Lawmakers Argue Over Aircraft Endeavor

AP via SFGate ^ | 6/12/7 | ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer

[SmithL]

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- Democratic lawmakers argued Tuesday that Congress should stop spending money on an aircraft that's never become airborne over two decades of research and testing. Republicans pushed for continued support.

Neither the Pentagon nor NASA ever wanted to invest money in the DP-2 aircraft, meant to hover and take off and land vertically, but the program has gotten more than $63 million over the years at the direction of Congress.

An additional $6 million is being proposed for the 2008 fiscal year, supported by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., the former Armed Services Committee chairman who's now running for president.

Hunter's district is close by the duPont Aerospace Company in La Jolla, Calif., that's building the plane, and he and other Republicans have gotten tens of thousands in donations over the years from Anthony duPont, the company president.

"This project is just fraught with problems," said Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., who chaired a hearing on the issue by the House Science oversight subcommittee Tuesday. "Should we continue to fund this, or is there an accountability by Congress?"

Hunter defended the concept of the DP-2 as "extremely difficult to achieve but extremely valuable."

"The Pentagon doesn't come up with every great idea," said Hunter, explaining why Congress has repeatedly overridden executive branch opposition.

[theDentist]

For once, I find myself agreeing with them... shelve it.

[tobyhill]

If no results have been achieved after about a 20 year period then the likeliness that some can be is about zero! Scrap it and move on to the next best thing.

[untrained skeptic]

Sounds like the liberal media is working to defend the Dems that are under pressure for earmarks by saying everyone does it.

Unfortunately, it's true.

[highball]

The Pentagon doesn't want it, NASA doesn't want it, and after twenty years and $63 million of our dollars it doesn't work?

Time to shelve this pork.

"The Pentagon doesn't come up with every great idea," said Hunter, explaining why Congress has repeatedly overridden executive branch opposition.

Wow. I just lost a lot of respect for Hunter. That's a really stupid thing to say.

[Ol' Dan Tucker]

Maybe duPont should talk to Bell...

[Restore]

Yikes! I’ve been a professional pilot for over 23 years and I’ve never heard of this.

[PAR35]

Sounds like an idea Lockheed played with in the ‘60s. They finally dropped it after killing some test pilots.

Can you really blame Hunter for bringing home the pork?

[UNGN]

You know your airplane sucks when you google it and you get nothing.

I have more relevant hits than this turd.

[Little Ray]

Sorry, but $63 million is pretty cheap on R&D for a VTOL transport. How much did the F-35 cost in research?

[UNGN]

Sorry, but $63 million is pretty cheap on R&D for a VTOL transport. How much did the F-35 cost in research?

We paid $63 Million for nothing and we got off cheap?

No wonder the debt it $8 Trillion.

[ulm1]

The great Duncan Hunter pushing EARMARKS and PORK ??? Hes a louse like most of the rest of them.

[Little Ray]

You want expensive? You should look into the A-12 AvengerII - it has to be one of the most expensive planes that never flew - or even made it to prototype stage!.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-12_Avenger_II

[SmithL]

$63 million here, $63 million there, and pretty soon you’re talking big money.

[CholeraJoe]

I wonder how much Duncan’s been taking under the table for delivering the pork to this company?

[darth]

I don’t recognize the screen names of most of the posters throwing mud at Hunter. $63M is close to the cost of one F22 coming off a PRODUCTION line. As an aerospace engineer, I spent a lot more than $63M on PAPER STUDIES of spacecraft that never cut a single piece of metal. Maybe Duncan Hunter actually saw some promise in the aircraft? I am inclined to reserve judgement rather than pile on with his dim attackers.

[Sandhawk56]

