of admirals and generals—and the citizenry at large. Let us begin....

The Navy, unable to unhorse McNamara, played along with him on the development of the bi-Service F-111 until Hughes Aircraft Corporation had enough of the Pentagon's money in pocket to complete design and development of the Phoenix missile. The extra-long-range, uncannily guided Phoenix had been conceived specifically as a weapon for the F-111 in one of its roles—never to be realized—as a Navy interceptor. All the while, the Navy had in mind putting the Phoenix aboard another plane and forsaking the F-111. McNamara would not be around forever.

Victory often comes to those who wait, and soon McNamara was gone. Clark Clifford was in his final month as McNamara's successor. Nixon had won the election and would soon introduce a whole new team to the civilian offices of the Pentagon. The civilian leaders now in those offices were packing their things. The Navy struck. It signed a contract with Grumman Corporation—which, tidily enough, had been chief subcontractor for General Dynamics on the F-111—to build the F-14 Tomcat as the end-all air defender of the fleet for as far into the future as the tacticians could see. Before Packard ever set foot in the Pentagon, the Tomcat contract had him by the tail.

Packard had the option, of course, of ordering the Navy to renege. He approved the contract because it would have been sticky not to do so and because the Tomcat did promise to be a marvelous plane. But he was not happy with the terms. The contract locked the Navy into ordering by a fixed date no fewer than 48 production models of the F-14 beyond the original 12 development models and the first production lot of 26. That was a big commitment for production before the first plane had ever flown. If the Navy were to back away from this commitment, the contract automatically would be broken and Grumman might even be in a position to sue.

Muffling his misgivings, Packard followed through, in the case of the F-14 program, on his theory that the Services should be unfettered in their management of weapons programs. He made it clear that he was giving the Navy its head. Two years later, he was in a mood to hand the Navy its head. What happened in the meantime was ample evidence of the natal agonies of a weapon system when its wonders-to-be warp the judgment of what it will cost or of what it will do.

The twin-jet F-14 is, indeed, some airplane. It was designed to range farther, fly faster, climb higher and pack more wallop than any interceptor ever built. While it possesses some of the features of a fighter, fighter pilots certainly would prefer to call it an interceptor. Its long suits are its fire-control system and its missiles. With his AWG-9 radar and infrared-sensor-computer system, the backseat Missile Control Officer of the Tomcat can track 24 separate targets, from sea level to 80,000 feet, up to 100 miles distant. The silicon chips in the Tomcat's "little black boxes" of electronics are synaptic with six Phoenix missiles, which separately can seek out enemy planes or missiles coming at the fleet from different directions, altitudes and ranges, and with Sparrows and Sidewinders. Plus the F-14 carries a 20-millimeter cannon. The Navy's response to the argument that a Mig-23 or a Mig-25 would overmatch the Tomcat in a dogfight is simply (does it ring a bell?) that neither would ever get close enough to turn on the Tomcat's tail and even then might find the Tomcat too much to handle. The Tomcat's infrared search-and-track system can be used along with its radar or independently. Unlike the radar, the infrared system can detect and track targets without transmitting, which means that it does not break radio silence and cannot be jammed by enemy electronic countermeasures. The infrared system also can count and pinpoint clusters of targets that may show up on conventional radar as mere blobs. Against air-launched and ship-launched missiles, the infrared sensing range exceeds that of the radar. Could not this Mandrakian masterwork of sensors be installed on some fighter already in service? Here is what the Navy, in its self-serving fact sheet on the F-14, had to say about that:

Navy studies show that the F-14 AWG-9-Missiles-Gun combination provides an air-superiority increment equal to that of at least three conventional fighters.... It is equally capable on combat air patrol, on escort or in a dogfight.... This aircraft design has been evolving since 1959.... Navy fighter pilots have been among the most important participants in this evolution, and they have the most to gain or lose by its success or failure. To install the AWG-9 and Phoenix missile on an aircraft of lesser performance would be equivalent to putting Willie Shoemaker on a mule entered in the Kentucky Derby.

Nothing the Navy could have said about the Tomcat would be so persuasive as the spy case that showed how intrigued the Soviets were with the plane. A Soviet employee at the United Nations contacted a Grumman engineer of the Tomcat about handing over its blueprints. The engineer told the FBI about the contact. When he met with the Russian and handed over the blueprints, FBI agents swooped in for the arrest.

