ARSENAL SHIP

 

BUSH CALLS FOR REVIVAL OF ARSENAL SHIP

AuthorAuthor

By WASHINGTON BUREAU and PILOT ONLINE

PUBLISHED: April 9, 2000 at 12:00 a.m. | UPDATED: August 17, 2019 at 8:40 p.m.

 

If George W. Bush wins the White House, the Navy may be required to create a revolutionary new warship that was widely panned as impractical a few years ago. The Texas governor’s defense platform calls for taking another look at building an “arsenal ship,” which was designed to be the most heavily armed and lightly manned warship ever built. With a skeleton crew of maybe 20 sailors, the surface combatant would be packed with 500 long- range missiles that could strike deep inside enemy territory.

 As originally conceived, the ship – essentially a floating missile storehouse – would offer military commanders massive firepower in the opening days of a regional war at a fraction of the cost of aircraft carriers or submarines. Critics, both within the Navy and on Capitol Hill, dismissed the project at the time as a “sitting duck” that would be highly vulnerable to attack – and an obvious early target because of its huge arsenal of weapons.

Local lawmakers never fought hard for the ship, partly out of fear that the project would compete for funding against carriers and submarines, the core work of Newport News Shipbuilding. The shipyard was part of a team of contractors that bid on the arsenal ship in 1996. The Navy scrapped the program a year later, citing inadequate funding by Congress. But a Bush administration would re-examine the ship as part of an effort to modernize U.S. forces, campaign aides said.

The issue is seldom mentioned on the campaign trail, mostly because defense policy in general has played almost no role in the presidential race and is not a top concern of voters. But in a speech last fall at The Citadel, where Bush offered his most detailed outline of defense policy to date, the Republican governor made clear his determination to press ahead with revolutionary weapons systems.

 “On the seas, we need to pursue promising ideas like the arsenal ship – a stealthy ship packed with long-range missiles to destroy targets from great distances,” he said. Vice President Al Gore, like Bush, has called for strengthening the military, particularly to improve the quality of life of troops and make up for years of neglected weapons modernization. But the Democratic presidential contender has stopped short of calling for revolutionary programs.

 Perhaps the leading advocate of the arsenal ship within the Bush campaign is Richard L. Armitage, a veteran ambassador and foreign policy adviser who served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. Armitage was a member of the National Defense Panel, a group of strategic military thinkers that was created by Congress to critique the Pentagon’s reform plans. The panel’s final report, issued in 1997, faulted the Navy for canceling the arsenal ship, which it said would provide a valuable “test bed” for new technologies. In reviving the concept of an arsenal ship, Armitage said, the Bush campaign is hoping to stress the need for transforming all the armed services into more mobile and cost-effective fighting forces.

 “We know of no better way to signal it than to encourage the Navy to explore such concepts as arsenal ships,” he said. The proposal won a qualified endorsement last week from Sen. John W. Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has talked to Bush informally about defense policy.

 “I come down foursquare in support of the concept,” Warner said. In recent months, Warner has urged the armed services to develop revolutionary weapons that will respond to the public demand for few or no casualties – a result, he said, of the successful 78-day air war over Kosovo last year that was free of U.S. combat casualties. Warner has urged the Air Force to set a goal of making a third of its strike aircraft unmanned within a decade. And he has encouraged the Army to try making a third of its ground combat vehicles unmanned by 2015.

 For the Navy, Warner said, the arsenal ship – at least in theory – would meet the same objective. “We’ve got to move toward maximizing America’s technology to deliver incredible quantities of firepower in order to limit casualties,” he said. To Pentagon reformers, the appeal of the arsenal ship was easy enough to understand. With 500 vertical-launch missile tubes, a single ship with 20 or 30 sailors could unleash massive firepower on enemy shores without tying up an aircraft carrier and its 5,000-man crew and air wing.

 And the ship’s estimated price tag of roughly $500 million, not including the missiles, would be a bargain compared to a $5 billion carrier or even a $2 billion submarine. “Here’s a way, without requiring a large-deck carrier, we can kill people at a great distance,” said naval analyst Norman Polmar, an early advocate of the arsenal ship who has consulted informally with the Bush campaign.

