Austin Wright is a defense reporter for Politico.

Spartacus was getting a little choked up.

For 30 years he had battled the profligate spending of the military colossus across the river. He had tried with limited success to shame legislators over their pork-barrel ways. He had taken on the F-35 fighter, the Pentagon’s costliest weapons program, and fought to save the A-10 Warthog attack jet, which was relatively cheap but Air Force brass wanted to retire. When he couldn’t put his own name on his blistering reports, he wrote under the pen name of the famed leader of the Roman slave rebellion. Everyone knew it was him anyway.


Winslow Wheeler, 68, was a legend, and now he was retiring. One evening recently he stood in a small conference room in downtown Washington, surrounded by gray-haired comrades from long-ago campaigns. It was a party fit for the frugal registered Republican, nothing ostentatious, just a few six-packs of Fat Tire and Miller Lite.

There was Chuck Spinney, who graced the cover of Time magazine in 1983 sitting at a congressional witness table under the headline, “Are billions being wasted?” Spinney, now 69 and slightly hunched, sipped a Diet Coke as he chatted with 30 other defense budget mavericks. There was Pierre Sprey, 76, a member of the 1970s “Fighter Mafia” inside the Air Force that eschewed whiz-bang technology in favor of lightweight and highly maneuverable jets.

And in the middle of it all was a man whose last day at work at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit determined to root out government waste, coincided with news that the Pentagon would ask for an increase of 19 F-35s in next year’s budget, at $100 million or more apiece.

But Winslow Wheeler was not in a despairing mood. Emotional, yes, but still feisty.

Spinney and Sprey, he said, “have gotten me into lots of trouble—but no trouble I didn’t enjoy.” And he took several parting shots at the F-35 program.

“It keeps embarrassing itself,” he said. “At some point, the weight and momentum of all those problems and all those costs are going to pass a threshold in our political system.”

His longtime patron addressed the crowd.

Philanthropist Phil Straus is the primary backer of POGO’s Straus Military Reform Project, the mission of which is to “keep the Pentagon from spending all of the country’s money,” as he put it.

Straus presented Winslow a parting gift: a clear plaque that he joked was a “naked, see-through thing.”

“It’s like one of those weapons systems,” shouted Lawrence Korb, the former assistant secretary of defense who co-wrote a book with Wheeler when they were both at the think tank Center for Defense Information.

“This is more transparent,” Straus shot back to laughter.

On the plaque was a quote from the late military strategist John Boyd, who was a mentor to many of the men in the room:

There are only so many ulcers in the world and it’s your job to see that other people get them.

***

Wheeler came to Capitol Hill in 1971 as a young Senate aide to New York Republican Jacob Javits and immediately started working on the War Powers Act to rein in the president’s authority to send U.S. forces into combat.

At that time, the Defense Department’s budget was $419 billion (in 2009 dollars), according to the White House Office of Management and Budget. It would grow for most of Wheeler’s career, reaching $577 billion in 2013.

He worked on defense issues for several senators, including Republican Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas and Democrat David Pryor of Arkansas, and investigated military weapons at the Government Accountability Office.

In 2002, when he was working on the Senate Budget Committee under New Mexico Republican Pete Domenici, he got more notoriety than he was expecting.

Wheeler had written a series of essays under the pseudonym “Spartacus,” culminating in an insider’s account of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) doing little behind the scenes to stop spending projects despite being a self-proclaimed opponent of pork.

The pseudonym “simply seemed to fit—a slave revolt against his masters,” Wheeler said. “And I was always a fan of the movie.”

His real name soon surfaced in the news media, leading to a meeting with Domenici in which he offered to resign rather than be fired. “I thought it was something that needed to be said, and I was willing to face the consequences,” Wheeler explained.

He quickly landed a job at the Center for Defense Information, where he was paid to speak his mind. He became a well-known figure in defense circles for his emails blasting Pentagon officials and lawmakers alike, pointing out flaws in the military’s flagship weapons programs and analyzing the defense budget in excruciating detail.

He was a master at influencing the debate in Washington from the outside.

