Original audio cassette(s), signed legal release forms, and edited interview transcripts are on file in the Defense Acquisition History Oral History Collection, U.S. Army Center of Military History, Fort Leslie J. McNair, Washington, D.C.

Paul R. Ignatius

UNITED STATES ARMY
CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY
DEFENSE ACQUISITION HISTORY PROJECT

INTERVIEW OF
PAUL R. IGNATIUS

CONDUCTED BY
DR. WALTON S. MOODY
AND
DR. WALTER S. POOLE
AT
WASHINGTON, D.C.
JANUARY 20, 2003

Interviewee: Paul R. Ignatius (ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE ARMY (I & L), 1961-63; UNDER SECRETARY OF THE ARMY, 1964-65; ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE (I & L), 1965-67; SECRETARY OF THE NAVY, 1967-69)

INTERVIEWER: Dr. Walton Moody, Dr. Walter Poole
Date: January 20, 2003
Location: Washington, D.C.

INTERVIEWER: I would like to begin the first question with how Thomas Morris recruited you for the administration from Harbridge House.

MR. IGNATIUS: I had known Tom Morris when he had been deputy assistant secretary of I&L some years earlier and I was working with a firm called Harbridge House that I founded with two other people in the 1950s, and Tom at that time around 1955 or 1956 was thinking about the need to bring together common supplies under a single command. He was concerned about duplication in the services and he came to Harbridge House and to me and asked if we would prepare a book that described the supply systems of the several services.

It had a very tight deadline and he had very little money and my partner said, "We can't do that for the amount of money that he has." I said, "Well, it is an important thing to do and we ought to try to do it." As a matter of fact, we got it done and that was when I got to know Tom.

There is another link, of a personal sort. When McNamara was recruiting for people, Adam Yarmolinksy, who was a recruiter for the Kennedy administration, called my partner Sterling Livingston and asked for suggestions for the I&L assistant secretary slot.

Livingston called me and I suggested Tom Morris. I'm sure others did, too, but at any rate that was a second link, and then many years later I learned that it was Tom Morris who had suggested me to Elvis Stahr, the Army secretary, when Stahr went to Morris for suggestions about an Army I&L. So I tell you all of this because there was a link between Tom and me that went back.

I relieved Tom as assistant secretary of defense, I&L, when he returned to the consulting field, and he relieved me as I&L when McNamara suggested that I become secretary of the Navy. Tom was a really quite remarkable person and I have the absolute highest regard for him. I'm sure he'll loom large in your study.

INTERVIEWER: Yes, he certainly does.

I wanted to ask about the OSD's view of the Army and acquisitions. I got the impression that in '61-'62 that McNamara and the high ranking people in OSD looked upon the Army acquisition organization as rather sluggish and unimaginative, badly in need of some prodding. Is that the impression you had?

MR. IGNATIUS: Yes, very much so. I think you're quite right. The culmination of various studies and efforts in the formation of an Army logistical command, was hastened by McNamara's pushing the Army to move ahead.

I think it probably would have happened without that, but it wouldn't have happened as soon.

The reason I say that is if you go back into the 1950s when GEN Williston Palmer became DCSLOG, he was very much concerned about the need for coordinating the work of the tech services and bringing what he called direction and control over them. So the seeds were all there, and the Army was working in that direction, but McNamara hastened it and Vance, who was his general counsel but concerned with organizational studies at the time, pushed very hard and brought it about sooner than it would have otherwise occurred.

INTERVIEWER: Now I wanted to ask a broad question about Army Materiel Command. What would you say overall was the value added by creating AMC and the criticism, among some people, that Army Materiel Command really turned into sort of Ordnance writ large? Is there any validity to the criticism?

MR. IGNATIUS: I think the value lies in the reasons for its origin and I believe those reasons are that the tech services' jurisdictions no longer were valid because of electronics and the missile. You had fairly clean assignments in the olden days. A gun was a gun and food was food, and so the quartermaster could do food and the ordnance could do gun, and then the airplane came in, and then they weren't quite sure what to do so they put the airplane with the signal corps. After all, the signal corps had been fooling around with carrier pigeons so they might as well fool around with other things that fly.

But as time went on, and particularly with the advent of the missile, it became more and more difficult. Also the tech services were independent fiefdoms with very little overall coordination, and more and more weapons became weapon systems.

In the early days, you had a horse and you had a saddle, a fairly simple proposition, but as time went on you merged technologies which belonged to ordnance or transportation or signal in a single weapon system, but the jurisdictional claims were rather precise and limited. So you had a tough situation dealing with modern technology.

The other factor in all of this was the growing dependence upon industry versus the arsenals. The arsenals have been the repositories of the military arts, and we were a nation in our earlier history that went to war and then enjoyed peace, and if we had to go to war again we picked up where we had left off and mobilized. But the arts of warfare were kept alive in the arsenals and a lot of the production, like guns at Springfield, was done there.

The tech services depended upon their arsenals, particularly the ordnance corps. With the defense industry becoming a permanent element, as the cold war replaced World War II, and industry moving rapidly, it was difficult for the old system of tech service cum arsenals to keep up.

I think that is another reason that something needed to be done, and what was done was to form a command overseeing all the tech services.

Now your question was, what was the value added and did it improve things? I have said that it had to come, and if it hadn't, the Army would have struggled along and eventually come to something along the lines that happened.

