MDHIs soggy cereal

Boo Hoo Hoo, MDHI cries over the loss of the contract for the new Army LUH to EADS.

http://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?ContentBlockID=51c49476-6dd3-461e-9c2d-86d983c84a0d&

The bigger question is not why did MDHI lose out to a European consortium. No, the bigger question is why are so many contracts being awarded to foreign manufacturers?

Currently, the Future Cargo Aircraft is a contest between Italians and Spaniards. The morons at Lockheed, once they realized what the FCA really meant, cobbled together some piece of garbage C-130 derivative that my four year old could have presented. Nothing new there. Nothing future focused at all; the lazy way out. The issue was the production run. Without a future support-contract-bloated, high numbers production run, American defense contractors lack the will, creativity and, likely, the ability to produce a viable product.

The President will be flying on an EH-101, oops VH-71 here in the USA, built by Augusta-Westland because Sikorsky and presumably MDHI and any other USA rotary-wing geniuses couldn’t get past the major intellectual roadblock of putting a simple design on paper that cost less and performed more.

And now the LUH is going to a European Consortium because MDHI couldn’t prove its worth. Forget all the ballyhooing from MDHI, the fact is that they lost. They lost because they produced an aircraft that couldn’t compete with the contract offered by EADS. NOTAR or not and in the end US Army money is going to a machine designed by folks that have seldom been able to fight and win their own wars.

What is next, our next attack helicopter will be a US built Hind-A derivative?

Here is the deal, like it or not. The USA defense complex is fixated on complexity for complexity’s sake. The big news today is how to take a $3 million dollar death trap called the Stryker M1126 (among other variants) and make it survivable against a $100 anti-armor grenade called the RPG-7. At $3 million plus a copy any savvy consumer would demand it come out of the box ready to take on an RPG. Sadly, though the RPG-7 has been around since the early 60s, in their zeal to come up with the most expensive and incapable troop transport possible, the procurement people apparently forgot to harden it against the single weapon system preferred by all of our enemy dismounted forces for the last 3 decades.

It is a crime. Stryker costs an absurd amount of money, cannot perform its stated mission and is still unsafe against rocket propelled grenades. And we bought it, hook line and sinker, because it was new, sophisticated and sexy. More than likely we bought it because it meant a lot of technician jobs to support its absurd technology suite.

This week the space shuttle was launched again and true to form, it shed pieces and parts etc. The space shuttle is perhaps, with the possible exceptions of the garbage-stuffed ISS, the most intense example of confusing a simple problem with inordinate layers of complexity. It is aged, spends a considerable amount of its energy lofting non-cargo related mass (wings, fins, landing gear, what-have-you) into orbit and has the nasty tendency of developing failure modes, many of which seem to be catastrophic, which end up costing our nation millions if not billions to clean up.

No different are the B-2, the F-22, the JSF and, indeed, the Stryker.

The F-15 remains the most capable fighter aircraft in the world. The next step in the evolution of the fighter is not F-22, it is UCAVs. That we will spend billions on F-22s so that another generation of young men can have jaunty patches and a swagger for the bar is insane. The future is unmanned in the arena of air to air and deep interdiction. Indeed the future for CAS is unmanned as well. And all we do is spend ridiculously large amounts of money to create a generation of weapons that in 5 years will be obsolete, but their programs and contractors will remain in place for a generation or more.

The LUH problem is understandable. Defense contracting today is less about providing the best equipment possible for troops and more about laying an enormous civilian support infrastructure out to support a bloated program that gets discarded at the tip of the spear by the end-users. If I were to detail just a couple of systems that I discarded out of hand in Iraq in favor of self-purchased civilian systems it would blow your mind.

The only reason I don’t discuss them is because they are in current use and to discuss their short-comings might help the enemy leverage an advantage. But make no mistake, the issues were huge and problematic enough that I boxed the stuff and used commercial stuff that was orders of magnitude more reliable and orders of magnitude cheaper as well.

