A revived defense industrial base doesn’t just depend on entrepreneurial energy and innovation, or warfighters seeking the fastest and best possible solutions to their problems.
It also requires government bureaucrats who are willing to take risks, and who use their knowledge and skillset not just to protect their own self-interest, but to protect the nation. George Spangenberg epitomized that kind of bureaucrat for nearly thirty-five years with the Navy’s Board of Aeronautics and Naval Air Systems Command. One of the first aircraft he worked on was the Grumman F4F Wildcat before World War Two; the last was the Grumman F-14, the plane that the movie “Top Gun” made famous. That extraordinary continuity gave Spangenberg a deep understanding of what the Pentagon was doing right in defense acquisition, and where it was going wrong. Even before the Last Supper, Spangenberg was warning colleagues and defense officials against the rigid, top-heavy institution the Pentagon was becoming, although few were listening.
Then, no one paid attention. Now we should.
Born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1912, George Spangenberg studied aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan before being recruited to join the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia in 1935. At the time it was the only government-owned aircraft production facility in the country; yet Congress had just passed a law requiring the Navy to build ten percent of its military aircraft on its own.
Facing multiple demands with meager resources, Spangenberg worked on several engineering projects until December 1939, when he was offered a position on the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington DC.
It was an interesting time to be in the nation’s capital. War had broken out in Europe between Germany and Britain and France; war was raging on the other side of the world between Japan and China, and was threatening to engulf U.S. interests across the Pacific.
Yet in Washington the mood was so isolationist that it was de rigeur for naval officers not to wear their uniforms in public. “Civilian attire was the norm in order to keep "military presence" in Washington to a minimum,” Spangenberg recalled in his 1990 oral history.1 “There was only one admiral in the bureau then, Adm. Towers. Ramsey wore a pair of slacks and a black cambric jacket all the time.”
Spangenberg added, perhaps unnecessarily, “That policy ended with Pearl Harbor.”
That wasn’t all that changed. In 1939 the BuAer, as it was known, was tiny. On his first day on the job Spangenberg was able to meet all the division heads and still have time for lunch. Also, “When we arrived in Washington, there was no security to speak of,” he recalled. “Here were all the secrets of the nation and we didn't even lock file cabinets. It was strange.”
During this pre-war period Spangenberg worked on early versions of aircraft that would become famous: the F4U Corsair, the Consolidated PBY, and the Grumman fighter F4F Wildcat. It was Spangenberg who told Roy Grumman that his aircraft had been turned down as the Navy’s lead fighter because it was underpowered (a mistake Grumman corrected with the F6F Hellcat).
The relatively leisurely pace of activity at the Bureau changed quickly after December 7, 1941. As his questioner in his oral history pointed out:
“After Pearl Harbor now did all of a sudden your work intensify or were you already working pretty hard to begin with?”
SPANGENBERG: We were working hard then. When I came down to Washington we were on a five-and-a-half-day week. We worked seven hours a day and four hours on Saturday. In order to park you had to get there at 7:30. So most people were in there at 7:30, 7:45, around that time.”
When war came, however, the schedule moved to an eight-hours a day, six days a week and “we civilians got paid overtime, but at a rate only the government could calculate.”
The buildup of naval aviation was dizzying, with eight new aircraft programs getting launched in 1942, and ten in 1943. Yet the ground had been prepared beforehand. Spangenberg remembered, “I went back and tabulated all this stuff and lo and behold in those early days starting in '39, '40 and '41 we had started buying trainers. We bought trainers and transports. We didn't buy very many combat airplanes, but we didn't have anybody to fly them anyway. I was really surprised when I saw how logical the buildup was.”
During the war, a rapidly expanding navy bureaucracy (civilian employees alone jumped nearly sixfold) saw its principal job as expanding resources for mobilization, and drawing in as many companies as possible through contracts, including contracts to build planes. “We probably bought too many types of airplanes during the war,” Spangenberg later said. “Once we were into World War II most of the procurement rules got suspended. We didn't run a full design competition until the war was over, but rather tried to keep all the competent contractors busy.”
Nonetheless, it was a world war and the demands for newer and better, as well as more, aircraft were incessant. That meant “we had no design competitions, but rather initiated new aircraft by direct negotiation with both our major and minor producers. With the war's outcome no longer in doubt, we returned to our normal method of aircraft acquisition,” based on competition between major plane makers, with peak performance being the goal.
It was a significant shift. While competitive bidding helped to keep costs down—at least at the outset—and gave the Navy more direct control over requirements, it also meant that it was no longer tapping directly into the innovative designs and energies of the companies themselves. As postwar turned into Cold War, the growth of requirements at the expense of innovation began to take over the acquisition process. While the services still demanded peak performance, each service’s bureaucracy spent more and more time protecting their budget vis a vis other services, rather than looking for the best solution to problems regardless of cost.
