Pentagon turkeys

Many of the Pentagon's fattest turkeys escaped Donald Rumsfeld's little-used chopping block over the Thanksgiving holidays and will continue to be fed billions of dollars in the coming year. For longevity, some of these turkeys are beginning to resemble the Laysan albatross, a bird that lives for up to 30 years.

Neither President Bush nor Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as the halfway point of Bush's first term nears, has had the stomach or heart to use the ax on these fowls so prized by the armed forces.

The Bush-Rumsfeld performance contrasts sharply with their campaign platform of two years ago. They came to office promising sweeping reform of the American military, including killing off weapons that they said would not combat the radically different threats of the post-Cold War world. The defense budget going to Congress next year, and being finalized now, is the last real chance for Bush and Rumsfeld to transform the military. Congress will not be interested in doing anything radical in 2004, an election year. And who knows who will be in the White House and Pentagon after that?

True, Bush and Rumsfeld will be able to claim when they unveil the budget for fiscal 2004 that they are cutting back on the number of some of these superweapons that the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps want to buy over the next several years. But this assertion will mean little, because Congress pretty much finances the Pentagon's purchase of weapons a year at a time. Lawmakers can always add on more orders in future years, after Bush and Rumsfeld are long gone.

For sheer longevity, the Army's turkey of a new light helicopter has to win the blue ribbon. At the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the Army rightly argued that it needed a new bird to replace its aged fleet of light helicopters: the UH-1 Huey, which did just about everything in Vietnam; the OH-58A Kiowa scout; and the AH-l Cobra shooter. Endless Army arguments centered on what this new helicopter should look like, how much it should cost, what it should do, and how many fliers should be in the cockpit.

The rhetoric was suspended in the 1980s with the signing of contracts for the light-helicopter experimental, known as LHX. But the Army kept going back to the drawing board for so many years that the helicopter it finally came up with, the Comanche, is obsolete, according to Pentagon critics. Better to kill off this bird, projected to cost $48 billion for 1,213 Comanches, and settle for the Army's Apache Longbow helicopter already flying, they say. But Bush and Rumsfeld have not heeded that advice in their new budget. Comanche lives on.

Then there is the Navy's Virginia-class submarine, a technological marvel but a turkey all the same because the threat justifying its gigantic cost of $2.4 billion per boat no longer exists. There's no need to keep on building Virginias, when Russia is no longer threatening the United States with large roving fleets of missile subs. Will Bush, Rumsfeld, Chief of Naval Operations Vern Clark, or Congress have the gumption to take on the military-industrial-political complex and kill this turkey? No, is the short answer.

Nor has the Air Force F-22 Raptor or the Marine Corps' V-22 Osprey gotten the ax. Despite cost overruns for the Raptor, Bush and Rumsfeld will keep buying the F-22 air superiority fighter, projected to cost $70 billion for 341 of them, or almost $205 million a plane. Never mind that American fighter planes already flying can handle any air-to-air threat from the "axis of evil" countries-Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

As for tomorrow, the Pentagon plans to buy 2,866 Joint Strike Fighters for $226 billion, or about $80 million apiece. So why do we also need 341 F-22s costing more than $200 million each? Lockheed builds both planes, so canceling the F-22 wouldn't ruin the company. But Rumsfeld only went so far as to reduce the order for F-22 Raptors in the new budget, not kill the program, meaning the per-plane cost will climb even higher as the savings from quantity production are lost.

As for the Marines' V-22 aerial taxi, Pentagon procurement chief Pete Aldridge has reportedly been saying in closed-door meetings that too many billions have been spent on the tilt-rotor aircraft to cancel it. Does this mean that no matter how bad a weapon performs in testing, the Pentagon considers it past the point of no return if enough money has been spent on it?

The Osprey program office says that $12 billion has been spent on Osprey to date. Test pilots have told National Journal that they are appalled over the number of shortcuts the higher-ups in this and the previous administration allowed in the V-22's original testing program, which in three crashes has taken the lives of 30 people. But the Osprey lives on in the new defense budget. The Marines hope to buy 458 V-22s for $46 billion, or $100 million plus for each one.

Along with keeping these and other turkeys well fed, the fiscal 2004 defense budget, as now put together, calls for spending new billions on laser communications, missile defense, and anti-terrorism efforts around the world. Invading Iraq would cost additional billions. The Bush-Rumsfeld defense program is well on its way to costing taxpayers a million dollars a minute. It's already at $750,000 a minute under the $393 billion defense budget signed into law this week, and we don't have troops in Baghdad-yet.