Commentary: The plane truth hurts

The DC-3 "Gooney Bird," the transport plane that changed the world, hangs proudly from the white-pipe rafters of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Its silvery face has reason to smirk at the dilemma the new President will confront as he tries to find a new airplane to take U.S. military forces from here to there.

Back in 1935, when the DC-3 first flew, and in the early years of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt as commander in chief faced no such predicament. The Gooney Bird was the only bird in hand for taking soldiers and cargo from place to place and keeping them in the fight. Then and now, the American Army could not move--much less win battles--without aircraft to bring them beans and bullets from afar. Roosevelt bought thousands of DC-3s for the armed services. Nobody second-guessed him. And he had the money to do it.

Not so for a President Bush or Gore. The next President's choices for a new transport plane will not be easy, and the money for buying it will be in doubt, even under the higher defense budgets both presidential candidates have promised. Neither of them is talking about tripling today's $300 billion-plus defense budget, which is what would need to happen to equal Roosevelt's defense budget in 1945, which totaled $983 billion in fiscal 2001 dollars. Besides, Roosevelt was not under pressure to cut taxes and beef up health and Social Security programs, as the next President will be.

Briefers will tell the new commander in chief that the Army is largely home-based these days and needs more airlift "to get to trouble spots faster than our adversaries can complicate the crisis," as Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki puts it. Without more airlift, the President will hear, the Army will become irrelevant in the new and different combat challenges of the 21st century.

If Pentagon analysts get to show the new President their charts and tables, he will see that he could narrow the airlift gap by buying more Boeing C-17 transports, which are now in production; modernizing the old Lockheed C-5 cargo planes; or doing both. Thousands of jobs hinge on his decision. That means enormous pressure will be exerted on the next President by politicians, corporate executives, and union chiefs-many of whom contributed heavily to his election campaign.

The chilling reality is that neither plane is cheap enough to buy by the thousands, which Roosevelt did with the comparatively simple and inexpensive DC-3. Over three decades, Douglas Aircraft Co. of Santa Monica, Calif., sold 10,600 of its DC-3s to military and commercial airlines around the world. China and Russia produced thousands more under license. Partly because high volume decreases the unit price, the venerable DC-3 cost only $98,497 in 1942 dollars.

The Pentagon figures it is now paying $335 million apiece, counting research costs, for the first group of 120 C-17s from Boeing. Largely because the plane's research-and-development costs will be charged to this first group of planes, Boeing has now offered to sell to the Pentagon 60 more C-17s for $149 million each, almost half the original price.

Air Force Secretary F. Whitten Peters wants to purchase additional C-17s, modernize the existing C-5 transports, and raise the total Air Force budget by $20 billion a year for 10 years. But he is not optimistic. "The American people are most concerned about the money for Social Security and Medicare. The next Administration in the immediate future may not have a lot of options because I don't think the case has yet been made publicly for additional military spending."

Franklin Spinney, a Pentagon aircraft specialist and a former Air Force officer, counters that heaping more money on the Air Force will not close the airlift gap or solve the service's other pressing problems. The Air Force F-22 fighter-for which the Pentagon projects it will spend $62 billion for 341 planes, or $182 million each-should have been canceled when the Cold War ended a decade ago to free up money for more pressing needs today, Spinney contends. He predicts the F-22 will not only drain away dollars needed for transports and tankers, but eventually will also force the Air Force to reduce its number of total airwings.

Another expensive aircraft program on the horizon is the Joint Strike Fighter. The blueprint the new President will inherit calls for building about 3,000 of these for the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and foreign customers at a total cost of $200 billion. Will the new President continue on with three such expensive aircraft programs at once-the F-22, the JSF, and the Navy's new F/A-18 E and F-when there are so many mismatches elsewhere, such as the one between Army war plans and the airlift to carry them out?

These issues, and other crucial defense questions glossed over during the presidential campaign, will have to be addressed by the new President. No choice will be as easy as Roosevelt's purchase of the DC-3. Therefore, look for the new President to buy himself time by ordering new studies next year and putting off most major defense decisions until 2002, when he will submit to Congress the first defense budget he can call his own. But delaying the big decisions won't make them any easier.