Interview: Rear Admiral Wayne E. Meyer, USN (Ret.)

 

 

 

Proceedings: The Soviets have devel­oped an Aegis-like phased-array radar system. What are vour impressions o

Admiral Meyer put together a triad that saw Aegis through development and into the fleet. He worked with RCA (at top, breaking ground for the Combat System Engineering Development site in Morrestown). Ingalls Shipbuilding (sitting behind John Lehman at the Ticonderoga's christening), and the Navy (in train­ing and at sea, facing page).

must be very-high-impulse systems. They might go for weeks, months, maybe even years, and never be called upon. Then instantly, as in the case of Vincennes, they must react and react fast. And at that time they must work. The fifth cornerstone is the matter of coverage. The Aegis ship protects oth­ers more than herself, and she must be able to fend off crossing attackers.

Proceedings: Do you think the success of Aegis spells the end of airborne naval air defense?

Meyer: No, but it permits mitigation or modernization of a good deal of it. Airborne interceptors don’t have to carry the role singularly, so the center- piece—our aircraft carrier—can focus more on the strike mission. There again, an aircraft carrier’s deck is like anything else—it’s finite. And if you have to use many fighter planes, you don’t have room for as many attack planes. In that sense, Aegis relieves the carriers. But in another sense, don’t be misled, because the threat is great and varied, so neither can Aegis carry the defense single-handedly.

Anything can be saturated. You can be saturated right now with an attack­er’s two arms and feet, and you won’t be able to fend him off. Anything can be saturated. Aegis can be saturated.

But the thrust of the Aegis design was to force the enemy into saturation tactics, both in the electronic and ord­nance modes, and then defeat him in those modes.

What do I mean by electronically? First, we do not want him to be able to defeat the system with some clever lit­tle technique—some gadgeteering.

Thus the Aegis design can resist a cou­ple hundred different kinds of clever techniques. Will diabolical man invent a new one? History tells us he will, and we require an in-service force clever enough to appreciate it when it comes. So we try to drive him into the main beam, in our jargon, to try to jam us or defeat us with countermeasures, which means he has to carry a lot of power. And then we are truly in an electronic battle. He’s playing on our turf because we have a very high- powered radar, with a lot of power to zap him.

Second, from an ordnance viewpoint, you must not allow the opponent a free ride. If you concentrate your system design to deal with targets on the deck, for example, you go overboard. If you decrease the power of your radar, you'll get stronger countermeasures. If you shorten your range, he’ll come in closer. If you don’t have a requisite spread of counter-weapons, he will find a hole and come right through the mid­dle. Thus to kill the Aegis ship or get through to the carrier takes a lot of power.

One of the Aegis ship’s many pur­poses is to be the missilier—the pro­tector of the aircraft carrier. At the same time she must coordinate the bat­tle with other defenses available, both air and surface. If she is there, the enemy has to amass countermeasures and missiles to penetrate. These high- priority mission in the design serve, and will continue to serve, our country well in the “edge-of-war” demands such as the Persian Gulf.

system. What are your impressions ' the system and its likely performance- and how do you think they came by the technology?

Meyer: Why has the Russian navy built the Kirov, a gigantic, 40,000-1⁰¹¹ nuclear cruiser, and the Oscar, a g>" gantic—allegedly by them—tactical submarine? Both ships have giant mag azines of surface-to-surface missiles- Why would they spend the effort to f¹- such gigantic big ships? I’ve watche them for 20 years as they react to °^u engineering. In this case, these ships represent their way of how they p|^an try to punch through to the aircraft ^ca riers. But they can’t get there it they can't punch through the Aegis. Ho* are they going to get to punch throw? the Aegis? A mass of firepower—4r above, on, and under the sea.

Kirov's superstructure is the . ^ damndest thing you ever saw. It >^s J . loaded with microwave nightmares- you’re a technical person, you have wonder how it ever works. But the P tures of the latest Soviet ships, with their new phased arrays, tell me that they are trying to get to Aegis. Why it taking them so long? In the end it really our own secret, and yet it ^{s n}° secret at all. It’s American technical and manufacturing prowess. I am h of one group of people in this coun ) constantly berating us and saying tha other countries are so much better c¹- signers, builders, producers, and m^a facturers. I’ve looked at a lot of we^Jl ons, warships, and other technical outputs, and in general I haven’t see any clearly better at all.