The other services did the same thing. The Navy didn't quite know what to do with the missile. So they said if the missile has a wing on it, the bureau of aeronautics will buy it and if it doesn't have a wing on it, the bureau of ordnance will buy it. That was clearly arbitrary and inefficient, and so they merged them together into the bureau of naval weapons. That is another example of the point I am making about how technology drove organization.

INTERVIEWER: Now from your standpoint, I assume Elvis Stahr did not turn out to be a terribly effective secretary. There was a large jump in efficiency and performance when Cyrus Vance replaced him.

MR. IGNATIUS: Well, I want to say the right thing here, because Elvis Stahr was a good friend. He was my boss. He treated me well and I liked him very much.

One of his greatest qualities was his championing of the Army's cause, but in the McNamara Pentagon that was also one of his problems. McNamara expected the civilian and military leaders at the service level to put up a good fight for what they believed in. But he also felt, and particularly in terms of the secretarial people, that we all should wear a Defense hat along with our service hats, that we were at a corporate divisional level, you might say, in a multidivisional company.

I think Stahr didn't sense that perhaps as much as he might have. Gene Zuckert, his counterpart in the Air Force, certainly did. In fact, Gene wrote a very good article on the service secretaries' roles that was published in the Harvard Business Review about the dual nature that I have described earlier, to be the advocate on the one hand, but part of the Defense team on the other.

There were other reasons that had to do with chemistry and stylistic differences. McNamara told President Kennedy that he would accept the job under two conditions one, that he could pick his own team, and secondly, that he didn't have to be a "social secretary." What he meant by that was going to all of the Washington parties and so forth. I must say Elvis liked the Washington parties and was a welcome guest at them.

Vance had a wonderful background. People sometimes forget about all the work he had done for Lyndon Johnson when he was the Senate majority leader, and Vance had been general counsel for some of the hearings that then-Senator Johnson held on the Hill. He came in as general counsel of Defense and very quickly established himself as a confidante and trusted advisor to McNamara. So when the situation with Stahr came to a head over the formation of the Army Materiel Command, Elvis resigned because he thought that McNamara personally and Defense people in general were interfering with the Army's affairs, and forcing changes that he felt the Army itself should have more control over.

INTERVIEWER: I wanted to move to a specific issue, particularly how you got involved in the M-14 versus M-16 controversy.

MR. IGNATIUS: I got involved in the M-14 controversy first, over a procurement issue. The M-14, though it wasn't all that much of an advance over the M-1, was regarded as something of an exemplar of Army re-equipment. And the contract had been placed with a gun firm in Massachusetts called Harrington and Richardson.

This company was having increasing difficulties meeting its production schedules. We got quite concerned in the Army and decided that we needed a second source as insurance against the possibility of continued failure by Harrington and Richardson.

A number of gun companies indicated an interest and to our great surprise one of the proposed second sources was Harrington and Richardson itself with a new plant in West Virginia. West Virginia was a rather special place because President Kennedy had won the primary there and people thought that particular primary overcame the belief that a person of the Catholic faith could not really aspire to be President of the United States. Everybody had a fond view of West Virginia in the Kennedy administration.

Well, it seemed to me as the procurement secretary that if we were going to get a second source because of the potential failure of our initial source it didn't matter what state it was located in. The problem was Harrington and Richardson's apparent inability to get the job done, and so I took a firm stand. I was visited by the delegation from West Virginia, the two Senators and the Congressman and including Harrington and Richardson's very aggressive lawyer named Chuck Colson, later famous in the Nixon administration. That is how I first got into the M-14.

The M-16: I became very much involved in that while I was in the Army secretariat but also when I was in Defense. We began buying the M-16 for the Vietnamese. McNamara made the Army the procurement service for the gun, but as time went on the M-16 controversy became a very, very messy affair and not the finest chapter in the Army's history.

We could go into great detail. There is an excellent book by Jim Fallows called National Defense that recounts this whole thing.

By the time the malfunctioning of the M-16 occurred, because of the changes in ammunition and in the gun, there were hearings chaired by Chairman Eichord in the House. I was in Defense and I did not appear in the Eichord hearings. They were handled at the civilian level by the one who succeeded me, Dr. Robert Brooks.

But I was involved both in Defense and in the Army with the procurement of the M-16 and very conscious of the controversy within the Army about the gun. The traditional Army view was very much opposed to the gun. It didn't look like a gun ought to look. It was made of parts stamped out rather than machined. The Air Force’s GEN LeMay was promoting it. It didn't come from Springfield armory. It wasn't good at 3,000 yards. There were all kinds of arguments that were advanced by the traditionalists against the gun.

If you look at how it finally got decided, Creighton Abrams played a role. Not many people know that. But when the Army finally sat down with all of its four-star and three-star generals, they pretty much went down the line against the gun, but MG Creighton Abrams, who had returned to the Pentagon from commanding a tank division in Europe, was the last to speak. His comments at this meeting with the chief of staff were very telling in words that were typical of Abrams, very much to the point, dramatic, ironic. He talked about how in all his years he hadn't seen too many people killed at 3,000 yards. It was usually a lot closer up, and having a gun that could fire automatically was an advantage over an M-14 that theoretically could be fired on automatic but the power of the bullet was such that you couldn't control it in automatic firing.

So Abe helped to carry the day. If you ever wanted to follow up on that, the person to talk to would be GEN (Retired) Paul Gorman, who as a younger officer was secretary of the whole panel that reviewed the M-14 and M-16 controversy.

