Today’s Early Bird carries stories from the Washington Post and others about the VH-71 program, Lockheed Martin’s effort to build 23 new ‘Marine One’ helicopters for presidential usage. After his first few rides in the existing Sikorskys, Mr. Obama declared that the current aircraft “seems perfectly adequate,” and that he had instructed Robert Gates, his defense secretary, to undertake a “thorough review of the helicopter situation”.
I really can’t imagine how the morning is going for Lockheed Martin’s program manager. Or AgustaWestland’s, who’s responsible for the actual aircraft. Or Bell Helicopter’s, who’s responsible for assembling the whole thing here in Texas. It’s going to be a bad day all around, with a really, really high briefing slide count by close of business. Which will be really, really late tonight.
Unfortunately for those concerned at those three companies (and with their suppliers), PowerPoint engineering isn’t going to fix this problem. At a White House meeting yesterday, federal senator John McCain (R-Arizona) said that he couldn’t think of “any more graphic demonstration of how good ideas have cost the taxpayers an enormous amount of money.” As the Post put it,
Senior Pentagon officials, including outgoing procurement chief John J. Young Jr. and testing chief Charles E. McQueary, have frequently described the VH-71 as an example of how military systems should not be bought: the White House security office repeatedly added highly complex security requirements, and the Pentagon began building the helicopters without first settling on a design and testing the key components.
This is not news, as parallel problems have sunk program like the US Army and Navy’s Airborne Common Sensor, and imperiled projects like the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). In a floor statement yesterday, McCain explained how he and senatorial colleague Carl Levin (D-Michigan) were introducing a bill styled the “Weapon System Acquisition Reform Act of 2009”, which amongst other things, “puts Nunn-McCurdy on dynamite.” That is, the bill would require
that programs currently underway (post-Milestone B) experiencing “critical” cost growth either be terminated or enter the new defense acquisition system, which the DoD recently and fundamentally restructured to help it manage technology and integration risk. In so doing, Chairman Levin and I hope to transform Nunn-McCurdy from a mere reporting requirement into a tool that can help the DoD manage out-of-control cost growth.
Of course, decades of acquisition reform have had, at best, mixed results. Fortunately, McCain says that he and Levin are under no illusion that legislation alone will change this, and that commitment from the appointed leadership in the Pentagon is essential. This is why the recent nomination of Harvard professor Ashton Carter to replace Young as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition may be important. Young seemed a late convert to the concept of thrift; Carter has been talking about it for some time.
As I have been saying for some time, spending will be decreasing, and many procurement programs that aren’t obviously more important than others will be eliminated. If you’re managing a portfolio of programs in military contracting, and the US government is amongst your larger customers (as it is for many), you may want to think about three factors that could signal vulnerability or opportunity, and what to do about them next time:
Substitutability—are there other platforms or systems that could perform this mission adequately?
Possible example: the CSAR-X. As Mr Young mused to the press a few weeks ago, the cost-benefit analysis for a separate fleet of helicopters raised purely to affect “single-digit” rescues is hard to make. If you’re at Boeing Helicopters, you might take solace, however, in the worldwide demand for and admiration of the power and versatility of the Chinook. That leads to my next point...
Adaptability—are there other latent missions that your platform could be marketed to perform?
Possible example: the San Antonio-class assault ship. Admiral Vernon Clark once famously admitted that he hadn’t considered whether helicopters and small craft based on large ships wouldn’t be a better solution to littoral sea control than small frigates. After all, the Danish approach to this problem is nearly cruiser-sized. If you’re at Northrop Grumman Ship Systems, you might be marketing this alternative hard against the now relatively costly Freedom and Independence-class LCSs.
Flexibility—does my platform or system address the balance between big-war and small-war needs?
Possible example: the MRAP-ATV. If the M113 and the Humvee were meant for the Fulda Gap, then it’s unclear why evolutionary developments of the all-terrain MRAP program wouldn’t be a more cost-effective solution in second-line roles than the great leap forward of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. Such a fleet would certainly be less expensive than a utility version of the tracked FCS vehicles, and the basic concept is already proven against the classic trinity of small-war weapons: the Kalashnikov, the RPG-7, and the roadside bomb.
As I indicated in the title of this article, when the words “perfectly adequate” emanate from the Oval Office, it’s time to take note. Money is going to get short, and as in the early 1990s, congressional benefactors will only be able to save a few pet projects. The response to that predicament requires strategy, marketing insight, and engineering excellence. It was time to get started quite some months ago.
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