A few months after this affair, the Navy pitted the F-14 against the F-4 in eight air duels over Long Island Sound. Each time, the "dogfight" began with the F-4 already in the six-o'clock position, all set to score an electronic hit. And each time, the F-14 pilot wracked into a tight turn, got out of trouble and swiftly reversed the advantage. The Navy and Grumman publicized these trials to the hilt. But some fighter pilots remained skeptical. In their opinion, beating an F-4 proved little, for the F-4 was not a pure fighter.

The F-14 program began to come apart. Production fell behind schedule after a failure of titanium hydraulic lines caused the first F-14 prototype to crash, in its second test flight, off Long Island. Four months later, Grumman told the Navy that it would be "commercially impracticable" to build any more than 38 Tomcats unless the contract were torn up and a new one written that would provide Grumman with an added $2,200,000 per plane. Critics took note that the price increase almost exactly matched the amount by which Grumman had underbid McDonnell Douglas for the F-14 contract in the first place.

When the Navy broke the bad news to Packard, he blew up. First, he was angry with Grumman for not having given advance warning of big trouble ahead. Then he learned that Grumman had been trying to tell the brass in the Navy F-14 program offices for almost a year of the turbulence that lay ahead for the Tomcat program. Packard called a meeting of the Defense Systems Acquisition Review Council and let the Navy have it. When he had finished chewing out the admirals, he stormed from the meeting room, roaring, "You're fired!" at all of them, most notably Navy Secretary John Chafee and Vice-Admiral Thomas F. Connolly, deputy chief of staff for Naval air operations. The next day, Packard called the council back into session but pointedly omitted the Navy. He apologized to the others for his outburst. He said he was drafting a memo ordering the Navy to take a second look—a hard one—at the F-14 program. The participants at that meeting reported that Packard seemed not only subdued but, for the first time in their experience with him, a shade dispirited. The word began to spread that he was sick of the Pentagon and was longing to return to his ranch, secluded in 50 acres of apricot trees, near San Francisco. Six months later, he was gone. So was Connolly. Chafee followed five months later. But Packard had left the Navy something to think about.

He had instructed the admirals to find out whether the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle, a fighter newly in development for the Air Force, could be adapted to the fleet-defense mission. Chuckles of satisfaction could be heard throughout the Air Force suites and in the board rooms of McDonnell Douglas. This could mean sweet revenge against the Navy for having foisted off the F-4 on the Air Force. The situation was ominous for the Navy and for Grumman. The F-15 program, which had counted Packard among its enthusiastic inceptors, was riding high.

The F-15 was designed to make fighter jocks wave their white-silk scarves and show their perfect teeth in exultation. It was their kind of bird—an honest-to-goodness fighter that, unlike any plane ever flown before, could effectively double as an interceptor and as a long-range escort of bombers. It would climb like a rocket, accelerate like a missile. It would not be armed with Phoenix missiles and could afford to disdain them. But it would bristle with Sparrows and Sidewinders at no sacrifice of speed or maneuverability. And it would have a rapid-fire, 25-millimeter cannon. Its "heads-up" radar display would permit the pilot to "see through" the display and still be able to scan the sky around him. He would need no missile-control officer. He would have it all to himself, the way fighter pilots like it. The Eagle's twin engines, generating more than 40,000 pounds of thrust, would make it the first fighter ever with more thrust than weight. Well, not quite. The F-104 had more thrust than weight, but the advantage wasn't worth much. At top thrust, a red light would come on in the cockpit of the F-104 that told the pilot that he had better either slow down or punch out: His fuselage and wings were about to melt. Not so the F-15. Its leading surfaces were titanium and composite-metal, almost impervious to the heat caused by friction. And, best of all, the Air Force—McDonnell Douglas F-15 development program was staying right on target, as to both performance and costs of the airplane. The Air Force planned to buy more than 700 of them and there was nothing to indicate that this plan might be upset. Moreover, it now seemed that the Navy might wind up being dragged into the market for F-15s as well, which would double the market and drastically cut the price of each plane.

Meanwhile, Congress had forced a ceiling price on the Navy and Grumman for the F-14. Grumman said it would go bankrupt. Frantic negotiations dragged on, as the F-14 program foundered, until a new Deputy Secretary of Defense charged into the Pentagon at the beginning of the second Nixon term, confident that he could find a way to keep the F-14 flying.

