Cutbacks, Cancellation Possible for Osprey

For two decades, Marine leaders have managed to defend their futuristic Osprey aircraft against critical government auditors, hostile civilian overseers and a string of fatal crashes and mechanical malfunctions.

But now, the Osprey’s luck could be running out.

Amid parallel investigations of the Osprey’s capabilities and the Marines’ oversight, even some defenders are acknowledging the $40-billion program faces probable delays and cutbacks. They say that cancellation--extremely rare for a weapon program at this late stage of development--is a real possibility.

For the Marines, who considered the Osprey their dream machine, it is a stunning turn of events.

The Osprey promised a bigger role in America’s wars to a small military branch that has always feared its larger rivals would put it out of business. It offered a dazzling tilt-rotor technology to an outfit that has had to put up with hand-me-down weapons and gear for all of its 225-year existence.

If the program is canceled, the Corps will have to rewrite its war-fighting doctrine, reorganize its ranks and begin trying to develop a new transport fleet with helicopters it believes are inadequate for its mission. The Corps will need, in other words, a whole new identity.

Marine Corps aviation “would be crippled for a generation,” said Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst and longtime Osprey supporter.

A cancellation would also be a heavy blow to the reputation of Marine leaders, past and present, who have bet so much on the Osprey to the exclusion of other weapon programs. Allegations of falsified maintenance records are already threatening the reputation of the Corps, which seeks to emphasize honor among its members.

In addition, a decision to kill the program could make the military services leery of pursuing groundbreaking weapon technologies that may provide huge payoffs eventually, but may also entail more setbacks--and casualties--in the short term. Such a shift in attitudes could be a major setback for the Pentagon, which historically has made some of its biggest advances with such high-risk programs, analysts say.

Relying on huge rotors that tilt between horizontal and vertical positions, the Osprey can take off and land like a helicopter but cruise at the speed of an airplane. These capabilities enable the hybrid aircraft to lift off from carrier decks and crude landing zones, and to ferry troops from coastal areas hundreds of miles into the interior.

The program was about to get the go-ahead in December to enter full production. But a fatal crash on Dec. 11, after an earlier one in April, caused the Pentagon to order an indefinite delay pending a full-scale review by a special panel.

Thirty people have been killed in four Osprey crashes since 1992.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon inspector general has begun an investigation of allegations that senior officers pressured subordinates at the Marines’ Osprey squadron in New River, N.C., to falsify maintenance data to help secure approval for final production.

“I’ve never seen so many bad things happen to a program in such a short time,” said Thompson, who is chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a research concern in Virginia. “It’s amazing.”

Of course, the Osprey has gotten through tight spots in the past. In fact, it has become a textbook example of the staying power of major weapon programs.

When the previous Bush administration came to power at the end of the Cold War, it looked for weapon programs to eliminate as part of a program to reduce the size of the military by about one-third. Vice President Dick Cheney, then secretary of Defense, decided that the Osprey’s cost was simply too high for its intended job of transporting 24 Marines per plane.

For four years running, Cheney’s Pentagon put no money into the budget for the Osprey. The Osprey was an aircraft “I don’t need,” Cheney bluntly told Congress. Yet the plane’s advocates were not deterred.

The Marines have been renowned for their ability to successfully lobby Congress, which created them in 1775 and has taken care of them ever since.

In this endeavor they were joined by ex-Marine lawmakers, defense hawks and liberals alike, in a group that ranged from former House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas) and Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) to conservative Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.).

Allied with contractors, auto worker unions and technology buffs, they built support for the Osprey as an innovation that would yield benefits for civilian transportation.

This group, known as the Tilt Rotor Technology Coalition, got Congress to earmark money for the Osprey year after year. When Cheney refused to spend the money, they rose up in protest--and put the money in again the following year.

With Boeing and Bell Helicopter Textron as lead contractors, the program now provides work for about 15,000 people in 43 states. At full production, about 23,000 workers would be involved in some way.

The contractors “went to great efforts to broaden the plane’s domestic constituency,” said Christopher M. Jones, a professor at Northern Illinois University who has studied the politics of the Osprey program.

Through the travails of the 1990s, the Osprey remained a top priority of Marine leaders.

They talked about how the Osprey would allow the Marines’ amphibious force to travel twice as far, twice as fast, and put down troops behind the enemy lines.

It would be well-suited for the kind of military operations that are of increasing concern to the Pentagon: rescues in the Third World, and even biological warfare attacks.

Though they talked mostly about tactical advantages, Marine leaders had their eye on the way the Osprey would help guarantee the Corps’ importance and survival.

With the Cold War over, the roles of the services were up for grabs. The Marines hoped that the Osprey would give them a prominent piece of the action in new-age wars involving higher speeds and longer distances.

During most of the Clinton administration, the program encountered little opposition.

But December’s Osprey crash changed the politics of the program overnight.

By coincidence, it came at a time when a number of major weapon programs were up for review, and when the Pentagon was looking for ways to cut back a procurement program that was tens of billions of dollars larger than what it believed it would be able to spend.

The crash called attention to critical government reports about the Osprey prepared by the General Accounting Office and by Philip E. Coyle, who until January was the Pentagon’s chief weapon tester.

Recent changes in Congress and the executive branch also do not augur well for the Osprey.

Cheney, after making supportive noises about the Osprey during the presidential campaign, has recently suggested he believes there are serious questions that remain unanswered. Sean O’Keefe, who as Navy secretary in the early 1990s tried to kill the program, is back with the new Bush administration as a deputy budget director.

On Capitol Hill, Weldon, the Osprey’s most important past ally, was replaced last month as chairman of the House Armed Services research and development subcommittee. The post has gone to Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon), who according to a spokesman is still considering his views on the Osprey’s future.

Most lawmakers are wary of saying much, pro or con, about the Osprey while the investigations are underway. But some lawmakers have confided that the loss of 23 young Marines was making it increasingly difficult for them to be visible supporters of the program.

Marine leaders have been determined to show no sign they are losing faith in the Osprey.

This week, when a published report said the Marines were looking for an alternative to the Osprey, the Marine commandant, Gen. James Jones, took the extraordinary step of issuing a statement saying the Corps was not developing a backup plan.

Many people knowledgeable about the program believe that the fraud investigation won’t turn up criminal misconduct, but only evidence that higher-ups--using ambiguous language--pressured subordinates to do all they could to see that the Osprey received production approval.

But even Weldon predicts that program development will be delayed to allow more testing, and that the number of planes ultimately produced will be cut back from the 360 the Marines wanted to buy.

And if the investigation does find fraud, “that could finish it,” Weldon said.