Have We Dulled Our Edge? : Those distressing reports from the gulf on equipment unreliability

The Pentagon likes to say that U.S. armed forces are the best equipped in the world. Americans can only hope that evaluation is right, more than ever now that some 200,000 U.S. members of those forces in the Persian Gulf area are facing the prospect that their equipment could be put to wartime tests.

What’s best, though, isn’t necessarily determined only by high cost or technical complexity. Above all, the tools of war must be reliable. Troubling questions have arisen about the reliability of certain key weapons, questions that may have been given even more ominous significance by the recent spate of air crashes in Saudi Arabia that forced a temporary grounding of all training flights.

A new congressional report, for example, finds that at any given time only half the Army’s Apache helicopter fleet is ready to do its job, against the Army’s goal of having 70% of its Apaches “mission capable.” That goal is being defeated by breakdowns that on average require major maintenance on the copters every 2 1/2 hours. The Apache, armed with anti-tank weapons, is being heavily counted on in the event of war to offset Iraq’s large numerical superiority in armor.

Army specifications call for the M1-A1 tank to be able to operate for 101 minutes without a mechanical or electronic failure. In practice, something breaks down in an M1-A1 every 21 minutes. The catalogue of failed expectations doesn’t stop here. The Air Force has problems with some of its advanced planes, the Navy with some of its ships.

Some of the reasons have long since been identified: Technological and performance goals that were set too high by the military itself, sloppy work and--as we now know--in some cases flagrantly dishonest testing and evaluation procedures by military contractors. The consequences, whatever the primary cause, are equally worrisome. American armed forces are depending for their success and maybe even their survival on a qualitative edge that in some cases may prove not to be there.