The Air Force and Navy took a pounding! Their Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35, was supposed to be an all-in-one wonder-weapon. It was a lot closer to an elephant, which is a mouse designed by a government weapons board. The last time we had a fighter that both the Navy and the Air Force liked was the F-4 Phantom II, which was originally a Navy plane but so good that the Air Force wanted them, too. Carrier aircraft are so specialized because landing them involves a controlled crash, and that is not generally something airplanes can do. All the variants of the F-35 were overdue and overpriced, and designed for fighting the Soviet Union, which didn't even exist anymore. I promised a big budget increase on drones, but they squawked. Nobody gets medals for flying drones. Meanwhile, buy some more F-18s.
The Navy lost their Littoral Combat Ship. This was still in a proposal stage, unlike the F-35, which was now in a development stage. This was supposed to be a small and lightly manned ship designed to operate close to shore, so that if the bad guys took one out, it wouldn't hurt. It would carry modules of mission packages, so that it could be easily turned from an anti-aircraft ship to an anti-sub ship to a mine countermeasures ship. In the future it would grow into a half billion dollar monstrosity, with two different hull forms since nobody could figure out the best way to build it and nobody had the balls to fire enough admirals to get them to make a decision. None of the mission modules were ever built on time, or could be made to work, and operating the ships took more manpower than they were designed to carry. Total clusterfuck of a ship. I also killed off the DD(X)/CG(X) class of stealth destroyers and cruisers, which were designed to fight the Cold War. They were projected to cost about three to four times what a quite suitable Arleigh Burke would cost.
In place, I told them to keep building Arleigh Burkes, and to figure out a conventional frigate or corvette design. The Perry class hadn't been built in years, but why couldn't they come up with a plan to build new and updated ones? For that matter, what was wrong with an updated and Americanized version of the Sa'ar V class that Ingalls built for the Israelis in Mississippi, or maybe build a version of some of the smaller ships some of the European nations built? I also approved plans for a guided missile submarine version of the Ohio class boomers, which replaced their ballistic missile tubes with seven-packs of Tomahawks. That sounded fairly sensible and budget minded. I would also be happy to purchase more gators and transport ships, and more transport and spy planes for both services. We needed to do things differently, and buy smarter.
The admirals and generals were not amused. Colin Powell and Tom Ridge told me privately that they were simply nodding agreement for now. As soon as they got back to Washington, they were going to meet with their favorite Congressmen and Senators and lobbyists to roll back my roll backs. I could expect a fight on my hands. This was not unprecedented. Carter had killed off the B-1 bomber, which the Air Force and Rockwell had kept secretly on the back burner until Reagan took office, when it resurfaced as the B-1B. I replied that I understood, but that I wasn't afraid to fire people, and if the Congress got too uppity, I would be happy to unpack the Veto pen.
As for foreign relations, both Colin and Condi told me to behave and grow up about dealing with the ragheads. I didn't have to like them, but I did have to deal with them, and politely, too. I was rather rudely informed that I was smart enough to learn that each country had its own issues and problems and cultures, and that Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, for instance, all had their own beliefs and interests, and just because they were Muslim, it didn't mean they were all the same. I was also told by State that I needed to make nice with the Saudis. Lowering the price of oil would be helpful, too. I grumbled some, and replied I would behave, but that the Saudis would have to show some progress on taming their nut cases. We would end up waiting for some auspicious moment we could claim an agreement to, and then exchange ambassadors.
By the end of the summit we had the start of a coherent plan on national security and immigration. Meanwhile, all through the month of March we were preparing some new legislation based on the ideas I had pushed during the State of the Union speech. Carter and Marty Adrianopolis got together to hammer out some quick bills that would be pushed through Congress while people still liked me. Carter was heading my legislative drive. He would stay out of the spotlight, which was a good idea. The right wing didn't overly like that I had a faggot (their words, not mine) working in the White House. They would have preferred Carter be the guest of honor at a bonfire. Instead, Carter was the eminence grise overseeing the legislation.
I had seen what had buried other Presidents over the years, and one big item was trying to pass gigantic all-in-one all-encompassing total omnibus wonder-bills. When you write that sort of thing it takes forever and nobody likes it. No matter which side you were on, there was always something to bitch about and vote against. No, we needed a bunch of little bills, which we could write quickly and pass quickly, and keep the individual costs down. Better to pass ten $50 billion dollar spending bills than a single $500 billion dollar bill. Marty fed Carter a series of bills related to infrastructure and research. We could fill some potholes, fix a few bridges, update water and sewer systems, and so forth. Most of the money would be funneled through the states, which all had an existing structure to do so. One of the more subtle bills had some wording hidden in it to cut down on the time spent in approvals, to move things along faster.
Then we had some bills for research and development. Quite a bit was funneled through the Pentagon and DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, on dual use technologies. Drones, for instance, might have a terrible name for dropping bombs on people, but were amazingly useful for things like border surveillance and monitoring pollution and wildlife in national parks. A lot of what the military uses can have some form of civilian application, and vice versa. What Wal-Mart brought to retailing through computers, networking, and warehousing made supporting the troops during Desert Shield and Desert Storm possible.
Other items to be funded included increased funding through the National Institutes of Health (basic research masquerading as bioweapon defense), some more money for NASA (more and better satellites for weather prediction and climate science, not that we ever said the word climate, all covered as border surveillance), and so forth. We also let the Department of Energy have some funding for alternative energy projects, couched in the phrase 'energy security'. Some of these projects would fail, and many would take years to develop into new technologies, but they would all be worth it in the long run.
The PATRIOT Act (Protecting America, Tools to Restrict, Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) had been rushed through back in November, just after the bombing campaign in Afghanistan finished. Congress had been terrified and rushed through a measure that basically loosed the handcuffs on any intelligence gathering in the U.S. I was of two minds on this. It was really obvious by that time that the general stove-piped nature of our numerous intelligence agencies had contributed to the disaster. On the other hand, it trashed parts of the Bill of Rights, and as I recalled, a number of succeeding administrations had gone way beyond what the Act allowed. I was able to redline a few things before it hit the floor of the Congress for a vote (We did not need to scan people's reading lists at the library! For one thing, you could find the info you needed to be a terrorist easier on the Internet.) Otherwise, the thing sailed through with almost no objections and I signed it into law two days later. It had been the first piece of legislation I ever signed.