INTERVIEWER: Did you become involved in the main battle tank collaboration?

MR. IGNATIUS: With the Germans? Not so much. My recollection was that was one of those projects that was going to be done through international logistics, a combined effort. My recollection is that it was in an R&D stage at my time and I didn't get involved in it.
I do remember Creighton Abrams once telling me that from what he heard the tank was going to be so expensive that he wouldn't dare risk it in battle.

I was involved in the M-48 and M-60, but I don't remember much on the FRG main battle tank.

INTERVIEWER: I wanted to also ask about your role in helping develop the air mobility concept and spurring helicopter procurement.

MR. IGNATIUS: Well, first, I thought the Army did very well in getting its air mobile forces into being quite rapidly. It took years to bring the tank into the forces and to bring in trucks versus horses. They moved pretty rapidly with air mobility.

In part, they were driven by civilian people in Defense who urged the Army to do it, and in part by their own very able Hamilton Howze. GEN Howze made a good study on air mobility, and there were some bright Young Turk officers who believed strongly in helicopters as a result of the potential they saw in Korea, so they wanted to move rapidly.

My own role was helpful in one or two ways. The Army specifications were a barrier to air mobility because most Army specs said equipment had to work in the frozen tundra of Alaska and the jungles of Panama. You ended up with things that weighed a lot and were ponderous, that was just the way Army specs were written.

Some of the younger officers who were working on air mobility came to me and talked to me about this Harry Kinnard is one I remember. He became the first commander of the air mobile division that went to Vietnam. He said, "You know, we have got to do something about this." I can't remember the details, but I know I stuck my neck out quite a long way in giving the Army some relief from these specs that facilitated buying things that weighed less and were therefore air mobile.

The second thing was that I was very much involved both in the Army but even more particularly when I was the assistant secretary of defense in the helicopter production program. We may want to go into that later on, because there were some quite remarkable achievements by industry in reacting to the demand for hiking production.

INTERVIEWER: Then I wanted to move to your time as assistant secretary of defense for I&L. I begin with the broad question about the tensions between military and civilian.
Had you already seen the tensions before '65 in Vietnam, or was it the Vietnam war that really aggravated matters?

MR. IGNATIUS: No, I think there were tensions that arose before that, as between civilian and military leadership, and I think they had to do with McNamara and his people forcing change on the services at a rate they were unaccustomed to.

Secondly, McNamara had a habit of cross-examining people. A lot of the military people who were accustomed to giving their views based on their experience were being cross-examined often by young MIT economists who were working in systems analysis. It didn't sit too well with some of these people.

There were other reasons. McNamara's reforms were quite significant. With Charlie Hitch’s help, the whole program package concept came into being and the services lost some of their independent jurisdictions. All strategic systems, for example, were looked at as a whole, under one procurement package, and all tactical systems under another package. Tensions arose.

Now I never had any problem, nor did Tom Morris, between civilian and military leadership. I think there is a very good reason for this. We both had deep respect for the military people. We both knew quite a lot about the substance of our jobs, and so we were able to work productively with our military counterparts.

One little example of that. I hadn't been in the Army secretariat for very long before the DCSLOG, deputy chief for logistics, GEN Colglazier at the time, came to me and said he had a procurement staff in DCSLOG. I also had a procurement staff in my office as assistant secretary, and Colglazier said, "I don't need my procurement staff. Why don't you handle it?"

And he reassigned his people to me. We saved some spaces in the process and we eliminated a layer of review. That was an example of military and civilian people working together.

All of this went on quite apart from tensions arising from the war.

INTERVIEWER: I also wanted to ask about possible overlapping between your responsibilities as the ASD and those of Alain Enthoven, systems analysis.

I got the impression that there was some friction here systems analysis wanted to move into the matter of assessing R&D projects for cost effectiveness, both in the DDR&E and the ASD I&L. They didn't care for that and thought systems analysis was moving beyond a proper scope.

MR. IGNATIUS: I think you are right, but the question is, what is the proper scope? To some extent, they had a hunting license to look where they thought their skills would be beneficial. So they were looking at things in the comptrollers' area, in the R&D area, in the I&L area.

I don't remember too much of a problem as between my I&L office and Alain's people in systems analysis. Usually we worked independently of one another.

There was one instance where we formed a group and went out to Hawaii to look at an ammunition problem. Bob [McNamara] wanted me to go out and do it, but he said, "Take a couple guys from systems analysis with you. They are good with numbers." But I don't recall much of a problem that affected me and I&L. It perhaps affected the germination of new weapons systems more than it did their procurement.

By the time things came to me, they had been pretty well developed. Alain would be involved in whether a carrier should be nuclear-powered or conventionally-powered and other things of this sort.

But that was all during the early phases of the acquisition of weapons.

I believed strongly in the importance of a systems analysis office at Defense. The reason I did was that I was never troubled by the services competing one against another. It seemed to me that was a good thing. But like a lot of good things, it can be carried too far. If the competition among the services resulted in too many people wanting to do the same thing and not enough wanting to do something else that was needed, or the claims of one service really were more valid than the claims of another, you needed a staff at Defense level that could review and analyze all this, so that effective decisions could be made ultimately by the secretary.

So the idea of decentralizing responsibility for operations down to the services but retaining in Defense the review and analytical capability was, to me, absolutely essential.

