Posted on 07/24/2004 3:49:55 AM PDT by MadIvan
WASHINGTON - The Air Force continues to order a new type of cargo plane despite spending $2.6 billion to buy 50 planes that do not meet the military's requirements and cannot be flown in combat zones, Pentagon investigators said.
Contractor Lockheed Martin hasn't delivered any C-130J planes that met requirements in the eight years since the program began, the report said. The Air Force and Lockheed Martin disagree.
Problems with the propeller-driven cargo planes include faulty computer and diagnostic systems and inadequate defense measures, the Pentagon's Office of Inspector General concluded.
So far, none of the planes has been cleared for some of their primary missions: Dropping troops and cargo into war zones and flying in conditions requiring the crew to wear night-vision goggles.
The inspector general's report concluded that Air Force and Defense Department officials mismanaged the program, requiring millions of dollars in upgrades and thousands of hours of work to make the planes capable of performing as well as the aging models they're supposed to replace.
The Air Force strongly denied the report's conclusions.
Marvin Sambur, the Air Force's top acquisition official, wrote to the investigators that the program is within its cost, schedule and contract guidelines. Lockheed Martin has started delivering planes which meet Air Force specifications and the necessary upgrades have either been completed or scheduled, Sambur wrote.
"While some of the facts presented in the DOD/IG report are accurate, the findings and conclusions ascribed to these facts cannot be supported," Sambur wrote in response to the inspector general's office. "The Air Force fully endorses the C-130J program."
Lockheed Martin spokesman Jeff Rhodes said Friday the company agrees with the Air Force.
"The Air Force, ultimately the end user who is flying the aircraft, also says that the C-130J program is meeting cost, schedule, contract and regulatory commitments," Rhodes said in an e-mail statement.
Two Air Force squadrons haven't been able to perform their missions for more than four years because they only have C-130Js, the report said. The 815th Air Squadron at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi and the 135th Airlift Squadron of the Maryland Air National Guard are supposed to drop troops and supplies into hostile areas.
Five other Air Force and Marine units have the C-130J planes but use older C-130s to perform their missions, the report said.
Air Force testers found so many problems with the planes they stopped evaluations in 2000 so the problems they already found could be fixed, the report said.
The report cites problems with the planes including:
The Air Force continues to order more C-130Js despite those problems. The military is buying the planes as a commercial item - a process designed to allow the military to purchase goods on the open market that need few modifications for military use.
That process gives the Air Force less oversight and fewer cost controls, the inspector general's report says. For example, the commercial contract means Lockheed Martin doesn't have to give the Air Force data on how much the planes actually cost, so the Air Force has no way to check the company's profit margins.
Sambur suggested the inspector general's office was biased against such commercial contracts, an accusation the office denied. The inspector general's office has been among critics of another Air Force plan to retrofit Boeing 767 jets for use as midair refueling planes.
Agreed.
As our traditional moral foundations are erased from the drawing board by the left wing thought police, so erased are good designs and good production systems ... replaced by a politically correct code of conduct that does not recognize the rule of law that is part of the laws of physics.
Worth science is being replaced by junk science, by order of the courts. That is capability is being exterminated and replaced by incapacity --- doing a good job is "unfair" to the "sensitivity" of societal engineers, and so their societal engineering is replacing quality engineering.
A manufactured part, according to socialism, must meet socialist job requirements before the part meets use requirements.
Yet, the socialist masters complain when things don't work right, and so a special "two-tiered" manufacturing system follows their needs; specialists beholden to the state, make for state officials, things that work, while the public tier suffers under the legendary socialism that occupies the minds of the public's managers.
The problem is showing up in medicine, at the public level, now.
Over the last five years, only one fourth of the usual number of applicants for practicing gastroenterology, apply. Gastroenterology is rejected because the "new" people want mone, and they do not want to be involved in medical practice that is "too technical" in the out-patient realm where their incompetence will show.
We are a nation suffering under the burden of almost everything being governed by the judiciary. The judiciary make the laws, no matter how quaint is the legislative process for traditional American tourists. Lawyers are running the show.
The courts' egos are destroying the noble motivations of ordinary people who once were free of the burden now imposed by the judiciary, and thus their personal initiative and honest interest in doing a good job, prevailed, and provided well enough.