William P. Clements went to Washington from Dallas with a reputation as a hawk and a half. A multimillionaire with a hard-bitten look about him, he spoke his piece in accents less mellifluous than those of, say, his fellow Texan John Connally, and in utter disregard of subtleties. His penchant for bluntness was illustrated at a Pentagon luncheon in honor of General François Louis Maurin, chief of staff of the French armed forces. Clements accosted Maurin, demanding to know why the French had sold Mirage fighter planes to Egypt in contradiction of the announced French policy of not supplying weapons to any nation that had been involved in the Arab-Israeli Six Day War of 1967. Maurin said he knew nothing of any such sales. "Why don't you know?" Clements asked. "Here they are." And he plopped onto Maurin's place at the table intelligence reports and aerial photographs of Mirages on Egyptian soil.

Dallas computer tycoon H. Ross Perot said of Clements: "If you ever decide to run over him, kill him, don't leave him unconscious. He's as tough as anyone you'll ever meet, and I mean that as a compliment.... Bill Clements could handle anything he wanted to do. There are basically two kinds of people—work horses and show horses. Bill is a work horse."

When he arrived at the Pentagon, Clements took charge of the F-14 issue. He visited Grumman's headquarters at Bethpage, Long Island, to see for himself what was going on. The Grumman people did a little dance after he had departed. He had seemed, according to one of them, "a quick study, a businessman who understands our problems." When he got back to the Pentagon, Clements took another look at the Navy study of the F-15, which Packard had ordered. It said, naturally, that the F-15 would not really suffice. Its landing gear would need to be strengthened, for slamming into carrier decks, and its tail section would have to be equipped with a hook. These additions would mean much more weight. And the F-15 could never, of course, match the F-14 in the range or the firepower that would be needed to combat the anticipated Soviet tactic of saturating fleet defenses with co-ordinated aircraft and missile attacks.

Now Clements really mixed things up. He prevailed upon Dr. Alexander Flax, former assistant secretary of the Air Force for research and development, now president of the Institute for Defense Analyses. Clements instructed Flax to supervise a crash study of the likelihood of using the F-15 on carriers and/or adapting the F-14 to the Air Force mission that had been plotted for the F-15. The Air Force promptly joined the Navy in the sweatbox. Puff sheets on both planes poured out of the Services' publicity shops. Someone from the Air Force slipped into the Navy F-14 program offices a bunch of blown-up color photographs of an F-15 with a tail hook and the marking F-15N—for F-15Navy. The Navy people did not think this was very funny. A 1969 report by a Wall Street investment-analyst firm—Bear, Stearns & Co.—began to look awfully prophetic. It had been published at a time when both the F-14, then called the VFX, and the F-15, then called the FX, were still in the experimental stage. Under the heading "Pentagon Rivalries," the report had said:

How well a new airplane could do against a prospective Russian fighter is probably not really the battle which now matters the most. A much more important and basic consideration is the "Eternal War," that is, the Navy against the Air Force and the Army, all within the Defense Department. It would appear that the Navy created the VFX [F-14] partly from a self-preservation instinct to escape subjugation by the Air Force–administered F-111 program.... The Air Force, on the other hand, has been quite embarrassed in the last few years when circumstances have dictated that it adopt tactical aircraft developed by the Navy.... It appears, however, that the Navy's choice of the VFX concept leaves considerable room for improvement, and an Air Force FX [F-15] could now emerge with significantly better air-superiority performance.... The FX also may be adaptable for use by the Navy.

Clements looked at the studies, heard out the admirals, generals, Service secretaries and corporate executives involved and went before the Tactical Air Power Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee with a plan-on-top-of-plans that left the subcommittee incredulous. He proposed a three-plane prototype competition, with the winner to become the Navy's new fighter: a stripped-down F-14 sans Phoenix missiles and fire-control system; an F-15 reconfigured for carrier duty and a modernized F-4. Clements said this program, replete with "fly-offs" among the three contestants, would cost about $250,000,000 but would settle the issue. The Navy immediately end-ran Clements and leaked its own cost estimate to the subcommittee: $475,000,000. Whatever the cost, the subcommittee asked Clements, why do you need "prototypes" of planes that already, in effect, exist? Where do you think you're going to get the money? Clements said he would answer the first question in detail at a later date. He said he hadn't figured out the answer to the second question. A couple of weeks later, he told the House Armed Services Committee that his prototype-competition program would cost only $150,000,000, because he had decided to eliminate the F-4 from consideration. He said he would get the money for the remodelings and fly-offs by slowing the Navy's conversion of ships and transferring the funds from one place to another in the Navy budget. The House panel seized on this with great fervor. It not only denied approval of the prototype program but also cut from the Navy budget the $187,000,000 that had been requested for conversion of the ships.