Proceedings: As a part of the f^eV'^,el\_ve more sophisticated, and more expeⁿ- platforms theory, what is your ansW to those who claim more less-soph^|S cated platforms would better counter more numerous enemy?

Meyer: We could defend against a ^ cruise missile by arming our ships nothing but 20-mm. guns. In the H'¹¹

\y J cheap ships; that’s no problem. tha_n^Can ®^{6t S}^'P^{S t}*^{lat c}*^on'^{t cost more}

a_n(/ ^and lives. But there are limits y_0(J j^)ere are thresholds below which ity ^ai;^e not go. So am I a high-qual

yo_Ur to

am. I don’t want to fight

fj* to be

havf»^^{at c}heap ships don’t cut it. We’ll

nave

tai_n?^a'ⁿ tf we’re not careful. And cer- Se_V(^V

n_Umb- ^Scores recently. The relative have ta

''icalT^³¹^ ^w'*h *h^e other side. Tech- ‘*1(1 f ^suP^er>or ships, well-engineered ^^efeawuht hy well-trained men, will thn

^eat the eat.

^lhe front 43

lines, and was there

^0lhe

_|)i^We put hundreds of thousands of 20- ■ 8^Uns on our ships, theoretically ^e could kill all the cruise missiles.

^s the same way with building a na^ ^{we ean} build ^a 1.200-ship do^’ °^{f an} ' .^00-ship navy, if you kJJ ^care what it can do. You can

'^e can

Jou ³ ^^CW hundred thousand dollars if ' ^u don’t care about losing a lot of

^0r high-tech ship person? You bet _a ³°ts I am.

thj_n ^fleaP ship. 1 think if there’s one itv ®,^to he learned from the Falklands, that i

it _a„ P^lenty more opportunities to learn

J 'he Iranians have learned it on eral

hav«^^Crs °f NATO-Warsaw Pact forces ^taught us not to try to compete

current numerically superior

Aeoj^ee^ⁿ8s: What does the rest of the Ce_m.^S P^rogram look like into the 21st

\,"^tUry?

P^r(₎₍,^^r' 'Veil, 1 certainly don’t see the o_{ne o}^ani 'n trouble. On the contrary, lo_oki 'he things we seem to be over- here >^s that virtually every atjj, ' ctuiser that has joined the oper- tisej , °^rces has ended up in battle, or 2/_Co ^er Power against an adversary. he_{r s}h ^e^°8^a ICG-47) sailed right from <)nt₀ th ^C^^own ynfd. armed, pulled

Wi_th ^a days on her maiden voyage— 3s_ke(j^{Ut a} hiccup. She did everything ^Corhn *'^Cr: surveillance, tracking, Pre_Ssj ^n<a’ gunfire, air control, air sup- °ⁿ you name it. Now what the hell better testing are you going to get than that? It’s vacuous to sit around here five years later and talk about how the system wasn’t tested. What matters is that every one of these ships has performed extraordinarily in the battles each has been called into.

Now I want to confront—head on— several incidents. One was the squabble that your own magazine supported, which was less than 1 expected from you. The charge was that there was a little bitty plane [off Beirut in 1983] and the great Aegis didn’t find it.

Well, my reaction is la-de-da. Kami­kaze! First of all, to the best of my knowledge, the plane never was in the radar’s field of view. It has been my experience through hundreds of thou­sands of hours of operation of this sys­tem that every single object in the field of view of this radar has been detected.

1 do not know of any kinks that we did not anticipate. If this were the case here, it would certainly have been the extraordinary exception.

1 also recall from that incident that the pilots of the air group and members of the aircraft carrier group came to 77- conderoga to see what this wondrous thing was. It was constantly able to tell the E-2Cs and F-14s where they were, and whether they were on current sta­tion or not. The small plane affair is a silly, trivialized incident.

