NEW POWER IN THE PENTAGON

Last summer, on an average day in the not-so-average life of Dallasite Paul Thayer, an interesting message crossed his desk. It was from Gov. Bill Clements, who had suggested to Washington officials that Thayer, who until recently was LTV Corporation’s chief executive officer (CEO), be considered for the position of deputy secretary of defense, a position Clements had held almost a decade earlier. Clements knew that Thayer was a daring WWII hero, who at 62 still adores challenges, so Thayer’s decision to apply for the job wasn’t a surprise.

In a one-hour meeting, the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously recommended Thayer for the position. After Thayer accepted, he resigned as chairman and CEO of LTV, the 25th-largest defense contractor in the country, and sold his company stock. In January, he was sworn in.

Thayer describes his position at the Pentagon as one of chief operating officer; he compares his work relationship with Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger to his relationship with Ray Hay, who worked under Thayer at LTV as chief operating officer. Weinberger, he says, spends the majority of his time “trying to tie defense policy and international policy together.”

Thayer’s main functions will entail working with the defense budget and acquiring major weapon systems. He says he will be basically “running the Pentagon,” an organization with 26,000 employees-4 million, counting reserve forces.

Not accidentally, Thayer is quite familiar with the Pentagon. His relationship with the defense department began when he was a test pilot more than 30 years ago. He later went into the aerospace industry with Chance Vought aircraft and was vice president of Washington operations and foreign sales for several years. He has been CEO of LTV for 12 years.

But despite his vast background with the department, Thayer feels like he’s a newcomer in many ways. “I don’t think you can sit outside and really get a strong feeling for what kind of threat you’re coping with,” he says. “I’ve had some indications in the briefings that I certainly need to know more than I’ve known in the past.”

Thayer is going into his new job carefully. “I’m going to spend awhile learning how the organization really operates, not what the organization chart says happens,” he says. “It’s such an awesome undertaking that I don’t know that any one or two men can really get their arms around it.”

He has one main priority before he tackles anything else: understanding “the threat”-the Soviet Union. He says that one glance at the Soviet Union’s weaponry spending shows that its intentions aren’t peace oriented. Its budget is spent primarily on offensive -not defensive – weapons which, he says, makes it “a little hard to swallow all the rhetoric that they put out about being peace-loving. I think the nuclear freeze movement may be well-intentioned,” he says, “but it’s severely misguided. Everyone who feels we should unilaterally freeze our nuclear capability at this level is giving the Russians a tremendous negotiating advantage.”

Thayer says the United States must replace the Min-uteman missiles, and the MX missile, he says, is a “sound technological achievement,” and its production should begin, despite the fact that a basing method has not been found.

This month -as a sort of initiation rite -Thayer will have to justify the 1984 defense budget, an awesome job, indeed. Then the real challenge begins. But Thayer says, “I can’t think of a better way to top-off a career.”