Floating Pork?

After my post about the C-27J Spartan project, and its attendant squandering of funds by a Federal government that can’t seem to afford to keep its own lights on, I wasn’t expecting to find anything significantly worse any time soon. After all, it’s hard to picture anything more wasteful than spending hundreds of millions of dollars on aircraft that we’re going to put straight into mothballs as soon as they arrive from the foreign company that is making them. Granted that the C-27 is a perfectly useful airplane, and a few squadrons of them might come in handy at some point, the whole point of buying them was to keep an airbase open in Ohio, which seems silly if all of them are in storage in Arizona. To top that we’d have to imagine a project that spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a single prototype that ends up not working at all, with a design concept so absurd it’s hard to imagine anyone taking it seriously…

Then the story surfaced in the Los Angeles Times about the U.S. Army's Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle program being cancelled, and the single $297 million prototype being sold back to the British company that built it for $300,000. That’s right; in this case we paid nearly $300 million for an aircraft we’re not even going to keep and stick in the desert for possible future use. But the numbers don’t really tell the whole story here. Consider in addition that the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle is an unmanned blimp, 300 feet long and 85 feet tall, and was expected to operate at about 20,000 feet over the battlefield for up to three weeks at a time. We should probably also add that the vehicle only ever made one test flight, during which it was determined that the 12,000 pounds of overweight it had packed on during its development had left it unable to lift the sensors and communications gear it had originally been intended to carry…

Now, to be fair, the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle is hardly the most spectacular waste of money and resources to come out of the US Military/Industrial complex. Certainly it has nothing on the $6.97 billion dollars (in 1981 dollars, no less) originally awarded for the M247 Sergeant York air defense system, which was eventually cancelled after repeatedly failing to shoot down a stationary balloon. Lighter-than-air craft have a long history as military observation platforms, and it isn’t too far-fetched to imagine that a drone version of one might be as useful as its heavier-than-air drone cousins. What is truly amazing about the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle project is the amount of money spent on absolutely nothing of substance – and the fact that such programs are still being funded after the failure of the M247, the A-12 attack aircraft, and so many others that have not only failed but also left their supporters open to mockery over the decades…

Back in the 1940s and 1950s anything having to do with atomic weapons was in vogue; projects that could even vaguely offer additional nuclear capability were funded despite a complete lack of reason or sanity, such as the Davey Crockett rifle, otherwise known as the “Atomic Bazooka” – a weapon with a range of a mile or so and a blast radius of almost three-quarters of a mile. In the 1960s anything that could possibly help us beat the Soviets into space was going to get funded, and during the 1980s anything that could help keep them from overrunning Western Europe had top priority, however implausible it might be. So it’s hardly surprising that in this time, when unmanned combat vehicles are the in thing, that an unmanned platform that could remain on station for weeks at a time would find acceptance despite being the stupidest-looking idea to come along in fifty years…

I’m hoping that this will remain the worst example of government excess for a while, or at least the worst example of our government spending hundreds of millions of dollars it doesn’t have on crackpot aerospace development programs that a small child could have told them were silly ideas for a while. But I am very much afraid that it won’t be. Keep watching the skies, folks…