Pentagon Regularly Buys Pricey Weapons Before They Are Fully Tested
Source: ABC News
December 6, 2000
Would you buy a car or fly in a plane before it was
fully proven for its capability, reliability or safety? Probably not.
But that’s been standard practice with the U.S. military
for decades - costing American taxpayers, critics say, hundreds of
millions, if not billions, of dollars on back-fixes of equipment that
wasn’t quite right and unanticipated cost increases for weapons that
didn’t work as expected.
And that’s how the Pentagon could soon buy two of its
most technologically sophisticated - and most expensive - military
aircraft, the F-22 stealth fighter (an estimated $105 million-$124
million each) and V-22 "Osprey" tilt-rotor aircraft (estimated $83
million each).
Moving to Production
Later this month, the Pentagon is expected to decide
whether to begin buying its first 10 F-22s, and officials say chances
are good that it will.
Yet by the time the decision is made, the Air Force will
have completed little, if any, of its planned 1,970 hours of
flight-testing of the F-22’s unique avionics system - the vital
electronic and computer systems that enable the pilot to control the
sophisticated plane and are important for giving the aircraft its
edge.
The F-22’s airframe, in addition, will only be
flight-tested for an estimated 1,000 hours, as opposed to the 1,400
originally planned, Air Force officials have said.
Similarly, the Navy plans this month to decide whether
to initiate full production of up to 30 V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft per
year for the Marine Corps.
Yet when it makes the decision, the Navy will not have
fixed and tested some 22 "major" problems identified with the
aircraft, according to a report released by the Pentagon’s inspector
general in August. Those "deficiencies" include problems with the
Osprey’s ground-collision avoidance and warning
system, its ability to operate in icing conditions, and its ability to
maneuver as intended in combat, said the report.
The inspector general called the deficiencies "major"
and judged at least one to be safety related. The Navy says all are
not major and they "are in no way safety related."
The Navy in July 1999 waived Pentagon rules requiring
those deficiencies be fixed before full production begins - so that
they’d be addressed afterward.
A Pentagon report late last month warned the aircraft in
its current form is unsuitable for operations because of lingering
problems with reliability, maintainability, interoperability, and
possibly safety.
The ’Buy Before You Fly’
It’s been called the "buy before you fly," apparently
after the practice of buying military aircraft before they are fully
flight-tested, and it’s been routine with the U.S. military for
decades.
Commonly, an armed service will make the important
decision to begin building a new weapon or to buy it in great numbers
before key aspects of the weapon have been fully developed and proven
to work as hoped.
Defenders of the practice say concurrently buying
equipment while it’s being developed and tested is a necessary way for
the military to obtain highly sophisticated weaponry that requires
extensive testing, and constant upgrading over the equipment’s service
life.
"If you test it forever and you never build anything it
will end up costing you a lot of money," says Gerry Freisthler, deputy
director for the Air Force’s F-22 program.
But critics say the practice, intentionally or not, can
camouflage serious, sometimes costly problems that might only come out
in the later testing after the weapons are built. Keeping potentially
serious problems hidden, they say, can reduce the possibility the
Pentagon or Congress will scale back, delay, or even cancel a program.
Facing the possibility of reduced support for their
weapons program, service "managers thus have incentives to postpone
difficult tests and to limit open communication about test results,"
explained Congress’s watchdog agency, the General Accounting Office,
in a recent report on the subject.
Efforts to Sustain Support
Preventing a loss of support was what the Pentagon
inspector general’s report said was behind the V-22 Osprey deficiency
waivers.
Program officials, it said, "accepted a higher level of
risk [presumably of increased costs in the future] to get the work
program into production, despite uncertainties that the system would
work as intended, rather than delaying the program and risk losing
funding."
Weapons programs are rarely killed after production
begins, defense analysts say, and dollars and new jobs begin flowing
to key congressional districts where the weapons are manufactured. And
that creates an incentive for service managers to get the systems into
production before they
might be ready, they say.
"The name of the game is to get the program funded,"
says Chuck Spinney, an aviation analyst at the Department of Defense
who is often critical of the department’s policies. "The production
decision is the golden cornucopia, and so they want to get it into
production, and if there are delays for whatever reason in the test
program, they’ll try to waive
some of the testing to put it in production."
