Nuke the Pentagon

David Hackworth joined the U.S. Army in 1946, when he was 15 years old, and quit with the rank of colonel in 1971. Along the way he was awarded more than 80 medals for valor and eight Purple Hearts for wounds sustained in combat in Korea and Vietnam. In 1989 he published the best-selling "About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior," co-authored by Julie Sherman. Hackworth stays in close touch with soldiers and wars. He provided distinguished reporting for Newsweek during Desert Storm and more recently from Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia. He is one of America's preeminent military journalists and has fought in or reported on eight wars. Playboy asked him for his assessment of the U.S. military at the end of the 20th century.

Now that the Cold War is over, the only military entity that threatens the U.S. is our own defense establishment. If we want to save ourselves militarily, we must destroy the way the U.S. military is run. That means shutting down the Pentagon. It is a corrupt, bleak place filled with many people whose mind-set is warped by traditions that are as obsolete as the sword. It is also the anchor of the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC), which has to be dismantled as well. The Cold War created a military Frankenstein that must be destroyed to free our national energies for more constructive ends.

The first step in the process is to terminate the role of the Pentagon and to move military headquarters as far as possible from the slime and corruption of Washington, D.C., and the armyof Beltway bandits. The new HQ would be the center of a brand-new entity--the American Peace Force (APF), which would unify our current military branches into a single service. The Armyand Marines would become a single ground force supported by one air arm formed from the air forces of each of today's services. The Navy would also cease to exist as a power unto itself and would join the united team. These moves would eliminate interservice rivalry and gross duplication, which cost us money we do not have and, in combat, make unity of command impossible and casualties from "friendly fire" all but certain.

Turning off the lights in the five-cornered concrete squirrel cage would also have powerful symbolic value. It would signal to the world that we've closed an era and that we're putting America's real priorities--problems at home--into focus.

The Pentagon is incorrigible and impervious to reform from within. The awful twin of its dead Kremlin counterpart, it has had no master. It must be put down like a mad dog.

If we started moving people and jobs to the new HQ immediately, the transfer could be complete by the year 2000. Then, the APF would be cocked and locked to meet the many challenges of the world. But don't let the Pentagon building rot. Turn it into a hospital for sociopaths and the criminally insane. Only they would truly appreciate the weird, evil, distorting vibes that ricochet through its corridors.

•

If you work at a place where the sole purpose is self-perpetuation and where there is a concentration of death and destruction, you will find that personality distortions are inevitable. Hangmen seldom like ballet.

I saw it from inside after I finished my first tour in Vietnam. I wanted to go to Fort Benning to teach leaders how to fight the Viet Cong, but I was ordered to a make-work desk job at the Pentagon. I refused to go, but a senior officer laid down the law: If you don't come to the Pentagon, your career will be over. He also tried to stress how valuable the experience would befor me. "Pentagon duty is a must," he told me. "This is the place where the stars are made."

I served five tours in Vietnam and one at the Pentagon. I quickly understood why the vibes there were so bad. On one occasion I ghosted an article for a major general that appeared in Army magazine. I didn't mind that he took the byline, but when he also took the check, I asked for my dough. He refused to part with it and claimed he was going to use it for an office party. I never saw the party. This puke went to four stars.

The real problems of the place were not so petty. I tried to do something about what I had decided was the biggest mistake the Army was making in Vietnam--rotating combat officers too frequently. Just when a leader got it together and learned how to fight Uncle Ho's military machine, he would be pulled out and given another job. The entire military career system is based on these regular changes of assignment. It's called punching your ticket, or getting the right jobs in the right order so that you rise in rank. Back then the Pentagon wanted to have as many combat-seasoned people as possible ready to fight the Soviets.

In the war we were losing in Vietnam, that policy was a disaster. A CO should stay with his unit like bark on a tree, because he is the continuity, the institution, the memory, the fatherand mother. This was especially important in Vietnam because the war was so goddamn complicatedthat it took time to learn its nature and how to fight it. Whenever a commander got his ticket punched, his shift gutted the unit. The military did it repeatedly. We lost a winnable tacticalwar preparing to fight an unwinnable, mostly nuclear war against the Soviets.

Many leaders wanted to spike the rotation policy. When I triggered a paper about how to fix things, I was optimistic. After a few months, the paper made its way through the bloated bureaucracy and, ironically, came to my office for action. It looked as if the civilians in the Pentagon's powerful E Ring bought my idea, and the strange Pentagon system was now giving me opportunity to approve my own idea. Far out. I was ready.

"The man says to shoot it down," my boss told me. That was the guidance he had received fromthe top ranks, nearly all of whom were master ticket punchers and wheeler-dealers.

