Defense Spending Follow-up

Some years ago I brought you the curious case of a low-cost close-support aircraft that the Textron Company was developing for use by the Air Force. What make the story, and the airplane it describes, so unique was that no one in any of the Armed Services or either house of Congress had asked for such a thing. Given the enormous cost of designing and flying even the prototype for a new military aircraft, it has become increasingly uncommon for anyone to risk developing one on spec. Even more peculiar, though, was the fact that the next Textron product, now tentatively called the Scorpion, isn’t fast, sleek or pointy, and does not introduce any brand-new gee-whiz wonder technology – setting apart from everything the Department of Defense (DoD) has been interested in for the past few decades. But then, that’s kind of the point…

According to the story this week on the Business Insider website, the Air Force has finally agreed to run some tests with the Scorpion prototype and see it they can find a role for it in their upcoming doctrine. There’s no indication that they intend to give up any existing aircraft or support units, but it seems like the idea of having something in inventory that can perform some of these basic, low-prestige missions at less than a quarter of the cost per flight-hour is starting to catch on. How much of that policy shift is the direct result of the development and teething issues with the F-35 program is not mentioned in the article, and may not be clear even to General Goldfein, the Air Force Chief of Staff, who is apparently now in favor of the trials for this airplane…

The possible change in policy appears to be at least partly the responsibility of Senator John McCain, who recently released a policy statement about future defense spending. That the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee would be in favor of increased defense spending should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, but McCain’s new policy statement contains a surprising amount of support for low-intensity and non-traditional systems, such as unmanned vehicles and low-cost combat support units like the Scorpion. This is encouraging, in the sense that it isn’t more of the same warmed-over thinking we’ve been seeing from the DoD since the 1960s. The problem is that it’s an increase, not a reallocation, and that would mean spending more money we don’t have…

In his policy paper, Mr. McCain makes the point that the outgoing administration lowered discretionary spending for each of the past eight years, which greatly curtailed the amount of funding available for the Department of Defense to spend on untried weapon systems. It also left some of our more Hawkish lawmakers and their uniformed allies in the unenviable position of having to fight for funding to maintain aircraft that can’t fly in the rain, can’t fly in the dark, can’t fly above or below certain temperatures, can’t fly at all, or in extreme cases, that asphyxiate their pilots during their flights. Even granting that we need programs like the F-35, the F-22 and the Osprey, and we might, there remains the issue that the United States is only staying out of bankruptcy by borrowing money every year, some of which is coming from countries that aren’t particularly friendly…

Regular readers of this space (assuming there are any) will recall that I have been in favor of increased defense spending in the past, provided that the new acquisitions offer greater value for the money than existing systems. This is why, for example, I have objected to aspects of the F-35 program, and the development of supersonic aircraft into ground-attack platforms while trying to get rid of the highly-effective A-10 Thunderbolt II attack plane. In this particular case, I do believe in the Scorpion program, for its capabilities as much as for its lower operating costs. I’m also in favor of the program in job-creation terms, assuming that Textron is willing to keep most of the airplane’s production units in the U.S. But in a time when this country’s infrastructure, healthcare, education, and human services needs are all dramatically underfunded, I’m not convinced that maintaining all of our current pork-barrel spending while purchasing cost-efficient new systems is the right answer…

Flying in the Face of History

At first glance, it looked like one of those stories that turn up from time to time railing about the fact that the US does not buy the things it needs and spends too much on things it doesn’t need. At second glance, it looked more like one of those defense industry stories about how some contractor or other is going to improve the nation’s defense against attack by weaving safety nets made out of actual dollars and then running their operations from a building made entirely out of gold and gullibility. And at third glance it looked like yet another story about how an aircraft that is older than I am is showing no signs of retiring anytime soon, provided we keep pouring money into it – which is actually a subset of the first two stories…

For those not familiar with it, the Boeing B-52 “Stratofortress” strategic bomber was originally designed and built over sixty years ago (first flight in 1952), primarily as a carrier for nuclear weapons during the Cold War. A lineal descendent of the famous “Flying Fortress” and “Superfortress” types of World War II, the B-52 combined a number of new design elements and new technologies to produce the largest, most powerful and most effective strategic weapons platform of its time. Since then, the aircraft have seen action in every major conflict the United States has fought in, slowly evolving from carrying giant thermonuclear gravity bombs to stand-off weapons, smart bombs, missiles, and anything else you could ask for. It even stepped in as a cruise missile launch platform when the B-1A was cancelled during the Carter Administration. Meanwhile, regular updates of its avionics and control systems have kept these airplanes flying decades after the intended end of their service life…

What usually gets lost in all of the shouting is that while the mission for which these aircraft was designed (e.g. dropping massive hydrogen bombs on the Soviets) has long since vanished, the utility of a large flying truck that can carry forty tons or more of assorted weapons to pretty much anywhere you might want them to be launched from has not. It’s debatable as to whether or not the B-52 could ever have accomplished its primary mission as designed (rather than simply being hacked out of the sky in droves), but as long as its systems are kept compatible with the rest of the military, and as long as you can still find things for it to carry, there’s no real need to build another huge, radar-friendly, gas-guzzling, smoke-spewing, noisy, ugly and incredibly adaptable flying machine…

