Weapons That Will Never Die: We Need To Stop The Expensive Reincarnations

Part I

This is the first part of a two-part series on how the Department of Defense (DoD) and its contractors keep reinventing overpriced and failed weapon systems. Many of these systems go on for decades, feeding the contractors who make them and becoming institutions within the DoD. These weapons also get political constituencies and end up outliving administration after administration, Congress after Congress and investigation after investigation. In this first column, I will examine a weapon system that I have been investigating and exposing since 1982 but which promises to outlast the harshest criticism with its perpetual reincarnations. Part II will examine some solutions on how to keep future unworkable and overpriced weapon systems from getting the same stranglehold on the DoD bureaucracy.

There are weapons that started out sounding good on paper but end up not fitting the threats of changing wars or are deployed in war and fail to perform. These same weapons, because of their myriad problems, also become vastly overpriced as the DoD and their contractors try to fix the problems under the guise of endless upgrades. The base price of the first round of the weapon gets very high, and subsequent buys of the weapon become so inflated that the DoD either lowers the units that they buy for the same amount of money, or cuts the spare parts and training budgets. The cuts either prevent the weapons from being used enough in training to prepare for the real battlefield, or create a lack of spare parts that keeps a large portion of these weapons from being battle-ready. Logic would tell you to move on to another concept early on and cut your losses, but the DoD bureaucracy knows these weapons will survive many generations of civilian managers and even weak Congressional inquiries, because the weapons take on a life of their own.

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