“My whole philosophy is it’s useless to appeal to the intellect or reason of Congress,” he said. “They’ll thank you politely and go do whatever they f—-ing please.”

Defense industry bigwigs came to respect—and even fear—his work.

“I didn’t agree with some of the things he said, but there was never any question he brought discipline and accountability to the system,” said Loren Thompson, who could be considered Wheeler’s nemesis: an oft-quoted defense industry super-consultant.

“When you put the amount of work into an analysis that Winslow did, people can’t ignore it,” said Thompson, who was not at the retirement party. “It has to be considered.”

Thompson, of course, was one of the targets of the ulcers that Wheeler, Boyd and other budget mavericks tried to inflict. He has no stomach problems, as it turns out. Lockheed Martin and many other top defense contractors that Thompson counts as clients have seen their profits soar in recent years, even under the current federal caps on Pentagon spending.

Like the other defense budget mavericks, Wheeler said the Pentagon’s out-of-control spending on frivolous weapons has only gotten worse since his efforts to rein in the military began during the Cold War. He insisted his life’s work wasn’t in vain.

“It’s certainly true that things have gotten a lot worse since the 1980s, when I first got involved in the military reform movement,” said Wheeler. “Forces are smaller. They train them less. Equipment is even older. There’s been real decay since the 1980s.”

Still, he said, “I don’t feel frustrated.”

He remains convinced his chief target for the past decade, the F-35, will eventually be killed off. This comes as the Pentagon prepares to send a budget proposal to Capitol Hill that’ll boost funding dramatically for the military’s costliest—and most politically untouchable—weapons program.

And he pointed to several successes, from the early cancellation of the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor fighter jet program to the current Budget Control Act spending caps that have led to a decline in military spending. “The fact that they’re not doing precisely what I’ve been recommending doesn’t mean that the things we’ve done haven’t helped to provoke the debate and shape the debate,” he said.

Sprey agreed, saying he and his fellow Pentagon budget mavericks had succeeded in chipping away at the power of the military’s entrenched interests—even as he acknowledged setback after setback.

The Congressional Military Reform Caucus, which during the 1980s had a roster of more than 130 lawmakers, has since “faded away into the dustbin of history,” Sprey said. Former supporters of the effort, such as then-congressman Dick Cheney, flipped sides to become war hawks. And the think tank that used to host meetings of defense reformers, the conservative Heritage Foundation, now advocates for increased defense spending.

“The reason I’m not working at the Pentagon anymore is I decided the place was too corrupt to ever build a good fighter again,” Sprey said.

Spinney, meanwhile, said he never felt he was wasting his time. “To the extent that I would do anything differently, I would have hit them harder,” he said.

And he hasn’t left the fight. He continues to sound off on military waste on his blog, The Blaster, which he writes from his sailboat off the coast of Spain.

“I can still keep my oar in the water,” he said. “With the Internet, it’s amazing.”

***

With the beers disappearing and the ice cream melting, Wheeler passed the torch to his successor, Mandy Smithberger.

He presented her with a large, framed photo of an American Indian stone carving that depicted two headless warriors.

“What better depiction of the Pentagon?” Wheeler said, noting that the photo also showed a third warrior who still had his.

“This one is Mandy,” he said. “It’s your job to remind them that you have one—they don’t.”

Smithberger, 29, is returning to POGO after a three-year stint on Capitol Hill working for Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.).

The Straus project’s only employee (for now) is already well-versed in the ups and downs of taking on the Pentagon bureaucracy. She helped in Speier’s efforts to rein in the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship. The ship has faced development problems and questions about its ability to survive in combat but continues on despite concerns even from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.

Smithberger, who said she has “very big shoes to fill,” is as optimistic as her predecessor. Like Wheeler, she is convinced the F-35 will eventually be canceled. And she already has several projects lined up intended to stick it to the Pentagon, including a revolving door database, documenting the private-sector jobs of former senior defense officials.

Wheeler said the defense industry shouldn’t be breathing a sigh of relief because of his departure. Smithberger, he said, “is twice as smart and full of energy. They’re going to wish for the good old days of Winslow Wheeler.”