Pentagon can put its trust in Sikorsky

By JUSTIN BERNIER

HARTFORD COURANT

This year’s defense budget request, submitted to Congress last week, reveals the Marine One helicopter building program is in need of a bailout. The helicopter intended to carry future American presidents is behind schedule and over cost. Still, it’s not too late for the Pentagon to avoid additional pitfalls by giving Sikorsky Aircraft, a division of United Technologies Corp., another shot.

In 2005, the Defense Department passed over Stratford, Conn.-based Sikorsky to build the next helicopter for the U.S. president. Instead it chose the US-101, a Lockheed Martin helicopter based on a design by AgustaWestland, an Italian-English conglomerate with a less than perfect track record. The deal was struck for 28 helicopters for $6.1 billion.

During the competition for the contract, Sikorsky’s VH-92 model had finished first in flight performance, communications security and safety, including the ability to weather a crash — key attributes for a helicopter intended to fly the country’s commander-in-chief. The AgustaWestland helicopter won on cabin space.

With Sikorsky offering a better helicopter, but the White House requesting more room, the contract ultimately came down to dollars. The two products had comparable price tags, but a last-minute tie-breaker went to AgustaWestland when it promised to meet an earlier delivery date at a lower cost.

It is now clear that the US-101 will not fulfill its promise. The program, years behind schedule because of engineering challenges and other delays, needs more than a half-billion dollars in extra research and development funding — a sure sign the helicopter is not ready for prime time.

Defense officials are now reviewing options that reportedly include a major restructuring of the existing program. Seeing no easy solution, they have bought time by extending the life of existing Sikorsky-made Marine One helicopters.

White House pressure

How did we get to this point? One likely reason is pressure from the White House to accelerate the Marine One program in response to a perceived terrorist threat, a reasonable concern under the circumstances. Less understandable was the judgment that Lockheed Martin and AgustaWestland — companies struggling to fix basic problems with their products even before 2005 — could do the job for less than Sikorsky, which has flown the president without incident since 1957.

Rarely does the Pentagon take a “do-over” and overturn a major acquisition program that is failing. Usually when a defense program is over cost and behind schedule, civilian and military officials ask Congress for additional funds and try to make the best of an unfortunate situation.

In the case of the derailed Marine One program, however, defense officials should strongly consider scrapping the old contract and conducting a new competition. The first couple of US-101s were recently flown in from a European factory for testing, but the bulk of the fleet is due to come in a second batch of helicopters. The Pentagon should cancel the contract now and put it back out to bid. In the meantime, the president will need to get by on the dependable helicopters Sikorsky made decades ago.

Pentagon leaders also should consider the Marine One lesson in the coming months, when they will decide between U.S. and European companies on two gigantic projects: a search-and-rescue helicopter contract worth twice as much as Marine One and an airborne tanker deal valued at $40 billion.

The tanker competition is between a Boeing KC-767 powered by Pratt & Whitney engines and an aircraft made by Airbus, which is owned by EADS, the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co.

European conglomerates, desperate to increase their market share of American defense contracts, have proved willing to bend the truth in recent bidding wars. That’s because, when it comes to defense contracts, European companies no longer can count on European governments, which have slashed their military budgets since the end of the Cold War. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the same European governments have been slow to let American companies compete for scarce defense contracts in Europe.

Pentagon officials lately have promised internal reforms aimed at reducing the number of defense programs that underperform. Future decisions should reward excellence and honesty in the U.S. defense market.

X Bernier is acting executive director of Connecticut’s Office of Military Affairs. Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service