poor-attitude.org

McPeak interview.

The Portland Oregonian ran an interview with retired General Tony McPeak. McPeak commanded the US air forces during the first Gulf War. He is not very happy with how the current administration is handling itself.

Relevant quotes include;

"As chief of staff from 1990 to 1994, McPeak accomplished the biggest reorganization of the Air Force in its history. He believes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should be dramatically transforming the military to confront the new terrorist threat, slashing redundancy and cutting heavy Army divisions in favor of agile special forces. Guarding the Washington Monument with Stinger missiles, McPeak says, is "amateur hour."

McPeak thinks U.S. forces may well encounter biological weapons in Iraq but not chemical munitions, which are difficult to deploy. "I regard the nuclear threat as zero," he says. "I regard the connection between Saddam and al-Qaida as less than zero."

Airstrikes would wipe out Baghdad's communications system again, McPeak says. "If we go in there and occupy the place for 50 years, which is my prediction, we'll have to rebuild it."

Close combat in Baghdad would be stupid, he says, despite what Army generals may advocate. "We've already radicalized 99 percent of the Arabs in the world. We'll get the holdouts if we start doing hand-to-hand combat in Baghdad."

McPeak and some other retired generals caused controversy by abandoning their officers-corps' neutrality during the last presidential campaign and supporting Bush, an endorsement he regrets. Aside from Powell, whom he still respects, McPeak dismisses members of the current administration as ideologues who favor big business over the middle class, boost the federal deficit and damage the environment."

The Oregonian seems to expire news, and put old stories behind a pay per view firewall. I am going to attempt to violate their copyright for my own purposes to keep a copy of this article handy.

THE MONDAY PROFILE: A warrior's view

02/24/03
RICHARD READ

The man who headed the U.S. Air Force during Desert Storm will tell you, over black coffee in a Lake Oswego cafe, that the potential attack on Iraq is "the fight you dream about, a wonderful kind of war to have."

The former fighter pilot calls the conflict a "no brainer," pitting the U.S. military machine -- with precision-guided munitions that he conceived -- against a nation whose gross national product is dwarfed by what the Air Force spends each year.

"Everybody's going to get decorated out of this thing," says Tony McPeak, a four-star general who retired to Oregon in 1995. "Everyone comes home. It has a lot of appeal to me."

And yet McPeak will tell you, before the next coffee refill, that President Bush has botched the crucial process of building a coalition, of enlisting the United Nations and of rebuilding Afghanistan as a model of reconstruction. McPeak, who served four years on the Joint Chiefs of Staff advising Bush's father and then President Clinton, says the younger Bush should publicly admit personal failure and start the diplomacy over.

"The world would breathe a sigh of relief, and we'd go back and do it right," says McPeak, 67, brown eyes flickering from a weathered face. "I mean, the world would fall in love with this guy. It's not that hard to fix."

Fighter pilots who survive as long as McPeak -- he flew two years with the Thunderbirds, the elite aerobatic team, and 269 Vietnam combat missions -- master contradictory skills: Laser-like focus and floodlight-like awareness. A pilot who fails to strike this delicate balance can develop target fixation, trying so hard to hit something that he flies right into it.

McPeak thinks past the horizon. That makes him question Bush's priorities as the president confronts terrorism, North Korea and Saddam Hussein. It makes him worry about a return to federal budget deficits and about declining goodwill toward the United States since 9/11.

"I pray that America will last another thousand years, and during all of that time we're a pre-eminent power," says McPeak, a wiry man whose Indiana Jones hat covers thinning white hair. "To do that, you have to understand the world in a more sophisticated way. You make your friends many and your enemies few."

As he speaks, a grim-faced Colin Powell, McPeak's former Joint Chiefs boss, argues 3,000 miles away with U.N. Security Council members over weapons inspections and authorization for war. But McPeak, who recalls Secretary of State James Baker carefully assembling the 1991 Persian Gulf War coalition, has other priorities on this gray February morning.

He tips back his coffee cup, grabs his hat and slides his 6-foot-1-inch frame out of the Wild Heron Cafe booth. He zips his brown leather aviator's jacket.