While all of us were involved in this review and analysis within our jurisdictional responsibilities, the focal point was the systems analysis office. There were a lot of very bright people there. Some of them occasionally got out of line, rubbed old hands a little bit the wrong way. But there were some very able people, of whom Alain was probably the best example.

And one interesting thing is that the services, once they saw the permanence and the importance of systems analysis, began assigning their best people. Bob Pursley, who was one of the top Air Force officers, a highly capable fellow, was assigned up there. The Navy put Stan Turner up there, later a four-star admiral and ultimately head of the CIA. People like that were assigned on a "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach and they set up their own systems analysis offices at the service level.

Bud Zumwalt, one of the Navy's brightest officers, headed up a systems analysis staff, if you will, at the Secretary of the Navy and Chief of Naval Operations level.

INTERVIEWER: Now I wanted to ask another Vietnam war question. McNamara's critics frequently claim that the ammunition and inventories were being cut back in order to help defray the costs of the war. Now do you think there was any validity to that argument?

MR. IGNATIUS: I was in charge of ammunition procurement and spent most of my waking hours on that important matter. I would say that I don't know of any validity to that.

We did shift stocks. The Air Force ran into some problems of supply of air delivered ordnance, and I went down to the Secretary of the Navy and Chief of Naval Operations and said, "You have got some overages in Navy stocks and the Air Force is short." So we borrowed some Navy stock and made it available to the Air Force.

We moved some stocks out of some of the western depots, Tooele was one of them. There were several western depots that carried a lot of mobilization stocks, and we used some of their air-delivered ordnance that helped to get over some temporary problems that arose in Vietnam for essentially operational reasons.

But the idea that we were going to save money somehow by drawing down stocks, I don't believe there's any validity to that. If we drew down stocks, it was to meet operational needs. The amount of money being expended for ordnance was incredible. We were buying at unbelievable rates to match the expenditure rates for both air delivered and ground delivered ordnance.

INTERVIEWER: I haven't gotten far enough into research. Do you recall some problems over shortages in, say, '66 I think particularly in helicopter engines?

MR. IGNATIUS: Yes. That was a very, very critical area because of two reasons. One, the rapid, you know, unparalleled expansion in production, and secondly, maintaining an adequate standard of operational readiness with the war in Vietnam. So let me just go into some of the details of that.

We increased the production of the UH-1 Huey from 75 a month to 150 a month. That is a lot of helicopters. And we increased the Chinook, which was the twin engine, Boeing Vertol, from five to 15 per month. The helicopter engines, as I recall, were all being produced by Avco Lycoming.

So this huge increase in helicopter production was accompanied by a huge increase in engine manufacture.

Secondly, in Vietnam the tempo of operations increased dramatically, and Vietnam was an environment that was unfriendly to reciprocating engines and moving parts. This was because of the laterite content in the soil there it was abrasive. Moving parts simply wore out more rapidly than they would in other locations.

So we had to make sure we had enough engines and rotors and other parts to meet our production goals, doubling from 75 to 150 to make Hueys and to support the deployed troops.

Well, one of the things that we did, I talked to General Electric and we found General Electric's Lynn, Massachusetts light engine plant could make helicopter engines and we brought them in as a second source. One of the serious problems I remember was an impending strike at Avco Lycoming. I was on the phone back and forth with Jim Kerr, who was the chairman of Avco, about the impact of that strike, and I also worked in the government, with the Labor Department mediation service, and so forth, to try to find a way to avert it. So we had some problems.

We did another thing. I asked Frank Besson, who commanded the Army Materiel Command, an exceptionally talented officer, if he wouldn't centralize management of helicopter spares under his own personal leadership. We established as a principle that if there was ever a conflict between the needs of the deployed units versus the needs of the production lines, the priority would be to the deployed units. If you centralized inventory control, rather than having pieces here, there and everywhere, and if you made use of rapid resupply, air delivery if you will, you could get a lot more use out of limited stocks.

The principle is very easy to explain. If you think of going on a trip, you don't need to take as many shirts if you can get one-day laundry service. So if you have rapid communication that is, learning immediately about a need in Vietnam, and rapidly resupply it through air delivery, and with centralized control you had knowledge across a vast logistical network.

INTERVIEWER: I wanted to ask about what has to be in retrospect the sad story of total package procurement, which everybody in '66-'67 there seemed to have been a general theory this is a good idea, it's going to work.

Using the wisdom of hindsight, what seems to be what everybody missed at the time that would become later become obvious?

MR. IGNATIUS: You are right, there was a lot of hope for it. There were a number of reasons for it. One was that the contractors had complained, and often rightly so, that the procurement officials in the services were interfering with them, and if you just left the contractors alone they could get the job done. There were dramatic examples of Lockheed's “skunkworks” with some projects for the CIA where they were free of a lot of the constraints that normally surround procurement.

The idea of "Leave the contractor to do what he knows best and keep the services' hands off it" a fundamental idea in the total package concept.

Secondly, the author of it was Bob Charles, who was the Air Force I&L and had come from McDonnell and presumably knew something about aircraft manufacture.
In hindsight, why did something that looked promising not work out? There are several reasons that I recall.

