Sen. John McCain quietly filed one last piece of legislation just a week before his death.
The Senate Armed Services chairman was critically ill. For the past eight months, he had been at home in Arizona getting his affairs in order, finishing a memoir.
But even at the very end of his life, McCain did not miss one more opportunity to weigh in on a Navy shipbuilding program he spent years criticizing.
His proposed amendment, co-sponsored with his friend and colleague Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., would have cut a $475 million littoral combat ship from the Senate’s $675 billion annual Pentagon appropriations bill. The amendment never got a floor vote and was rejected without much fanfare along with scores of others when the defense bill passed, an outcome both McCain and Flake must have anticipated.
It was a final example of McCain’s intense scrutiny of Pentagon plans he deemed wasteful or misguided as the Senate Armed Services chairman. The military’s war strategies and spending, especially certain Navy ship programs he felt were mismanaged, were particular targets of his attention and sometimes searing public criticism.
Now McCain is gone and his chairman seat is empty. But U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere continue apace, and programs such as the LCS replacement program and new Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers that drew his scorn lumber into the future with potentially billions more in Pentagon spending.
It all raises a question on Capitol Hill: Who will replace McCain as overseer and top critic of military programs and strategy?
“He will be irreplaceable for the next generation. Not only is there no one ready to fill his shoes with that level of experience or credibility, but also not much interest,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “On bipartisan street cred, it’s indisputable that he was a leader for the committee, his party, and the U.S. Senate writ large on defense and foreign policy questions.”
Senators deferred to the Arizona Republican’s expertise and trusted in his wisdom and energy as Armed Services chairman, Eaglen said.
McCain’s intense approach included very public battles with the Pentagon. Last year, after his brain cancer diagnosis, McCain grew frustrated with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis over what he saw as stonewalling on the strategy for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Navy ship collisions, and the death of U.S. troops in Niger.
As chairman, he blocked Trump’s nominees including Army Secretary Mark Esper in an effort to force the Pentagon’s hand. The standoff played out over weeks and ended in a McCain victory: Mattis journeyed to his office and pledged to gathered reporters that he would do a better job communicating with the Senate.
President Trump’s new strategy for Afghanistan turned one year old just before McCain died at his home in Arizona. A top U.S. commander said this month that the president’s strategy of sending thousands more troops and working more closely with Afghan forces is “fundamentally working,” despite stepped-up attacks by the Taliban and the Islamic State and slim evidence of progress in the almost 17-year-old war.
McCain’s likely successor on the Armed Services Committee is Sen. Jim Inhofe, a staunch party conservative and pro-Trump Republican from Oklahoma.
“I think it’s really more Mattis’ [strategy] than it is the president’s, in my opinion, because he recognizes he’s got a great secretary there that knows that. … I think it’s working well so I’m not critical of how he’s doing it,” said Inhofe, who also responded to whether the committee would hold hearings on Afghanistan progress. “I think there are going to be oversight hearings anyway, that always takes place when there is that type of activity in a country.”
McCain pressed for clearer military strategy, but the retired naval aviator directed special attention to ship programs.
The LCS program that produces small surface warships was a main target of his criticism and he referred to it as a classic example of Pentagon waste following a rocky development and disappointing performance. When he co-sponsored the amendment this month cutting one of the ships from the 2019 budget, he was standing by his position in past budgets, and pushing back against some powerful political headwinds.
The Navy would prefer to spend its money elsewhere and the White House Office of Management and Budget has protested against buying more LCS hills, but a smaller buy could endanger the future of two defense contractor shipyards in Wisconsin and Alabama, said Bryan McGrath, managing director of the FerryBridge Group and a retired Navy officer.
Lawmakers from both states have been pushing to have the Navy purchase two or three of the $475 million ships in the coming year. “I think another LCS gets added to the budget request, and that’s just the way it is,” McGrath said.
Meanwhile, the Armed Services’ next big oversight project related to LCS is on the horizon and will move forward without McCain. The Navy plans to transition the program to a class of 20 new guided-missile frigates, called the FFG-X program, beginning with delivery of the first ship in fiscal year 2020. McGrath said the frigates could cost roughly twice as much as the LCS.
McCain also heaped scorn on another major Navy shipbuilding program, its Ford-class carriers. He called the supercarriers a “spectacular acquisition debacle” and featured what he said was $4.7 billion in overruns in one of his reports on budget waste.
The senator’s strategy seemed to be to “scare the crap out of the Navy on a continuous basis so that they did everything they could to bring that ship in a reasonable cost” during development, McGrath said.
“My suspicion … is that he understands better than anyone how critical aircraft carriers are to America’s warfighting capability and I think that he saw the cost of the aircraft carrier as a threat to its survival,” he said. “This is the kind of thing you get from being a carrier pilot, an appreciation of how important it is.”
The first-in-class carrier built by Huntington Ingalls, the USS Gerald R. Ford, has been delivered for about $14 billion and the second, the John F. Kennedy, is nearing completion. Congress is considering a dual buy of the carriers in the defense budget this year.
The massive ships are not only a new class but also a collection of new Navy technologies that will need to be tested at sea. It could still take years of fine-tuning and oversight from Congress.
But it will have to be done without McCain’s expertise and critical eye.
“He was ridiculously well-informed, he knew his numbers, he knew his people,” McGrath said. “He was going to call you on your sins and it was going to make you explain, or if you couldn’t explain, make you sit there and get beaten up so that the American people understood that the Congress holds the purse and oversight is not optional.”
McCain’s best friend in the Senate, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, said McCain advocated on behalf of service members while he made the generals miserable.
“John McCain was the soldier’s best friend and the Pentagon’s worst nightmare,” Graham said. “I’d like to name the Pentagon after him just to get back at everybody.”