"I gotta go," McPeak says. Five days later, McPeak has driven to Seattle and back in a day; attended a San Jose, Calif., board meeting another day; and prepared for an overnight trip to Cannon Beach before driving to his Redmond condominium. His deep voice hoarse, he calls his yellow lab, Sophie, and strides toward the Willamette River in Lake Oswego's George Rogers Park.

Once, Gen. Merrill Anthony McPeak headed the 1 million officers, airmen and others who made up the U.S. Air Force. Once, he described himself to a reporter as a "hair-on-fire, kick-down-the-door, rip-your-face-off kind of guy." Once, he ejected from an F-100 after its wings fell off at near-supersonic speed and its engine blew up, shattering the front of the plane and spitting fire at him through the air vents.

Today, he's an anonymous guy at the park.

"Heel," he tells Sophie, who whines with excitement and falls into line. "Sit," he says quietly when they reach the water's edge.

McPeak eyes the muddy Willamette's brisk current, fingering the rope attached to the rubber float in his hand. He twirls the float and lobs it 30 feet, just far enough upstream to intersect the trajectory of a madly paddling Lab. "Fetch," he says, launching the well-trained dog like a Harpoon missile.

For all the hype over the accuracy of bombs that smashed Desert Storm targets in 1991, less than 7 percent of the munitions in that war were actually guided. And their laser- and television-guidance systems couldn't handle fog, dust or smoke.

McPeak's frustration over these munitions and their cost led to an innovation that has revolutionized warfare on a scale reminiscent of the 19th-century invention of the machine gun. Soon after Desert Storm, he jotted a note to subordinates: "We need to lay down a requirement for an all-WX PGM," shorthand for "all-weather precision-guided munition."

The general demanded an auto-pilot that could make dumb bombs smart, no matter the weather, by using global-positioning-system satellite technology commonly used today in automobile navigation. What's more, he wanted each GPS guidance package to cost no more than $20,000, a fraction of the $1 million price of a single Tomahawk missile.

Defense contractors told him the assignment was impossible. But they managed to beat McPeak's price cap and produce joint direct-attack munitions, or "jay-dams," that could strike within 10-meter accuracy.

U.S. forces reportedly dropped more than 6,600 JDAMs on Afghanistan. But the guided weapons are only as good as the intelligence that aims them: In 1999, U.S. fighter bombers unleashed JDAMs on a Belgrade target, which turned out to be the Chinese Embassy.

This time in Iraq, JDAMs would dominate the munitions mix. That's the main reason McPeak says it's possible to defeat a country such as Iraq in just a few days. He expects airstrikes to begin on a dark night in early March if the administration stays on course. Air Force planes have been bombing Iraq continuously, he notes, since January 1991.

"Now you're going to have a slightly different target set," McPeak says, "but the guys have been doing this all along."

Sophie lunges out of the water, delivering the float. "Good girl," says McPeak, and tosses it again. McPeak eases his 1999 Jeep Grand Cherokee into his immaculate Lake Oswego garage, facing a pegboard neatly arrayed with tools. His wife, Elynor, a vivacious white-haired woman 13 days younger than her husband, sits in the living room near windows that face three mountains.

"I'm ready," she says in the gently teasing tone of someone who has been chided before for delaying what McPeak would call a launch time.

In fact, Ellie McPeak has been ready ever since debate class in San Diego's Hoover High School, where she met the lanky young man from Grants Pass. She stayed ready as they moved 34 times in 37 years through the United States, Europe and the Pacific. The couple raised two boys, Brian and his older brother, Mark, who until recently helped rebuild villages in Vietnam, the landscape his father once strafed and bombed.

Ellie McPeak, who earned a master's degree in economics, champions downtown redevelopment in her post on Lake Oswego's city council. Her husband, who worked his way through San Diego State College and graduated from its Reserve Officers Training Corps program, pounds in campaign lawn signs.

Moving from Washington, D.C., they've traded next-door neighbors Colin and Alma Powell for John and Judie Hammerstad, Lake Oswego's mayor.