"I ain't doing it," I said. They went to some staff weenie and got him to write this fuckingpaper that said the existing rotation policy was a great idea, just fine. The rotation policy stayed the way it was and tickets kept getting punched for eight fucking years while men kept getting killed, until we lost the war with Nixon's "peace with honor."

•

The Pentagon system has always tried to squash mavericks, and it has always been mavericks such as George Patton who win wars. Bill Carpenter was a maverick when he was the Lonesome End on the 1958 and 1959 West Point football teams, and he somehow managed to stay that way. I knew him in combat, and he was the kind of guy who said what he thought. He was a total professional, a Patton-like fighter and a great commander. He wouldn't compromise. He rocked the boat. We need people like him at the top. They keep the system straight, build hard units and make tough but honest calls.

Carpenter hated the Pentagon. He avoided it through nearly all his career and stayed with troop commands. The Pentagon went nuts when he refused ticket-punching assignments, but Carpenter didn't care. He was famous and he was good, so he survived. He got three stars, but there was no job for him above three stars because he wouldn't sell his soul and become what warriors call a "Pentagon pussy." He retired at 54. America lost a rare and uniquely talented leader.

We both knew a man who was very outspoken when we were with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam in 1966. There had been some heavy fighting. After one firefight this lieutenant was raging and raising hell. He smashed down his M16 in front of his CO, declaring it a piece of junk: "I had two soldiers killed because this rifle jammed. Why don't they get the teething problems out before they give us the goddamn things?"

He went on to become a great warrior and I was proud to see him become a major general. I ran into him when I was lecturing about some of the problems I had seen in my visits with soldiers at bases around the country. One problem I mentioned was a new weapon the Army was introducing that often didn't work. I wanted the people in the audience, people with the power to fix things, to know about it.

In the question-and-answer period after my talk, my old pal referred to the controversial weapon. "Hack, you're barking up the wrong tree on that one," he said. "That's a good weapon. I've fired it many, many times. It's dynamite. So cool it."

I did, and we moved on to other subjects such as why the Army didn't have a decent shoulder-fired antitank weapon or a new family of infantry weapons.

A few weeks later somebody sent me a copy of a letter from the Chief of Staff of the Army to the manufacturer of the weapon. It threatened to cancel the contract.

I sent a note to the major general and included with it a copy of the letter. "I guess I wasn't barking up the wrong tree," I wrote. "What have you got to say?"

He replied that it was a good weapon, even if it had a few small problems. It was a brush-off letter. "It just has teething problems," he wrote. "All new weapons have teething problems."

Teething problems. CRS is a disease in the military, and it's a plague at the Pentagon. It means Can't Remember Shit.

Nearly all of today's top brass served in Vietnam. They may recall Vietnam but, like my friend the major general, they don't really remember it. If they did, they would put their hard-learned lessons into practice. If the Pentagon did remember, today's grunts wouldn't be packing Vietnam-vintage rifles and gas masks and wearing the boots that their fathers wore. If the Pentagon really understood the lessons of Vietnam, it would not have allowed the dangers of friendly fire to remain unattended.

Close air support is what they call efforts of the fly-boys to help grunts fighting on the ground. It can be terrifying and deadly, as I know. I was bombed and strafed from one end of (continued on page 176)The Pentagon(continued from page 120) Korea to the other by U.S. air. And the same thing happened to me in Vietnam. When I was covering Desert Storm, it happened again.

"Incoming," a Green Beret NCO yelled. He thought the Iraqis were shelling us.

"Incoming, hell. That was our own air," I said. I could see the U.S. plane climbing away. Ithad dropped two 500-pound bombs within our perimeter. One fourth of all American casualties in Desert Storm were caused by U.S. air power.

•

Did Desert Storm provide any lessons about the dangers of the current system, especially about the lethal consequences of continued interservice rivalry? It certainly did. But one of the most important lessons and most effective weapons has been deliberately abandoned.

The performance of the Air Force's A10--the Warthog--was a happy surprise for Schwarzkopf's troops. It turned out to be one of our best weapons in the desert. It was perfect for close air support because it flew slowly and could loiter and make deadly passes over a target. The pilot could get a clear view of targets and could talk to the grunts on the ground. And the Warthog could take hits and keep on flying. I saw some A10s that had more holes in them than Saddam Hussein's tanks. They limped back to base and three days later they were up kicking ass and painting Iraqis red. The A10 was so heavily armored that it was as if the pilot were wearing a steel bathtub for a flak jacket.