"I don’t recognize the screen names of most of the posters throwing mud at Hunter. $63M is close to the cost of one F22 coming off a PRODUCTION line. As an aerospace engineer, I spent a lot more than $63M on PAPER STUDIES of spacecraft that never cut a single piece of metal. Maybe Duncan Hunter actually saw some promise in the aircraft? I am inclined to reserve judgement rather than pile on with his dim attackers." If memory serves, the current procurement cost is on the order of $120 million per airplane. If you factor in R&D costs and try amortizing them over the life of the production line, it comes out to close to $400 million. In comparison, when I was in high school, an F-4E Phantom II cost $4.5 million and Grumman was threatening to shut down the F-14 Tomcat production line because Congress was complaining about spending 13.2 million dollars per copy. And this puts us in an interesting situation. $120 million is what you pay for a frigate or a destroyer. (And an Arleigh Burke class ship isn't really a destroyer, but rather is a thin walled guided missile cruiser.) And airplanes are, by their very nature, assets that you hazard in battle and expect to lose from time to time. Considering that, it's pretty obvious that we're getting into a situation where we have weapons that we can't procure in any kind of quantity because they're too expensive to build and to irreplacable to hazard. That bothers me, because like a lot of us, I see a war with China on the horizon. Back in 1947, a basic change was made to how we figure wars would be fought. The assumption was made that nuclear weapons would make the idea of an industrial base that can produce weapons in wartime, obsolete and irrelevant. So adopting the Air Force's primary assumption, it came to pass that all of our estimates were based on the concept of a 90 day short war. We assumed that we'd presite stocks of weapons, munitions and petroleum, oil and lubricants and when a war started, we'd do a REFORGER type deployment, draw our gear from climatically controlled warehouses and then sally forth, to do battle with the evil empire. And during this time, our aircraft and other defense industries began a long and destructive binge of merging and then closing plants and RIFing, (Reduction In Force) entire design teams. In the 70's, 80's and 90's, it wasn't a really good time to be an aeronautical engineer. First off, odds were that you'd get to work on maybe one project, and because of excessively long design cycles, (the F-22 has taken what, to reach IOC, 25 years? (IOC = Initial Operational Capability.) What that means is that if we start a project and it's not working, we're stuck, because we have nothing else in the pipeline. Contrast that with the good old days when you had multiple design teams with guys who had designed not one, but often dozens of airplanes! This provided us with a technological defense in depth so that when Donovan Berlin, hit his slump, Lee Atwood and Ed Heinemann and Kelly Johnson among others were there with competing designs that allowed us to retain our technological excellence and the military examples that these provide. Now we don't have that. And while we're a technological country, we're not an industrial one anymore. We've offshored or run out of business just about every critical convertible industry that might have contributed to an ability to do a prewar buildup and handle war production as well. Compare that with the Peoples Republic of China that is a rising technological power not to mention being the preeminent industrial power on the planet. That industrial base gives them the ability to not only hazard aircraft and other weapons, but to expend them, and in the end, we dare not do that. So, we're stuck. We can buy any fighter that we want to, as long as it says Lockheed Martin, or Boeing on it. And every engineer there probably has gotten to work on a fraction of a single development program instead of being able to demonstrate some talent and rise to head their own teams that could bring forth the kind of miracle that our guys could during the Second World War, and even the first. And because we're stuck, we get to pay $60 some odd million for airplanes that have been badly designed and which don't work, simply because we no longer have the industrial base and the time to simply cancel a project and put out a Request For Proposal or to test competing designs that have been produced on speculation by private firms seeking to keep their design teams together and who don't mind selling a few planes here and a few planes there. And changing that is going to take what amounts to a revolution because the guys doing the procurement from the Air Force and the other services, don't want competing designs being sold freely because if somebody produces a better plane than the one that the Air Force buys, then those orders go to the better plane which means that they don't get to amortize development and tooling costs over a longer production run. The Air Force gets a paper saving, (it gets eaten elsewhere) and our industrial base gets narrower and narrower while the Aeronautical Engineers who design those weapons become progressively more incestuous in their thinking. And this needs to be changed, before the Chinese clean our clock. (They don't need a lot of better planes than we have, just more of them and the willingness to handle them aggressively and accept losses. And they seem willing to do that.) In the meantime, until somebody over in Congress and the Pentagon starts to show a little backbone and worry a little more about our national security and a lot less about post retirement jobs, we're going to see more boondoggles like that nonfunctioning VSTOL transport that we've wasted Sixty Megabucks on.

[Ultra Sonic 007]

Hmm. Allow me to shed some light on why Hunter said what he said.

Back in 1995 - according to the New York Times on 06/15/95, in the article "House Votes $628 Million More for Pentagon's Missile Defense System" (obtained via LexisNexis) - Hunter along with a majority of GOP Representatives voted to increase the Pentagon's budget, which included more funding for B-2 bombers. Here's an excerpt:

The Administration suffered another setback late Tuesday when the House approved more money to buy more radar-evading B-2 Stealth bombers that the Pentagon says it does not want and cannot afford.

By a vote of 219 to 203, the House rejected an amendment to eliminate $553 million earmarked to buy radar components and fuselage sections for two additional planes.

Three years ago, the Bush Administration and a Democratic-controlled Congress agreed to buy a total of 20 B-2's for $44 billion, and then stop. Last year, at the request of Senator Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia, Congress approved $125 million to keep the production line open, but ordered no new bombers.

This year, however, an unusual coalition of conservative Republicans, who say more B-2's are needed to bolster a shrinking long-range bomber fleet, and liberal Democrats from Southern California, where the Northrop Grumman Corporation assembles the bat-winged Stealth bomber, have succeeded in reviving the B-2's chances.

The Pentagon and a number of Demorats turned their noses up at GOP Republicans like Hunter for voting to increase funding for these bombers, even though they didn't want them.

Fast forward to 2003, from the November 19th edition of the Financial Times (London), article "The technology is put to the test: There are mixed lessons from the Iraq war and the implications for weapons production, says Peter Spiegel ".

Read:

Long-range bombers, such as the B-2 stealth bomber and the B-1B Lancer, once seen as relics of the cold war because of their nuclear delivery missions, were heavily used for dropping handfuls of guided missiles on multiple targets in a single mission. In August, a B-2 dropped 80 individually-guided JDAM guided bombs at a US air force test facility.

"Operation Iraqi Freedom saw bombers account for less than 3 per cent of the strike sorties, but drop approximately 28 per cent of all munitions," says Andrew Krepinevich, an influential military analyst with the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

"The bombers' long range, extended on-station time, and large payload were key to the US ability to conduct sustained, mass, precision attacks against Republican Guard divisions."

And whaddya know? Less than a decade later, and it turns out the Pentagon and the military needed those B-2s more than they thought.

Hunter has butted heads with the Pentagon and the DoD on such matters before. More often than not, he's been on the right side in the end. And he's always keeping one eye on the horizon, not just on what's in front of him.

That's one of the reasons I'm supporting him for President.

[Kevmo]

Thanks for the ping. This article has cool stuff — Duncan Hunter, VTOL, military airplanes & resource strategy.

[Paperdoll]

Yes! Like I’ve always said, the man has vision, and unshakable good sense! GO DUNCAN HUNTER! (The Mariners-Cubs game in 13th inning, still 3-3!)