 “We’re talking about a ship with considerable capability at relatively low cost with few people.” But resistance to the arsenal ship is formidable. At the Pentagon, the ship was widely considered a personal initiative of Adm. Jeremy M. Boorda, the former chief of naval operations. “The Arsenal Ship Program is among the highest- priority programs within the Navy,” Boorda wrote in a 1996 memo, which was cosigned by other top defense officials.

 But when Boorda committed suicide later that year, support for the arsenal ship quickly evaporated. Boorda’s successor, Adm. Jay L. Johnson, has shown little interest in the ship. The Navy has not bothered to discuss it – much less promote it – since killing funding for the program in 1997.

 In Congress, the arsenal ship was little more than a mysterious concept without a political constituency. Since no one knew which shipyard would get the work, congressmen were more concerned with protecting funding for their own ships than diverting scarce money for an experimental program. “For that reason, the program received a skeptical reaction on the Hill,” recalled Ronald O’Rourke, a naval expert with the Congressional Research Service. Beyond the political concerns, many lawmakers expressed legitimate doubts about the arsenal ship’s potential effectiveness.

First and foremost among the myriad concerns was the ship’s perceived vulnerability to attack. Designed primarily as a low-cost vessel housing missiles, the ship would lack the extensive air- defense and anti-submarine warfare systems of other surface combatants. For all its cost efficiencies, the arsenal ship would be dependent on cruisers or destroyers for protection and could not travel unguarded into hostile waters.

 “Five hundred missiles on a platform that can’t fight back?” asked Rep. Norman Sisisky, D- Petersburg, the senior Democrat on the House military procurement subcommittee. At an estimated cost of $1 million per missile, Sisisky noted, “That’s $500 million that can be attacked.” Even supporters of the ship, including Warner, acknowledge the vulnerability problem and say more study must be done to limit the danger. While expressing support for the concept, Warner said he was not wedded to a specific ship design and would seek “successor-type options” to the original arsenal ship model.

Critics also argue that if the Navy wants a stealthy ship loaded with missiles, it need look no further than the submarine, which can operate covertly off enemy shores. Each new submarine, however, would cost as much as four times the price of an arsenal ship. Sisisky said there might be alternatives, such as retaining some Trident nuclear submarines that are scheduled to be decommissioned and converting them for conventional warfare. The Navy is already exploring that option and set aside about $1 billion in next year’s budget that could be used for that purpose.

Even so, the 150 missiles packed on a Trident sub could not match the 500 missiles on an arsenal ship. Providing more missile firepower – particularly the Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile – has been a priority since the Persian Gulf War of 1991, when Tomahawks were used extensively. Whether the arsenal ship is the best way to deliver those missiles is far from clear, but the issue could be hotly debated in a Bush White House. The shipbuilding industry, assuming the program was dead, has not been pushing for an arsenal ship. A Newport News Shipbuilding spokeswoman did not rule out bidding on the ship if the program were revived, but the yard generally has resisted straying from its core business of carriers and submarines in recent years.

 And with so much uncertainty surrounding the controversial ship, even the Bush campaign is treading cautiously. “Mr. Bush is not saying he knows the answer,” Armitage said. “He’s wedded to the concept of experimentation. If we don’t have a test bed, we’ll never get there.”

 

SHIP AT A GLANCE

 

Concept: Stealthy surface combatant

 

Purpose: Provide massive firepower in opening days of a regional war

 

Weapons: 500 missiles, including Tomahawk land- attack cruise missiles

 

Design: Length of 500 to 800 feet, double hull

 

Number: Six vessels providing continuing presence around the globe

 

Crew size: Zero to 50

 

Cost: About $500 million per ship in 1998 dollars, not including missiles

 

David Lerman can be reached at (202) 824-8224 or by e-mail at dlerman@tribune.com

 

SMOKING GUN FOUND ON TWITTER

 

DON'T EXPECT SPOOKS TO GIVE YOU THE TRUTH

Does Clinton deserve all the blame? It was Dick Cheney who wanted to dismantle RU. He pushed for the collapse of the Soviet Union. He wanted to erase Russia as a major player. In the 1990's the US sponsored a Chechen proxy terrorist campaign inside RU. The aim was to break the Caucasus Region away from Russia. No one talks about the murders of Prime Minister Ruslan Outisiev of Chechnya and his brother in London. They were in London looking to procure 2000 Stinger missiles and they had made a deal with the Royal Mint to print currency, passports and stamps for Chechnya. This deal never happened. The assassination occurred on or about 26 February 1993. A few days earlier Clinton had just met with  UK PM John Major. The 26th is same day that the WTC was bombed taking out the Presidential Motorcade. 