The path to well-intentioned and well-made productivity, is being torn apart because it is part of the worthy American heritage that is the target of the socialists who churn for the lawyers greed.
When you drive down a thoroughfare, past the large buildings of manufacturing establishments, you may see their marques and company names on the face of their buidings and in the signs on their manicured lawns, but these symbols are mere frontispieces (sp?) for this law firm and that law firm.
Lawyers are running the show and the activity on the plant floor.
Lawyers enabled the path for the September 11, 2001 hijackings of airliners in the U.S.A.
Lawyers are wrecking nearly everything, and plenty of them are federally funded, so they do not have to answer to any private client who can stop the lawyer by cutting off their cash flow.
The government is regulating all kinds of productivity, but the government is not watching, nor is it regulating the lawyers' part in productivity.
Want to save your company and save the economy and save jobs? Fire the lawyers.
Alot of this is invented. I guess the name of the paper could have something to do with it.
For Rumsfeld's approach to work, he will also need strong leadership from the top acquisition people in the DOD. They'll have to actively lead and manage the mid-level acquisition people who are usually too friendly with the contractors they want to be employed by after they leave the military. This is a big problem with acquisition all through our Federal government: the acquisition managers are being hired into cushy high-paying jobs with the contractors after they leave government, and this indirect bribery corrupts their decison-making to some extent. We may need some new laws that prevent government people from working for contractors that they deal with for some length of time after leaving government. (For all I know, these laws may already exist, but we need them.)
http://www.af.mil/stories/story.asp?storyID=123006165
Seems to me this Aircraft has just recently entered service.
Do you have a source for this statement and statistics that we can take a look at?
There are laws against middle level managers going to work for contractors they supervised. They get around it by going to work for a related system. For example, instead of going to work at Lockheed on targeting pods, they will get a job working data links. They still get a job with Lockheed, but a different division.
Also, there are no rules that I know of preventing senior managers from getting jobs. May be some - I would rather burn in hell than sell my soul to Lockheed, so I'll never know.
As Sherlock Holmes said, "Cui Bono?", (who profits?).
Follow the money, it leads to the perp.
I think that some time in the next two years, you will begin to see publicly published numbers, because of the failure to get enough good people on the job. Already, we read stories of doctors "who've had enough" of government and politicians' and lawyers' pressures, and seek relief, that is, they quit.
BTW, the real costs of medicine, are in a) the lawyers fees and the health maintenance managers's fees, salaries, and stock options, and in b) the administrative costs of group health insurance that is, for the insurer, a cash flow directed to lawyers and politicians in exchange for keeping the cash flow going.
My own view, is that we should ban group health insurance. There should be only individual health insurance.
Group health insurance became fashionable as a substitute at the bargaining tables with the unions, for large scale manufacters' otherwise paying larger hourly rates.
Such manufacturers thought that they could control the administrative costs, which they expected to be much less than paying higher hourly rates to union workers. In order to gin up business, the group health insurers went door to door. The general acceptance of group, was not because for the insured, the seeminly lesser rates. That cost was secondary to group members not having to do the paperwork.
Group health insurance most caught on because "the system" --- the lawyers got into the act along with the actuarials --- made filling out medical forms more difficult for individuals. Group health insurance took over that burden, for the group members.
Well, we can have individual coverage only, and then individuals who need help in filling out medical forms, go to a service that helps them with that, just like we go to an accountant to get help with tax forms.
Insurance companies should only pay the patients, and doctors should only accept payment from the patient. The cost of medical care being determined right there, at the doctor patient relationship ... instead of in the board rooms of grossly over-paid "health care executives" of which this town has one of the largest populations in the country, if not *the* largest.
I think that mostly, the 1994 rejection of the Democrats from the Congress by the national elections, spelled out how much the people DO NOT want public health care.
The kind of upbringing that leads to dedication in medicine, has been under attack and eroding quickly under "socialist ideals in the public education." Faster than expected.
I do not envy the younger generation at all, who will be subject to the new generation, currently stepping out from graduating medical school but especially health care administrators graduating from business schools.
