A battle royal is being waged between two titans in the Pentagon, 63-year-old Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Thayer and 41-year-old Navy Secretary John Lehman. In mid-October, Lehman decided to go public with the summer-long Mexican standoff between himself and Thayer, charging that Thayer and other DoD bureaucrats have been conducting anti-Navy “guerrilla warfare” on Capitol Hill, seeking to move $10 billion from the Navy to the Army, to scuttle the new DDG 51 destroyer program (whose vessels will sell for about a cool $1 billion each), and to lop $16 million from the Navy’s modified A-6 attack aircraft. Thayer, for his part, argues that the Army has been all but left out of the Reagan administration’s military build-up, while the Navy and the Air Force divide up the lion’s share of the $251-billion defense appropriation.
Some Reaganites believe that Thayer is predisposed to favor the Army on two accounts: 1) his ongoing relationship with Carter defense people like Harold Brown, Robert Komer (Carter’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy), and William Perry (Carter’s Under Secretary for Research and Engineering), and 2) his career experience as president of the Vought Corp. and then chairman of the parent conglomerate, LTV. President Carter’s defense policy, to oversimplify, was to concentrate on Central Europe and let the Navy more or less drift. Vought had been a big supplier of the Lance, the Army’s most powerful battlefield support missile and, more recently, the Army’s Multiple Launch Rocket System.
Comments