The Russians were sending a message - STAY OUT OF CHECHNYA. Of course Clinton did not heed the warning.  Long story short. US meddling in Chechnya led to the spectacular attacks of 911 - the closest the World has ever come to nuclear war. All four E4-B's were in the air. Cheney hid in the PEOC - the White House fallout shelter bunker. Wolfowitz and others also hid in their bunkers. Bush was on Air Force One. His communications were jammed most of the day. The World is lucky to have survived 911. 911 was the day that Russia avenged American aggression on their soil - declaring war on American unipolar hegemony by attacking the administrative infrastructure of America's global empire.

THE LOGISTICS OF RECRUITING, THE TIMING AND THE PRECISION FLYING THE 911 AIRLINERS

One of the problems of the official 911 narrative is - how did Bin Laden's organization recruit 19 "suicide" hijackers without it getting picked up by US surveillance? It's impossible. How many people would have to be approached before you found 19 suicide hijackers? Because like most people even "terrorists" are not eager to commit suicide. 

Bin Laden's organization would have had to interview tens of thousands of potential hijackers before they found 19 men who might commit to the plot. In 2001 Saudi Arabia had a suicide rate of 5.00 per 100,000 males. In other words one out of 20,000 males in Saudi Arabia committed suicide. The vast majority of Saudi men are content with their lives. 

People also have loose lips. The candidates who said no to the plot would have told other people about it. Where are the men who said no to this plot? Why have they never been interviewed by television or print media? 

The reason why the plot was not picked up is -- there were no human pilots. There was no plot involving human hijackers to be picked up by US surveillance. The planes were electronically hijacked, plucked out the air mid-flight. Electronic hijacking also solves the problem of the tight timing of hijackings. Four planes were hijacked in the less than an hour and crashed into significant American landmarks. The level of precision to conduct the attack on the Navy Operations Center and Defense Intelligence Agency offices at the Pentagon required electronic hijacking as well. We go over why it was impossible here. 

https://thearea51blog.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-impossibility-of-flight-77s.html

Electronic Hijacking also explains why Norman Mineta ordered all planes to land. Because any plane could have been the next plane to be hijacked and used as a cruise missile. 

1. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SAU/saudi-arabia/suicide-rate#:~:text=Saudi%20Arabia%20suicide%20rate%20for,a%200%25%20increase%20from%202015.

Electronic warfare 'Russian Woodpecker'

 From The Miami Herald, 7 July 1982

Radio hams do battle with 'Russian Woodpecker'

By Dave Finley

Herald Staff Writer

Electronic warfare is usually associated with a shooting war. But not always.

From their own homes, many ham radio operators have quietly carried on an electronic war with the Soviet Union for the last six years and, in some cases, are winning. Their battle is with a powerful Soviet radar signal dubbed the "Russian Woodpecker."

The Soviets fired the first shot in 1976. Miami Springs amateur operator Andy Clark (W4IYT, now SK) remembers it.

Clark was operating a commercial aeronautical communications station, one which keeps contact with long-distance airliner flights by shortwave radio. Suddenly, powerful interference came on the air, disrupting communications.

"I named that damn thing the woodpecker," Clark said, when he asked the New York headquarters of his communications firm if they, too, were experiencing "this woodpecker noise." They were.

The signal, he said, was "raising hell with the airplanes. We just couldn't contact some of them."

The "woodpecker," as it is now almost universally known because of its unmistakable sound, still disrupts shortwave communications. Its signals have long since been traced to locations within the Soviet Union.

It is, experts agree, a Soviet over-the-horizon radar system. Radio waves in what is called the shortwave range, which are actually longer than those in the VHF or microwave range, are, unlike the others, "bounced" off upper regions of the Earth's atmosphere and returned to the ground. This is how you receive faraway foreign stations on your shortwave radio.

The "skip" also is used to get a radar signal over the horizon and back to detect incoming airplanes.

The Soviets, however, have ignored internationally~accepted rules about what frequencies can be used by whom, and simply transmitted their ultra-high-powered radar signals on any frequency where "skip" conditions are good at the particular time. Their signal also is unusually "wide," blocking out a large number of other stations.