Goodbye Warthog. The most effective killing machine of the war--the one most feared by the Iraqis--has been retired from frontline duty. It has been replaced by the Air Force F-16. The F-16 is a fast burner, which means a pilot can't hang over the battlefield and get to know where everything is. One rifle slug can zap it. It's designed for other missions, not just close air support, because that was what the Air Force wanted. Historically, the Air Force has never given a rat's ass about close air support. It always plays second fiddle to other tasks such as interdiction bombing. That's why the Army has helicopter gunships. It doesn't trust the Air Force.

It doesn't make sense if the users--the troops on the ground--do not have control of the close air support that is supposed to help them. It's as if the post office kept all thefire department's hoses. Then, when there was a fire, the fire fighters had to go over to the post office and negotiate to get their hoses. The hoses should be screwed to the fire engines, ready to ride, ready to be used to put out a fire.

But the Pentagon recoils from common sense. And besides, upgrading the F-16 for a close-air-support role is great for the MICC. It keeps the money wheel spinning in high gear. Just as the top brass ignored the value of the A10, they show every sign of ignoring our need to adapt to the post--Cold War period.

The U.S. can no longer toss away dollars for defense like a drunken recruit. Soviet defense spending killed the bear, and if we don't cut spending, it will kill America. But the Pentagon is practically a government by itself; after all, it distributes close to $300 billion a year. And it is a government that has declared war--a war of survival--in which the countryit supposedly serves is its foe. The top brass see the threat quite clearly. Without an enemy such as the Kremlin, the Pentagon has no job. Now the Pentagon fears that the American public will realize that it is an old war horse with no war and should be put out to pasture or shot forglue. More than anyone, the top brass realize how desperately they needed their Kremlin twin.

Since the Sixties, with rare exceptions, the wrong people have become generals and admirals.The Pentagon has few leaders with vision who have the guts to bring about the reforms that would blast our armed forces from the past. Most of the guys at the top are slicker at staff infighting than they are in real war fighting. Most are writers, not fighters. Most are perfumed princes brainwashed to sell their service over the good of America or their own warriors. Most of the guys who get to the top are quick to go along. They don't fight for the right stuff, which explains why our warriors who get in the arena with the lions don't have the right killing gear.Decent rifles, radios and ground-support aircraft don't pad up the budget like the big-ticket Stealths and exotic choppers. These slick dudes are protecting their own billets at the expense of the fighters.

Many of these guys with stars cash out to cash in. They jump aboard the defense contractors' money train, making big salaries selling the stuff they used to buy. Then they call back to the people still at the Pentagon and massage them with promises of good jobs later. Or they ask, "Remember when? Remember when I got your ass out of a crack--or when I got you promoted?"

If the Pentagon isn't winning its war to date, it certainly is holding its own. Spending for the wrong weapons continues unabated. The Pentagon still gives priority to heavy-duty, high-priced wonder weapons--the top end of the military market. The big-bucks items get priority because they are the direct connection between the defense industry and Congress. The MICC is agreed club wrapped in an American flag. It will take as much money as it can until everything goes pop. It is armed and dangerous.

Inside the Pentagon the momentum of the Cold War hasn't slowed. Day in and day out, the basic mission of hundreds of Pentagon officers is to get more money for their individual services. Senior military officers become master salesmen, and the MICC determines how America is defended. The Pentagon can't go broke until the taxpayer has nothing more to give, which ain't far down the track. The nation can no longer afford such waste. If the services continue to do their own thing, America will end up broke and with a hollow military, to boot.

•

At last count there were more than 1000 generals and admirals on active duty. During World War Two, when the military was six times larger, there were 2058. For the brass and their entourage, the trenches more often than not are Washington cocktail parties where they dress in medal-bedecked uniforms and sell their service and hustle their needs. I saw an episode of the Pentagon process at a gathering a few years ago. A Marine Corps officer buttonholed a U.S. senator and spoke about the need to extend the Corps' reach to get in deep behind the shoreline. For this, the Marines (joined by the Navy and Air Force) decided they needed a new type of aircraft.

Listening to this pitch, I thought my drink had been laced with LSD. Here was the Corps hustling for a new billion-dollar bird for a questionable mission.

The cocktail party encounter showed the MICC at its most proficient and most dangerous. Out of conversations such as that one came the Osprey--an aircraft that is half helicopter, half fixed-wing airplane and all problem. The prototype performed two functions well: eating money and crashing.

For the defense contractors the Osprey was an entirely new candy store. If the military could get money to build a wacko contraption such as the Osprey, the MICC might one day get away with brave Marines in flying submarines. In Pennsylvania and Texas, where the prototypes are built, political muscle protects and promotes it. The Osprey means jobs for the local voters, pork and hefty political contributions to keep the bums in Congress. So far the cost has been over $2 billion and seven lives.

