The meeting was held in April 1975 in Schlesinger’s office. It was to begin at 1330 and go on until neither side “had anything more to say.” Then Schlesinger would make the decision. The CNO was allowed to bring only two people “because of the size of the room.” I selected Vice Adm. Tom Hayward, who headed Navy Programing, and Vice Adm. Kent Lee, the commander, Naval Air Systems Command. Both were experienced Navy fighter pilots. When the three of us arrived at the SecDef’s office we were stunned to find more than a dozen OSD people assembled — Leonard Sullivan and Chuck Myers, plus analysts, engineers, and finance types. It looked like an attempt to overpower the Navy with sheer volume of testimony. The first part of the meeting involved lengthy discussions on the carrier suitability of the F-16. I advised that our naval test analyses indicated the F-16 would bang the tailpipe on the deck with unacceptable frequency. OSD claimed this could be solved by faster landing speeds and better pilot technique. Then came the discussion of the alternative program costs and the synergy of a single type of fighter for all services.
The CNO was to be the only witness to speak for the Navy side. When I complained that the short mission range of the F-16 would reduce the carrier air wing’s striking radius by several hundred miles from even its current capabilities, Leonard Sullivan told SecDef that could be a plus; it would get the carriers back where they belonged, conducting antisubmarine warfare and covering amphibious landings.
I had saved my blockbuster until the SecDef’s Office of Program Assessment and Evaluation (PA&E) had run through all of their arguments. I then advised that the F-16 was not acceptable as a carrier fighter because it lacked an all-weather capability. There was dead silence in the room. Schlesinger said, “Say that again and explain.” I pointed out that the F-16 carried only AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles and they were clear-air-mass missiles. In clouds, a radar missile like the AIM-7 Sparrow III was required. This capability, with the necessary radar guidance system and heavier pylons, had been incorporated in the F-18 design, but the F-16 would not accommodate an all-weather missile system without extensive redesign and added weight. Schlesinger was incredulous. He asked Sullivan to explain. There was silence and then confusion. Then Myers said, “Most of the time, maybe two thirds, the weather on the average would be suitable for Sidewinder. Why should we assume the enemy would attack in bad weather?”
I replied that if the enemy knew our air defense was no good in cloudy weather, that is precisely when they would choose to attack. The debate was over. There was another half an hour of perfunctory discussion, but the suggestion that Sparrow III be installed on the F-16 was never mentioned again.
Both sides had run out of discussion points, and SecDef adjourned the session. He called me into his inner office alone. “Admiral,” he said, “you’ve got your F-18.” After a pause, he added, “PA&E never pointed out to me the all-weather limitations of the F-16.” On 2 May 1975, the OSD announced that the Navy had DoD approval to develop the F-18 for production.
The F/A-18 is still the Navy’s premier aircraft. It has filled the carrier decks as a fighter-attack aircraft, replacing the A-7 attack plane and the F-14 fighter with a single plane that can perform both of its predecessors’ functions. This gives the carrier enormous flexibility in its air wing, capable of launching more than fifty attack planes or fifty fighters, depending upon the tactical situation. With four squadrons of F/A-18s in each carrier’s embarked airwing, the maintenance and supply support has been dramatically simplified, and the F/A-18 was designed for ease of maintenance, only needing a third of the man-hours required by the F-14. Early F/A-18 models performed admirably in Afghanistan and in 2003, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and as the F/A-18E and F versions continue to enter the fleet, this will be another giant increase in air wing capability.
EDWARD TELLER AND THE SUBMARINE CARRIER
In the summer of 1976, I had been in the job of CNO for two years and had testified several times both years before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and Appropriation Subcommittees on naval matters, extending from our strategy and military capabilities to the emerging weaponry of nuclear propulsion, ballistic missiles at sea, and satellite surveillance from space. Therefore, I was not completely surprised when Capt. John Poindexter, the executive assistant, said that Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, would like to discuss a highly classified subject. He indicated a preference for seeing me in a one-on-one situation without aides or other experts present. I told Poindexter to set up a luncheon in the office for the two of us and to give me an hour with Teller, whom I had not previously met.
Teller was a charming old gentleman, pleasant and polite, with a thick accent and all the other expected characteristics of a brilliant but perhaps absent-minded scientist. We had just been seated when he launched into the subject of our get-together, a proposal that he felt was terribly important to the future of the Navy. He said the Navy should construct a fleet of very large submarines that could serve as mother ships to small, high-speed submarines to operate below the surface of the water, in the same fashion that aircraft operate from a carrier on the surface. He proposed that the mother ship have an ample hangar to house the smaller submarines for rearming and crew replacement and that it be nuclear powered, as would the “fighter” submarines. The mother sub would proceed to a remote area of the ocean that was within the smaller submarine’s range of the nation’s strategic military objectives. From there, either resting on the bottom or at very slow speeds it would launch its small submarines, with their crews of only one or two operators. The miniature subs would then carry out the tasks that are normally the mission of the current Los Angeles—class boats, which have a crew of more than a hundred officers and men. These tactical submarines would, in Teller’s words, be very fast, implying a speed of one hundred knots or more. These speeds astounded me, because my knowledge of hydrodynamics, which was not entirely primitive, told me that submerged objects, such as a fully submerged submarine, a partially submerged under-hull area of a larger ship, or even a smaller highly streamlined device such as a torpedo, were physically limited in their maximum velocity. To date the best speeds attained by a submerged body in our weapons tests was less than forty miles an hour in spite of extensive experimentation. Even theoretical studies conducted in an effort to improve the performance of underwater weapons, confirmed this limitation of the velocities of underwater bodies.
Teller continued to present his proposal, which depended upon a large number, twenty to thirty, of these tactical submarines, traveling at speeds of one hundred knots, for scouting, surveillance, attacking enemy submarines, destroying hostile warships, and sinking cargo ships. The analogy was obviously similar to that of an aircraft carrier, with the mother sub as the carrier and the small — even single-seat — tactical submarines as the aircraft. There was no discussion of what kinds of reactors would be used, the configuration of either of the categories of the submarines or the mode of propulsion. Teller had thought out the concept quite thoroughly but had given little or no thought to the feasibility of designing, constructing or operating the components. To him it was just a helluva good idea but the details of making it work he was leaving up to Rickover and the naval architects. I was surprised that Teller had never indicated why he felt that the present system would need to be replaced, or why his proposal would be any better. I am sure that it was the exciting idea of having fantastically fast “fighter” submarines zipping around underwater that appealed to him. But I was amazed that he as a physicist did not take into consideration that the current state of the art of hydrodynamic theory would limit the maximum speed of these underwater fighting subs to certainly less than fifty miles an hour.