Paisley Halted Experts’ Attempt to Kill Missile : Navy Weapons Scientist Who Opposed Troubled Northrop Project Was Later Eased Out of Job

A top-secret missile called Tacit Rainbow was beset with so many problems in 1985 that scientists at the China Lake Naval Weapons Center recommended that the contract be killed. Then, former Assistant Navy Secretary Melvyn R. Paisley stepped in.

Paisley, now under investigation in the Pentagon procurement scandal, overruled the scientists and kept the multimillion-dollar project alive, The Times has learned. Also aligned with Paisley on the Tacit Rainbow decision was another Pentagon official who is also under investigation: Victor D. Cohen, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for tactical warfare systems.

The prime contractor on Tacit Rainbow is Northrop Corp., which was served with a search warrant this month at the firm’s Ventura Division in Newbury Park. Investigators were said to be seeking information concerning the Tacit Rainbow and other unmanned aircraft programs.

The missile remains under development there even though Northrop has encountered significant technical, schedule and monetary problems; its cost, officially classified, has soared tenfold, from $30,000 per missile to $300,000, according to Navy sources.

Meanwhile, the scientists at China Lake who recommended killing the Tacit Rainbow missile program have encountered significant career problems. Burrell Hays, the former technical director of the Navy lab, was forced out in 1986, and members of the technical staff who made the recommendation were reassigned, according to Navy sources.

“It was a long battle,” said Dr. Frank Cartwright, a former senior adviser to Hays at China Lake. “Paisley essentially fired Burrell Hays.”

Paisley’s action shows the powerful influence that top political appointees at the Pentagon have been able to wield in the Reagan Administration, not only over weapons contracts but over the government’s basic weapons research capability.

Ultimately, the loss of the China Lake scientists led to a significant weakening of national capability in anti-radar missiles, which are critical to the high technology warfare that U.S. forces may have to wage, some experts say.

At the time of the controversy, the Tacit Rainbow was so highly classified that even the existence of the program could not be acknowledged. The secrecy kept the controversy contained, even though it was causing a major uproar at the isolated weapons development center in the Mojave Desert. The secrecy that surrounds these so-called “black programs” often means that they get little scrutiny by Congress, critics say.

Profound Problems

“We had some pretty strong discussions,” Hays acknowledged, but he refused to discuss specifics of the incident. However, Navy sources who back Hays said the problems with Tacit Rainbow uncovered by China Lake were so profound that they could not understand how Paisley could have sided with Northrop in the case.

“At one point, development costs at Northrop were running $20 million per month,” one official said. “Even the Air Force wanted to terminate Northrop’s contract.”

The Air Force’s Aeronautical Systems Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio had the original lead role in developing the missile, but the Navy joined the program during the mid-1980s. In 1985, China Lake was requested to provide an independent evaluation of the program. The weapons center was also responsible for developing the missile’s warhead and fuse.

China Lake, a vast complex of laboratories and bombing ranges the size of Delaware just east of the High Sierra, is widely regarded as the top ordnance laboratory for the military services, having produced some of the most successful missiles, bombs and conventional warheads in the Navy and Air Force arsenals.

Military Maverick

But, at the same time, China Lake has gained a reputation as a maverick in the military system, an organization populated by independent scientists often at odds with Washington bureaucrats and defense contractors.

The center has aggressively pushed for a role to conduct full- scale weapons development by government scientists, build prototypes and develop detailed manufacturing plans for weapons. Then, it would hand over those plans for competitive bidding by manufacturers.

That attitude is anathema to defense contractors, who want lucrative defense research and development dollars under their own control.

When Paisley arrived as an assistant secretary of the Navy, the defense industry found a friend who would do battle with military laboratories, in part because the Reagan Administration was eager to reduce the government’s research and development payroll.

The issue of China Lake’s role in the development of weapons came to head on several major programs, including Tacit Rainbow.

Tacit Rainbow is a type of anti-radiation missile, and China Lake is particularly known for its expertise in anti-radiation missiles, which are used to attack enemy radar. The missiles utilize electronic seekers that find enemy radar by using the radar’s own electronic emissions to guide the missile in.

Tacit Rainbow is unique in that the missile is capable of what the industry calls “loitering in flight” for long periods of time, waiting for an enemy to turn on his radar and then attacking it. Normally, such missiles are fired only when the radar is operating, meaning the missiles can be defeated by momentarily turning off the radar.

But Tacit Rainbow started off as a generic unmanned aircraft and was adapted by Northrop to an anti-radiation role, according to Navy officials. As a result, the missile experienced aerodynamic problems with its turning or yaw capability. In addition, its electronic seeker had experienced technical difficulties.

“There was an awful lot of dumb engineering by Northrop,” Cartwright said. “They don’t know ordnance engineering.”

Behind Schedule

Development is now at least one year behind schedule, and some Navy sources said it could be as much as two years behind schedule. This spring, a missile failed during a test, resulting in additional delays to the program.

Scientists at China Lake in 1985 could see this coming. They recommended to Paisley’s office that Northrop’s contract to develop Tacit Rainbow be terminated and the Navy open the program to new bids by defense contractors. (Northrop would not have been barred from bidding to reenter the program.)

According to Navy officials, the Air Force’s program office at Wright-Patterson agreed with the recommendation, but Victor Cohen, the deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for tactical systems, agreed with Paisley.

Retired Air Force Gen. Lawrence Skantze said in an interview that he could not recall that a specific recommendation to terminate Northrop’s contact was brought to him during his tenure as commander of Air Force procurement.

“If the recommendation was made, I probably would have endorsed it and taken it to the Pentagon,” Skantze said. “I was very unhappy with Tacit Rainbow and Northrop’s progress. I was never very high on the program.”

Within a year of the Tacit Rainbow controversy, Hays had been forced from his job by Paisley. Officially, Paisley said that Hays was offered a promotion to director of Navy laboratories in Washington and turned down the job. In fact, the job was scheduled to be eliminated within a few months, and the promotion was considered nothing more than ruthless bureaucratic gamesmanship.

“It would have been career suicide to take that job,” Hays said.

Hays said he thought at the time that Paisley’s actions were motivated by ideology that favored industry labs over government labs. Paisley, along with Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr., imposed a number of changes designed to circumvent the authority of career scientists in government and transfer that power to political appointees, Hays said.

Lehman mandated that all civilian senior executives had to rotate out of their jobs every five years, thereby dissipating the influence of institutions such as China Lake. At the same time, Lehman won the right to approve the promotion of every admiral, ensuring that military officers would not obstruct his will, Hays said.

In referring to recent new reports on Paisley, Hays said, “If all these allegations are true, then clearly you wouldn’t want a strong technical laboratory system to come in and say your decisions are wrong.”

In addition to Hays, a number of scientists and engineers at China Lake were reassigned to new jobs after the controversy with Tacit Rainbow. “It breaks my heart to see what was the premier anti-radiation group in the country destroyed by all of this,” said Cartwright, the former senior adviser to Hays.

Prosecutors in the Pentagon fraud investigation have learned of several instances of documents’ being destroyed by people implicated in the probe, according to court papers. Page 22.