Aspin Claims That AF ‘Cut Corners’ on MX Inspections

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wis.) has charged that Air Force officials have been so eager to correct the problem of late delivery of MX missile guidance systems by Northrop that they have failed to properly inspect some units.

Aspin released an advance copy of a speech he said he will give today in the House. In the prepared text, he charges that the Air Force has “institutionalized corner cutting” at the Northrop plant and deferred inspections “in pursuit of a paper schedule.”

The allegations by the powerful committee chairman appear to extend the long-running dispute between the House committee and the Air Force over problems that Los Angeles-based Northrop has had in building the MX guidance equipment, known as inertial measurement units.

An Air Force spokesman at the Ballistic Missile Office in San Bernardino responded that Aspin “is not saying anything new.” He added that the IMUs installed in MX nuclear missiles are 53% more reliable than had been anticipated.

A strongly worded statement by Northrop Vice President Tony Cantafio said: “As it pertains to the Northrop electronics division, the information seems to be old, wrong or obsolete.” The electronics division plant that produces the IMUs is in Hawthorne.

The company has been late with deliveries since the first IMU was scheduled to be delivered in 1985, and the Air Force is withholding all progress payments to the company for the guidance system. Cantafio said the company expects to meet its Air Force delivery schedules before the October, 1988, deadline set by the Air Force under a recovery plan for the troubled Northrop program.

But in his new remarks and in other recent statements, Aspin referred to “severe reliability problems and fraud” in Northrop’s IMU program and has been unwilling to accept guarantees that the problems have been solved.

“The Air Force has institutionalized corner cutting at that plant,” Aspin said. “It is allowing Northrop to bypass testing of many components in the IMU even though the units have demonstrated reliability problems once they are delivered to the Air Force. And when even that isn’t enough, the Air Force is willing to bypass its inspection routine entirely and simply order its inspectors to pass an IMU.”

The IMU problems were the subject of four congressional hearings last year and have become the object of several civil lawsuits by the government and former Northrop employees. Northrop has rebutted the criticism, noting that an independent Air Force board last year said: “Many of the deficiencies found by the committee have been or are in the process of being corrected.”

Documents released by Aspin indicate that Air Force officials at the Ballistic Missile Office last year ordered the shipment of one IMU before it was fully inspected, even though Air Force officials at Northrop’s plant cautioned against the move.

Unit Failed Early

“When an inspector protested in writing, action was taken to remove his comments from the record,” Aspin said.

Air Force officers raised concerns in a 1987 memo about the potential “impact” of a decision to rush an IMU into the field. An earlier memo, dated Nov. 21, 1986, had said the IMU should be shipped “prior to completion of all reviews by the NED AFPRO (the Air Force representative at the plant).”

Eventually, that guidance system, known as Production Unit No. 21, failed after only 200 hours of operation when it should have operated for more than 3,000 hours, Aspin said.

Cantafio has sharply disputed Aspin’s interpretation of such reliability figures, citing Air Force statistics that show that the Northrop equipment is operating better than expected.