During this period, a Grumman public-relations executive telephoned a public-relations executive at Raytheon Company in Lexington, Massachusetts, which makes the Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles. Worrying about the F-14 had long since become their shared pastime. "Don't tell me," said the Raytheon man jocularly, on picking up the phone, "that a Sidewinder has shot down an F-14."

Long silence at the other end and reflections on ESP. "No," said the Grumman man, "it was a Sparrow."

High over the Pacific off California, an F-14 had practice-fired a Sparrow. Instead of dropping ten to twelve feet before its rocket motor fired, the Sparrow gyrated back upward and mashed the fuselage. The F-14 pitched up, caught fire and plummeted into the sea. Fortunately, the Sparrow had been unarmed. The pilot and radar officer were rescued. No one held this mishap against the plane itself. But by now, the cost of each plane in a projected production run of more than 300 had soared to more than $20,000,000 and the Navy publicity mill whirred furiously in behalf of the F-14.

Just in case Clements were to follow through with his scheme to strip the Tomcat of its Phoenix system, the Navy began emphasizing the plane's other virtues. "The F-14 fighter," said a puff sheet, "is not being purchased simply because it can carry the Phoenix missile. This aircraft has many other features not currently available in Navy fighters but which are vitally needed to accomplish the Navy mission. Its air-superiority armament load is flexible...."

The Navy also dragooned the Marine Corps, which had planned to renovate its squadrons with F-4Js. Secretary of the Navy John W. Warner and Chief of Naval Operations Elmo R. Zumwalt began pressuring Marine Commandant Robert E. Cushman to buy F-14s instead. Cushman balked. All three were called to testify before a House committee. Cushman insisted that he wanted F-4Js. Zumwalt claimed that Cushman had made "a bad decision." Warner tried to keep the controversy from flaring any further in public, saying that the issue was still open and that he would make the final decision. Stubbornly, Zumwalt, who had become a zealot for the Tomcat, again referred to Cushman's bad decision. A few weeks later, before a Senate committee, Cushman testified that the Marines now planned to buy F-14s. He was asked why he had changed his mind. "My mission has been changed," he said somewhat sheepishly. Simple. The Navy brass arbitrarily had decided that Marine fighter planes would take on the extra duty of helping Navy fighter planes defend the fleet. To do this, they would have to be F-14s. Senator Stuart Symington, at the time the acting chairman of the Armed Services Committee, accused Warner of "shoving the F-14 down the throats of the Marines." Warner flashed anger in his quick denial. It did not ring true. Neither, for that matter, did Symington's dudgeon. He represented Missouri, home of McDonnell Douglas, maker of the F-4 and the F-15. His concern with resolving the fighter issue was something less than pure.

Now the battle got very rough, indeed. Dispensing with the superficial niceties of interservice rivalries, the Navy fired directly at the F-15, aiming for the Eagle's experimental engine then under development by Pratt & Whitney. A "fact sheet" bearing the headline "The F-15 is Inherently a High Risk Design" was circulated in Congress and in the offices of the Defense Department. It went, including the italics, as follows:

Of the 34 major manned fighter-bomber weapon systems developed by the Air Force and Navy since the Korean War, only three with simultaneous development of new engines, new airframes and new avionics [a perfect description of the F-15] reached full production without major developmental problems. These aircraft were the B-47 and B-52, Air Force bombers, and the F-105, an Air Force fighter-bomber. Among those aircraft which were canceled or limited in production due to simultaneous development were the YF-12, XB-70, F3H-1, F-111B, F-111A, SR-71, B-58 and A-5A. All other aircraft which reached production successfully had only one or two components developed at the same time. The F-14 uses proven engines and avionics, combined with a new airframe—it minimizes risk.

Like magic, the F-15 engine began acting up in tests. In the first ten months of 1973, it broke down several times, causing fires and explosions. By the middle of the year, vigorous Ben Bellis was in hot water at the Pentagon.