The new story is really just another case of finding new things for the B-52 to carry. According to the press information on Boeing’sMedia Room page, the company has signed a small contract to develop modifications to existing launcher systems that will allow these venerable airplanes to carry the latest generation of “smart” weapons in their internal weapons bays, instead of having to carry all of them on external mounts. This will enable the aircraft to carry larger loads, or to avoid external mounts (and their attendant drag) and operate more efficiently. It won’t enable them to fly through contested airspace, ignore active threats, or do anything else they don’t already do, in fact. But if you just went off the original story headline (“Boeing to extend B-52 life span by increasing smart weapon capacity by half”) you could easily get the idea that this is a massive deal that will drive the company’s bottom line for decades to come…

Instead, we’re just looking at a $26 million upgrade to the airplane’s weapons stations – a nice project, and potentially very useful, but not particularly significant compared to the $33 billion in business that Boeing’s Defense, Space & Security division does in a year. I don’t know what the next big thing in manned strategic weapons platforms is going to be, if in fact there is every going to be one, but I can tell you with a fair amount of confidence that this isn’t it…

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…

Almost Obvious

This past weekend I noticed a story on the CNN Technology page about a new development that promises to save the United States millions – if not billions – in defense spending, while potentially also creating hundreds of new jobs and eliminating thousands of tons of air pollution. It’s a product prototype that has the potential to complete several different (critically needed) missions at lower cost than any existing platform, and should in theory be the kind of thing that business leaders brag about and Congress approves the moment it appears. The catch appears to be that this particular product is coming from a non-traditional source – and that no one asked for it…

You can pick up the CNN story here if you want to, but the basic idea is that Textron (the company that makes, among other things, Cessna airplanes and E-Z Go golf carts) has teamed up with a small company called AirLand Enterprises (which was founded for this purpose) to create a low-cost, relatively low-speed military aircraft specifically intended for Air National Guard and other lower-intensity combat settings. According to the joint venture’s website, the airplane, called the Scorpion, is ideally suited for “…irregular warfare, border patrol, maritime surveillance, emergency relief, counter-narcotics and air defense operations," all things traditionally done by all-up strike-fighter and fighter-bomber types like the F-15E Strike Eagle and F-16 Falcon at much higher costs – but which don’t have to be…

Company figures indicate that the Scorpion will cost about one-eighth as much to operate as an F-16 (about $3,000 per air hour compared with $24,899 for the F-16); the aircraft is also expected to be much less expensive to produce. The problem is that the U.S. Air Force did not request such a vehicle, and has so far showed no interest in the program whatsoever. It’s partly that the Air Force has committed itself to the F-35 Lightning II as an eventual F-16 replacement, which hasn’t been easy given (unconfirmed) reports that the F-35 can’t fly in bad weather, can’t hover or handle short runways, and so on. But it must also be noted that the US military has had a long history of ambivalence towards airplanes of any sort that aren’t sleek, photogenic, futuristic, and generally pointy – even when such types are not suited to the mission at hand…

To take the obvious case, much of the Air Force leadership never really warmed up to the A-10 Thunderbolt II attack craft, affectionately known as the Warthog to most of the people who have flown one. Despite the airplane’s extraordinary success in both Gulf Wars, the Air Force has been trying to phase it out almost since the lumbering, unglamorous – but supremely effective – air-to-ground platform first came on-line. The Navy had similar problems with the “drumstick-shaped” A-6 Intruder, which has now been replaced with sleek, supersonic (and pointy) F/A-18 Hornet types. Three generations of pilots have complained that it is almost impossible to fly effective close air support missions in a machine optimized for twice the speed of sound, but three generations of politicians could tell you for a certainty that such a task is still easier than trying to get funding for a new weapons system that isn’t either eye-catching or loaded with useless pork (or often both) through Congress…

The future of the Scorpion project is still up in the air as of this writing. Of course, Textron doesn’t have the prototype ready for trials yet, so perhaps things will be different once they can demonstrate the aircraft’s performance in person. But with no requests for the product – and as yet, no interest in the prototype – this is going to be a hard sell. I’m hoping that the Scorpion receives at least some support, and that the company is able to sell enough of them to at least prove the concept. In the long run, we need the capabilities that this vehicle is supposed to have, and we need the economy of operation that the design promises the end user, but the most important aspect of the whole project may turn out to be proving that entrepreneurship isn’t dead in the aircraft industry, that new airplanes don’t have to cost hundreds of billions of dollars to design or take twenty years to get ready, and that the U.S. military can still recognize a good idea they didn’t ask for, even if it isn’t pointy…

Because if any of those things is no longer true, I’m pretty sure we’ve got a bigger problem…

Old Days

There was a notice in the Long Beach (California) Press-Telegram this past week regarding the completion and departure of the 223rd and last C-17 Globemaster III from the Boeing facility in that city. To most people, I suppose, it's probably just another example of factories closing and jobs being lost as companies leave Southern California for cheaper parts of the US, and business in general migrates to lower-cost options in other countries. And that's fair enough, really; unless you were there in the old days, it's a notice of no special interest. Boeing will still provide service, spares and support for the C-17 fleet, and if they bid successfully on future Air Force contracts they can build the airplanes somewhere else without any real effect on the company. If the company can't find anything else to use the Long Beach facility for it would be bad news for the people who work there - and for the economy in Southern California - but the ongoing survival of Boeing is probably a bigger business issue. It's just that I was there in the old days...