Lockheed began to run into trouble on the C-5A. That was the air vehicle that was the first to be procured under this total package concept. Lockheed began to run into some trouble meeting its weight specs and what do you do when you are overweight? Well, you begin cutting weight. One of the areas where they cut weight was in the wing. Then they got into trouble because the wing wasn't strong enough, and about this point, despite all of the protestations about services getting involved with the contractor and "they ought to leave us alone," I had the feeling that Lockheed was glad that the Air Force came in and began holding their hand a little bit.

In short, the idea of "leave us alone" was all right up to a point and they had reached that point when the C-5A ran into trouble.

Harold Brown, who was the Air Force Secretary at the time, told me that he thought part of the difficulty was the mistaken belief that the C-5A was simply an extrapolation of the C-141, that it was just a step up from the C-141, whereas in fact it wasn't, Harold thought. It was a new airplane with new demands, and this led to misapplication of the total package concept because it assumed that R&D and production were a seamless process. Had the C-5A, Harold argued, been simply a step up, and not something new, it might have worked better than it did.

Those are the things I remember about it, and the concept went into disfavor. As the contractors got into trouble on other projects they said, "You've got to view R&D separately. It's got to be procured under cost reimbursement principles rather than anything that smacks of a fixed price contract."

INTERVIEWER: I wanted to move to your time as Secretary of the Navy.
(End side A, tape 1.)

MR. IGNATIUS: We left off with Walter Poole's question, did I see my role as Navy Secretary as a mediator between the Navy and Defense, and I responded by saying initially that I had some mediating to do within the Navy itself.

The Navy is a microcosm of the Defense Department. It's got land forces in the Marines, and it's got air forces in its air arm, and it's got surface forces, surface ships, and it's got underwater ships in the submarines. Sometimes there were arguments as between the ASW, anti-submarine warfare, people in the Navy and naval aviators. The ASW people would say that they could defeat submariners. The submariners would say "No, you can't, because we are ahead of you on quieting." The air people would say, "With our ability we can defeat submarines" always thinking of enemy submarines but the Navy submariners were thinking of their own field, so there was a lot of commotion within the Navy itself.
Now as between the Navy and Defense, I was in a peculiar situation because I had been for three and a half years an Assistant Secretary of Defense, and in that role had been involved in analyzing the Navy's and the other services' budgets for procurement and acquisition and supply. At Defense level you tend to look for opportunities to make cuts for a lot of reasons, among them that sometimes the budgets come in loaded with worst case scenarios.

I told McNamara when I became Navy Secretary, "If I do at the Navy level what I did at Defense, and try to wring out whatever I can from the Navy's submission that comes to me from the uniformed Navy, and succeed in doing that, and then in Defense you cut it way back, you've got to get a new Navy Secretary. Tell me what you want."

He said, "Well, you do at the Navy level what you did in Defense." I said, "Okay, with the understanding that your people will recognize this."

So I talked to Tom Moorer, who had just become chief of naval operations, and Horacio Rivero, who was the vice chief. Rivero said in effect, "Don't do it. You can't trust these guys." Moorer, on the other hand, said, "Why don't we give it a try?"

So over Rivero's doubts Tom and I went to work and we turned in a very, very lean, tough Navy budget. McNamara and his people he must have talked to them respected what we had done and we came out pretty much with everything that we asked for.

It was important for me at the time, because both Moorer and I had just come into our respective positions. I think he respected me. I certainly respected him. We were quite different though. He was a much more conservative person than I was, but we got along well, and when this thing worked out to the benefit of the Navy it cemented our relationship and we enjoyed a harmonious co-leadership, so to speak, in the remaining time.

Other issues arose as between the Navy and Defense. There was an issue involving a submarine Rickover wanted that Johnny Foster, the Defense [DDR&E] chief, didn't want. I got involved in mediating and working on that.

There was a controversy between nuclear-powered frigates versus conventionally-powered frigates that Alain Enthoven and McNamara opposed, but when Clark Clifford succeeded McNamara, I was able to persuade Clark where I had been unable to persuade MacNamara that we ought to get the nuclear-powered frigates.

So, yes, there was a lot of this always going on, but I go back to something I said at the outset of this interview. I always thought that in the Defense department someone at the service level needed to be the advocate, on the one hand, but recognize that he or she was part of a larger corporate organization and that at some point advocacy had to give way to overall best interest.

In short, I had a high regard for the notion of a Secretary of Defense with an able Defense staff on top of equally well-led military services.

Not everybody felt that way, and the Navy tended more than any of the services to be opposed historically to the formation of the Department of Defense. There were Navy Secretaries who would probably be horrified, and I can think of some of them by name, at what I just said about this sort of double-hatted concept of a civilian leader within the Defense department.

INTERVIEWER: I can't resist asking a question about the F-111 and what happened to it. Now I assume when you came in in '67 you must have walked into a brick wall of resistance in the Navy.

MR. IGNATIUS: You are quite right. I came into the Department of Defense in 1961 and had nothing to do with the F-111 until 1967, when I became Secretary of the Navy, and I did run into a brick wall. The Navy was dead set against the airplane. It was highly emotional.

Here was a case where McNamara, I think, expected me to keep the admirals in line. The more I looked into it, the more I became convinced that the matter had reached such an emotional state that even if the F-111B, the Navy version, turned out to be an excellent airplane, and it wasn't all that good, but even if it did, the Navy still wouldn't want it.

So I went to McNamara and said, "You may not like it, but it seems to me we have got to face reality here. Congress is turning against this. The Navy doesn't want it." When I say "the Navy" I am talking about the aviators in the Navy.

