Pentagon Wars and the Bradley "Fighting Vehicle"
-dubyasucks: June 6, 2001
The Book
The Pentagon Wars: Reformers Challenge the Old Guard - By Col. James G. Burton
ISBN: 1557500819
Publisher: Naval Institute PressThe publisher states, "From the late 1960s through the mid-1980s, a small band of military activists waged war against corruption in the Pentagon, challenging a system they believed squandered the public's money and trust. This book examines that movement and its proponents and describes how the system responded to their criticisms and efforts to change accepted practices and entrenched ways of thinking.
The author, an air force colonel and part of the movement, worked in the Pentagon for fourteen years. He presents a view of the Defense Department that only an insider could offer. He exposes serious flaws in the military policy-making process, particularly in weapons development and procurement. The details he gives on the unrelenting push for high-tech weapons, despite their ineffectiveness and extraordinary cost overruns, provide a strong case for the charge of ethical bankruptcy. This book should be mandatory reading not only for those involved with policy-making but for those concerned with the public interest."
Critics Reviews:
From M. O'Donnell - Choice
"Burton's important book exposes incompetence, mismanagement, and wastefulness in the Defense Department. . . . A good index, appropriate photographs, adequate documentation, and a reading list on military strategy are the book's strengths. Lack of bibliography on the Pentagon is a glaring weakness. . . . Readers have heard such horror stories many times, but almost always from journalists writing for left-wing publications. As an insider (a colonel who worked in the Pentagon), Burton offers what so many earlier writers lacked--credibility. For this reason, the book should find a place on the shelves of academic and large public libraries."From Tim Weiner - The New York Times Book Review
"The author's scathing memoir says the Pentagon's spending of the public's money is a dirty business, one that too often has nothing to do with national defense, one in which secrecy and deception are valuable currencies. 'Sadly, I have seen program managers lie to high-level review boards, generals lie to civilians, civilians lie to generals, and both lie to Congress and the American public,' Mr. Burton writes. 'Seldom is anyone held accountable. On the contrary, many are rewarded for their behavior.'"From Publisher's Weekly
"Former Air Force colonel Burton spent 14 years as a Pentagon specialist in weapons acquisition and testing before his retirement in 1986. In this angry, controversial, convincing brief, he testifies that the process of selecting and purchasing weapons for our armed forces is ``ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom,'' with few checks and balances. The most scathing and damning portions of the expose illustrate how Pentagon procurement officers routinely give more consideration to satisfying defense contractors than to the safety of the troops who will use a given weapon on the field. Burton recalls the fuss he raised over the Bradley Fighting Vehicle's vulnerability to anti-armor weapons, and though (reluctantly made) design changes improved the safety of the vehicle, Burton suffered both personally and professionally for his boat-rocking, as he shows here. Ultimately, he is not optimistic: the flaws in weapons procurement are probably permanent, Burton concludes, since the reforms he and others forced were only temporary."The Movie
All this was then made into one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. HBO's wonderful movie The Pentagon Wars is not only a strong condemnation of government waste in the Pentagon, but it provides the viewer with a fascinating case study of that which is wrong with most large organizations, both government and corporate. Namely, the rise of self-interested middle managers whose primary concern is their own advancement at the expense of all else - including common sense and in some cases, even safety. Below are a few select quotes from the brilliant script for your amusement:
Jones: You go out onto a battlefield with this pecker sticking out of your turret and the enemy's gonna unload on you with all they got. Might as well paint a big red bull's-eye on the side. Col. Smith: But, it's a troop-carrier, not a tank. Jones: Do you want me to put a sign on it in fifty languages: "I am a troop-carrier, not a tank. Please don't shoot at me"? ------------ Jones: You've already got 4,400 rounds of machine-gun ammo. Now you want 25 m.m. shells? Col. Smith: The General wants his ammo. Jones: He can't have his ammo. Not unless he runs alongside this thing carrying it. ------------ Jones: Anti-tank missiles?! Col. Smith: [Deep Sigh] I don't know. Jones: Where do I put them? The men will have to wear the missiles as hats! Col. Smith: I don't know! I