Yesterday’s Washington Post carries two opposing stories about Mr. Obama’s assertion that his current fleet of nineteen Sikorsky helicopters is “perfectly adequate”:
R. Jeffrey Smith (Wash. Post), “Marine One Upgrade Now Looks Less Likely”
Donna Borak (AP), “Aging presidential chopper may force Obama's hand”
Two oft-cited commentators seem to agree more with the second title than the first. Loren Thompson, who runs the Lexington Institute public relations firm in Washington DC, asserted that the existing Sikorskys are “dangerously outdated”. He may have meant that they are very old—roughly thirty years—and this is a reasonable concern. James McAleese, a lawyer in Washington DC who primarily serves military contractors, asserted that the money expended so far had been well spent, because
You can't lose the president of the United States. This aircraft only has one purpose and that is to protect the president.
Actually, no. There is a roughly estimable cost to losing the head of government or state of any country, and no vehicle replacement program should proceed without first estimating that cost. Here in Texas, the governor rides around in a very nice GMC Suburban (built, of course, in Fort Worth). Someone, at some point, decided that the governor didn’t need the same sort of limousine as the guy in Washington, and chose to save the taxpayers some money. The helicopters may need replacing, but $390 million per helicopter (that’s right: $11 billion for 28 aircraft) is a difficult case to make, regardless of who’s riding in it.
The point here, as I have made before, is that the era of performance-at-any-cost is drawing to a close. As Bryan Whitman, the Pentagon’s press briefer ominously observed yesterday, the VH-71 program
certainly fits the category of requiring a Nunn-McCurdy breach notification, and that is not a good position to have a program in... We are committed to looking at expensive programs, particularly those programs that are underperforming.
Just now, some large lines of business are in grave jeopardy, and as I wrote yesterday, thicker briefing decks aren’t going to save anyone. In the longer run, this relative debacle reemphasizes the importance of managing one’s customer. Contractors who fail to control the over-specifying impulses of military bureaucracies stand to see more than a few programs founder.
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