Weinberrger to Delay Decision on AF Missile

Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, under unrelenting congressional pressure to trim the Pentagon budget, has decided to delay a decision on future purchases by the Air Force of a highly sophisticated missile until its skyrocketing costs have been contained.

And he has raised the possibility of canceling production of the weapon, the Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile, which is to be produced by Hughes Aircraft Co. of El Segundo for both the Air Force and the Navy.

Behind Schedule

Development of the missile has fallen at least half a year behind the original schedule, and the weapon has been under attack in Congress, where the House Armed Services Committee recommended last April that it be abandoned if costs climb too high.

In a memo disclosed Wednesday, Weinberger ordered the Air Force and the Navy to seek ways to lower production costs while looking for other weapons that could perform the same functions.

Current plans call for the Air Force to purchase 17,217 of the futuristic missiles, at a total cost of $7.7 billion. The Navy would buy 7,272, for $3.1 billion.

A Wall Street aerospace analyst, speaking on the condition that he not be identified by name, said Weinberger’s action would help him demonstrate his devotion to money-saving efficiencies and bolster his case in Congress for the rest of his military buildup. “Weinberger needs to be seen in a forceful position,” he said.

The Wall Street analyst said the technical specifications for the missile, designed to be fired by airplanes at other aircraft, are ambitious. “Now the question is whether those specifications can be met at an acceptable price,” he said. “Going back to the drawing board would mean a delay of 10 years.”

The source predicted that the missile program ultimately will proceed, but only in “a condition of near poverty.”

As a result of development delays, Congress provided only $109 million for work on the missile in the current fiscal year, contrasted with the original Defense Department request of $430 million. In August, Col. Mike Lowry, the Air Force’s deputy program manager, said the program was in the 31st month of a 50-month development program and that the timetable, then five to six months behind schedule, eventually would slip at least a full year.

Automated Missiles

The weapon would be one of the first fully automated missiles, guided by its own, on-board radar transmitter that would allow a pilot to fire it at a target as far as 40 miles away and then change course to minimize his vulnerability and to seek other targets.

The new missile is intended for some of the military’s most sophisticated airplanes, including the Air Force’s F-15s and F-16s and the Navy’s F-14s and F-18s. Many newer aircraft have been designed specifically to accept the missile.

Hughes spokesman Scott Rayburn said Wednesday that a decision on production of the missile is not due until this summer. “If the Air Force can’t show that AMRAAM production costs have been contained by the time the production decision is due, the advance-buy decision would be deferred,” he said.

Rayburn said he did not want to “publicly take issue” with the Pentagon but that any interpretation “that we got the rug pulled out from under us” is not correct. “The decision to procure AMRAAM was not affected” by the Pentagon decision, he said.

In an interview last July, D. Kenneth Richardson, president of Hughes Missile Systems Group, the Hughes Aircraft Co. division working on the weapon, said the missile would cost an average of about $200,000 each, not counting inflation, based on full-scale production in future years. Critics have contended that the missiles will ultimately cost $1 million each.

Richardson said the delays in the program were caused by the technical complexity of the missile and a very short development schedule that was imposed by the Air Force. “That missile has about several million parts (electrical and mechanical) on it and it is a very, very sophisticated piece of machinery,” Richardson said.

Weinberger’s decision was a second blow in recent months for Hughes, the Pentagon’s largest supplier of tactical missiles with $1 billion in annual sales. Last August, Hughes shut its missile assembly operations in Tucson, Ariz., while it attempted to correct quality control problems cited by the Air Force and Navy. Missile shipments were resumed in December.