Secretary Cheney: Cut Your Losses, Stop Opposing The Tiltrotor

(Washington, D.C.): The Center for Security Policy today urged Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney to avoid further damage to his credibility and leadership of the Pentagon in the eyes of the Congress and the public by distancing himself from subordinates who have jeopardized both through their insistence that he terminate one of the most important national programs yet developed by the Defense Department — the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft.

The Center has long believed that these subordinates, most notably those in the Pentagon’s Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation (PA&E), simply do not appreciate the full value to the United States of operationalizing the V-22. This aircraft — which has the capability to take off and land like a helicopter yet convert in flight to move horizontally like a conventional aircraft — represents the most important single advance in aviation since the introduction of the jet engine.

"PA&E and particularly its director, Dr. David Chu, have determinedly refused to consider the revolutionary improvements the Osprey and its derivatives promise to make in a variety of increasingly important defense missions," Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director said. "These include: long-range special operations; search and rescue; drug interdiction, to name but a few, as well as the most obvious task of transporting men and materiel in combat."

Gaffney added, "Chu and his organization have similarly failed to appreciate the substantially larger benefits that will accrue to the country if, as it has so often done in the past, the U.S. military validates this radical new aviation technology and facilitates its adaptation for civilian use. The fact is that adaptations of the V-22 have virtually unlimited potential to improve interurban air transport, short-haul commercial delivery, oil spill containment, forest fire-fighting, emergency relief delivery, and a host of other functions."

Worse yet, PA&E has evidently given no thought to the costs to the United States should it now choose — as Chu recommends — to terminate the Osprey program, writing off the $2.5 billion the U.S. taxpayer has invested in bringing the tiltrotor technology to fruition, and leaving to others like the Japanese the opportunity to exploit that technology’s commercial promise.

Instead, PA&E has chosen to argue very narrowly that the costs of using the V-22 to perform just one defense mission — that of providing medium and heavy lift to the Marine Corps — exceed those of using a combination of other, traditional helicopter systems. Unfortunately for Chu, and for the Secretary of Defense who has relied on his analysis, even this extremely limited basis for weighing the value of the Osprey has now been shown to be wrong.

An independent study conducted by the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) at the request of the Congress and reluctantly released by the Pentagon at the end of June, clearly shows that, for the same level of expenditures ($24 billion) envisioned for Chu’s alternative mix of H-60 and H-53 helicopters, a fleet of 356 V-22s would be "more effective — sometimes significantly more and other times only slightly more — than all of the proposed helicopter alternatives in each of the four Marine missions examined."

In other words, Secretary Cheney, whose opposition to the V-22 was not based on its technical performance — he has called it "an excellent aircraft" — but on PA&E’s estimates of this system’s costs, was simply misled. Worse yet, he is still being misled.

Gaffney observed, "The cover letter transmitting the IDA study to Capitol Hill drafted by PA&E does a serious disservice to Secretary Cheney. This study offers a reasonable basis for reconsidering his opposition to the V-22; after all, it reveals the factual errors in what was the apparently determinative consideration, namely, PA&E’s assessment of relative cost of the Osprey and the alternatives to it. And yet, the letter has the Secretary of Defense ignoring the findings of the study, reasserting discredited data and reaffirming his ill-advised decision to seek the termination of the tiltrotor program."

The Center for Security Policy strongly believes that it is now incumbent upon the Congress to review with care the analysis and conclusions of the IDA study. Given the national interests at stake in the now-pending decision to proceed into production of the V-22, it is imperative that — before the defense authorization bill marked up last week by the Senate Armed Services Committee is considered by the full Senate — that committee (or others) conduct a thorough hearing into IDA’s work and the Defense Department’s deficient response.

Fortunately, Senator Malcolm Wallop (R-WY), the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee’s Defense Industry and Technology Subcommittee has requested just such a hearing from Subcommittee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) (see attached letter). If such a hearing is held and takes into account the panoply of military, commercial, industrial and technological considerations involved, the Center is confident that the Armed Services Committee will be favorably disposed to a floor amendment providing authorization for the $1659 million in production funding required in FY1991. It is in the national interest — as well as Secretary Cheney’s — that such a move receives the support of the Secretary of Defense, not his further, ill-advised opposition.

For more information about the V-22 Osprey, the contribution it promises to make to U.S. security and commercial interests or the background to the Defense Department’s recent opposition to this program, please contact the Center.