Major General Benjamin N. Bellis, U.S.A.F., one of the new breed of techno-managerial generals. His mission: Direct the development of the F-15 and shepherd it into production. Qualifications: U. S. Military Academy, 1946. Degree in military engineering, wings of a pilot. Service with the Strategic Air Command; Air Force Systems Command; Special Weapons Projects Office; Reconnaissance and Electronic Warfare, Aeronautical Systems Division; Legion of Merit with oak leaf cluster; Air Force Commendation Medal with oak leaf cluster; Master Missileman Badge—just to name a few.

Watching General Bellis get into the cockpit of an F-15 was like watching Cinderella dance with the prince. Bellis would have done anything to bring off the F-15 program. He did one thing that he probably should not have done, in terms of furthering his own career, but that, as it turned out, may have been the best thing at the time for his program. He relaxed the performance requirements of the F-15 superengine just before it was put to final testing in the air. The Defense Department and the Air Force had specified that those requirements—unrelaxed—were to be met or exceeded before the engine could be committed to production. Bellis had the authority to make his decision, but he made the mistake of not immediately telling his Air Force or Defense Department superiors what he had done. He just told them that the engine had passed its air tests. They then released $38,000,000 to Pratt & Whitney to get the engine production started.

This might have gone unremarked had not the engine encountered severe problems during a 150-hour endurance testing. Run up to maximum thrust for long periods of time in a ground chamber that simulated high-altitude atmospheric conditions, the engine's turbine blades kept breaking off. Over one stretch, more than half of the 64 blades had to be replaced and their cooling tubes strengthened. They were overheating badly. The Air Force felt faint about it. The original deadline for the testing passed, with the engine still partially disassembled in the aftermath of the latest of the fiery failures. Finally, the engine passed the test. But the Air Force, already committed to its production and staking the whole future of the F-15 on its performance, was forced to spend more millions on "engine component improvement." A big black cloud had settled over the F-15. Maybe the engine would pan out and maybe it wouldn't.

Bellis said of his decision to ease the engine's air-test strictures: He had been justified because the test pilots had found that the F-15 airframe induced less drag than its designers had anticipated. This meant that the engine could be checked out at lesser power and the combined performance of the airframe and the engine (the aircraft as an entirety) still would surpass the standards.

"No other engine ever built could have passed that modified test," Bellis snorted, "and still I have to walk into Washington with my tail between my legs."

Not long after all this, Bellis was told that he would be reassigned as commander of the Air Force Systems Command's Electronic System Division at Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts. This appeared to be a natural progression in his career. He had seen the F-15 through development and into production. Despite the trouble with the ground-chamber testing of the F-15's engine, the power plants of the Eagles already in the air were performing superbly. So the reassignment probably was no knock on Bellis. Still, some in the Pentagon said that he would have preferred to stay with his first love, the F-15, because it was not yet fully out of the flak. They said his move could be assessed as a boost upward or a shove sideways only later, when his promotion fell due.

While in charge of the F-15 program, Bellis figured in two incidents that showed how passionate, even puerile, the rivalry between the Air Force and the Navy over the fighter planes had become. Addressing a convention at Edwards Air Force Base, California, the F-15 flight-test center, Bellis extolled the F-15 as the fighter capable of "gaining and maintaining air superiority for the United States through air-to-air combat, using nonnuclear weapons, in the post-1975 period." When Bellis had finished praising the F-15's "firsts," a Navy F-14 pilot in the audience challenged, in all seriousness, the Air Force to a duel between the Tomcat and the Eagle, using live ammunition. To the relief of the dumb-struck audience, Bellis showed maturity by not responding in kind. Privately, he must have seethed.

On the subject of possible dogfights, Air Force Colonel Frank Bloomcamp and Navy Commander Rene "Call Me Sam" Leeds agreed on one thing: The F-4 Phantom, which both had flown in combat over Vietnam, left an awful lot to be desired. Bloomcamp, with a big grin, called the F-4 "dog meat" in comparison with the fighter he now flies in the Tactical Air Command. Leeds, less assertive, recalled that he'd had trouble seeing to the rear in the F-4, that the Migs had been especially troublesome "at close quarters, in pop-up situations" and that adapting the F-4 to fighter tactics had been "like trying to make a Cadillac into a small sports car." So much for the F-4. The issue now was the Eagle, Bloomcamp's baby, versus the Tomcat, Leeds's new love. Which would win if the two superfighters, the subjects of so much bitter controversy between the two Services, were to go at it, missiles to missiles, gun to gun, speed to speed, turn to turn? Bloomcamp and Leeds disagreed, of course, on the outcome.

