in mid June, it added $369 million as a down payment on a roughly $2.5 billion  tab for 12 more F-22s in 2011 -- thereby opening the barn door for many years and many billions more in production.

The Committee even opened some ambiguous loopholes for continuing the egregious presidential helicopter boondoogle, planting the seeds to neuter Gates' universally praised cancellation. And, despite the extra C-17s, the Committee raised doubts about Gates' zeroing funds for some elderly, superfluous Lockheed C-5A airlifters he was rightly sending to the boneyard.

Severing the Bacon that Binds

With his "sweeping reforms" of April about to be so publicly dumped into the Congressional trough, Gates and the White House finally acted.  Shortly after the House Armed Services Committee voted, the White House issued a new SAP, this time threatening to veto the 2010 bill if the F-22s stayed in.

Just a few days later, the Senate Armed Services Committee marked up its version of the same Pentagon budget.  There, the chief advocate of the F-22, Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), conveniently came up with a written statement from a key Air Force four star general, John Corley, head of the Air Combat Command. Corley obligingly wrote "there were no studies" to justify stopping F-22 production at 187 and that Gates' decision put the nation at "high risk."  Coming from the commander of all the Air Force's fighters, these timely words gave perfect political cover to any senators choosing to vote for more F-22s, planes that just might be produced in their own states.  The Corley encomium did its job: Chambliss garnered enough Committee votes to add 7 more F-22s to the 2010 budget for $1.75 billion.

A classic, even titanic, fight ensued when the bill reached the Senate floor.  For once joining together to do it right, John McCain (R-AZ) and Carl Levine (D-MI) – the top Republican and Democratic members of the Armed Services Committee -- wrote an amendment that revealed just how corrupt and rotten the effort to continue F-22 production really was.  Instead of openly adding new money to the bill to pay for the huge $1.75 billion cost for just seven new F-22s, chief Lockheed booster Saxby Chambliss chose instead to raid other spending accounts.

He used the SASC's time-honored gambit for paying for pork.  He raided the Operations and Maintenance account of the bill for $850 million – the part that pays for training, weapons maintenance, and wartime consumables. He raided the Military Personnel account for $400 million – that’s right, military pay -- and he raided $500 million in presumed savings from the above-mentioned Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act – a savings so preposterous that even the erstwhile reform bill’s authors said was it was completely phony.  It was the first time in recorded history that the leadership of the Senate Armed Services Committee noted and acted against the raiding of military readiness accounts to pay for Members’ porcine goodies, the very con they allowed so often themselves.

Happy to accept the added spending regardless of source, Lockheed, which had promised the Pentagon to not lobby for the extra aircraft, turned on its covert lobbying afterburners.  The company distributed misleading fact sheets in e-mails all over Capitol Hill, but they had an electronic signature of Lockheed’s top corporate lobbyist.  (While Lockheed was caught in flagrante by us, the press has failed to make mention of the double-dealing.)

When head counts of senators revealed that Lockheed, Chambliss, and pork might win, Levin withdrew his amendment to enable Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to gum up the legislative works with a highly provocative hate crimes amendment to the DOD spending bill.  It was a clever if disingenuous stalling tactic to gain time by throwing the Senate into partisan social agenda rancor.  Then Secretary Gates delivered a tough speech in Chicago against the F-22 and, more importantly, the White House got on the telephone.  Unleashing their rabid pit bull, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, over the weekend to call senators, the White House turned enough votes to win by a healthy 58-40 margin on the following Tuesday, July 21.

It was a major victory not just for Gates and Obama, but also for the embryonic anti-pork, pro-defense forces in Congress.  For these forces, it was their first taste of victory in Congress in decades.

Necessary Ingredients for Reform

The victory against the F-22 showed that severing the sinews of pork that bind the Pentagon and the Hill requires ruthless determination and unblinking vigilance.

It required the same kind of toughness that Gates showed in 2008, when he fired the Air Force's Secretary and Chief of Staff for an F-22-boosting end run and when, a year later, he threatened to fire any senior general prematurely leaking budget details to the press or the Hill, a favorite service game for overturning unwanted SecDef budget decisions.  Gates has also put an end to a longstanding scam favored by the Joint Chiefs of Staff:  ever since the Joint Chiefs learned they could roll the weak-kneed Clinton administration with impunity, they have pimped Congress with lists of so-called "Unfunded Requirements" to the tune of the tens of billions of dollars each year.  These budget-busting wish lists announced annually that the SecDef was not the final word on the defense budget.  This year Gates forced the Chiefs to submit these expensive lists to him, then whittled them down to almost nothing.

The First Baby Steps

Plainly, the mighty minions in the Pentagon bureaucracy, Congress and the defense contractors that nourish them are working night and day to head off even the slightest changes. But the victory Gates experienced on July 21 with the help of a shockingly large 58-40 majority in the normally change-averse, reform-hostile Senate shows it may be possible to follow a different path, one that doesn't lead back to business as usual every time.

The ingredients are there for those who want to lead America's defenses out of fifty years of decay.  They face a long, painful journey and endless tough hurdles.  Nevertheless, there's a chance we may be seeing the first steps of that journey.

In the early 1980s, a group of liberals and conservatives from both parties joined in a coalition to reform – quite genuinely – America's defenses.  With the Pentagon and the Armed Services Committees fighting them tooth and nail every inch of the way, this Congressional Military Reform Caucus revealed to the public previously untold horror stories of grossly incompetent weapons and waste, maneuvered inside the Pentagon to cancel at least one shockingly ineffective megabuck weapon (the Army's infamous DIVAD air defense gun), and legislated serious reforms without huge loopholes.  Defense contractors, together with their uniformed and civilian allies reacted vociferously; one complained bitterly to the press that the Military Reform Caucus was cutting them up into "itty, bitty pieces."

Unfortunately, over the following years Capitol Hill's reform impulse waned, crushed by the military-industrial leviathan. Soon, Congress was being lulled by the delusionary argument that the 1991 Gulf War proved America's overwhelmingly powerful defenses needed no reform -- a delusion that has become all-too-obvious after six years of Gulf War II.

Today, some congressmen and senators may be discovering that, despite the various reform pretenses of the last 30 years, including this year's charade, nothing has slowed the decay of the country's defenses.  Their dawning awareness that pork is not invincible, that real pro-defense measures can prevail, may lead these deeply...