don't know! Can't you just squeeze them in? Jones: We're not trying on a pair of Levi's here Colonel.... ------------ Sgt. Fanning: So what we have here is a troop-transport that can't carry troops. A reconnaissance vehicle that's too conspicuous to do reconnaissance.... Col. James Burton: And a quasi-tank that has less armor than a snow-blower, but has enough ammo to take out half of D.C. ------------ Gen. Partridge: We take atoms and molecules and before we're finished with them, they're everything from combat boots to bombs! The kind of bombs that nobody from the other side will ever see until the damn thing is plowing down their chimney like Santa Claus from Hell! ------------ Gen. Partridge: The Paveway is one Hell of a bomb: laser guided, state-of-the-art. Chairwoman of the Senate Armed Services Committee: And it proved what? That we have an effective weapon as long as the enemy allows us to build a two-story crane directly above their tanks? ------------ Gen. Partridge: You know in baseball, a guy who hits .400 is considered pretty damn great. Congressman: In baseball the losing team isn't killed by their opponents ------------ Col. James Burton: Just how long will it take you to get your "sheep specs"? ------------ Col. James Burton: Do we have a rule book? Sgt. Fanning: A rule book, sir? Col. James Burton: You know, a book with rules in it. Sgt. Fanning: What do you need a rule book for? Col. James Burton: Because I always play by the rules. Sgt. Fanning: How do you know you're playing by the rules, if you need a rule book to tell you what the rules are? ------------ Gen. Partridge: Even a heat-seeking missile can miss a target. Chairwoman of the Senate Armed Services Committee: General, I see here that you taped electric hot-plates to the surface of the vehicle to help your heat-seeking missile find its target. And, that the temperature of the vehicle was so high that it could have fried an egg at twenty feet. ------------ Col. Smith: I've been a bird Colonel so long, I swear I'm growing feathers! ------------ Casper Weinberger: When the Sergeant York proved incapable of hitting airplanes, we test fired it at hovering helicopters. When it failed to hit hovering helicopters, we fired it at stationary targets . . . and it missed those and hit a latrine instead. Were we test firing at latrines that day? ------------ Chairwoman: Am I to understand that you were not in favor of the tests Colonel Burton proposed? Gen. Partridge: Absolutely not. Chairwoman: "Absolutely not," yes? Or, "absolutely not," no? Gen. Partridge: "Absolutely not," absolutely. ------------ Col. James Burton: It was my understanding that only Soviet arms would be used in these tests. Col. J.D. Bock: Well, yes. And, Romania is one of the Soviet blocks . . . isn't it? ------------ Gen. Partridge: [Harumpf] Uh, billion. Chairwoman: With a "B"?!!
CAST
Col. James Burton (Cary Elwes)
Gen. Partridge (Kelsey Grammer)
Madam Chairwoman (Olympia Dukakis)
Casper Weinberger (Richard Benjamin)
Sgt. Fanning (Viola Davis)
Col. Smith (Richard Schiff)
Jones (J.C. MacKenzie)
Col. J.D. Bock (John C. McGinley)
----------------
Whistle-Blower Finds a Jackpot As He Reaches End of His Quest
-Lee Gomes, Wall Street Journal: April 27, 1998
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A dozen years ago, Henry Boisvert was a testing supervisor at FMC Corp. who refused to sign his name to a report he didn't think was accurate. As a result, Mr. Boisvert may soon be signing something else: the back of a check from the defense contractor for $100 million.
Two weeks ago, Mr. Boisvert earned a place in the annals of corporate do-gooders, winning what may be the largest award ever to a whistle-blower in a federal case. After an almost four-month trial in U.S. District Court in San Jose, a jury found in favor of Mr. Boisvert in a civil suit he brought against FMC, coming in with a $171.6 million award against his former employer.
The federal judge on the case could reduce the award, and FMC says it plans to file an appeal. But under the False Claims Act -- written to reward people who report wrongdoing by federal contractors and to help government recover money from them -- certain portions of damages can often double or triple. If that happens in the FMC award, it would push the company's liability up to at least $356 million. Such a sum would top the current record for a whistle-blower award, a $325 million settlement last year with SmithKline Beecham PLC, in a case involving Medicare billing, according to Taxpayers Against Fraud, a Washington group.
Mr. Boisvert, who was unable to land a permanent job during his fight, says he will give away most of his share of the award. He wept when the verdict was read in the courtroom April 14.
"This wasn't about the money," Mr. Boisvert said. "They were sending false materials to the government and were telling me to cover up everything. They didn't care about the troops."
