Military cutting orders for costly high-tech weapons

Look at the plans for the DDG 1000, the Navy's newest guided-missile destroyer, and you'll see the makings of a sea warrior's dream.

The 600-foot-long, next-generation warship is a technological marvel, with state-of-the-art multiphased radar, advanced gunnery and missile systems, electric propulsion, and an integrated power-generation package that will pave the way for future use of laser or electromagnetic guns.

The vessel is expected to provide three times as much firepower as today's destroyers. It will have three times the defenses against anti-ship cruise missiles and 10 times the mine-warfare capability of today's ships. It presents a 50-fold reduction in radar cross section, making it appear no bigger than a fishing boat to enemy warships.

As a bonus, the DDG 1000 will sail with a crew that is half the complement needed to operate today's ships its size.

"This is a quantum leap from anything you've ever seen on a surface combatant ship," says Cynthia L. Brown, president of the American Shipbuilding Association, the Washington-based trade group for the nation's largest shipyards.

But the vessel, formerly known as the DD(X), also poses some problems. Depending on the estimates, it now costs between $2.5 billion and $3.8 billion a copy -- about four times the original projection and almost triple the price tag for the DDG 51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers now in service.

A wary Congress has cut orders for the DDG 1000 to only two ships in fiscal 2007 and seems unlikely to approve more than five beyond that -- far fewer than the 16 to 24 ships the Navy had wanted. And some analysts worry that the ballooning cost of the destroyers will leave the Navy without enough money to replace other classes of aging warships and to maintain its planned 313-ship fleet of destroyers, cruisers, aircraft carriers, and submarines.

The DDG 1000 isn't the military's only budget buster. In a report issued last April, the Government Accountability Office pointed to dozens of other high-tech weapons programs that are so costly that they are obliging Pentagon buyers to cut orders to a trickle, to avoid squeezing other needs.

Included are the Air Force's F-22A Raptor, designed to replace the aging F-15 as an air-to-air fighter; the all-services F-35 Joint Strike Fighter; the Army's Future Combat System, a network of advanced high-tech equipment to support the shift to autonomous combat brigades; the Marine Corps's Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, designed to speed troops to amphibious landings; the Air Force's Space-Based Infrared System High, a satellite network aimed at gathering intelligence and detecting missiles; and the Air Force's Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle, to be used for satellites.

The GAO report says that the Air Force trimmed its order for F-22As to 181 aircraft, down from the 648 it initially sought, after the cost per airplane skyrocketed by 189 percent.

The Air Force cut back purchases of the EELV from 181 to 138 after costs rose 138 percent, and the Pentagon is ordering only 2,458 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters rather than 2,866, because the price tag has jumped 27 percent. The cost of the Space-Based Infrared System High has ballooned by 315 percent, and the Air Force now plans to buy only three units instead of five.

Cindy Williams, a military analyst formerly with the Congressional Budget Office and currently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points to such programs as prime examples of the inherent conflicts stemming from growing demands for costly high-technology weaponry, increased pressures on military procurement budgets in the face of wartime spending, and competition from domestic programs.

The Bush administration is expected to seek an extra $170 billion in supplemental defense spending for fiscal 2007 -- beyond the $447.6 billion basic defense appropriation -- to cover the cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to replenish the stocks of tanks, Humvees, and other destroyed or worn-out equipment. President Bush has asked Congress to increase overall U.S. ground forces by 92,000 soldiers and marines over the next five years, the largest buildup since the Cold War.

As spectacular as some of the high-tech weapons are, some military specialists question whether the military really needs them. The most immediate threats facing the military -- from terrorists and insurgent groups such as those in Iraq -- require ground troops capable of house-to-house fighting rather than high-tech aerial fighters and naval destroyers. And even potential threats from China -- dramatized last month when Beijing fired a test missile to destroy one of its communications satellites -- would primarily involve ballistic missiles and submarines; building more-sophisticated fighters or DDG 1000s won't bolster America's defense against such threats, critics say.

"I would argue that most of these big-ticket items, if not all of them, are unnecessary," said Charles V. Pena, a defense analyst with the Independent Institute, a nonpartisan research group based in Oakland, Calif. "Almost none of them has killing terrorists as a primary mission."

Andrew F. Krepinevich, a former Army lieutenant colonel who heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based research group that specializes in defense issues, agrees. He says the military should build fewer F-22As and F-35s and instead pour more money into increasing the number of Special Forces battalions, designing a new long-range strike aircraft that can spend long periods over the battlefield, beefing up the capability to detect and destroy weapons of mass destruction, boosting production of submarines, and modernizing the nation's aging air-tanker refueling fleet. "What kind of air force does Al Qaeda have?" Krepinevich asks.

Others question whether some of the new weapons are as effective as they're cracked up to be. Winslow Wheeler, a former Capitol Hill defense specialist who is with the liberal Center for Defense Information in Washington, says that the F-22A Raptor has turned out to be so large, so complex, and so heavy that "it's a poor performer, less reliable than its predecessors."

The eye-popping price tags of the high-tech weapons are tied to complex cost structures. In many cases, the defense contractors are working with infant, unproven technologies that require significantly more research and testing before they can be installed. What's more, the armed services often add new missions to a weapon that is already in development or even in production -- sometimes to boost its marketability on Capitol Hill. When specifications change, timetables grow longer and costs grow higher.

The DDG 1000 is a prime example of the Christmas-tree effect. The Navy, initially seeking to build a small, low-cost destroyer that could do well in shallow coastal areas, kept adding missions and technological marvels to the vessel until the cost exploded.

"The DDG 1000 is really a dozen different programs all converging into one warship," says Loren B. Thompson, chief executive officer of the Lexington Institute, a defense research group in Arlington, Va. "It's not so clear why the ship has so many requirements, given the [threat] environment in which we find ourselves."

The Pentagon has done little to rein in the cost of high-tech weaponry. Although former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld advocated restructuring the armed forces to focus on countering new threats -- from Islamic terrorists and unstable countries such as North Korea and Iran -- he proved unwilling to slash costly weapons systems to pay for it.

The department's latest policy-setting Quadrennial Defense Review, issued last February, outlined a plan that would leave U.S. forces equipped primarily for traditional warfare, and would not scale back the Future Combat System, the DDG 1000, or the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The GAO says the Pentagon has yet to do what is needed to cut costs on its major programs.

To be sure, not everyone is appalled at the burgeoning cost of programs such as the DDG 1000. William M. Arkin, a former Greenpeace International military analyst and longtime independent national security investigator, says that cost overruns have always plagued big-ticket weapons projects and always will.

He argues that the public shouldn't worry about it. Estimating the cost of new weapons is always a difficult job, he says. And he points out that when officials scale back the orders, the cost per unit shoots up.

"The argument that these high-tech weapons cost too much and aren't going to work is an old-fashioned one that was deflated during the Persian Gulf War," Arkin says. "The numbers may be staggering, but I don't see what the alternative is. We're still spending a lower percentage of our gross domestic product on the military than we did during most of the Cold War, so it isn't that we can't afford it."

In any case, Arkin expects Congress and the Pentagon to do little any time soon to get a better handle on the new technology. "We probably could make an argument that we don't need the best technology attainable to deal with the threats we're facing," he says, "but I don't think we're going to have that dialogue until well after Iraq is past us."