• Chopped chopper
Chopped chopper
When the army’s chief of staff announced the cancellation of the Comanche helicopter program this week, the first five production models of the $53 million helicopters were left, still unfinished, on the floor of the Sikorsky plant in Bridgeport, Conn. Twenty years and $8 billion into the Comanche program, not a single production unit had been finished.
This fact alone would have argued for the cancellation of the program. As it happens, there were lots of others, including this astounding admission by the Army: Even with a $401.7 billion military budget, there wasn’t enough money to fix all the problems facing Army aviation units and still pay for the Comanche. For the first time in memory, a military service bowed to budget pressure and whacked one of its own major weapons programs.
Two years ago, the Army lost its Crusader howitzer program, but that was Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld’s doing. With the Comanche, the Army killed its own. “It’s about fixing Army aviation,” said Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff. “It’s a big decision. We know it’s a big decision. But it’s the right decision.”
The Comanche was first proposed in 1983 as a stealthy combination of gunship and reconnaissance craft, able to replace both the Cobra gunship and the Kiowa reconnaissance birds. In addition, its advanced electronics systems would have made it an airborne command center, instantly controlling what were then Cold War battlefields.
But in some ways it was too advanced and too versatile; Sikorsky and Boeing Co., the joint contractors, couldn’t get all the pieces to work. The fits and starts in its production lasted so long that not only did the Cold War end, so did the era of large set-piece battles like Gulf War I. Furthermore, during the Iraq war, the Army’s helicopters proved more vulnerable than anticipated to bad weather and sand, to say nothing of the shoulder-fired missiles that are ubiquitous in the Third World.
The money that would have been spent on Comanches will go instead to buy 800 new, and upgrade 1,400 existing, Black Hawk and Apache helicopters. More funding may also be directed at reconnaissance planes that are part of the Army’s Future Combat System project. Both the Apache and the Future Combat System are Boeing projects with strong ties to St. Louis. Both make better use of limited funds than the Boeing-Sikorsky Comanche.
That phrase, “limited funds,” is the real surprise of the Comanche decision. At nearly $402 billion – plus the costs of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq – the military budget now exceeds 4 percent of gross domestic product. In an era of $500 billion deficits, absent a clear major threat to national security, 4 percent of GDP is more than the nation can afford to spend. The Army, at least, has recognized that it can’t have it all. And that’s a major milestone.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