The new graduates have little sense of how far off track they are, out of the gate. Any number of these kids are well-intentioned, but their minds are seriously wayward, having been, and to many remaining, under the control of politically correct gobbledygook.
That reflects on how poorly they studied ideas while in school. Instead, they absorbed what they were told, not bothering to follow up on it, hardly questioning it. They have been politically indoctrinated, which "junk science" occupies too much of their minds, vacating the sense of duty they should have to their patients. They feel that their duty is instead, to the state, to be blunt, though they would not word it that way; they call it "the greater good" and other such Hillary Care-less wordity.
We may still be able to find a doctor who is approaching fifty and thus still "old guard," but our kids face a bureaucratic meltdown, post office-like "care."
I'd say that within six years, we'll hear more about this in public. In ten years, we'll hear more about the pain from suffering under it. In twenty years, the bubble will burst. "The trouble" is creeping into the country as creepy are the terrorist insurgents, here.
Medicine is too complex to be entertained by good doctors as a way of life, under government burden. There is too much science to study and appreciate and apply; they have no time for government burden.
Currently, the relative ease of finding a good doctor, will fade away to the point of ... the lower level where we already find how difficult it is to find a good lawyer. There will be as many doctors practicing "junk science" as there are currently so many lawyers lost in extra-Constitutional space.
Agree..wholeheartedly :)
Well at least now we know that all of your replies on this topic are completely unbiased.
Since the from the article, The inspector general's report concluded that Air Force and Defense Department officials mismanaged the program, it is more likely that the Air Force had to come back and add requirements to the contract after they had already signed. To which Lockheed would rightly demand additional money.
Very well put.
Lockheed - and Sam Nunn - literally rammed this turkey down the Air Force's throat. The USAF and foreign customers were perfectly happy with the H-3 model, and the Marietta factory could have kept on producing three aircraft per month for decades.
Now Lockheed produces two J models per month for unwilling customers (U.S. Military).
Foreign Military sales are drying up as smaller countries that were C-130 buyers no longer can afford the inflated price and expensive upkeep of this so far unreliable aircraft.
This brings up another subject.
The C-130-J has been in production for over eight years and the Tac Airlift model has STILL not been certified by the USAF to go to war.
Forty year old C-130E models are doing the heavy lifting in Iraq and the Middle East while the "new and improved" Tac Airlift J models are sitting on the ramp and growing old in Mississippi, Maryland and Rhode Island.
Sad.
My bias comes from having worked two Lockheed programs from the viewpoint of flight test - ie, the folks in the military who are responsible for determining if the contractor performed. On both programs, Lockheed management repeated lied - not made mistakes, not didn't quite meet goals - but repeatedly LIED about the status of the program and what they were doing to fix the problems. I no longer work test, but neither program I worked on has fielded yet - and both were supposed to field years ago. I don't want to work for people who are actively dishonest, and whose dishonesty adversly impacts our military and country.
For The_Victor...on the programs I worked, the problem wasn't requirements creep, but a failure to perform basic functions of the system. One of the systems may field this winter. The other is still delayed due to significant problems making it unsafe to use outside the tightly controlled test environment. This latter system was 'NDI'.
I only spent a short time working on the C-130J program, and haven't kept close track for the last 4 years. At that time, the J was being delayed because it was of questionable safey for flight in clouds...and flying in clouds was certainly an ability required in the original contract.
In my experience, requirements creep does occur, and when it does the contractor deserves extra money and time. However, most requirements creep that I saw went the opposite direction - a dumbing down of requirements in the hope of being able to field something that was in some way better.
On the J, during the short time I was involved, all the requirements creep was of the dumbing down sort. There is a reason the USAF originally opposed the purchase of any J models.
I've sent a freepmail your way.
Since the customer - the USAF - didn't want the product to begin with, it isn't surprising Lockheed wasn't too worried about customer satisfaction. And in most, if not all cases that I worked on (and that doesn't include the J - only spent a few weeks in that world), the SPO was helping Lockheed in dishonesty. As I pointed out in my first post, the problem started with a corrupt Congress and devolved from there.
It was the only time in my life that I've received phone calls that required me to pretend I didn't know the caller before the caller would speak to me!
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