Those sentiments may come off as sound bites scripted by his lawyers. But people who know the soft-spoken Mr. Boisvert say his selflessness isn't a pose. A neighbor, Al Hadad, recalls that even though Mr. Boisvert has three sons, he took in a troubled 17-year-old foster child and has since found the boy a job.
The 48-year-old Mr. Boisvert wasn't doing battle alone. He has a formidable legal team, and it is a big reason why he was able to persevere through the 12 years of the lawsuit. The law calls for the government to get 70% of damages and for the whistle-blower to split the rest with his attorneys. Besides that, the lawyers also will be able to bill FMC separately for their fees, possibly resulting in added millions.
At issue in Mr. Boisvert's suit was the manufacture of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, a tank-like troop carrier that has been controversial ever since it began rolling off FMC's manufacturing lines here in the 1980s. Mr. Boisvert alleges that FMC quashed a report he wrote calling into question the Bradley's viability in water.
FMC, which also produces machinery and chemicals, calls the Boisvert verdict and award "outrageous." The Chicago defense contractor continues to dispute Mr. Boisvert's allegations. Indeed, to this day, FMC points out, the U.S. Army remains a customer of the company.
Mr. Boisvert wasn't always disillusioned with FMC. He was drafted into the Army in the late 1960s, and soon became fascinated with the big armored vehicles that were one of FMC's main product lines. Mr. Boisvert went to work for FMC in the 1970s and by the mid-1980s had become one of three test supervisors for its San Jose Bradley plant.
The Bradley was designed to ferry soldiers around battlefields in the company of more heavily armored tanks. Because it was conceived to take on Warsaw Pact vehicles, its ability to "swim" across the rivers and lakes of Europe was an important part of its job description. FMC would eventually sell 9,000 Bradleys to the Army for as much as $1.5 million each.
Still, the vehicle has been a favorite target of critics and members of Congress, who contend it was badly designed and too expensive. A recent HBO movie, "Pentagon Wars," told the story of James Burton, a former colonel who battled superiors over how the Bradley should be field-tested. But Pentagon brass and FMC have continued to defend the vehicle, citing among other things its reliable performance during the Gulf War.
Desert Storm, however, would never have exposed what Mr. Boisvert said was the vehicle's main weakness. In many circumstances, he charged, the Bradley swam like a rock.
Mr. Boisvert said he first encountered problems with the Bradley in the early days of the Army procurement process. He had one driven into a test pond and watched it quickly fill with water. Mr. Boisvert says he began checking into the matter and found other problems related to the Bradley's amphibious ability, including pumps that didn't work right and water-related tests that had been called for but never conducted.
He says he wrote a report on his findings and intended to send it to the Army. But he says an FMC manager told him his write-up would never leave the company. Mr. Boisvert says he was eventually fired in 1986 when he refused to sign a falsified report. FMC officials refuse to discuss the circumstances of Mr. Boisvert's termination.
Mr. Boisvert contacted Phillip G. Svalya, a San Jose attorney who had represented his first wife in their divorce and impressed him as fair. Mr. Svalya has had the case since then, along with attorneys from two other firms. The team has pursued a series of legal attacks. In 1992, Mr. Boisvert was awarded $200,000 in damages by a jury in a wrongful-termination suit he filed in California state court against FMC.
For a case involving crateloads of brain-numbing technical documents, the more recent trial produced some sensational testimony. For example, former FMC welders who worked on Bradleys claimed they weren't given enough time to do their work properly and so would simply fill gaps with putty. Other FMC workers said quality-control measures were a sham. One procedure, for example, called for a Bradley to be pulled at random from the assembly line for exhaustive testing. But Mr. Boisvert's team said the test vehicle was marked with an "X" for all to see and received more work than any other vehicle.
FMC disputes those accounts. For example, its lawyer John D. Dwyer said in a post-trial interview that the welders who testified couldn't speak for standards in every stage of manufacturing. He denied Mr. Boisvert's allegations about the test vehicle.
But the jury didn't buy FMC's arguments. It took 12 days to reach a verdict. The foreman says most of the time was spent sifting the evidence rather than arguing about a conclusion. "There weren't a lot of disagreements," says the foreman, software engineer Francisco Navaria. The verdict, Mr. Navaria says, was meant to reimburse the government for what it paid for amphibious capabilities but didn't get.
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