The Osprey program has had its share of opponents since
it was begun in 1982. Three test Ospreys have crashed since the first
prototype flew in 1989, with the most recent crash in April. That has
raised questions by some about whether the program should continue to
receive extremely limited Pentagon procurement dollars.
From 1989 to 1992, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney
tried to kill the Osprey program, arguing it was too expensive and
other helicopter types could do the job. But Congress, urged by
industry, was determined to appropriate money to buy the aircraft,
initially in low numbers, and so it kept the program going.
Congressional budgeting committees said the
aircraft represents "revolutionary technology" and may prove
affordable.
Additional Concerns Raised About V-22
Late last month, the Pentagon’s top testing official
said in a report the V-22 probably won’t be able to conduct military
missions without significant maintenance problems and that it has had
a worse reliability record than the
36-year-old helicopter it is intended to replace.
Furthermore, the official, Philip Coyle, the Pentagon’s
director of operational test and evaluation, warned all V-22s may be
susceptible to a problem found with a test aircraft that crashed
earlier this year, killing 19 Marines. Coyle recommended that further
research be conducted on the
phenomenon, known as "vortex ring state."
"Unless corrected," he wrote, "these issues will impose
an unacceptable burden - cost, manpower, mission reliability and
operational availability - on the fleet."
To gather more information on the matter, the Navy
reportedly delayed its decision on whether to approve V-22
full-production from Tuesday until Dec. 19.
Osprey Case Not Unusual
Osprey program officials say the numerous deficiency
waivers associated with the Osprey are not uncommon for U.S. weapons
programs. In fact, says Capt. Landon Hutchens, a spokesman for the
Marine Corps, with 22 waived deficiencies, the Osprey is actually
ahead of the curve.
The Navy has "done that with every aircraft they’d
procured in the last 40 years. And guess what: the V-22 had about a
third of what was normally done. So the V-22 actually has . less of
those areas where they have to waiver a discrepancy," he says.
That may be the case. "Waivers and deviations are just
routine, it’s an ingrained practice," says Ernie Fitzgerald, another
outspoken civilian analyst who’s been with the Air Force for decades.
v"The first C-17 [delivered to the Air Force], if I
recall correctly, was accepted with a 98-page list of deficiencies and
the thing sat [on the ground] for about a year after it was
delivered," he says.
A July report by Congress’s General Accounting Office
offered a list of Pentagon programs that have dealt with problems late
in the program schedule. It included such high-profile, big-budget
items as the Navy’s F/A-18E/F fighter, the Army’s THAAD missile
defense system, and the Air Force’s C-17 aircraft, B-2 stealth bomber
and F-22 stealth fighter.
Lost Opportunity Costs
Officials associated with the V-22 and the F-22 say
there are good reasons to press ahead with production before all
deficiencies are remedied or all systems are flight-tested.
"There’s no such thing as a perfect platform," says Navy
spokeswoman Gidge Daby. "If you waited to get everything fixed, you
probably would delay production a lot longer than would be beneficial
to the program."
They also contend it costs less to back-fix aircraft
already out in the field than to delay production and have to rehire
and retrain the production line workers hired to build the test
aircraft but laid off during the delay.
Military systems generally take longer to develop than,
say, automobiles, and require special knowledge and skills on an
assembly line, says V-22 program manager Marine Corps Col. Nolan
Schmidt, so it’s important that the lines keep producing aircraft
after the prototypes and test aircraft are built.
"What you need to do in that analysis is tradeoff the
cost of retrofit to the cost of lost opportunity costs of the learning
on the production line. And if you would do a good analysis of those
two things together, it’s my conviction that you are better off to do
the concurrent model."
The F-22 program’s Freisthler says the Air Force can’t
afford to wait for testing to be completed to begin production because
readying the aircraft for combat takes a long time as it is.
Right now, the Air Force plans on delivering its first
combat-ready F-22s in December 2005, he notes. Prior to that, 10 F-22s
will go to Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada for tactics development
beginning in early 2002, and 20 or so more will go to Tindle Air Force
Base in Florida for training.