The McPeaks still debate each other. She wishes he would quit flying, for example. In 1995, pilot Stephens Moseley, who was demonstrating an aerobatic plane that he wanted to sell to McPeak, lost a wing, crashed and died near Forest Grove.

But McPeak, a two-time recipient of both the Legion of Merit and the Distinguished Flying Cross, thrives on the challenge of flying a more advanced model of the kit-built plane. McPeak, who also received the Silver Star and distinguished service medals, built the tandem two-seater RV-8 with Portland executive Charles Carlbom.

"I hope he won't die that way," Ellie says of her husband's flying, "but if he should, it would be his own decision."

One issue they debate is Iraq. "The case has not been made for a pre-emptive strike," she says. "I wish we'd concentrate more on al-Qaida -- without the duct tape."

He says the test in Iraq will be whether, the day after a U.S. victory, the United States is more secure than it was before. He's not convinced it will be.

At their home, McPeak is set to go. "Ellie, can you secure the house?" he asks, and they drive off with Sophie for their overnight getaway in Cannon Beach. Halfway to the coast, McPeak takes a wrong turn, heading southwest. Instead of doubling back, he deftly threads his way north, jogs east and finds the highway.

In 1994, Ellie witnessed her husband's cool under pressure when he realized that an Army helicopter ferrying them and other military brass across France had begun circling in heavy fog. McPeak conferred with the pilot, who acknowledged trouble reaching the airport where the Air Force chief's plane waited to return them to Andrews Air Force Base.

Ellie saw McPeak direct the pilot to land. She watched cattle scatter in a meadow below. The chopper alighted, McPeak jumped out and -- speaking French learned years before in preparation for a Cambodian assignment that fizzled -- he enlisted surprised motorists to drive them to his plane.

These days, McPeak helps direct corporations, serving on the boards of companies including Tektronix, Centerspan Communications and ECC International. His management style: "You have to notice a problem and you have to fix it. But believe me, not many people do either."

His decisiveness extends to policy. In David Halberstam's latest book, "War in a Time of Peace," the best-selling author describes McPeak as early as 1992 urging his Joint Chiefs peers to recommend airstrikes on marauding Serbs in Bosnia.

As chief of staff from 1990 to 1994, McPeak accomplished the biggest reorganization of the Air Force in its history. He believes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should be dramatically transforming the military to confront the new terrorist threat, slashing redundancy and cutting heavy Army divisions in favor of agile special forces. Guarding the Washington Monument with Stinger missiles, McPeak says, is "amateur hour."

McPeak thinks U.S. forces may well encounter biological weapons in Iraq but not chemical munitions, which are difficult to deploy. "I regard the nuclear threat as zero," he says. "I regard the connection between Saddam and al-Qaida as less than zero."

Airstrikes would wipe out Baghdad's communications system again, McPeak says. "If we go in there and occupy the place for 50 years, which is my prediction, we'll have to rebuild it."

Close combat in Baghdad would be stupid, he says, despite what Army generals may advocate. "We've already radicalized 99 percent of the Arabs in the world. We'll get the holdouts if we start doing hand-to-hand combat in Baghdad."

McPeak and some other retired generals caused controversy by abandoning their officers-corps' neutrality during the last presidential campaign and supporting Bush, an endorsement he regrets. Aside from Powell, whom he still respects, McPeak dismisses members of the current administration as ideologues who favor big business over the middle class, boost the federal deficit and damage the environment.

Back in the car, the McPeaks reach Cannon Beach. They turn off U.S. 101, drop down the hill into town and find the hotel. He walks the dog. She checks in. Facing the ocean spray, he chucks the float for Sophie.

Once, McPeak commanded the Pacific Air Forces, which stretch from Alaska to Southeast Asia. Today he walks a short stretch of sand by the Pacific surf.

McPeak has spent a lifetime thinking, training, conducting and dreaming about fighting in the air. Despite his demanding new career and his misgivings surrounding Iraq, he admits missing the action as war looms.

"I feel like I'd like to climb back in the cockpit," he says, "and do what fighter pilots do."

Richard Read: 503-294-5135; richread@aol.com.

Posted by dglynn at February 25, 2003 02:55 PM