Its bad enough we have to endure a senseless war where over 25,000 Americans have been killed or maimed; where we have spent a half trillion dollars; where Bush, the incompetent, wants 100 billion more dollars, but now I have to read this crap.......and you complain about socialism. I am sick to death of making the owners and upper mgmt. of defense companies like Gen. Dynamics rich for their expensive screwups. Sick to death.........and its been going on for decades.
After $1.7 billion, new craft still not ready to hit beach
By Renae Merle
GENERAL DYNAMICS
The new Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle for the Marine Corps breaks down frequently, leaks and sometimes veers off course. With $1.7 billion spent so far, the Pentagon now wants to relaunch the troubled program and develop seven new prototypes.
WASHINGTON — After 10 years and $1.7 billion, this is what the Marines Corps got for its investment in a new amphibious vehicle: a craft that breaks down about an average of once every 4 ½ hours, leaks and sometimes veers off course.
And for that, the contractor, General Dynamics of Falls Church, Va., received $80 million in bonuses.
The amphibious vehicle, which can be launched from a ship and then driven on land, is so unreliable that the Pentagon is ditching plans to begin building the first of more than 1,000 and wants to start over with seven new prototypes. They will take nearly two years to deliver, at a cost of $22 million each.
The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle is one of the Pentagon's largest weapons programs and exemplifies the agency's struggle to afford new megasystems that are larger and more complex, but also more troublesome, than their predecessors.
Despite reforms meant to rein in costs, it is not unusual for weapons programs to go 20 to 50 percent over budget, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently found. Among the offenders is the Army's sprawling modernization program, which aims to update everything from tanks to drones and is expected to cost $160 billion, up from $90 billion, and a Lockheed Martin missile-warning satellite program, which is projected to cost more than $10 billion, up from $4 billion.
The Marines' troubled program is on a collision course with critics who note its growing price tag and wonder about the utility of an amphibious vehicle meant to storm beaches in a way the military hasn't done for decades, and at a time when soldiers are consumed with urban warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Marines, though, are not dissuaded by its poor test results, as such fits and starts are common in military development programs. "We were disappointed. We weren't shocked," said program manager Col. John Bryant.
The cost of the amphibious-vehicle effort has increased 50 percent, to about $12 billion from $8 billion, with another cost bump projected after the program is relaunched.
The overruns are eating away at the Pentagon's buying power, but not its appetite. The amount the Pentagon plans to spend on major weapons systems has nearly doubled during the past five years, to $1.4 trillion from $700 billion, according to the GAO.
When it was launched in 1996, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle was held up as an example of acquisition reform. To save time and money, hundreds of General Dynamics and Marine Corps officials moved into the same 62,000-square-foot office building in Woodbridge, Va., to run the program. Efforts to keep maintenance costs low won plaudits from Defense leaders and twice earned the program the Pentagon's highest acquisition award, in 1997 and 1999. In 2001, the program earned an innovation award for developing a system to keep the craft's internal components from overheating, a technology adopted for other weapons.
But the program has faced delays, cost increases, budget cuts and dashed expectations, according to military officials and government reports. Problems range from leaks in hydraulics systems to software glitches, the reports say. Last year, the vehicles completed just two of 14 planned tests.
"They started out really well, and I was really pleased," said Philip Coyle, the Pentagon's former director of operational test and evaluation. "But gradually the complexity of the program has overcome the contractor, so they are years behind schedule."
General Dynamics defends its progress, noting that the vehicle has met many goals, including being able to reach speeds of 30 knots on the water. The vehicle is fast enough to keep up with the Abrams tank on land; it can carry 17 Marines; and its systems can communicate with ships and tanks — all key performance criteria, the company says.
"I have heard no one in leadership say that they don't need this capability, that they don't want this capability," said Peter Keating, a General Dynamics spokesman.
An independent review released in December by the Navy's acquisition office questioned the company's commitment to solving the vehicle's development problems. The report said General Dynamics appeared more interested in starting production than in trouble-shooting. The production phase is typically more profitable for a contractor, and it often marks a point at which a program becomes more difficult to cancel.
Noting that the bonuses for the company did not reflect the vehicle's performance, the report recommends that the Defense Contract Management Agency consider recovering some of the award fees. The agency had not addressed the issue, a spokesman said, because it was unaware of the recommendation.
The Marine Corps has tried to deal with some problems by lowering its expectations for the vehicle. The service originally wanted a craft that could operate 70 hours between major breakdowns, but it cut that target to 43.5 hours after seeing the vehicles struggle to meet the higher goal.
But even the lower targets have been hard to hit. Tests last year revealed an "operational mission failure" on average every 4.5 hours.
seattletimes.nwsource.com
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