A big budget item: Secret and cutting-edge defense

Regular readers will know that I talked about the X-37b some eight years ago, and this paper even published photos four years ago. The space plane was really no secret. What was a secret was this comment from Air Force Public Affairs people as they showed “for the first time” the plane on CBS this week: “The X-37b was turned over to the Air Force in the early 2000s...” That’s about 10 years ago. And whose project was it before that and for how long? And does anyone, anywhere in government, know what the real cost of these planes (three known to have been built) were? And given that the project is still super-secret, how big a budget ticket item is this program, even now?The truth is, the cost is buried in “cost overruns” and “$200 hammers,” what we’re always told is horrible government waste. Yeah, sure. The real waste here is in our faith in the system of government, open, honest government. Now, I’m not saying the X-37b is a waste of time. Simply put, we elect our politicians to make sure we get a return on our tax investment (ROTI) instead of the standard MBA businessman’s catch phrase of ROI. But with all super-secret programs, we never get to assess the ROTI. And I know 90 percent plus of Congressmen and women have no access either.I saw a picture the other week of the spy plane the Iranians shot down. It wasn’t a stealth plane. I recognized it immediately, twin props, wings and all. Back in 1986, two black-suited DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) agents showed up at the Voyager world flight hangar in Mojave and demanded access to the Voyager plane designs. Why, we asked. “Because the capability to loiter for 10 days makes this a great spy plane.” Well, yes, so we offered to build them. No deal, Boeing had the contract for the Condor project. Later on, after the Voyager broke the last great milestone in aviation (Dec. 23, 1986), the two guys came back and congratulated us and sheepishly admitted Boeing was building the same plane for around $80 million each. No way. Much of that had to be spy equipment. Our budget had been around $2 million. On the other hand, maybe the Condor budget was hiding parts of another super-secret program.And then you come to the huge amount of time it takes to complete some of these cutting edge design programs. The stealth fighter, the F-117, was flying way back in 1984 (saw them in the skies) but were only made public for the Gulf War. And before that, the Blackbird (YF-14 to SR-17), B-1 bomber and B-2 bomber, all flew six years before anyone knew they existed publically. Where’d that tax funding appear from? No way it ever appeared as a line item in the Congressional budget.What does appear in the Congressional budget is the development and building program for a one-size-fits-all next generation fighter called the F-35 called the Joint Strike Fighter. When it was planned (and a competition was held between Boeing and Lockheed, Lockheed won) in 2001 the budget estimate was $177.1 billion (2012 dollars), with a “b.” Currently, that estimate is so shot that it has topped $330.5 billion and is still rising by $200 billion a year. How much of that cost is accountable as belonging to the actual plane? No one knows. To quote an expert at AvWeek, the budget and program has been labeled “cracked and broken....” And yet, there it is, sitting in the budget for the next six years (at least), supposed to provide us with a fifth-generation capability (when the very best of the rest of the world doesn’t have fourth-generation capability), and an engine which was developed in the late 1980s. Like the Concorde, whose airframe was great, the 1956 Rolls Royce Spey engines so out of date it could not carry enough fuel and made ten times as much noise as the designers wanted. Similarly, the F-35 is a huge compromise, old parts and new, and doesn’t seem likely to compete with existing aircraft anytime soon. So why doesn’t Congress just line-item the budget and cancel the program? Where in the budget? There is no one line, no one section. The costs are hidden everywhere and also hide the costs of other more super-secret programs. In pre-emptive retaliation, the Pentagon wants to keep this cash cow and has begun releasing super-secret spy images of Chinese planes they say they are “concerned” about. Ah, so the Chinese have replaced the Soviets as a foe in an arms race? Hardly. AvWeek and other expert aviation magazines look at the so-called Chinese stealth prototypes pictured and calculate their effectiveness as below that of existing fighters already in service across the globe, all built here in the USA.In the end, Congress has to evaluate these super-secret and wasteful programs. If they are a good ROTI, then make the decision to keep them. If they are defense industry spending as usual with no accountability, scrap them all. But to evaluate these programs, they need a really (currently absent) good detective and audit.Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.