Cheney Proposes Production Cut in C-17 Program : Defense: If approved, the move would be a setback for the expansion of Douglas Aircraft’s Long Beach work force.

In a move affecting the Southern California defense industry, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney has proposed cutting production of the Air Force’s C-17 airlift plane from 10 aircraft to six next year, defense sources said Tuesday.

The decision, if approved by the White House and Congress, would be a blow to Douglas Aircraft’s plan to boost its 8,000-member Long Beach work force for the stepped-up production that had been planned earlier.

In an unrelated move that also cut into programs at the Long Beach plant, Douglas’ parent firm, McDonnell Douglas Corp., announced Tuesday that management and production of its $4.5-billion T-45 Navy jet trainer program will be moved from Long Beach to the company’s McDonnell Aircraft division in St. Louis.

About 1,800 of the Long Beach plant’s 37,000 workers will be affected by the move. Most of them will remain employed at Long Beach, said a Douglas Aircraft spokesman, Richard Hill, but will be shifted to other military and commercial programs, including, ironically, the C-17 as well as the MD-80, MD-90 and MD-11 commercial airliners. He said a undetermined--but small--number of Long Beach workers will be transferred to St. Louis in connection with the shift of the T-45 program.

Hill said McDonnell Douglas had been aware of Cheney’s proposal to cut production of the C-17. The decision on the T-45, he added, was “purely a business decision. It will allow us to concentrate our resources where they are most needed.”

The C-17s, which cost $178 million each, are designed to haul the Army’s bulkiest weapons to crude airfields in faraway hot spots. Officials said that in trimming the C-17 program in his 1991 budget recommendations, Cheney has left open the option of scaling back the Air Force’s planned purchase of 210 of the planes.

At an estimated total cost of about $37.5 billion, the C-17 program is among the military’s most expensive. It is, thus, an attractive target for cutbacks as the Pentagon prepares for tighter budgets and the diminishing Soviet bloc military threat.

The C-17 airplanes might be further jeopardized by new intelligence estimates suggesting that the West would have as much as 90 days’ warning of a Warsaw Pact military attack on Western Europe.

With that kind of warning, officials said, the United States could afford to reduce its reliance on fast but costly airplanes to move weapons and other material to fighting zones and to concentrate on building cheaper, but slower, transport ships.

Furthermore, the possibility of arms negotiations and further progress in East Bloc reforms have prompted Cheney and his senior advisers to order the preparation of a new assessment of the need for the C-17, according to several officials who have participated in early discussions about the plane’s future.

“It really depends on what we want our forces to look like” after arms negotiations, budget cutbacks and changes in Eastern Europe run their course, one senior defense official said. If the Army recasts itself into a lightly armed, fast-reaction force deployed primarily from the United States, the official said, there may still be a strong rationale for full production of the plane.

With that decision still to come, Cheney has decided to set aside his often stated aversion to “stretching out” production runs--Pentagonese for the practice of decreasing yearly production rates and planning a longer production period to complete a purchase of equipment. Cheney has said that the practice merely increases the cost of building weapons over the lifetime of a program.

McDonnell Douglas officials said the shift of the T-45 program to St. Louis, which will take place during the next several months, is intended to focus more effort on construction of large airframes at Douglas, where the company has a backlog of orders. The company said it expects some reduction in defense-related aircraft manufacturing at McDonnell’s St. Louis plant in coming years, so it is moving the T-45 program there to help maintain production efficiency.

McDonnell Douglas won the Navy contract to develop and produce the T-45 training system in November, 1981. The program calls for 300 aircraft, 32 flight simulators, 49 computer-aided instructional devices, four mainframe computer facilities and 200 computer terminals.

Only two of the jet training planes have been completed for the Navy’s test program.

In another blow to a Southern California defense firm, it was learned that Cheney has recommended ending production of the Maverick anti-tank missile by the end of fiscal year 1990, two years earlier than originally planned. In doing so, Cheney deleted Air Force and Navy requests of $350 million for the missiles, which are built at Hughes Aircraft Co.’s missile systems group in Canoga Park.

Melissa Healy reported from Washington and Jube Shiver Jr. from Los Angeles.