I said, "I have talked with ADM Moorer about this and he and I have agreed that what we need to do is undertake a study of just what kind of airplane the Navy needs." And I said, "I'll tell you one thing if we do go down this route and we procure a new aircraft we are going to do it competitively."

Bob wasn’t happy, but I think he had other things to concern him and maybe he was persuaded that it was an inevitable conclusion. We stayed in the program but meanwhile a successor airplane was studied. If I remember right we asked Bud Zumwalt to do the study. He was a black shoe naval officer and not an aviator, and that was an advantage in his case.

Then a so-called unsolicited and I use that term deliberately, "so-called unsolicited" bid-- came in from Grumman for a successor airplane. When we had made a decision to go to a new airplane, I insisted that it be done under competitive procedures. We had a lively competition with two excellent airplanes proposed, one by McDonnell Douglas and the other by Grumman, the so-called unsolicited proposal that Grumman had submitted.

As it turned out, the Navy selected the Grumman airplane. It became the F-14 Tomcat, and the McDonnell airplane became the F-15 that the Air Force bought. The F-111 was born in controversy. The Navy version died in controversy. It was a problem with the Congress at the outset when McNamara and Zuckert had to defend their selection of General Dynamics over Boeing for the airplane and it was a controversy when I was the Navy Secretary and had to go and testify before Senator Stennis with Tom Moorer and the Navy's top aviator, VADM Connolly, with me.

It finally all worked out, but it was a contentious and difficult matter. I am not sure I know what the lessons are that one learns from this. It is true that demands on a Navy airplane are different because of shipboard operations from those on the Air Force. On the other hand, the idea of commonality when you can achieve it makes awfully good sense. People forget that the F-4 had both a Navy and an Air Force version, and it worked well in both services. The tensions that grew up around the F-111 became so great and so emotional that you just had to scissor it off and let the Navy have its own way.

INTERVIEWER: Could you see the benefits of the switch that had occurred before you took over as SECNAV, abolishing the old bureaus and switching them into systems commands? Was there an evident benefit from that?

MR. IGNATIUS: Well, I think some of the same conceptual arguments that I mentioned earlier in connection with the formation of the Army Materiel Command were also present in the Navy instance.

You had the same onrush of technology that disturbed the prior jurisdictional claims of the Navy's bureaus. I gave you one example of how the missile created havoc between the bureau of ordnance and the bureau of aeronautics.

So a commodity command made some sense in the Navy, as I believe it did in the Army. Of course the Air Force had gone that route earlier.

I don't know that I can point to any measures of merit that would say that we were "x" percent better off having done it than not having done it, but I think it was the way everybody was moving, driven principally by technology and increasing dependence on industry, instead of arsenals and shipyards.

INTERVIEWER: I wanted to ask about the legendary figure of ADM Rickover and particularly what you picked up on how the uniformed Navy looked at ADM Rickover.

MR. IGNATIUS: Well, the uniformed Navy looked askance at his ways of operating, and so I might add did the civilian leadership. More than one Navy secretary tried to get rid of ADM Rickover.

I had a feeling about Rickover that, on balance, the nation was in his debt for bringing into being a nuclear Navy that was particularly important for the underseas Navy. Nuclear power was more important for submarines than it was for surface ships because the essence of submarine warfare is stealth. With nuclear power you can stay submerged. With diesel power you have to come up and disclose your location, so it was particularly important in the submarine service.

A lot of what Rickover did was offensive. I remember once having to testify before a Senate committee and there was old Rick in a civilian suit sitting up there on the dais with the Senators. The uniformed Navy guys were terribly upset by Rickover's success in bypassing the chain of command when he believed it served his interest to do so. He did it through a very clever arrangement. He was double-hatted as assistant chief of the Atomic Energy Commission's nuclear power division, at the same time that he had a title in the Navy's bureau of ships. So when he opposed something that the Navy wanted to press upon him, he would deal on Atomic Energy Commission letterheads, separate from the Navy.

Well, this would drive Tom Moorer crazy. But let me tell you what Rickover's ultimate strength was. Ultimately he was responsible for nuclear safety, and nobody wanted to second-guess Rick when it came down to this, because safety was the overriding consideration and Rick had that responsibility.

I differed with him in some respects. I treated him once pretty much like another project officer and hauled him in to the Secretary's review and analysis room with my assistant secretaries. We put Rick through a really tough session because he was encountering serious overruns on one of his projects. Part of Rickover's myth was that other people had overruns but he didn't. But, as I say, fundamentally I believe the nation was in his debt. I think somehow Rick understood that I felt that way, and I made no effort to get rid of him because it was hopeless. There was no way. You just couldn't do it. People had tried and failed. Rickover was an example, and there aren't many in modern history, of a person who had an independent base of power Edgar Hoover would be another example. Lewis Hershey, the head of selective service, was yet another.

The checks and balances in our system are part of the genius of the American government, but every once in awhile there are people who have a kind of independent power, and Hoover had it for reasons that we're all familiar with. Rick had it for a variety of reasons, and he went on and on and on. When it was time for him to retire, he'd get the law changed to exempt him from retirement. He was a very, very skilled bureaucrat as well as a well-trained and effective Navy engineer.

INTERVIEWER: This was the time when there was an effort to switch over to the private shipyards. Were you involved in that, and how well do you think it was working during your tenure?

