Obama, McCain hit cost of presidential helicopter

Phase two of VH-71 on hold pending review by secretary of defense

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

The helicopter is being tested at Patuxent River Naval Air Station. This week, both the president and the Republican candidate who ran against him in November criticized the mounting cost of the project.

On Monday, President Barack Obama referred to the helicopter as "an example of the procurement process gone amuck," according to a White House transcript. The president said he had asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates for a thorough review of the helicopter situation.

During the same session, Sen. John McCain, the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and his party's candidate in the 2008 election, told the president his helicopter was going to cost as much as Air Force One. McCain said he didn't think there was any more graphic demonstration of how good ideas have cost taxpayers an enormous amount of money as he called for an overhaul of military procurement. The comments came during a question and answer session of the Fiscal Responsibility Summit held in the White House.

Lt. Clay Doss, a U.S. Navy spokesman, said later, "It would be completely inappropriate for me to comment on the president's remarks."

The VH-71 helicopters are intended to replace the current fleet of VH-3D and VH-60N Sikorsky helicopters used for flights inside and outside of the continental United States by the president. The program was divided into two phases or increments.

Increment one was to provide five helicopters by September 2010. Increment two, which has been under a stop-work order since last year, would provide 23 additional helicopters with more advanced technology. It is the future of increment two that is in doubt.

Some of the presidential helicopters that are still in use have been flying since the 1970s. Those aircraft are scheduled to be dropped from operational service at a rate of three a year beginning in 2017.

In testimony before a Senate subcommittee last September, Michael Sullivan, director of acquisition sourcing management for the Government Accountability Office, said the Department of Defense's processes for identifying warfighter needs, allocating resources and developing and procuring weapons systems are fragmented and broken. At the program level, according to Sullivan, the weapon systems programs are initiated without sufficient knowledge about system requirements, technology and design maturity.

Sullivan said poor outcomes in DoD's weapons system programs reverberate across the entire federal government. Over the next five years, according to Sullivan, DoD expects to invest more than $357 billion on the development and procurement of major defense acquisition programs.

The presidential helicopter, which has been under development by Lockheed Martin Corp., is built by a European company, AgustaWestland. It is then shipped to a Lockheed facility in Owego, N.Y., for customizing.

Under a law known as Nunn-McGurdy, the Pentagon is required to notify Congress when the costs of a program increase by 50 percent over the original baseline estimate. Congress was officially notified of cost overruns in the presidential helicopter program in late January.

jmalene@somdnews.com