When I was kid growing up in Southern California there were no major Boeing plants in the area; the powerhouse companies in Los Angles County were McDonnell-Douglas, Hughes Aircraft, Northrop and TRW. The area had a long history with the aerospace industry - or, at least, as long a history as you can have with an industry that has existed for less than 60 years at that point. Douglas had been based in the Los Angeles area since before its merger with McDonnell Aircraft, and the facility in Long Beach had been building transport aircraft (including the celebrated Douglas Commercial or DC line) since before World War II. After I got home from college I applied for a job with McDonnell-Douglas and went for a series of interviews at the Long Beach facility; although I didn't get the job (a degree in English and a love of airplanes isn't really a good set of credentials for a Technical Writer) I lived for the next three years just a couple of miles away from the plant...

Now, I understand that it's a different world from the one I remember. The United States doesn't have the budget to just purchase whatever ships, tanks or airplanes we want anymore, and with the end of the Cold War and the corresponding drawdown in our armed forces we don't need as much hardware to begin with. The fact is that the scene in Long Beach has been repeated all over the US, and given the correspondingly smaller chance of being randomly vaporized one night, I don't suppose that the lowering of international tensions is a bad thing. But I do worry about the damage all of this is doing to the American aerospace industry, to communities like Long Beach, and to grand traditions like aerospace companies and innovative new aircraft coming out of Los Angeles County...

Almost a century ago the fledgling airplane comanies came to California for much the same reasons the movie studios had: the land was cheap, the weather conditions made it possible to work on projects outside for much of the year, and the final product could be sent east in a small metal film cannister - or, in the case of the airplanes, just fly away on its own. I know that in the long run it's more important for the US aerospace industry as a whole to prosper, and that as long as we have overall  economic stability and sufficient military defense it doesn't really matter if powerful and graceful flying machines are being built and then flown away from a factory in Long Beach...

But despite the fact that I live in Michigan now - or possibly because of that - I still miss the old days back in Long Beach...

Can You Blame Them?

I was reading through some of the news aggregation sites the other day when I turned up a story about several countries (notably including Australia, Canada and Italy) that are backing out of the multi-national purchase program for the Joint Strike Fighter, otherwise known as the F-35 Lightning II. This is problematic for all of the usual reasons – the company’s profits will drop, possibly until they can’t make any money on the project; the volume savings the program was supposed to provide may not be possible if they don’t make as many airplanes; various U.S. allies may not have the best gear (or may buy it from companies in other countries), and so on – but in this particular case there’s also a certain amount of credibility involved. You see, one of the reasons that Australia has given for not wanting the aircraft is that they can’t fly within 25 miles of a thunderstorm…

You can find the Reuters/Yahoo News story about the situation here if you want to, but the basic idea is that if you fly the F-35 too close to an electrical storm there is a risk that the airplane’s fuel tank may catch fire and explode. This is not an attractive quality for a military asset, and it isn’t helping the reputation of a project that has already cost nearly $400 million without producing a single deployable airplane. But the fact that the general overseeing development of the F-35, on an interview for Australian television, admitted that production of the airplane was started before the design was ready is only making the whole thing look more like a gold-plated boondoggle and less like a critical defense asset. This, in turn, is causing some of the prospective buyers to consider purchasing other types of military aircraft – pretty much anything that won’t catch on fire and explode in the event of an electrical storm, in fact…

Now, we should probably consider that the American track record of producing and supporting cutting-edge military equipment has been somewhat hit or miss over the past two generations. On the one hand, we’ve produced world-beaters like the F-15 Eagle (which has never lost a dogfight in the over 30 years it has been operational), the F-16 Falcon (one of the most commonly-used warplanes in the world), the C-130 Hercules and F-4 Phantom II and a number of others that remain in use in dozens of countries. On the other hand, we’ve also produced flops like the A-12 (a strike airplane so ridiculous that it was cancelled after the program has spent over $2 billion without producing a single flyable airplane in the 12 years they were working on it) and the “Sgt. York” air defense gun (which was cancelled after it repeatedly failed to hit a large helium balloon). There’s no question that a good design would find fans (and buyers) all over the world; but these days the potential customers are requiring rather more convincing than they once did…

I’m not sure how this story is going to turn out. On the one hand, the F-35 represents not one but several completely new capabilities that would be of enormous utility, not just to the United States but also to a number of friendly nations that have agreed to buy it. On the other hand, there’s a limit to how much use a tactical fighter or strike aircraft is going to be if you can only use it in nice weather. The company says that now that they are aware of the problem it will be easy for them to correct, and the final design will be even better than they initially claimed. And all of that may be true – but until they can back up those claims it’s going to be really difficult to blame Australia and some of the other prospective buyers from acquiring the Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet instead…