MR. IGNATIUS: The Navy shift from shipyards to ship builders was accomplished for some of the same reasons that we saw in the Army, as exemplified by the M-14 and the M-16.

In Defense and in the Navy we became interested in series production of ships versus looking at each ship as an individual entity. The Navy used to argue that ships weren't manufactured, they were constructed. I think what they meant was it was sort of like a tailor-made suit, where you have to take in a little bit here because of a lower shoulder, that sort of thing. Each ship was regarded as an individual effort.

Meanwhile, in the commercial shipyards new techniques were employed, based upon Japanese technology, in Japan, and by Japanese shipbuilders in Brazil, and in the Scandinavian countries, to manufacture ships rather than construct them individually.

This was a new development. Additionally, the defense industry became a permanent part of the economic scene. We had excess capacity in the naval shipyards. We closed Brooklyn. We thought we had closed Portsmouth but we gave Portsmouth 10 years to effect a phasedown, and in that time they were able to overturn the decision.

The Navy always argued that you wanted to have production in a Navy shipyard was well as in a ship builder's facility in order to keep the ship builder honest. You would have your own costs to use as a yardstick.

But it happened well beyond shipyards to ship builders. The Navy had its own ropewalk, where it made lines, fibers and so forth. Indeed it had its own milk cattle for Annapolis cadets. And so more and more people began talking about what are inherent governmental responsibilities and what things aren't inherent--if you could ever succeed in defining what you meant by “inherent.” Those that weren't “inherent” should go to industry in a country like ours that depends upon private industry. So there were a whole lot of things at work that resulted in this shift from government shipyards to industry.

INTERVIEWER: I think that covers all my questions?

INTERVIEWER: Thank you. My particular interests have been precisely this shipbuilding matter. To what extent did the issue of these private yards that were being taken over by larger companies come into play in your time?

MR. IGNATIUS: Well, I am searching my memory to see if I can recall some specific things. There were, you know, Litton Industries bought a shipyard in Mississippi

INTERVIEWER: Pascagoula.

MR. IGNATIUS: Pascagoula. And I viewed that as a part of the consolidation, an early example of the broadening of interests and eventual consolidation among the defense contractors. Litton started very small, making wave guides for Korean War electronic systems. They gradually grew and eventually got into the shipyard business.

One of the things that they promised, as I best remember, was that they were going into series production on a big run of Navy destroyers, and this interested a lot of people. We talked earlier about this, about how ships had been regarded as individual entities. Litton offered series manufacturing with consequent savings and greater standardization.

INTERVIEWER: Because this becomes an issue with how that yard at Pascagoula was actually doing, whether they were actually producing the economies and the effectiveness that was promised.

MR. IGNATIUS: I had left by then and I don't recall whether their promises were realized. Often those promises aren't realized and there is a good deal of brochuremanship that often enters into procurement. A wise procurement person is able to take that into account. Whether that was present here or not I don't know.

INTERVIEWER: When you were talking about the C-5 and that, this gets tied in with everything else that Lockheed was involved with at the time--what the skunkworks was doing and Lockheed bidding on a number of Air Force systems, and the Cheyenne helicopter and various other things. At what point did you feel they began to realize that perhaps this problem with the C-5 was a problem with Lockheed as a whole?

MR. IGNATIUS: First, I didn't have anything to do with the C-5 but I observed it and I never had the feeling necessarily that the problem was because of the breadth of Lockheed's interests. Rather, it was more a problem of, as Lockheed would argue and many opponents of the total package concept would argue, a misapplication of the concept to an airplane that didn't lend itself to it.

Lockheed out at Sunnyvale was the principal contractor on the Polaris weapon system, and they were a kind of independent operation. I don't think that the folks at Sunnyvale on Polaris had too much to do with the Georgia operation of logistical airplanes for the Air Force.

There was overall control at the corporate level. I was quite familiar with Lockheed's operations on the missile because I had worked on Polaris as a consultant before I came into the Government. Then as a Defense official and Navy Secretary I became very much involved in Polaris, and Lockheed and Aerojet. I think they all did a very good job.

Polaris was an extremely well-managed and successful program, in part because the Navy had some damn good people on it. ADM Levering Smith--not too many people know who he is, but insiders do. He was the technical leader, and Adm. Raborn was the one who everybody knew because he did the testifying. He was good at that, but the very sound technical leadership came from Levering Smith and very effective management control by a Navy civilian who gave birth to the so-called PERT [Program Evaluation and Review Technique] system

INTERVIEWER: Was that Gordon Rule?

MR. IGNATIUS: I think that was his name, thank you. And so that I always thought this was a very good example of Navy acquisition people working effectively with contractors.

In fact, I used that example in later life. I spent 15 years as head of the Air Transport Association, which represented all the airlines. We were very concerned about the aging equipment that the FAA, Federal Aviation Administration, used for air traffic control.

You couldn't find parts for these old IBM vacuum tube systems that FAA was using and so they finally decided to give birth to a whole new high-tech air traffic control system. I was concerned because FAA didn't have in its resources people like Red Raborn, Levering Smith, and Gordon Rule.

Lockheed did a good job on Polaris and at Georgia had a good record, did it not, on the C-130 and C-141?

INTERVIEWER: Yes, very good.

MR. IGNATIUS: And eventually the C-5 became a pretty good airplane, but it went through some very tough times.

INTERVIEWER: I wanted to go back to '61, about your two step advertising.