Now let’s take the one associated with Yorktown |CG-48]—some inane thing about the ship’s Aegis radar hav­ing targeted something that the press reported was actually a cloud. Was it a cloud? I don’t know. I’ve never seen the data; I only know what was printed. The captain, whom I consider to have been one of our top-drawer captains, determined that there was a surface target. And he determined that the target ought to be engaged with Harpoons, with the approval of proper authority. I believe I’m correct that the press reported that the target then dis­appeared. Well, what else can we ex­pect the captain to do? Are you going to walk into a dark room, having heard rattling in the middle of the night, and not take some action for your protec­tion? What else did we expect? It doesn’t matter whether they were clouds. What matters is the action. And by the way, Yorktown performed mar­velously in guiding our interceptors to the Egyptian airliner carrying the Achille Lauro hijackers.

Now let’s move to Vincennes. What if Vincennes didn't fire? You read every day about near misses between two airplanes. Well, this would have been another near miss—“Got away with it that time.’’ The Stark [FFG-31) didn't get away. What kind of culture would send a commercial airliner into the middle of an active firefight that it started? Do its leaders really trivialize the value of life? Every time they do a write-up on the Iranian Airbus, they say 290 people were killed. We don't have any idea of how many people were killed. We don’t have any idea who the hell was in the airplane. I’m sure many people in this country disa­gree, but I believe that a significant reason that the Iranians are at the table right now is Vincennes, and her sister ships in the Indian Ocean-Persian Gulf operations.

Proceedings: You have a reputation for having created good working relations between the Navy and the Aegis con­tractors. What is your view of the cur­rent acquisition problems, and what can be done to get the process back on a productive footing?

Meyer: I remember when the Wein- berger-Carlucci team came on board DoD. There was going to be an initia­tive to square away acquisition. From that came the famous 32 or 34 Carlucci initiatives. I was sent for in that in­quiry, and after one afternoon they got rid of me. I was never sent for again.

Proceedings: Why did they get rid of

you?

Meyer: Because they did not like my simple doctrine, which was that some­body has to set priorities and somebody has to lead. You can’t expect other people to follow if someone doesn’t lead. It’s my view that in the designing and building of instruments of war no one but the military should lead. That’s why we’re appointed. Weapon acquisi­tion is not a civilian process. It’s not a business. The DoD is not in business; its purpose is to deal in war.

You can’t run anything without trust­ing someone. Try to find people within the Pentagon who trust the project manager. Try to find people in Con­gress who trust the Pentagon. Why don’t we trust project managers? I rec­ommended to the Carlucci investigators that if we have project managers we can’t trust, we should get rid of them, and put in somebody we do trust.

Now, some members of Congress, sup­ported by others, are proposing to find a group of nameless civilians who somehow are experts and authorities on engineering and producing instruments of war. 1 don’t know where such peo­ple arc. But somehow we’re going to place great trust in them?

theif

naval leaders, I’m encouraged by

You also have to tell people every now and then that you love them. You’ve got to tell project managers and the people that are part of your organi­zation. We cannot continue to do the bashing of our industrial base that we’ve done over the past six years, and not have it take an irreversible toll.

In my early days, there were a lot of “professionals” in the congressional staffs. The staffs were relatively small. There was a protocol in the staffs that was pretty well understood internally and externally. And you could go to those people and talk to them.

Today the congressional staffs have exploded. Some say there are as many as 20,000 people on the congressional staffs. Many of them are youngsters, and they’ve never had another job.

Many of them have come straight from school, and some come here to partici­pate in the glitter; they’ve gotten caught up in the protocol—and the military base has become their chattel. So they play with it in the name of their supervisors. Their own people, including elected officials, fail to disci­pline them. In the old days if they tried to behave that way, we’d kick their asses all over the moon.

Why do these little people behave in a legalistic, confrontational manner? They’re all wallowing in the trough of self-importance and greed trying to gain attention. Why is it out of con­trol? It is a dual failure by DoD offi­cials and our elected officials to keep it in check.

Proceedings: How do you keep it in check?

Meyer: Discipline for one. Continuing credible communications for another. I spent a significant part of my life over on the Hill, but my last four years in the Navy 1 only went to the Hill twice.

Proceedings: How did you manage that?

Meyer: Because our leaders of the time thought they knew enough without help. You can't wing it very long in a democracy. In the end you have to have some credibility. And you cannot send service officials on, say, some­thing like Aegis, or some other techni­cal thing, who can’t bring that credibil­ity. Or, for that matter, to espouse how a navy battle group fights. It just isn’t credible. The Navy, in particular, lost that credibility.