I interviewed Bloomcamp one clear blue day at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington as he made ready to strap on his parachute. In a few minutes, he would pull shut the canopy of his sky-blue F-15, taxi out and, in less than 30 seconds, literally fly the fighter out of sight in a near-vertical climb. How would he do battle with the F-14? Would he win?

"Sure, I'll be glad to talk about it," Bloomcamp said. "Yes, I could take him, especially if he wanted to come into me and try to turn with me. If he got the six-o'clock position on me, I'd use the turn performance I've got in this airplane and make him overshoot. My airplane lets me exploit classic tactics to the maximum, at all ranges. At long range, maybe we'd both be shot down early in the fight. He's got the Phoenix; but I've got the Sparrow, and it's a lot better bird than it used to be. It could go out and get him. Just give me one chance to find him and lock on. That's all I should need. I'd probably see him better. He's got a second man, but the second man is busy looking at the displays. I've got the best cockpit visibility any fighter has ever had. I think my radar is better than his. I've got the good look-down radar. If we both missed with the radar missiles, I'd keep coming. I'd keep pressing the attack. Everything I did would be aimed at accomplishing one thing: getting around behind him, where he wouldn't see me. As I come in, I shoot the IR [infrared Sidewinder] missiles. If he's not dead by then, I go on in and get him with the gun. I go from maximum-detection range right on up to his tail pipe."

By the time I interviewed Leeds, he was deskbound at the Pentagon, as the Navy's F-14 program coordinator. Leeds had commanded the first F-14 training squadron at Miramar Naval Air Station. The squadron had just gone operational aboard the carrier Enterprise. "I wish I were back with them," he said. "I'm eager to see us explore the tactics. We don't know yet just how much this airplane can actually do and I believe it will be even better than we expect."

Could he defeat the F-15? Leeds nodded. But he said he preferred to discuss the relative merits of the F-14 and the plane it was replacing in the fleet—the F-4—and leave the F-15 out of it. On being told of Bloomcamp's confidence of victory in the F-15, Leeds allowed the Air Force pilot his privilege but said that confrontive comparisons served no purpose: "I'd rather not play that game."

"The best thing in any air-to-air combat," the commander continued, "is to get the quick kill. The longer you stay in the fight, the more risk you run—in any airplane—that somebody will get in behind you. The quick kill is the key to the F-14. It has the Phoenix and the Sparrow and the radar-fire-control system that gives you a God's-eye view; continuous, automatic mapping and lock-on. The whole picture out there. You can preempt six targets all at once with the Phoenix, at very long ranges. It makes no difference whether you are up against missiles or a numerically superior fighter threat. The F-14 gives you selective, intelligent engagement. The radar even tells you which target you should shoot at first, and when you do, it picks out the next. And not only at long range. The first Migs to face us would get missiles shot at them from very close quarters. That's something they've never seen before."

But what would happen if the F-15 penetrated the F-14's picket of missiles?

"It would be very interesting," Leeds said. "It would be a two-man air crew against one man. The F-14 has an excellent turn rate, too. We've pitted the F-14 against the T-38 and the F-86, which is probably the best-turning aircraft ever developed up to now, and we've been beating both of them in the dogfight."

About a month after the interviews with Bloomcamp and Leeds, an intriguing story began to surface at the Pentagon. It seemed that Chief of Naval Operations Zumwalt, prior to his retirement, had challenged Air Force Chief of Staff George S. Brown, prior to his becoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to a dogfight "fly-off" of the two fighters. Brown accepted. The Eagle and the Tomcat did not actually go up against each other; rather, their performances were measured by data-processing devices, mounted aboard, which computed such dogfighter vital signs as sustained g force, maximum g force, turn rate, turn radius and thrust. In each category, according to the charts, the F-15 was the clear winner. The Pentagon kept the results classified.

