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Dan Quayle, Competitive Strategist
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15151 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1989 |
2,569 Words |
| Author
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John F. Morton
John F. Morton is Associate Editor of Defense for the journal
Report from America. Previously, he was congressional editor
for Armed Forces Journal International. |
Last year, during the first TV debate, one of the moderators asked then presidential candidate George Bush what he saw in his running mate, Dan Quayle, that others did not.
Bush cited qualities that most political commentators clearly were not prepared to discover. This negative predisposition has sent reporters everywhere in search of the Quayle story when they could have started with Congress or the Pentagon, where, as anyone who has covered the beat on defense issues knows, the new vice president has been both active and effective.
Quayle sat on the Senate Armed Services committee and cosponsored important bi-partisan defense legislation with fellow lawmakers like former Senate majority leader Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia) and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn (D-Georgia). While the public generally was not aware of these efforts, top defense officials were, in both the United States and in Europe. In the Senate, Quayle successfully formulated a realistic, comprehensive, and bipartisan defense policy.
Early in his Senate career, Quayle focused on the reform of defense procurements and the rationalization of planning. Later, he sponsored with Nunn an amendment to extend the so-called two-way street of U.S.-NATO defense research and development (R&D) and procurements. This focus led him to work closely with Pentagon officials who were advancing the "competitive strategies initiative." A little-known term outside the defense community, competitive strategies is percolating upward in the Pentagon and may revolutionize defense planning in the 1990s to the degree that systems analysis changed defense programming
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