If the Air Force delays beginning production until
August 2002, when the avionics testing is scheduled to be done, it
could be that much longer before the F-22s entered combat, he says.
"We may be making a decision to go to production today,
but it’s December ’05 before we’re ready to go to war," says
Freisthler.
Back-Fixing Has Its Costs
Critics counter that conducting development and testing
requirements after production can greatly increase the cost and
difficulty of fixing a weapon in the long run, as it’s usually more
expensive to fix a weapon after it’s built.
"[S]ubstantial schedule and cost increases" were
ultimately incurred to redesign the C-17, according to a report in
July by Congress’ GAO.
In the case of the B1-B bomber, key tests were completed
after production of all of the aircraft was completed, necessitating
very costly retrofits, said the report.
The report warned against producing F-22s for the field
before the avionics are fully proven.
"The potential for performance problems in the future is
significant, given that the flight testing done to date has not
included all of the F- 22 ’s sophisticated subsystems [e.g., its
advanced avionics]," it said.
Delaying development and testing requirements, the
critics say, also can conceal fundamental problems with a weapon,
which if caught early, might have resulted in cancelation of a
program.
In perhaps the most notorious instance, the Army bought
for $50.6 million 6,700 pull-trailers, and began producing and
fielding them without first testing the design to see if they it met
requirements. The service later found the trailers could not pass
testing, posed safety risks, and would need extensive modifications.
After numerous problems, the Army
issued a safety message requiring they not be used and sent them into
storage.
New Navy Fighter Deficiencies
Dec. 6 - Some say the Navy’s reluctance to admit and
address fundamental, potentially costly problems with the F/A-18E/F
fighter, its most expensive aircraft (an estimated $70 million-$86
million each), has left it with a mediocre weapon that’s little
improvement over the aircraft it’s intended to replace.
Roughly 62 have been purchased so far, in a low-rate
production phase, and it was approved by Congress in June for full
production of 222 aircraft over five years, a decision worth $8.9
billion for the contractors.
Yet, "a lot of people think it needs a new wing. And it
will need a new engine if they want to get its performance up to
snuff," says Chuck Spinney, who tracks the fighter program for the
Office of Secretary of Defense. "You’ve got this F/A-18E/F where
basically by modern standards it’s a
mediocre performer."
Prior to its June decision to begin full production of
the F/A-18E/F, the Navy resisted corrections of some "serious"
deficiencies on the aircraft that may have to be addressed later in
the program, Congress’ General Accounting Office charged in a series
of reports.
The most serious deficiency, GAO reported in May, was a
"weak aerodynamic performance, which reduces the aircraft’s ability to
accelerate, climb and turn, and causes it to have a low top speed."
Such a deficiency, aviation experts have said, could make the aircraft
vulnerable in close air-to-air combat.
Another deficiency the GAO identified was the occurrence
of noise and vibration that damages air-to-air and air-to-ground
weapons carried by the aircraft in flight.
In the short term, not correcting those problems has
enabled the Navy stay within its congressionally mandated
developmental cost cap, the GAO noted. But correcting the deficiencies
after full production has begun - which could involve design changes
to the aircraft - could be costly, according to the agency.
Navy officials have said that isn’t a concern. They said
the F/A-18E/F would not need to remedy those supposed deficiencies
because new types of equipment are being developed, such as a helmet
that will aim missiles at targets and a new type of missile, which
will mitigate the aircraft’s maneuvering deficiencies in combat, GAO
Director Louis Rodrigues told a
congressional committee last March.
Rodrigues unsuccessfully recommended that Congress have
the Navy delay full production until corrections are made, tested and
funded.
Rodrigues noted there were numerous other deficiencies -
Navy managers identified overall 27 major deficiencies and 88 minor
deficiencies - that will probably need to be addressed at some point
and back-fixed on the aircraft already delivered to the service.
"Correcting these deficiencies will be costly," said
Rodrigues.
The Navy, for its part, says the aircraft is "a winner .
it’s affordable . and it’s flying today, exceeding every operational
goal."
A Navy Web page dedicated to the aircraft predicts it
"will outperform any top-line fighter aircraft of today and tomorrow."
- David Ruppe, ABCNEWS.com
by David Ruppe
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/dailynews/defensespending_001206.htm
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