Then Senator Thomas F. Eagleton criticized the Pentagon for "covering up the test results showing the F-14 to be an inferior aircraft, in order to preserve the pride of the Navy." Eagleton's motives were impugned at the Pentagon. McDonnell Douglas is his constituent. But he had gained access to the fly-off charts and he was firing at the F-14 from six o'clock. "I am especially concerned," Eagleton said, "that the U. S. Government may have given erroneous information about the two planes to the government of Iran, in order to bail out Grumman. The F-14 might have been adequate in the air-combat role if the F-401 engine it was designed to take had worked out. But with the 12-year-old TF-30 engine, it is nothing more than a Tom Turkey, the name assigned to it by Navy and Air Force pilots alike." His reference to Iran concerns the second of Bellis problems with the F-15.

It occurred at an air show of the two fighters at Andrews Air Force Base. Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi of Iran had come to the United States to shop for some American weapons. Iran was already on its way to possessing the finest air force in the Middle East. But the shah, himself a pilot, was not content. Soviet Foxbats, more heavily armed and longer-ranging than their pure-fighter predecessors in the long line of Migs, had been casing his kingdom from altitudes up to 80,000 feet. The shah wanted a plane that could go up there, if need be, or at least fire up there, and get them. He had his eye on the F-14 and the F-15. The Pentagon showed them off for him.

The F-15 pilot demonstrated the Eagle's near-vertical take-off, rate of climb, slow approach, fast approach, acceleration and landing, keeping it simple and straightforward. But the F-14 pilot did all that and more: Immelmann turns, fancy rolls, upside-down passes. That night at the Pentagon, several Air Force officers groused about what had happened at Andrews. "We had agreed with the Navy," said one, "that the demonstrations would be limited to specific maneuvers. The Navy turned it into a stunt show, hot-dogging."

Bellis, who had been there, brushed it off. He had briefed the shah on the F-15 on three occasions prior to the show, at least once in Teheran, and was satisfied that the shah, if he had any sense, would favor the F-15 in the end. Bellis speculated that even the shah would balk at the $20,000,000 for the F-14 compared with under $15,000,000 for the F-15. But the shah fooled him.

Early in 1974, His Highness signed up for 30 F-14s at about $900,000,000. The Air Force offered to sell the shah 53 F-15s to go along with the F-14s and was led to believe, by the Defense Department officials, that the sale probably would go through.

Air Force Secretary John L. McLucas estimated that an Iranian order for 53 F-15s would save the Air Force $150,000,000. But the shah turned down the Air Force offer and signed up, instead, for another lot of 50 F-14s, for an additional one billion dollars. The Air Force generals were livid. Stories spread like wildfire in the Pentagon. One of them suggested that the Defense Department had juggled figures to make the F-14 less costly than it really was and to make the F-15 more costly than it really was. Why? To go along with the Navy in trying to save Grumman's solvency and to make sure that the F-14 program did not meet an untimely death for insufficiency of funding by the Navy alone. Another story had it that overseas salesmen of McDonnell Douglas had pushed the shah too hard to buy F-15s and that he had reacted petulantly by buying more F-14s. Yet another version, the most logical, was that the shah had decided to buy only one type of fighter in order to simplify the logistics—the spare parts, ground-support equipment, training and the like—and that he was looking forward to augmenting the F-14 not with the F-15 but with one of the newer, lightweight fighters coming along. Whatever, the Air Force was down, the Navy up. But not for long.

Moments later, it seemed, Grumman came knocking on the Navy's door, like a panhandler from the past, demanding another multimillion-dollar escalation of funding and threatening once again to shut down F-14 production unless its contract were revised. The Navy pleaded and Congress grumpily agreed. The issue subsided for a while—until Grumman went back to the Pentagon yet again, only a few months later. The company had been unable to get bank loans to tide it over until April 1975. It was in the nasty predicament of not having enough cash to continue to meet its payrolls. The Navy had been "advancing" (Pentagon code word for lending) Grumman money at a rate of interest so far below the prevailing commercial rate as to be laughable. These advance payments had amounted to about $54,000,000. Now Grumman wanted another $45,000,000 or so and the Navy, in asking Congress for permission, had to reveal publicly the scope and interest rates of the advances outstanding. Even though the Navy agreed to increase the interest rate on the next loan to a level more like that of the real world, the Senate voted overwhelmingly and angrily to let Grumman get its loan from commercial banks like everyone else. Even F-14 buff Barry Goldwater took this position.

