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Caspar Weinberger and the Reagan Defense Buildup

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Caspar Weinberger and the Reagan Defense Buildup The University of Southern Mississippi The Aquila Digital Community Dissertations Fall 12-2013 Direct Responsibility: Caspar Weinberger and the Reagan Defense Buildup Robert Howard Wieland University of Southern Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations Part of the American Studies Commons, Military History Commons, Political History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Wieland, Robert Howard, "Direct Responsibility: Caspar Weinberger and the Reagan Defense Buildup" (2013). Dissertations. 218. https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/218 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The University of Southern Mississippi DIRECT RESPONSIBILITY: CASPAR WEINBERGER AND THE REAGAN DEFENSE BUILDUP by Robert Howard Wieland Abstract of a Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School Of The University of Southern Mississippi In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2013 ABSTRACT DIRECT RESPONSIBILITY: CASPAR WEINBERGER AND THE REAGAN DEFENSE BUILDUP by Robert Howard Wieland December 2013 This dissertation explores the life of Caspar Weinberger and explains why President Reagan chose him for Secretary of Defense. Weinberger, not a defense technocrat, managed a massive defense buildup of 1.5 trillion dollars over a four year period. A biographical approach to Weinberger illuminates Reagan’s selection, for in many ways Weinberger harkens back to an earlier type of defense manager more akin to Elihu Root than Robert McNamara; more a man of letters than technocrat. And yet Weinberger, the amateur historian, worked with budgets his entire public career. Essentially, Pentagon governance is the formation of a military budget that proscribes strategy. In Weinberger’s case this meant financing a six hundred ship navy with fifteen aircraft carriers. His career began in Sacramento hammering out budgets while an assemblyman on the California State Assembly Ways and Means Committee. By 1968, Governor Reagan selected him as California State Finance Director. By 1970, Nixon appointed him Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission and then Director of the Office of Management and Budget. By the time Weinberger left President Ford’s cabinet as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in 1975 he accumulated twenty-five years of budget expertise. After five years at the Bechtel Corporation, Weinberger emerged a Republican senior statesman and was well prepared for the grueling defense budget battles ahead. ii Eventually the political momentum for more defense dollars waned but the Secretary remained committed to larger defense budgets and the loyalty of his boss. This dissertation explores the many challenges he faced through procurement scandals, MX basing, defense reorganization, and the selling of both the defense budget and the Strategic Defense Initiative. The President entrusted his good friend gifted with rhetorical skill to oversee the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. This study concludes that in the end Weinberger, a center-right Eisenhower Republican was beholden to no one but his boss, and accommodated his instinct for fiscal conservatism to the spending requirements of the Reagan Doctrine, thus “Cap the Knife” became “Cap the Ladle.” iii COPYRIGHT BY ROBERT HOWARD WIELAND 2013 The University of Southern Mississippi DIRECT REPONSIBILITY: CASPAR WEINBERGER AND THE REAGAN DEFENSE BUILDUP by Robert Howard Wieland A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Approved: _Andrew Wiest_______________________ Director _Heather Stur________________________ _Mao Lin____________________________ _Chester Morgan______________________ _Troy Gibson________________________ _Susan A. Siltanen____________________ Dean of the Graduate School December 2013 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The writer would like to thank the dissertation directors, Dr. Heather Stur and Dr. Andrew Wiest for their grace, patience, diligence, and support throughout the duration of this project. I would also wish to thank the other committee members, Dr. Bo Morgan, Dr. Mao Lin, and Doctor Troy Gibson for their valuable suggestions and hard work. I am especially grateful to Department Chairman Dr. Kyle Zelner, whose professionalism, hard work and devotion to the department inspires us all. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iv CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................1 II. BOOZE AND WATER: EDUCATION OF A CIVIL SERVANT ...........16 III. CAP THE KNIFE WITH NIXON, FORD, AND BECHTEL ...................52 IV. FROM CAP THE KNIFE TO CAP THE LADLE: THE BUILDUP AND CONGRESS……………………………………………………….83 V. REAGAN’S RHETORICIAN .................................................................111 VI. MX, PROCUREMENT, REORGANIZATION, GOLDWATER, AND OTHER HEADACHES .................................................................133 VII. TO RULE THE WAVES, FOR CAP IS AN ENGLISHMAN! ..............155 VIII. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................180 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................186 v 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In 1981 President Ronald Reagan began the largest peacetime defense buildup in American history. Whether real or imagined, the political perception created by him was of a weak America that needed an improved defense to compete with an aggressive Soviet Union. “Peace through strength” became a popular slogan in the 1980 presidential election campaign, and Reagan hoped to deliver on the defense hawks’ wish list. A nuclear strategic upgrade, the Triad, consisted of a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the MX; an updated submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM), the Trident; and the resurrected B-1 bomber. On the conventional side, the army wanted new equipment like the M1 Abrams tank while the Air Force requested a host of new fighters. Ultimately, the lion’s share of the Reagan defense buildup went to the navy with a goal of six hundred total ships including three new carrier groups. To implement this 1.5 trillion-dollar buildup, Reagan chose a most unlikely candidate for secretary of defense. He selected a close political friend with little defense experience and no political ties to the hawks on the Committee on the Present Danger or the American Security Council, two influential defense lobbying groups. In almost every way, Caspar Weinberger, Harvard aristocrat and dogmatic lawyer, was a perfect foil to his predecessor, Cal Tech technocrat and pensive scientist, Harold Brown, who Colin Powell once mused, “preferred paper to people. I always had the impression that Brown would be just as happy if we slipped his paperwork under the door and left him alone to pore over it or to work out theorems.”1 Where Brown pored over plans of fixed-wing 1 Charles A. Stevenson, SecDef: The Nearly Impossible Job of Secretary of Defense (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006), 127. 2 aircraft, Weinberger gave speeches. Often away from his office in a manner Brown would not have imagined, Weinberger was a gregarious wordsmith who enjoyed sparring with analysts on the Sunday news programs. He would need all his rhetorical skills in the coming budget battles with Congress, the press, Reagan’s cabinet, and even members of his own party. Most observers had expected Reagan to appoint someone like former secretary James R. Schlesinger, a conservative defense expert familiar with all the complexities of planning, programming, and budgeting at the Pentagon. Weinberger’s only defense experience consisted of a few combat patrols with the 42nd Infantry Division on New Guinea during World War II, but Reagan chose him based on a twenty-year relationship going back to days in California politics when the two worked well together, always seeming to know what the other was thinking. Also, Weinberger was at least familiar with Pentagon budgets, having served at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the Nixon Administration. Moreover, as Victor Davis Hanson suggests, “the study of history, not recent understanding of technological innovation, remains the better guide to the nature of contemporary warfare,”2 and Weinberger’s education in the liberal arts gave him a perspective that would serve him well as secretary of defense. Interestingly, most studies of the Cold War or the Reagan administration contain few references to Weinberger, though Nicholas Henderson, British Ambassador to the Unites States, considered him “the most respected and influential long-standing member of Reagan’s cabinet and someone with whom the British embassy were lucky enough, 2Victor Davis Hanson, editor, Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 2. 3 thanks to his goodwill, to enjoy excellent relations.”3 In 1998, Weinberger and scholar
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