PERSPECTIVE ON THE NAVY : Next, Carriers With Empty Decks : Canceling the A-12 Stealth plane was correct, but now the Navy is without a new long-range attack jet.

Just a week before the Gulf War began, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney canceled the Navy’s new Stealth attack bomber, the A-12. There are plenty of bad choices in the current defense budget, but the decision on the A-12 was the right one.

Two of our best defense contractors, McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics, had decisively proved that a Stealth airplane with at least the capabilities of the Navy’s A-6E Intruder attack bomber (the plane that the A-12 was supposed to replace) could not be built at acceptable cost. But now there is nothing in the defense budget to replace the dwindling “main battery” of the aircraft carriers.

This latest defense budget is the most anti-Navy in 14 years. It retires the last two battleships, despite their successes in the Gulf. It cancels all Navy fighter and attack jets except for the shorter-range, one-seat F-18, which is not designed to do the same job as the heftier two-seaters like the A-6E and the Air Force’s F-15E. Carriers are to be cut from 15 to 12--but without a replacement for the A-6Es, there isn’t much point in having even 12.

The early allied success in the war against Iraq is a tribute to the precision and effectiveness of these Air Force and Navy strike aircraft, so how did we get to this point?

In 1983, the Navy requested a new version of the A-6 to replace the A-6E. Instead, the Office of the Secretary of Defense ordered funding for the A-12, which the Navy opposed from the beginning, and later canceled the new A-6. In the same budget, the Air Force wisely funded a modernization of the F-111 and an entirely new two-seat bomber version of the workhorse F-15 fighter. The Air Force now has two successes in the sky, while the Navy’s air attack capability is fast disappearing.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense, once known as the “whiz-kid” department, is now just another permanent bureaucracy, really a fourth military department after the Army, Navy and Air Force. In the 1960s, the office conceived the TFX airplane and ordered the Navy to put it on carriers. It failed because it was too heavy for carriers and the Navy succeeded in getting Congress to fund the A-6E. When it came to building a new A-6, the office was apparently still nursing a grudge. Thus the disastrous A-12.

What set the A-12 apart, but proved too costly in the end, was its Stealth technology. The success of the F-15E proves that Stealth is unnecessary against even the thickest air defense for this class of attack plane. The Navy should copy what the Air Force did with the F-15E--take the best Navy fighter, the F-14 Tomcat, and build an attack version using the new radar and avionics developed for the A-12. Call it the Avenger II, after the Grumman bomber that George Bush flew in World War II.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense will continue to push the F-18. It is a short-range swing fighter--well-suited to the Marines, relatively cheap to build and easy to maintain. But it is intended primarily for daylight missions and fair-to-marginal weather. It also lacks the range and payload capability for strike missions from carriers.

To avoid future fiascoes, the reform recommendations of the Packard Commission on line management by the military services and accountability in procurement should be implemented and the dabblers in the secretary’s office should be thrown out of the process, prohibited from ordering design and requirement changes that skyrocket costs.

With the Secretary of Defense properly focused on the war, the bureaucrats are running the Pentagon. But when (with the help of carrier-based attack bombers) the war ends, perhaps Cheney and President Bush will have time to actually read the defense budget and save the Navy from the former whiz kids, now become “whiz-fogies.”