George Spangenberg watched it happen and was not happy about it. He drew up a working chart on the number of naval aircraft “starts” (i.e. new programs, usually with an assigned model designation) from 1935 to 1970, and remarked on a disturbing trend. Compared to the World War II years, and even before, the number of new aircraft starts was steadily declining, as the range of choices of new planes for the Navy narrowed—even as the time for procurement and development took longer and longer. Spangenberg tried to draw his superiors’ attention to this issue, but with little success. Even his beloved F-14 wound up with half the number the Navy hoped to procure, and all produced at about the rate for which they been initially priced, bringing Grumman to the brink of bankruptcy.
He noticed another unfortunate change within the personal dynamics of the Bureau of Aeronautics itself (which was replaced in 1966 as Naval Air Systems Command).
“In the old [Main Navy and Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue] I'd walk down the passage way and I might see Chuck Francis, the avionics fire control guy or the AEW guy, Leo Puckett, or perhaps the seat guy, Bill Thomas, and we would exchange items and not require a memo,” he recalled. “I might have a question come up or he might have a question of me but just walking down the hall I'd see these guys and we would talk. We might end up going to get a cup of coffee at the snack bar or something like that if there was an issue.
Once we got over to [the new building] in Crystal City we got the elevator between us and you didn't see people. The Electronics Division might have been on the sixth floor, I never went to the sixth floor, I was on the eleventh. It made a real difference to us. It went from the horizontal to the vertical. It was something nobody I think had anticipated but it really cut down on that informal contact. Everybody doesn't need it of course. There are some parts of the organization that probably didn't give a damn. But those of us who were in the coordination business—I would meet the head of the aircraft division when I was still a GS low level something or another. You got to know people a lot better just by seeing them.
Office doors were also always open in the old Constitution Avenue building; that wasn’t the case anymore in the silent new high-rises at Jefferson Plaza.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon bureaucracy was getting progressively top-heavy. While the actual number of civilian employees remained relatively constant during the Cold War years—1.2 million in 1951, 1.1 million thirty years later in 1981—the Office of the Secretary of Defense produced new executive positions like mushrooms after a summer rain.2 By 1995 OSD personnel practically numbered the same as the entire workforce at Naval Air Systems Command.
"Too many Chiefs and not enough Indians," was Spangenberg’s sardonic comment. He remembered that the first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, wanted his staff to number no more than half a dozen.
However, Spangenberg’s most important battle before retirement in 1973 was over the trend in Navy fighter acquisition. He had been a keen champion of the F-14 Tomcat, which was designed to rectify the lack of maneuverability and performance of the F-111B—one of Defense Secretary McNamara’s most ill-conceived projects to save money by having all the services buy the same aircraft.
As the Tomcat aged, the question of a next-generation replacement became current. Spangenberg believed the decision to replace the Tomcat with the F-18 Hornet and then Super Hornet over the Tomcat was a political decision made at the expense of combat capability. Why spend more to develop and acquire a plane that can do less, was Spangenberg’s constant refrain regarding the F-14’s replacements. As he told his interviewer in his oral history recordings, “The F-16, F-17, and F-18 programs were clearly not in the best interests of our country. Within the system, we tried, and we failed, to convince those above us to buy the most cost-effective alternatives available. The fleet pilots of tomorrow deserve better.”
Spangenberger was just as dubious—perhaps more justifiably—about the Joint Strike Fighter program, which suffered from the same myopic perspective as McNamara’s F-111 program, i.e. the belief that money could be saved by getting all the services to buy the same plane. In the case of the JSF, the Air Force convinced the other services to accept a “single engine, single crew” concept with the rationale that a single basic model would save money long-term by producing quantities of aircraft that would lower the cost per plane.
Today, of course, the JSF program cost has gone through the fiscal roof at $2 trillion at the GAO’s latest estimate—even with other countries buying and building their own versions of the F-35. At the time, Spangenberg predicted that the only service to gain advantage would be the Air Force, with only minimal improvements over its existing Stealth aircraft, the F-22 Raptor. As for the Navy, he stated baldly, “The JSF will not improve the situation for the Navy or Marines. It is evident to me that the Navy has elected to give up its one area of advantage in the air-to-air arena.”
Before he died, Spangenberg wrote in a note to his oral history interview: “As I now review the record some 24 years after my retirement and 22 years after my last official testimony on the Navy's fighter/attack programs (October `75, Senate Appropriation Committee), I am more than ever convinced that we, the technical community, were correct in the positions we espoused” about the need to let the Navy buy and build the planes it needed to accomplish its specific missions. “Of course, we didn't make our case within the Navy, or OSD, or in the Congress.”
Spangenberg died tragically in an automobile crash in November 2000. He didn’t live long enough to see the arrival of the debate over autonomous systems as the basis for the next generation of American combat aircraft. Perhaps he would see the fact that the Air Force passed over the big primes and chose Anduril and General Atomics for the next phase of the CCA contract, as a step in the right direction.3
In any case, George Spangenberg remains a shining example of the bureaucrat as hero—the expert who sees serving the public and the truth, as one and the same mission.
https://www.docdroid.com/x9czNLE/george-spangenberg-oral-history-pdf#page=295
https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/historical-tables/executive-branch-civilian-employment-since-1940/
https://breakingdefense.com/2024/04/air-force-picks-anduril-general-atomics-for-next-round-of-cca-work/