In October 1974, a consortium of U. S. banks and the Bank Melli of Iran solved Grumman's problem for the time being by lending the company $200,000,000. This enabled Grumman to pay back the money that the Navy had advanced, maintain its cash flow and meet its payrolls, continue F-14 production at a steady pace and look ahead to rolling out 80 Tomcats for the air arm of the Imperial Iranian Armed Forces, beginning in 1976. Irony lay heavily in all this. Shortly after the announcement of the loan to Grumman, President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made back-to-back speeches in which they hinted of drastic measures against the oil-producing nations unless those nations lowered the price of oil, which was threatening to undo the economies of the U. S. and, more immediately, of western Europe. In quick response, the shah reminded Ford that in the battle over oil prices. Iran, as a member of the oil-cartel Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, stood squarely on the side of his Arab neighbors. Was it possible that the U. S. would be forced to take the ultimate antitrust action and someday have to fight against F-14s and other American-made weapons in the Middle East?

Withal, the Great Fighter Plane Battle inside the Pentagon had wrung out both the F-14 and the F-15 programs and both Services, too. Neither fighter, it seemed, would be produced in anywhere near the quantities that the Air Force and the Navy had counted on in the beginning. The fighters would be augmented, instead, by greater numbers of a new breed of bird, much lighter, less costly, less sophisticated in electronics and weaponry, but superior even to the F-15 as a clear-weather dogfighter. These would be the quick-turning, swift-sprinting fighters that American pilots had lacked over Vietnam. The need for these new planes—first called Lightweight Fighters and then Air Combat Fighters—was demonstrated by the war in Southeast Asia and clinched by what happened over the Middle East in the Yom Kippur war of 1973. In three weeks of combat, the losses of Israeli planes to surface-to-air missiles was eye-popping: more than 100, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. This gave pause to the Pentagon as it shaped and sized its air wings of the future. The heavy attrition of equipment to modern air-defense weapons is sufficient in itself to militate against forming air forces exclusively with planes costing $15,000,000 to $20,000,000 apiece, such as the F-15 and the F-14. One F-15 might be as good as two or three lightweights, but when it has been shot down, there is nothing left and the air is the enemy's. The new Air Combat Fighters chosen for Air Force production early in 1976 also caught on in Europe, where NATO nations lined up to buy them as replacements for the aging American-made fighters in their inventories. The shah, naturally, indicated that he would be in the market for the Air Combat Fighters, too. This just about eliminated any chance of his ever buying the F-15, which had become too high-priced for the European market as well. The Eagle had been caught in the middle, but its manufacturer was fighting back.

As 1974 drew to a close, McDonnell Douglas persisted in trying to sell F-15s to the shah and in Europe. Moreover, the company made the Defense Department and the U. S. Air Force an intriguing offer: It would sell them 1000 or so F-15s at about the same price they would pay for the same size fleet made up of a combination of Air Combat Fighters and F-15s. The extra quantity of F-15s would enable the company to lower the unit price and enable the Air Force to have an all-F-15, all-weather fighter force, thus simplifying the maintenance, spare-parts handling and pilot training. This proposition embarrassed the Pentagon, which tried to keep it quiet. The Air Combat Fighter was where the action lay now, and McDonnell Douglas was mucking up the scenario. The Pentagon likes to feed as many airplane manufacturers with new contracts as it can. If it were to buy all planes of any one type from one company, other companies would die. In dealing with an aerospace industry that operates, in its best years, at a grossly inefficient 60 percent of capacity, the Pentagon's approach is to hand out as much money as it can to as many companies as possible, rather than concentrate its aircraft procurement on a few companies and let the others adjust to the commercial market or go out of business. This may seem to be in keeping with the concept of free enterprise, but it really isn't. It amounts to subsidies. The Air Force and the Navy always seem to find a mission for an airplane that a marginal company might be able to produce and then see to it that the marginal company gets the business. This makes for a Pentagon-regulated industry and for much confusion and waste in aircraft procurement.

There will be still more goodies for the industry even after the Air Force and the Navy become fully stocked with F-14s, F-15s and Air Combat Fighters. The Services are already deep into "advanced" fighter technology, involving new concepts of propulsion, aerodynamics, electronic controls and the broadening use of composites as replacements for conventional metals. The Air Combat Fighter program started out as a "technology demonstration" program, and just as surely as it led to production of new planes, the new technology program will, too. The one sure thing about a new superfighter is that it quickly will be superseded. As they say at the Pentagon: If it has already flown, it is already obsolete.