The U.S. commander in the Middle East recently went over the heads of his Pentagon bosses, by persuading a key member of the House Appropriations Committee to support buying the military a $63 million jetliner which the Pentagon not only did not request but explicitly opposed, Defense Week reported Tuesday.
On several occasions over the last year, Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni told Defense Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member John Murtha, D-Pa., how U.S. Central Command needed a new, bigger aircraft to replace the aging EC-135 that now ferries Zinni and staff between their Tampa, Fla., headquarters and places such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, according to Murtha's spokesman and several congressional aides.
As a result, Murtha, a former Marine himself, made sure money for a new Boeing 737-300 ER was inserted in the FY2000 funding bill the House passed last July, Murtha's spokesman confirmed.
No 737 for any commander was in the Senate-passed appropriations bill or either the House- or Senate-passed authorization bills. This month, a House-Senate conference is scheduled to reconcile the two Defense appropriations measures.
Zinni will have retired before the new plane arrives.
Zinni's spokesman said the general did not ask for the 737, but only recounted his requirements in response to congressional queries.
But that picture of a passive Zinni contrasts with those painted by numerous House officials, including Murtha's spokesman.
"Zinni did ask for the help, and Mr. Murtha was supportive of the request," Murtha's spokesman said. "I don't know if he asked specifically for [a 737-300 ER] but he asked for help" in the form of a bigger support aircraft, the spokesman added.
Last March, Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre and Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a study for Congress, said a Gulfstream V executive jet, not a 737, is "the single aircraft most capable of performing the CINC [Commander in Chief of unified combat commands] support role at significantly reduced costs ..."
The JCS study conceded that Boeing 737-300 ERs alone meet all the commanders' payload requirements, as the chiefs themselves state them. But the report advocated the Gulfstream V because the 737s cost twice as much.
"I'll be honest," Hamre said in an interview with Defense Week last May. "It was hard pulling this off. We said [of the Gulfstream, or G-5]: `That's good enough. It can get you to the theater, it can get you back and you'll be in constant communication with your battle staff.' So we sent up a report this spring saying the right answer is a G-5."
Having lost the battle inside the Pentagon, Zinni appears to have sought to win it in Murtha's House panel.
A Zinni spokesman said: "Gen. Zinni never made a request for a 737 or any specific aircraft. Nor did he ask to have his own individually assigned aircraft. Rather, he provided his requirements when asked. ... Gen. Zinni has said he would accept the Gulfstream V with noted reservations about the suitability of the plane to the ... mission."
However, several congressional aides said that if Murtha asked Zinni questions, they were likely to have originated as broad queries about overall needs, not questions about CINC-support aircraft. They said Murtha almost certainly did not ask if Zinni would like a new airplane.
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