40 Years of the ‘Fighter Mafia’
>"West Point Mafia" parallel..
September 20, 2013
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At a glance it seems like any other fraternal convocation in Washington—dazzling credentials, even more impressive name-dropping. These military sages have been meeting weekly for four decades to talk shop, and on this night of nights their camaraderie is expressed in so many anecdotes, many of which date back to the Johnson and Nixon administrations.
Wednesday nights at the round tables in the Officers Club at Fort Myer: beer, wine, and exhaustive talk about fighter aircraft, weapons systems, combat vehicles, ships, politics, and the Pentagon budgetary labyrinth—what more could a klatch of the defense world’s best and brightest want in their downtime?
“Typically, there’d be ten to fifteen people for a couple of hours, lots of beer,” says Norman Polmar, advisor to three U.S. Navy secretaries, who has been coming to the group for some 20 years. He was on point to offer newcomers a semi-official history at the gathering’s 40th anniversary meeting on Wednesday night. “We sit at a couple of tables and discuss military issues—I’d guess half the people here are active [military and Defense Department employees], the other half retired. They bring the perspective of people who are making day-to-day decisions at the Pentagon.”
But this is much more than a social hour for flyboys and engineers, test pilots and whiz kids—though all are represented here. Peel back the layers and the glamorous resumes and this roomful of genteel men (and a few women) reveals a shadowy reformist element once dubbed the “Fighter Mafia” and what one founding member has called a “conspiracy” of “bureaucratic guerilla warriors.” Why else would a writer like Andrew Cockburn—author of Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy—be wandering about, mixing it up with Pentagon critic Winslow Wheeler, and Danielle Brian, head of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO)?
This group is not radical in the obvious sense, but they’ve been doing battle within the system (and despite it), members say. They are committed to reforming the defense industry, not tearing it down. They’ve occupied coveted positions at the top and have advised cabinet members, service chiefs, and members of Congress. They have brought ingenuity and better technology to flagging systems and fought like back-alley bullies to get their reforms through.
>https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/40-years-of-the-fighter-mafia/