The "woodpecker" regularly interferes not only with commercial and amateur communications but with international broadcasting stations.

The hams, along with many others, complained to the U.S. government, which relayed the protests to the Soviets. Officially, the Soviets don't even admit the signal is theirs.

Some hams, irate at the intrusion into their legally-allocated frequency bands, have gone beyond simple protests.

Wayne Green, publisher of the ham magazine 73, in a recent editorial urging hams to "attack" the problem, described the process:

"If you want to screw up a radar signal, all you have to do is send a return signal on its frequency which blocks out the echos. Hams, from the earliest woodpecker days, have been driving the monster off their bands by getting on the frequency and sending properly spaced dots back. The screen somewhere in Russia blanks out and the operators utter some Russian oaths and change the frequency to get rid of the interference."

It works, too, say many hams who have tried it, although it greatly helps if several hams in different locations "gang up" on the radar's frequency. Green advocated better organization for doing just that.

Hams in Texas have tried such tactics and dubbed their group The Russian Woodpecker Hunting Club.

Robert Haviland, a Daytona Beach amateur, has heard "woodpecker hunting" on the air. There are several difficulties, he said, with transmitting on exactly the right frequency and sending the dots at exactly the right speed to interfere with the radar.

However, if it's done right, he said, "a shift in frequency of the woodpecker comes very quickly."

And an American ham operator has just won a one-on-one match with a massive Russian radar installation.

###

Copyright 1999 the Miami Herald.

Republished here with the permission of the Miami Herald.

No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the written approval of The Miami Herald.

SEPTEMBER 11TH / 911 : PUTIN'S CALL AND THE THREAT ON AIR FORCE ONE "ANGEL" WERE PHONED IN AT THE SAME TIME.

SEPTEMBER 11TH / 911 : PUTIN'S CALL AND THE THREAT ON AIR FORCE ONE WERE PHONED IN AT THE SAME TIME. 

(10:30 a.m.) September 11, 2001: White House Receives Phone Call in Which Caller Threatens Air Force One

Between 10An anonymous phone call is received at the White House in which the caller says Air Force One, the president’s plane, will be the next terrorist target and uses code words indicating they have inside information about government procedures. [CHENEY, 9/11/2001; NEW YORK TIMES, 9/13/2001; WOODWARD, 2002, PP. 18] Air Force One is currently flying toward Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, with President Bush on board (see (10:20 a.m.) September 11, 2001). [9/11 COMMISSION, 7/24/2004, PP. 325] The White House receives a call from an anonymous individual, warning that the next target of the terrorist attacks will be Air Force One. The caller refers to the plane as “Angel.” [SAMMON, 2002, PP. 106-107; WOODWARD, 2002, PP. 18; 9/11 COMMISSION, 7/24/2004, PP. 554; DARLING, 2010, PP. 60-61] “Angel” is the Secret Service’s code name for Air Force One. [WILLIAMS, 2004, PP. 81; CBS NEWS, 11/25/2009] An unnamed “high White House official” will later say the use of “American code words” shows the caller has “knowledge of procedures that made the threat credible.” [NEW YORK TIMES, 9/13/2001]

Government Officials Told about Threat - News of the threatening call is promptly passed on to government officials in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC)—a bunker below the White House—and reported on the Pentagon’s air threat conference call. [US DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, 9/11/2001 pdf file; NEWSWEEK, 12/30/2001; 9/11 COMMISSION, 7/24/2004, PP. 554; DARLING, 2010, PP. 60-61] Vice President Dick Cheney, who is in the PEOC, will comment that the news “reinforced the notion here… that the government has been targeted and that we need to be extra careful about making certain we protected the continuity of government, secured the president, secured the presidency.” [WHITE HOUSE, 11/19/2001] According to Major Robert Darling of the White House Military Office, who is also in the PEOC, “The talk among the principals in the room quickly determined that the use of a code word implied that the threat to Air Force One and the president could well be from someone with access to [the president’s] inner circle—possibly someone who was near the president at that very moment.” [DARLING, 2010, PP. 61]

