Charlotte Observer
11.28.04
Bigwigs should answer for this bunk
E-mails torpedo Navy's case on landing field
Jack Betts
You think the Navy is about to ship some officers from Norfolk to Thule, Greenland? Antarctica? Baghdad? That'd be my guess, after the time-bomb filed last Monday at the U.S. courthouse in Raleigh.
That's the day that lawyers for opponents of the Navy's cockamamie scheme to put a practice landing field next to a critically important wildfowl refuge filed a 79-page memorandum. It exposed the Navy's duplicitous shenanigans in fabricating reasons to build a field in North Carolina that would put $40 million jets and Navy pilots in danger of collisions with 15- to 20-pound migratory tundra swans and snow geese.
Lawyers at Kennedy Covington in Charlotte and the Southern Environmental Law Center in Chapel Hill examined more than 175,000 pages of Navy documents during the discovery phase of a lawsuit and found a box of smoking guns: e-mail exchanges indicating the Navy had made a political decision early on to build the outlying landing field and then ordered underlings to "reverse engineer" reasons to support the top brass, as one e-mail put it.
Among other things, the lawyers found suggestions that the Navy had cooked up a deal with the N.C. congressional delegation to put two squadrons of new F/A-18 Super Hornet jets at Cherry Point in exchange for the delegation's acquiescing on an OLF in Washington and Beaufort counties near the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.
An e-mail from a lieutenant commander noted that acting-Secretary of the Navy Hansford Johnson had wanted the OLF even while the Navy was supposed to be objectively considering a host of sites. Lt. Comdr. David Sienicki said that Johnson, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., and Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-N.C., were discussing where to put the aircraft and "are attempting to derive a political win/win for VA and NC."
That may explain why a number of the state's leaders were not actively opposing the landing field in such an environmentally sensitive part of the state. They wanted the jobs that would come with the aircraft at Cherry Point, and were ignoring the Navy's lame reasoning in picking the site near the refuge. Gov. Mike Easley was tip-toeing, Sen. Dole was walking a tightrope, and Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., was off running for president.
It was no secret by then that putting the jet field next to the refuge was ludicrous. Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Jeffrey Short, who devised the military's Bird-Aircraft Strike Hazards (BASH) program, said, "In 25 years of dealing with military BASH issues, I cannot recall a worse place to situate an airfield for jet training. Aircraft at the proposed OLF would suffer from continual and dangerous hazards to safe operations due to the huge waterfowl populations" that use the refuge each winter
Another expert hired by the Navy wrote that a collision wasn't a matter of if, but when - "and how severe it will be when it occurs."
The Navy's environmental expert didn't even read the studies the Navy cited in arguing that the birds pose no problems. One study not only didn't make that finding, but found just the opposite. Noise from a Cessna 185 at 10,000 feet would flush the huge birds into flight; imagine the noise from a Super Hornet making touch-and-go practice landings near the winter feeding grounds of tens of thousands of tundra swans and snow geese.
But the e-mails indicate the Navy decided early on that it wanted an OLF even though it didn't really need one. It wanted to put the OLF nearby in North Carolina to avoid noise problems from training flights at its Oceana base at Virginia Beach or at its Fentress field a few miles away. So it decided to put eight squadrons at Oceana and two at Cherry Point, with the OLF in between. To do that, the Navy had to ignore its own stated criteria about where an OLF should go, and why.
Alan Zusman, a Navy official working on the environmental questions, wrote in one e-mail, "Don't know about you, but I have a very uneasy feeling about our criteria and the process."
Cmdr. John Robusto replied: "Very uneasy. Up until the preferred OLF site was chosen, everything made sense and all decisions could be logically explained. Now we have to reverse engineer the whole process to justify the outcome."
The meaning of the e-mails - which the Navy may not have realized it was turning over to opponents of the OLF - is clear, wrote the lawyers challenging the decision: "The split siting decision was entirely motivated by politics. It was a political `pay off' to North Carolina, to induce the State's acceptance of a North Carolina OLF."
Heads ought to roll on this one. The Navy has wasted millions of the public's money on a dumb decision that some of its own civilian and uniformed officers privately acknowledged makes no sense.
The Observer has maintained for two years now that the Navy decision was flawed. After a July 2003 editorial that called the Navy's decision "stupid," Adm. Robert Natter wrote us to say that his OLF decision was made after the Navy completed an "exhaustive" environmental study "which culminated more than three years of meticulous research and investigation of every potential OLF site on the East Coast by a dedicated team of experts."
Now we know that assertion was so much bilgewater. Instead of making an exhaustive examination of the need for and impact of an OLF, the Navy first made a decision at the highest level and ordered the troops - Adm. Natter's "bubbas," as one e-mail put it - to rewrite the environmental impact statement to come up with a justification for the OLF.
But nobody told the Navy's underlings to deep-six those e-mails. And now we know what the Navy was up to when it was supposed to be adhering to the National Environmental Policy Act's requirement to take a "hard look" at the environmental impact of putting a jet field next to a wildlife refuge.
It was just following orders.
