The Pentagon's decision last week to cancel the $38 billion Comanche helicopter program was a good, relatively easy step down a path that will require the Bush administration to make some much tougher decisions if it is truly serious about remaking the armed forces for 21st-century warfare. The country's revenues have been so hollowed by President Bush's tax cuts that they simply cannot sustain all of the weapons programs on the books, much less the changes the military needs to make.
The Comanche was an obvious target. Designed in the early 1980's for armed reconnaissance missions against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, the helicopter was obsolete even though no operational models had ever been built. About $8 billion was wasted; failing to cancel it would have wasted tens of billions more.
The Comanche was a relatively easy program to kill because it had only limited support among military service chiefs, defense contractors and Congressional appropriators. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will have to take on some much tougher targets to free enough money for more pressing military needs.
The most urgent need is to provide fast relief for America's overstretched ground forces. The extended deployment of Army divisions in Iraq and the heavy use of the reserves strongly suggest the need for two additional active-duty divisions. That wo
| “The Comanche was a relatively easy program to kill.” |
ould make sense even with more multinational participation in future missions.
Financing and equipping two new divisions could cost upward of $5 billion a year and could easily be paid for by cutting back spending on unnecessary weapons systems. Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, writes in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs that scrapping the costly F-22 fighter and not rushing into a premature deployment of the technologically unripe missile defense program would save enough to pay for the two divisions.
The F-22 is one of three new-generation fighters designed to replace older models that already outperform anything any other country flies. One replacement model, like the F-35, a plane usable by both the Navy and the Air Force, may be justified. Three surely are not, and the F-22, intended for high-tech aerial combat against a now-nonexistent superpower, is the best candidate for elimination.
Pentagon theology holds that spending for weapons systems and spending for troops come from different parts of the Pentagon budget and are not readily interchangeable. But such rigid distinctions tend to break down on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, where soldiers and reservists on extended tours pay the price for excessive spending on misconceived weapons projects. Canceling the Comanche is only a start.
© 2004 The New York Times
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