The Pentagon has two weapons that work in concert with big spending in its campaign of self-perpetuation: promoting fear that a bad guy is going to eat up America and duplicating make-work.

Right now, for example, you can be sure that an Army colonel, Marine colonel, Air Force colonel and Navy captain are all at work on papers that one of them alone could do. It may be a study on what to do about senior officers' piles, or whether or not blow-driers should be standardissue. The four services have dozens of common functions: service schools, entry and specialty training, personnel, finance, intelligence, quartermasters, laboratories, storage, weapons testing, research and development, lawyers, medics and chaplains. Work is now duplicated like a hot-wired automatic copier churning out copies at ten bucks a pop.

•

Until the president pulls the Pentagon's plug, we remain in danger. Only then can our military begin moving in a new direction. Federal law must limit the size of the American Peace ForceHQ and abolish ticket punching, which has killed more men than friendly fire.

The APF won't happen overnight. It will take years before the merger's "teething problems" are fixed. But now is the time to strike, because America does not have an external enemy. Over the next decade, wars will be like those in Eastern Europe, Peru and Burma--what the military calls low-intensity conflicts. The U.S. must take extreme care before jumping into such fights. But we must be ready to support friends and freedom.

With only one service, by the year 2000 the U.S. military will look very different from whatit is today. Our active-duty armed forces, which now total nearly 2 million men and women, would total no more than 800,000, and the reserves would be scaled down. Annual defense spending would be cut by two thirds, to $100 billion. Yet with all the cuts, we would have a more flexible and effective military defense than we have today.

The worms that crawl in the Pentagon's dead brain will say that if defense spending is reduced, the U.S. economy will take a hit. There is some truth to this. But America is in a crisis and we must take action. In fact, with proper planning to convert from war to peace, a reorganization of the military will help make America healthy again.

In time the new HQ can make logical consolidations and slowly cut away the layers of duplication and redundancy. Unification would create a faster exchange of information. There would be less waste, more efficiency and big taxpayer savings.

There are a million things to do. Here are just a few first steps:

• It's time for West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy to fold up their tents. They breed interservice rivalry. The American Peace Force will require one academy that would take the best traditions of all service academies and produce future leaders to run the new defense team. The academies should continue their roles as teaching institutions, perhaps as national universities devoted to the environment, ecology or conflict resolution.

• Merge the Seals, Green Berets, Air Commandos and Marine Recon. A new special-operations branch of the APF would have one headquarters, one training place, one budget, one staff, one support system and would be the key players in low-intensity fights. It would be dynamite.

• Streamline military intelligence. Take a major step away from the secret wars of recent years that have been so disastrous and shameful.

• Keep Star Wars in the lab.

• Cut nuclear weapons to the bone.

• Park the B-1 and B-2 bombers next to Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose and charge admission to see two of the MICC's biggest rip-offs.

• Dump the National Guard. This force, though valiant in the past, as was the horse cavalry, is too inefficient and corrupt to fit into a modern military. Merge the Air Guard into the Air Reserves. It has some of the hottest pilots going. Retool the reserves and give them active-duty priority.

• Reinstate the draft, but make it an obligation of national service with the military as one option. Put everybody through eight weeks of basic training that includes U.S. history and citizenship in general. Afterward, some would go to the military and others could perform domestic Peace Corps--type work.

Unification would mean that, after specialty training, you would go to a unit. Let's say you were a close-air-support fighter pilot. You go to a squadron that would always work in direct support of the Seventh Infantry Division. The units would train together and become a tight team.

What nearly happened to me in Desert Storm when the Air Force pilot thought we were the enemy would not happen with one defense team. The guys on the ground and the guys in the air would all work together. The problems would be ironed out early. The guys on the ground would demand damn good communications and reliable systems to mark their positions.

Ideally you'd stay in one assignment, as we used to, perhaps for your entire career. You wouldn't have the turnover that comes with ticket punching, which rips the vital cohesiveness out of a unit.

Because units won't be rotating to Germany and around the world (our post--Cold War overseas commitments can be scaled back drastically), the American Peace Force warriors will not become isolated from the American community and values. The military would not be as removed from the rest of society as it is now. No more Fort Nowhere.

Reforming the military will be a tough job. The brass, the politicians and the arms merchants won't like it and will fight change just as a bronco fights its rider. But change is overdue.Unification will provide the lean military muscle needed to guard America's future in the troubled times ahead.

"More than anyone, the top brass realize how desperately they needed their Kremlin twin."