Sgt. York Is a Lousy Shot

For nearly a decade the Army has had its heart set on a mobile battlefield air defense weapon that it calls both the DIVAD, for divisional air defense, and the Sgt. York. So far about $1.5 billion has been spent to buy 146 of the weapons, though only 50 have been delivered. Currently the Army is asking for money to buy 117 more Sgt. Yorks. But is the weapon any good? Years of evidence point to the conclusion that the Sgt. York has been a costly failure from its very inception--a program that by any objective standard should have been abandoned long ago. Recent effectiveness tests conducted by the Pentagon only lend support to that view.

Trial live firings of the weapon were held in June in New Mexico. Remote-controlled F-100 fighters and Huey helicopter gunships were flown over the target area. Ford Aerospace & Communications Corp., which builds the Sgt. York and which had representatives present for the tests, assertsthat the Sgt. York destroyed “six of seven high-performance aircraft and three of three helicopters.” It sounds like a smashing success. Except that the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester, John E. Krings, says that it wasn’t.

For one thing, as Krings wrote to Rep. Denny Smith (R-Ore.), a congressional critic of the Sgt. York, the tests fell far short of approximating battlefield conditions. The “attacking” aircraft were controlled so that they could not maneuver or--in the case of the helicopters--hover, as the Soviet aircraft against which the Sgt. York is supposed to defend would certainly do. Moreover, Smith says, an Army videotape of the tests shows that “far more than 18 passes” were made by the planes before they were downed, indicating that repeated chances were allowed for hits to take place. Finally, Smith raises the question of whether the aircraft were even struck by fire from the Sgt. York, or whether instead they were blown up on command from the ground. In not a single claimed kill, he notes, was there any sign of smoke or fire before the planes were destroyed.

The June tests have around them the strong aroma of phoniness, of an exercise carefully staged and of results carefully manipulated to make a bad weapon look good. Add that to years of earlier poor test performances, of negative evaluations and of efforts to obscure the facts, and it is unmistakably clear that there is no justification for continuing with the Sgt. York program. Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger is supposed to make a decision on the future of the weapon this month. It will be inexplicable if he does not order it scrapped.