This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 30, 2012 - WASHINGTON – Shortly after freshman U.S. Rep. Todd Akin got a seat on the House Armed Services Committee in 2001, he and other lawmakers started looking at the potential for replacing Prowlers with Growlers.
That is, they were asking for a modified version of the St. Louis-assembled F/A-18 Hornet fighters – later named the EA-18G Growler – that could conduct “airborne electronic attack” warfare and replace the Navy’s aging and outmoded EA-6B Prowler planes.
Akin, an engineer by training, says he “was the one to put in the initial [House] funding” to study whether jamming devices and related equipment could be attached to an F/A-18 frame and operated with only two crewmen. The goal of such aerial warfare is to counter hostile radar, “jam” enemy communications and repulse incoming anti-ship missiles.
“They took that jamming unit and, using modern instrumentation, turned it into a two-man plane,” recalls Akin, R-Wildwood. By adding jammers to the Hornets, “you could use that F-18 for other purposes, too – so you’ve got a multipurpose plane.”
Eventually, the concept got support from more powerful Missouri lawmakers like then-U.S. Sen. Christopher Kit Bond, R-Mo., and the top Democrat on House Armed Services, U.S. Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo. Congress approved the funding and Boeing delivered its first Growler in 2008. “Now, one out of three F-18s coming off the line is a Growler,” says Akin.
When it comes to the Navy and Marines, Akin has emerged as a congressional player, becoming chairman of the Armed Services subcommittee on seapower and projection forces when the GOP won control of the U.S. House in January 2011. Akin says he is especially concerned about what he views as the deterioration of U.S. naval power.
“We have the same number of ships we had in 1917,” he said in an interview, using the same comparison that GOP nominee Mitt Romney deployed in this year’s final presidential debate. That's the assertion that President Barack Obama derided with his oft-quoted debate quip that “we also have fewer horses and bayonets” than in World War I.
Akin views that as a false comparison because America's influence is now much greater, the Navy is the Pentagon’s principal projector of military power abroad, and each aircraft carrier is accompanied by 10 or more other vessels. The specter of long-term cutbacks in shipbuilding is one reason Akin voted against the 2011 Budget Control Act – and its “sequestration” trigger that would severely hit defense spending.
“To force people not to spend money – on at least a number of the line items – you have to take that same percent out of all of them,” Akin said. “You either have enough money to build a ship or you don’t. You don’t want to build 70 or 80 percent of a ship.”
Maintain defense spending
Akin’s interest in military affairs came naturally to him: His father served under Gen. George Patton in World War II; Akin himself was an Army engineer and later a reservist; and three of his sons attended the Naval Academy and became Marine officers.
(Akin’s son Perry, now his campaign manager, fought with the Marines in Fallujah, Iraq. Son Micah is a career Marine who recently returned from a tour in Afghanistan. And Akin’s youngest son, Ezra, is a Marine now deployed in the Mediterranean.)
While his opponent, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., has concentrated much of her subcommittees' efforts on Pentagon contracting waste and fraud, Akin – partly because of his panel's jurisdiction – has focused more on military hardware and plugging what he sees as gaps in the nation’s defenses.
A devout Presbyterian, Akin usually opens his subcommittee hearings with a prayer, and he is dogmatic in his argument that the major defense cuts that would be spurred by sequestration – across-the-board cuts that start in January if Congress doesn’t act before then – present “a huge problem” for defense.
“For people in the state of Missouri, you’re talking about jobs and the economy,” Akin said. “You’ve got the 20 percent cut affecting a lot of F-18s … You’ve got Whiteman AFB, Fort Leonard Wood. All of those things are affected by this kind of cut.” And, he added, “the worst thing is that it’s going to make [the U.S. military] less capable.”
At a subcommittee hearing he chaired on March 29 on the Navy’s vessel acquisition programs and force structure, Akin and fellow lawmakers probed the importance of shipbuilding in helping the U.S. maintain “maritime superiority” around the globe.
But not all of Akin’s defense-related initiatives emerge from his subcommittee. Akin has also taken up causes brought to his attention by uniformed personnel – such as the veteran from Elsberry, Mo., and others who complained of medical problems after being exposed to fumes from a giant “burn pit” at a U.S. base in Iraq.
After his staff looked into the issue, Akin introduced a bill last year to instruct the Veterans Affairs Department to establish a burn pits registry. Such a database of symptoms, similar to the Agent Orange and "Gulf War illness" registries of earlier wars, could be used by researchers seeking a link between the smoke and various illnesses.
Last month, the U.S. House included Akin’s burn pit bill in wider veterans’ legislation it approved. “It appeared that there was a pattern – that people exposed to burn pit smoke or gases were developing some strange medical complications,” said Akin.
“We want to collect the information on this and try to determine, first of all, if there is some sort of correlation on how dangerous these pits were,” Akin said. “Second, if there are symptoms that develop over a period of time and if you catch them early enough, may result in saving somebody’s life or being able to better treat a particular condition.”
Another effort that Akin says originated from a request from the field was the need to produce and send more armored Humvees (jeep-like vehicles that transport troops) to combat zones in Iraq during the fighting there.
When Akin visited Saddam Hussein's former stronghold of Fallujah, he asked the U.S. Marine commander there what equipment was needed. Akin recalls him saying that “an awful lot of our Humvees are not up-armored here. And it’s costing us lives” when improvised explosive devices (IEDs) go off and destroy the Humvees.