MR. IGNATIUS: Well, in the Army, two-step advertising was one of the several things that we pioneered. What we achieved with it was the advantages of advertising, which opened up the business to anybody who wanted to bid on it. But secondly we avoided the pitfalls of someone clearly unqualified.

So in step one, we would let anybody submit a bid. The bids would be reviewed and if in the judgment of the procuring authority there were one or more bidders who simply did not have the capability or any reason to believe they would have that capability, they would be eliminated.

In step two, you would have a sealed bid and the low bidder would win, even though there may have been qualitative differences between the low bidder and, let's say, the next one. You still awarded it to the low bidder.

So it had advantages. Tom Morris, who was in Defense at the time, publicized what we were doing in the Army.

We did another thing. This isn't your question but it is related to some procurement changes in the Army. In some instances the Army provided tooling to manufacturers to produce the end item. An example of that would be the jeep. It is a ubiquitous vehicle for the Army with all kinds of applications.

In one particularly critical period, the contract for the jeep shifted from one company it may have been Ford to another company, it might have been Kaiser Jeep. The tooling was yanked out of one company and re-established at the other. There was a hiatus in production at a time when we needed production critically.

So I said, "Why do we do this?" Why only one year and the exposure to military risk and the greater cost? If you amortize start-up costs over one year's run as opposed to three years' run, you obviously are going to spend more money per unit.

Well, they said, "You have to do it, because Congress votes money annually." I said, "Look, as to Congress if we think we're smart, why don't we assume they are smart up there too? If we can give them a good reason, maybe they will find some way to accommodate us."

So I got a Judge Advocate General's officer and a procurement man in my office and said, "Figure out a way to do this." And we did. I went to see George Mahon, who was chairing the House Appropriations Committee, and he went along.

The essence of what we proposed was to make multi-year buys where we could see requirements fairly clearly, as we could with a jeep or a truck. A truck has, say, a useful life of 10 years and let’s say you need 100,000 of them in your inventory. So you would want to buy 10,000 trucks a year. It is easier to forecast this sort of thing than for some of the more complex military items.

So in instances like that, we said, "Why don't we buy three years' worth at one time? It will give us a higher state of readiness and give us a lower price. General Frank Besson, who was much more willing to experiment than some of the military people, said, "Great idea, why don't we do it?"

So what we came up with was a contract for 30,000 trucks--three years’ worth. If at the end of year one the Congress in its wisdom decided not to appropriate the money for years two and three, we would owe the contractor the unamortized amount that he assumed over the three-year run. That was the essence of what we came up with and George Mahon approved.

So we went ahead and we bought jeeps and trucks that way. Eventually the Army decided it didn't want to tie up its money and lost interest in multi-year buys.

INTERVIEWER: One last question about the issue of the handover, which at OSD level would be between DDR&E and I&L, from the point when you are developing something to when you are buying it-—at the Air Force level between, say, the systems command and the logistics command.

Did you find that there was a particular point of view that you favored? When is the appropriate time for handover and who decides?

MR. IGNATIUS: Well, I think the difficulty of pinpointing the time to hand over responsibility is one of the reasons why we use the term "acquisition" now, instead of "procurement." When I first got started in this stuff we called it “purchasing.” Then it was “procurement” a little fancier word and then “acquisition” even fancier.

But quite apart from the word selection, it had to do with the process. The fact is that during the R&D phase there are a lot of procurement questions about logistical support, spare parts and all of that.

So the idea of thinking in totality in the acquisition process about design, production, and support, makes awfully good sense. And putting it all under someone like an Under Secretary for Acquisitions also makes sense.

In my day they were separated. In the Army I tried to foster a very close, informal, mutually respectful relationship with the R&D people like Willis Hawkins. We were in each other's offices all the time and we encouraged our people to do the same. There had been some rather rigid barriers prior to that between Army I&L office and R&D. In Defense, by the time I got involved in major weapons systems, the keel had been laid. We then got involved in technical aspects of procurement having to do with the Armed Services Procurement Regulations or supply support. But the major decisions had been made prior to that by the R&D folks. That I take it has been changed through placing the totality of the steps of acquisition under an acquisition official at both Defense and the service level. I think it is basically a good thing to do that.

INTERVIEWER: How formal does the procedure need to be? How do you analyze the process to find the right point for a particular changeover?

MR. IGNATIUS: Well, in terms of formality, I think it is useful to think about the spectrum of items that are procured by the Defense Department and separating those that have a commercial counterpart from those that don't.

Where you have a commercial counterpart, essentially the same thing or almost the same thing, it's pretty clear how you go about your buying. You don't fool around with the specs too much. You buy off the shelf. You use highly competitive procurement tools, formal advertising if you will. At the other end of the spectrum you are giving birth to something that doesn't exist in the commercial market. Then it seems to me you have to think differently about acquisition. You have to think about the acquiring service and the contractor working together in appropriate ways to bring the system into being.

So I have always found it helpful to think about what it is we are buying and then applying the buying techniques to those quite different purposes. You have to be close to the contractor if the government and the contractor are working hand in hand on something new. They must be at arm's length and have all the safeguards, obviously, but there's got to be some kind of partnership.

If you are buying commercial type items the government to the maximum extent ought to stay out of it and let the contractor produce for you as he produces for the commercial market, with all the benefits of a competitive system, which in our country by and large has produced good quality and reasonable prices.

(End of tape.)

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