Accounts Conflict over Who Receives Call - It is unclear who at the White House answers the call in which the threat against Air Force One is made. The call is received by the White House switchboard, according to some accounts. [SAMMON, 2002, PP. 106; FLEISCHER, 2005, PP. 141-142] Other accounts will indicate it is received by the White House Situation Room. [9/11 COMMISSION, 7/24/2004, PP. 554; DARLING, 2010, PP. 60-61] Eric Edelman, a member of Cheney’s staff who is in the PEOC, will say the call is received by the Secret Service. [WHITE HOUSE, 10/25/2001] But two Secret Service agents who are on duty today will deny “that their agency played any role in receiving or passing on a threat to the presidential jet,” according to the Wall Street Journal. [WALL STREET JOURNAL, 3/22/2004 pdf file] However, a Secret Service pager message will be sent at 10:32 a.m., which states that the “JOC”—the Secret Service Joint Operations Center at the White House—has received an “anonymous call” reporting that “Angel is [a] target.” [CBS NEWS, 11/25/2009]

Military Officer Passes on Details of Threat - Officials in the PEOC reportedly learn about the threat to Air Force One from a military officer working in the center. Although Cheney will say the threat “came through the Secret Service,” he will say later this year that he is unsure who passed the details of it to those in the PEOC. [MEET THE PRESS, 9/16/2001; WHITE HOUSE, 11/19/2001] An official in Cheney’s office will say in 2004 that Cheney was informed of the threat by “a uniformed military person” manning the PEOC, although Cheney and his staff are unaware who that individual was. [WALL STREET JOURNAL, 3/22/2004 pdf file] National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will say that those in the PEOC are told about the threat by a “communicator,” meaning one of the military officers who works in the PEOC, and is responsible for “establishing phone lines and video lines, and staying in touch with the National Military Command Center” at the Pentagon. [WHITE HOUSE, 11/1/2001] The military officer Rice is referring to may be Darling. Darling will recall that he answers a call from the White House Situation Room about the threat to Air Force One and then passes on the information he receives to Rice, telling her, “Ma’am, the [Situation Room] reports that they have a credible source in the Sarasota, Florida, area that claims Angel is the next target.” Rice immediately passes on the news to Cheney, according to Darling. [DARLING, 2010, PP. 60-61] Cheney will subsequently call Bush and tell him about the threat (see (10:32 a.m.) September 11, 2001). [SAMMON, 2002, PP. 106-107; CBS NEWS, 9/11/2002]

Reason for 'Bogus' Threat Unclear - The threat will be determined to be “almost surely bogus,” according to Newsweek. [NEWSWEEK, 12/30/2001] The Secret Service’s intelligence division tracked down the origin of this threat,” the 9/11 Commission Report will state, “and, during the day, determined that it had originated in a misunderstanding by a watch officer in the White House Situation Room.” Although the 9/11 Commission will say it found the intelligence division’s “witnesses on this point to be credible,” Deborah Loewer, the director of the White House Situation Room, will dispute this account. [9/11 COMMISSION, 7/24/2004, PP. 554] By the end of 2001, White House officials will say they still do not know where the threat came from. [NEWSWEEK, 12/30/2001] Darling will write in 2010, “To this day, it has never been determined why either the ‘credible source’ or Situation Room personnel used that code word [i.e. ‘Angel’] in their report to the PEOC.” [DARLING, 2010, PP. 62] “The best we can tell,” Rice will say, is that “there was a call that talked about events—something happening to the president on the ground in Florida. And that somehow got interpreted as Air Force One.” She will say that the fact the caller knew the code name for Air Force One is “why we still continue to suspect it wasn’t a crank call.” [WHITE HOUSE, 11/1/2001] However, former Secret Service officials will say the code name wasn’t an official secret, but instead “a radio shorthand designation that had been made public well before 2001.” [WALL STREET JOURNAL, 3/22/2004 pdf file]

Entity Tags: Eric Edelman, Condoleezza Rice, Richard (“Dick”) Cheney, Deborah Loewer, US Secret Service, Robert J. Darling, White House

Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, 9/11 Timeline:32 a.m. and 11:45 a.m. September 11, 2001: Russian President Calls the White House

Russian President Vladimir Putin phones the White House, wanting to speak with the US president. With Bush not there, Condoleezza Rice takes the call. Putin tells her that the Russians are voluntarily standing down a military exercise they are conducting, as a gesture of solidarity with the United States. [WASHINGTON POST, 1/27/2002] The Russian exercise began on September 10 in the Russian arctic and North Pacific oceans, and was scheduled to last until September 14. [NORTH AMERICAN AEROSPACE DEFENSE COMMAND, 9/9/2001; WASHINGTON TIMES, 9/11/2001] It involved Russian bombers staging a mock attack against NATO planes that are supposedly planning an assault on Russia. [BBC, 2001, PP. 161] Subsequently, Putin manages to talk to Bush while he is aboard Air Force One (see (After 11:15 a.m.) September 11, 2001).