“So I got back to D.C., worked with the staff and what we found out was going on that was Humvees were being shipped all over Iraq, but a lot of them were going to places where there wasn’t any conflict. So we re-directed those Humvees into Fallujah,” Akin said.
“A year or two later, I’m having Thanksgiving with my son at Camp Lejune in North Carolina, and a young Marine [whose armored Humvee had hit an IED] ... gives a big smile, puts his hand out and says, ‘Congressman Akin, thank you for saving my life.’”
In another, still ongoing effort, Akin led a group of 17 House members who complained to the Pentagon this year that the Army’s Medevac helicopter policies “may contribute to unnecessary delays in transporting our most critically wounded soldiers” to medical care in Afghanistan.
“Somebody had had been wounded and called for help because they were rapidly losing blood,” Akin said. Because the LZ was designated as being ‘hot’ with enemy fire, “there was 30 minutes lost waiting for the escort helicopter. What we discovered was that a number of the Medevac helicopters have no guns on them. Yet the same helicopters flown by the Air Force have .30-caliber machine guns.”
Akin said the Army responded that “the helicopter would be too heavy, with two extra [gunners] and two machine guns, that we couldn’t get the number of people needed onto the helicopter” for the Medevac.
“We went back and forth with the Army. My sense was there was a lot of bureaucracy but not a lot of common sense. So we tried to make the Army take a second look at that.”
Hornets buzzing Joint Strike Fighters
The $5.3 billion that the Navy committed in late 2010 to spending between this year and 2015 to build 66 Super Hornets and 58 Growlers from Boeing is a big pile of money. But Akin argues that the multi-year deal is a bargain – compared to the alternatives.
“We saved taxpayers $600 million by basically reminding the Navy – on a highly frequent basis – that they could save money by buying a multiyear contract instead of one year at a time on the F-18s,” said Akin.
Why was a long-term deal needed? “Numbers came out that the Navy had way too few F/A-18s on aircraft carriers,” said Akin, noting that the Pentagon intended to replace the Hornets with the new Joint Strike Fighter (F-35s), but that troubled program was at least three or four years behind schedule.
“I was pushing them: The JSF isn’t going to be ready for three or four years. You know you have this big [fighter] shortfall. Why don’t you agree to buy three years worth of these” Hornets? “That way, the manufacturer will give you a deal because he knows he’s got steady work for three years, et cetera.”
Akin’s interest in promoting Hornets and Growlers relates – at least, in part – to the fact that they are both produced by Boeing at its Hazelwood plant. But he also says the contracts – and his proposals to tighten oversight of the F-35 program – aim to save money.
Citing the F-35’s “cost overruns and delays,” Akin offered an amendment to the markup of this year’s Defense Department authorization bill that he said called for “stricter management of the project.” The panel opted to approve a weaker amendment.
“I am not hostile to the F-35 at all, and I believe it’s a plane that we need,” said Akin. “My concern is that the project management side of it needs to be tightened up. We’re just basically throwing money at something – and it’s money that we don’t have.”
While Akin complained last fall that McCaskill did not work hard enough on F/A-18 authorization in the Senate (McCaskill countered that the final Hornet numbers matched those of the House), the representative and senator generally agree on the wisdom of the multi-year contract for the Hornet and Growler programs.
They disagree, however, on which projects constitute "earmarks," a practice not permitted in the current Congress but quite common in previous years. Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group, has reported that Akin – at times working in parallel with Bond – played a role in securing an estimated $99 million worth of earmarks in fiscal years 2008 to 2010.
McCaskill has accused Akin of being "a top earmarker" and of changing his definitions of what constitutes an earmark. "Todd tries to say he is now against earmarks. I’m confused," McCaskill said in an interview. "He says it’s a constitutional principle and then he says, no, he’s just against the ones that are done in the dark of night." Her bottom line is: "Everything needs to be [funded] on a competitive, merit-based process."
Akin dismisses McCaskill’s complaint, contending that he is “totally opposed to what is generally the concept of an earmark . . . something done in the dark of night, slipped in in a committee, when nobody knows that it’s there, and then popped out for a vote when people haven’t had a chance to see what it is.”
He added: “So I’m very strongly opposed to that. But I’m not opposed to the people on the Armed Services Committee having the authority to do the job that we are supposed to be doing, which is reviewing defense spending and deciding what either is good or not good or adjusting it in various ways.”
As an example, he cited the provision (discussed above) on providing more armored Humvees to combat zones in Iraq. “Our committee [approved] amendments on the Humvees to put armor on them,” Akin said.
“Now, using some people’s earmark definition, you could call it an earmark. I don’t. It’s nothing done in the dark of night. ... It was designed to help troops.”
As a member of the Armed Services committee, Akin also has tried to exert his conservative social agenda onto issues such as the acceptance of gays in the military. In May, the House panel approved Akin’s amendment that would in effect shield chaplains and other military service members from discipline for openly opposing the presence of gays in the military.
In what Akin described as an effort “to protect the ability of people to have their own opinion,” the provision would create what he called a “statutory conscience protection clause” for members of the military in general and military chaplains in particular.
Groups representing gay and lesbian service members denounced the amendment, saying it would allow discrimination. They also criticized another provision, advocated by Akin and others, that would bar same-sex marriages or “marriage-like” ceremonies on military installations or any property owned, rented or under the control of the Defense Department.
During the debate on the amendments, the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., accused Akin and allies of "looking to turn back the clock and find new ways to discriminate against gay and lesbian service members.”