It is a tragic shame that the system for building weapons systems is so laden with fluff, like how many civilian support jobs come with it, that not a single American manufacturer can come up with a robust, simple, survivable system to fill the role of LUH, FCA, Presidential transport, infantry carrier… …but that is where we are at.

I spoke with a young Major at a conference last year about the XM-8, the proposed Buck-Rogers assault rifle that looks good on Playstation 2 but just by holding it conveys a sense of this-thing-will-break-and-get-me-killed-if-I-take-it-to-war to any soldier who has actually carried a weapon in combat (myself included). I asked him why the Army felt the need to develop horizontal technology, that is, a system that shoots the same round as the M-4/M-16 we currently field. A new system with a new learning curve, a new set of failure modes and a plethora of other looks-good but it no better than the last model features, instead of really working on something revolutionary. The Major had no response and was eager to turn to another soldier and get away from me.

The issue with believing your own press is that it tosses out objectivity. That’s where we are today. MDI is crying because it cannot see what it needs to see; the LUH needs to be new, better, simpler, cheaper and capable if it is going to be what we use. Certainly congress would demand it and they would be the selectee if that is what they had offered.

Finally, in some areas of combat, what you have right now is as good as you will ever get. The B-52 is simply the best heavy bomber the world will ever produce. It carries a boat-load of bombs a long ways. That is what it is supposed to do and we got it right in the 1950s. Everything else, is just a waste of time.

An APC can only get so good. Arguably, the M-113, with some adjustments in armor and powerplant, is the best APC that you can get. The Twin Huey, UH-1N (and likely UH-1Y) is probably the best light utility helicopter in the world. It certainly beats the EADS garbage, but we got fixated on Blackhawks 30 years ago and now we are where we are.

When I was in Iraq, I watched as we burned $3000.00 an hour to run UH-60s for jobs for which a Cessna Caravan C-208 Super Cargo Master would have been perfectly suited. The -208 would have cost the Army about 1/10th of the acquisition as well as about 1/6th of the hourly operating cost. Just a couple of companies of -208s could perform much better and save millions in routine jobs over there. But the fixation on making the simple complex has driven us to where we are today.

Now as I reflect on these comments I notice a certain lack of coherent logic in the entire process. Just for summary, let’s analyze where we are today.

The US military is under budget constraints.

The US military knows the way the enemy fights.

The US military consistently tries to buy stuff that is overly-complex, confusing to operate, breaks easily and costs a lot of money (SINCGARS, BFT, etc)

The US military selects foreign manufacturers for some of its end items. (EADS v. MDHI)

US defense contractors submit cobbled up bids for new contracts based upon decades old technology that doesn’t really fill the bill (read 4 engined C-130s when a 2 engine transport is desired)

The US military fails to buy off-the-shelf when it should (C-208) and buys stuff it doesn’t need (MOLLE system backpacks)

A lot of civilians are needed to go to war to fix the stuff we buy because it breaks all the time. (You name it)

The US military wants to field new systems that do nothing but cost more than the systems that they are to replace with no greater capability. (Stryker v. M-113)

The US military fields weapon systems that will cost enormous amounts of money to support when better technology is available. (F-22 v. UCAV)

We must demand a return to sanity in the procurement and development process. Just because a digital display in the tank is nice to have, doesn’t mean that it is a must-have or even a good to have in war. Just because something works well on the PS2 doesn’t mean that it will hold up well in the sands of Iraq. My experience is that the simpler, the better. The more rugged and reliable, the better. The LUH is an example of the opposite of that; how to take a perfectly simple mission, make it so complicated that it takes a PhD in organizational logistics to figure it out and then bid it out to a bunch of morons who couldn’t win their own wars and domestic interests that can only afford to produce large batches of expensive stuff to stay in business.

It’s a heck of a way to run a military and it will be paid for, ultimately, with the blood of our youth. There has to be a better way.