George Lee Butler VI-Another Hard Thing He Did Early as CINCSAC: Project Phoenix
Note: Quotations in this piece will often be cited to the page numbers on which the material appears in Volume II of George Lee Butler’s memoir, Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention, Outskirts Press (201).
General Butler became the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command in January 1991. By then, President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev had declared together that the Cold War was over.
It was over for some, anyway. For others, in both the Soviet Union and the United States, it might last as long as they did. It had lasted for at least 45 years, a generation and a half. And it was such a convenient way to organize the world. Them, the bad guys, and us, the good.
General Butler and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, were among those who believed the Cold War had ended and believed this meant that big changes needed to happen in the U. S. military. Major reductions in budgets. Maybe 50%. General Butler, just before leaving the Pentagon to become the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command, had specified some of those reductions in the new National Military Strategy he had prepared at General Powell’s direction and left on Powell’s desk.
In the world outside the military, there was talk of a “peace dividend.” But in the military, the news that cuts would be coming could not be entirely welcome. Delivering that news to the airmen in SAC was not, however, what General Butler thought would be his most challenging task.
The hardest thing—and he knew it would be the hardest thing—would be to change the attitude of the airmen toward the Soviet Union.
“Changing the image of Russia from hostile to moderately adversarial or even benign would rock the foundations of the Strategic Air Command,” he wrote in his memoir. “This would not be about just downsizing or moving boxes on an organizational chart; I was going for the cultural jugular of a storied military organization, and at that point I was far from certain that the command could survive the emotional impact of such a fundamental transformation.” (p. 85)
It wouldn’t be the reductions but the justification for the reductions that would be the harder sell. That the Soviet Union was simply no longer, if it ever had been, the “implacably hostile and permanent threat” it had been taken to be throughout SAC’s “storied” history.
“I harbored no doubt,” Butler wrote, “that inculcating this new outlook would be, by far, the most challenging of my priorities.” (p. 85)
At his first regular meeting with his senior staff, General Butler announced that he would be scheduling regular meetings every Saturday morning with them. They would meet in Executive Session but in casual dress with no indicia of rank “for a series of discussions on the future direction of the command.” (p. 91)
He would supply rolls and coffee, he said.
At the first of these meetings, he laid out two ground rules. First, nothing said would leave the room or be reported to subordinates, even to family members, especially when the discussion turned to “force structure” or “dramatic organizational changes.” Rumor control would be crucial. Second, he wanted to hear from everyone what they thought and every opinion would matter equally, rank would not factor in, which was why the civilian dress. The final decision would be his, Butler acknowledged, but he made the commitment to them that he would treat everyone fairly.
He then laid out the future very much as he had imagined it in the speech he gave at the National War College in 1988 (The speech, entitled “Tides, Trends, and Tasks,” is included in volume 1 of his memoir). And made concrete in the National War Plan he had left on General Powell’s desk just before departing the Pentagon to become CINCSAC.
The consequences that he and General Powell saw as imminent: sharp reductions in nuclear forces, base closings, a consolidation of missions, reductions in personnel, cuts in delivery of hugely expensive new delivery systems like the mobile “Midgetman” ICBM. Maybe also the new “Peacekeeper” ICBMs that carried ten independently targetable warheads. The new “stealthy” B-2 bomber would be cut from the 128 that Congress had authorized to the 20 that had already been delivered. The B-2 was made by our Boeing Company.
Did the B-2 really cost, as Butler said, more than $400 million a copy? More than 50 times the cost of a Minuteman III ICBM (also made by the Boeing company)? More than twelve times the cost of our newest submarine launched ballistic missile, the Trident D-5 (made by our Lockheed Martin company)? Not as much as a Trident submarine itself, though. They cost over $2 billion a copy. They were made by the Electric Boat division of the General Dynamics company. Congress had authorized 24 but that might be cut back to 18.
In general, General Butler was telling his senior staff in SAC that there would be “a decline of interest in and attention to and support for the strategic nuclear deterrence mission.” (p. 96)
“Strategic nuclear deterrence”? That was SAC’s mission. Its only mission.
These cuts would be coming, Butler said, and “I am absolutely determined that the fate of this storied organization, with its rich history of courage and accomplishment, will be determined by those of us in this room rather than being forced upon us by well-intended but uninitiated outsiders.”
He finished talking.
“No one spoke or moved,” he wrote. “I presumed they were still breathing, but there was no visible indication.” His special assistant, General Bob Linhard, broke the silence, to General Butler’s relief and gratitude, offering to write up notes and circulate them for comment.
General Linhard suggested the operation be called Phoenix.
It had begun.
Next: Another Very Hard Thing
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