From January to May every year, in an earlier time, every senior officer in the Naval Ordnance/Naval Ships build­ings could be counted upon to have to spend significant amounts of time pre­paring for hearings, participating in hearings, and meeting with elected and staff officials. That is rarely done any­more. So what happens is that the members of Congress take positions based on their own feelings rather than on hard facts.

It was my experience in those many years that the Congress really has no originality, but rather is a reflection of the stimuli it receives. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. The Congress truly is vox populi. The Congress is the instrument, or mechanism, of people.

So when the Congress decides that we must have competition in contracting, it’s because we went over there and told them that was a good thing to do. When the Congress decides that we must have objective testing, it’s be­cause we went over there and told that was a good thing to do. When the Congress decides we must have fixed- priced contracting, it’s because we went over there and told them it’s a good thing to do.

Now what happens in such cases?

We go over and tell them these things but we are so naive or arrogant—and, at times, so stupid—that we think that somehow we can control the throttle. Well, a congressman goes back home and says, “Hey, people what do you think about what we’re doing here?

Isn’t this competition and contracting a good thing?” “Yea, but you know, hey, I make flashlight batteries here, and I ought to have some of that. I pay my taxes too.” So then the congress­man comes back after Christmas and says, “You know, if a little bit’s good, a lot more’s better.” That’s the situa­tion we’re at. Then we blame the Con­gress. But the Congress is really only the mechanism that has caused it.

Proceedings: Is the military fighting a losing battle with the private sector for attracting the best, newest technology? Meyer: Why do you think it has changed?

Proceedings: Money.

Meyer: No, I don’t think you’re right on that. I think it’s certainly aggravated it, but I don’t think you’re right. I think it is a shift in our priorities, be­ginning with the abuse of our people.

The reason that, historically, we were on the cutting edge of technology of war was because the people at DoD were the nation’s leaders, all the way down through the civil service, all the way up through the political appoint­ees. They were the nation’s leaders in technology. They were the leading edge of technology. My goodness, look back through our history.

Take the Naval Research Laboratory and the Naval Observatory as exam­ples. The great technological innova­tions appeared from those institutions because they were the nation’s leaders- I am suggesting to you that we no longer have it, and that one of the big ^ ger reasons we don’t have it is abuse- don’t care how long we talk about technology. I don't care how long ^we talk about revolution at sea. I agree with [Marine Corps Commandant] G^en eral [Al] Gray. He says if we can t execute, it doesn’t matter. And the only way we have to execute in the Navy is through the material establis ment. The material establishment is ¹⁽¹ hemorrhage. It’s in hemorrhage in civil service and in its officers. It ^{s in} hemorrhage in its mission.

Proceedings: How do you fix it? Meyer: A, you put somebody in charge—somebody has to lead; B, y have to trust somebody; C, you have remind all those who produce that y love them as you lead them through hard times.

Proceedings: Does this leadership- ^ trust, and love come from the Navy- must it be a political initiative fro¹¹¹ Congress?

Meyer: I believe the Navy could co■ rect it. Now there is never going ^t0 , such a wise owl to come by that co say, “Hey, Wayne, I understand y°^u exactly. You’re right”—and in a day and-a-half correct it. That’s not g°'ⁿ-' to happen.

But we must be willing to reorien our material establishment structure a disciplined protocol; invest in teen cally/operationally experienced oft^|C and civilians; remove the burgeoning staffs of auditors, inspectors, and no accountable reviewers; restore trust our own bureaus; and be willing ^t0 stop abusing our people in our own line structure and in our industrial Unless we do this, we cannot reco “Waste, fraud, and abuse” has cer­tainly taken a strange turn. Soon, will have run out of human stock w which to build the recovery.

Is there hope? Yes, there is. If -^v°._g grew up on a farm, particularly dur* the Depression, you know that “n°P^ springs eternal.” In our case here, dynamics provide us hope. Having talked to many of our contemporary grasp and realization of what needs be done. With that wisdom, I’m ^c°ⁿ dent that they will take the actions called for.