Defense Procurement cost fiascos and scandals. Sometimes they feel as American as the Fourth of July and Smith and Wesson.
If you've paid any attention at all, you can probably remember more than a few defense procurement devleopment money pits that ended in successful programs (the F35 took two decades and insane money to get right; the B1 bomber took a couple of tries to find a budget and a role; the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford, which cut its teeth in combat this past few months, was commissioned after a long, fraught development process), or unsuccessful ones (the "Sergeant York" air-defense vehicle, the Comanche attack chopper, the Constellation class frigates among many other Navy procurement flops, the decades-long effort to replace the M16/M4 rifle for American infantry, the 65-year effort to replace the B52 bomber).
But in and among the forest of boondoggles, some on-time, on-budget, solid successes have sprung up.
One of the facts that's caused anxiety among defense planners this past decade - drones are far cheaper than the missiles we had to shoot them down. Even the relatively cheap "Rolling Airframe Missile" anti-air missile, between $250-425 per shot, cost 5-10 times as much as a typical Iranian drone. In a war of economic attrition, defending our troops would quickly become a huge money pit.
In a marvel of adaptation worthy of a World War 2 GI in a machine shop, the Air Force figured out how to tack a laser guidance module onto a 2.75-inch rocket - an unguided dumb weapon first fielded in Vietnam - to build a drone killer that's actually cheaper than the drones it targets. The Advanced Precision-Kill Weapon System (APKWS) is small and light enough to pack onto modern aircraft by the dozen, and cheap enough to use relatively profligately:
It has become the Air Force’s primary air-to-air weapon against Iranian drones in the Middle East in recent years. F-16 Fighting Falcons and F-15 Strike Eagles in the region commonly carry APKWS rockets for air-to-air use on combat missions, and the rockets are also employed by A-10 Thunderbolt II attack aircraft. APKWS rockets have been seen on U.S. aircraft patrolling the skies during America’s conflict with Iran.
And what about the drones themselves? An MQ9 Reaper costs $34 million with no options or upgrades. It's the best in the world at what it does - but at the cost of about 100 Shaheed drones a pop, it wouldn't take a lot before the economics just don't pan out.
Enter LUCAS - the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System. It takes the idea of a cheap drone and brings artificial intelligence and American production at scale:
The LUCAS program, developed by the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for Prototyping and Experimentation under OUSW R&E, is intended to field ‘affordable mass’ by producing large numbers of relatively low-cost drones that can be deployed in coordinated waves to saturate enemy defenses and expand strike capabilities at scale. Each LUCAS drone costs around $35,000, which is a fraction of the price of available missiles with similar range.
OK, that's great for smaller-ticket items - but what about the big line items, like bombers?
The B-21 Raider, slated to replace the B2 Spirit and perhaps the B-1 Lancer, is going into operational testing, leaving the test range and moving to its first operational base, Ellsworth, near Rapid City, South Dakota.
The Air Force plans to buy at least 100 B-21s, and top military officials are increasingly saying more will likely be needed. The new bombers will replace the 1980s-era B-1 Lancer and B-2 Spirit bomber designs.
The B-21’s range and next-generation stealth capabilities are intended to make the penetrating strike jet capable of slipping undetected into enemy territory and then operating deep inside rivals’ airspace. Northrop executives tout the bomber’s data-sharing capabilities and its digital open-systems architecture as key features of its “sixth-generation” description...Meink and Chief of Staff Gen. Kenneth S. Wilsbach have made improving aircraft readiness a defining theme of their tenures, and Meink said the service will have to make sure it has enough maintainers to keep B-21s flying.
Normally one would be used to getting a steady stream of headlines about cost overruns and schedule slips by this point in a big program.
And yet here we are.