Entity Tags: Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin

Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, 9/11 Timeline

Late March 1989 and After: Defense Secretary Cheney Advocates Enforced Regime Change in Soviet Union

Late March 1989 and After: Defense Secretary Cheney Advocates Enforced Regime Change in Soviet Union

When Dick Cheney becomes defense secretary (see March 20, 1989 and After), he brings into the Pentagon a core group of young, ideological staffers with largely academic (not military) backgrounds. Many of these staffers are neoconservatives who once congregated around Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (see Early 1970s). Cheney places them in the Pentagon’s policy directorate, under the supervision of Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, himself one of Jackson’s cadre. While most administrations leave the policy directorate to perform mundane tasks, Wolfowitz and his team have no interest in such. “They focused on geostrategic issues,” one of his Pentagon aides will recall. “They considered themselves conceptual.” Wolfowitz and his team are more than willing to reevaluate the most fundamental precepts of US foreign policy in their own terms, and in Cheney they have what reporters Franklin Foer and Spencer Ackerman call “a like-minded patron.” In 1991, Wolfowitz will describe his relationship to Cheney: “Intellectually, we’re very much on similar wavelengths.”

A Different View of the Soviet Union - Cheney pairs with Wolfowitz and his neoconservatives to battle one issue in particular: the US’s dealings with the Soviet Union. Premier Mikhail Gorbachev has been in office for four years, and has built a strong reputation for himself in the West as a charismatic reformer. But Cheney, Wolfowitz, and the others see something far darker. Cheney opposes any dealings with the Soviets except on the most adversarial level (see 1983), and publicly discusses his skepticism of perestroika, Gorbachev’s restructuring of the Soviet economy away from a communist paradigm. In April, Cheney tells a CNN news anchor that Gorbachev will “ultimately fail” and a leader “far more hostile” to the West will follow in his footsteps. Some of President Bush’s more “realistic” aides, including James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and Condoleezza Rice, as well as Bush himself, have cast their lot with Gorbachev and reform; they have no use for Cheney’s public advocacy of using the USSR’s period of transitional turmoil to dismember the nation once and for all.

Cheney's Alternative Policy - Cheney turns to the neoconservatives under Wolfowitz for an alternative strategy. They meet on Saturday mornings in the Pentagon’s E ring, where they have one maverick Sovietologist after another propound his or her views. Almost all of these Sovietologists echo Cheney and Wolfowitz’s view—the USSR is on the brink of collapse, and the US should do what it can to hasten the process and destroy its enemy for good. They assert that what the Soviet Union needs is not a reformer guiding the country back into a papered-over totalitarianism, to emerge (with the US’s help) stronger and more dangerous than before. Instead, Cheney and his cadre advocate enforced regime change in the Soviet Union. Supporting the rebellious Ukraine will undermine the legitimacy of the central Soviet government, and supporting Boris Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Republic, will strike at the heart of the Gorbachev regime. Bush and his core advisers worry about instability, but Cheney says that the destruction of the Soviet Union is worth a little short-term disruption.

Failure - Bush will not adopt the position of his defense secretary, and will continue supporting Gorbachev through the Soviet Union’s painful transition and eventual dissolution. After Cheney goes public one time too many about his feelings about Gorbachev, Baker tells Scowcroft to “[d]ump on Dick” with all deliberate speed. During the final days of the Soviet Union, Cheney will find himself alone against Bush’s senior advisers and Cabinet members in their policy discussions. [NEW REPUBLIC, 11/20/2003]

Entity Tags: George Herbert Walker Bush, Brent Scowcroft, Boris Yeltsin, Franklin Foer, US Department of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard (“Dick”) Cheney, James A. Baker, Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson, Condoleezza Rice, Mikhail Gorbachev, Spencer Ackerman

Timeline Tags: Neoconservative Influence