Hopeless Hardware

In an effort to quiet concerns that its $1.5-million armored personnel carrier known as the Bradley Fighting Vehicle is highly vulnerable in combat, the Army last year conducted a mock battlefield test of its own devising. It fired 10 shots at the Bradley, and concluded that there was nothing wrong with the machine that another $100,000 per copy couldn’t make right. But now two non-Army experts who evaluated the test have disputed that claim. Not to put too fine a point on it, they say that the Army rigged the test to give the results that it wanted.

So it would seem. The Army now acknowledges that it aimed its test shots very carefully indeed, to avoid hitting the Bradley where it is most vulnerable. In the words of the deputy chief of staff for research, development and acquisition, “There were certain places we knew we could shoot at it and we could destroy it in one shot.” But why do that and spoil a good test? Presumably hostile gunners will be equally considerate if the Bradley ever has to be sent into combat.

It isn’t clear what the Army shot at the Bradley with, but apparently it wasn’t Soviet-made ammunition--the stuff that the Bradley would be up against in combat. In fact, Air Force Col. James G. Burton told Congress, “There is no program to shoot real Soviet weapons at U.S. vehicles loaded with the dangerous materials they have to carry in combat--fuel, hydraulic fluid and live ammunition.” If that statement is true, it describes an appalling--even a criminal--lack of preparation. It is simply intolerable to ask men to stake their lives on the survivability of equipment that the Pentagon has failed to test under realistic combat conditions.

Anthony Battista, a House investigator, echoes Burton in finding the Army’s test manipulated and the Bradley highly vulnerable. Congress has worried for years that the military can’t be trusted to objectively evaluate its own weapon programs. The Bradley is a case in point. The Army wants money to buy 5,000 more Bradleys, to add to the nearly 1,900 that it already has. The evidence mounts, though, that the best thing to do with the Bradley program is scrap it as soon as possible.