Originally published in The San Diego Union-Tribune

Can another weapons system be stopped?

By Jack Shanahan
February 27, 2004

In some rare good news from the Pentagon these days, it recently cancelled the overweight, overpriced and behind-schedule Comanche helicopter.

The Comanche is the second weapons system that the Bush Administration has targeted for termination. The first, the Crusader artillery system, was a shockingly expensive weapon designed to fight the long-collapsed Soviet Union.

After Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's announcement of his decision on the Crusader in 2002, members of Congress—worried about losing jobs in their districts—went into overdrive to resuscitate the program. They were beaten back, due to Rumsfeld's personal attention to the matter and after being promised that the Crusader funding would go to toward the development of future combat systems.

The next most recent attempt to kill a major weapons program was the House of Representatives' bid in 2000 to cut all funds for the F-22 fighter jet, designed for air superiority over a Soviet fighter that was never built. In response to a surprising House vote to kill the F-22 program, defense contractors—led by lead contractor Lockheed Martin—took their case directly to the folks who would have been affected if the F-22 were cut, generating excruciating pressure on members of Congress, even from states with tangential connections to the F-22 program.

President Clinton joined the Senate in supporting the F-22, the House opposition melted away, and the program is alive today. Yet, the most basic problem with the F-22, which is that it does nothing for our military that less expensive F-15s cannot, remains and will never be remedied unless the Soviet Union returns from the grave. At the end of last year, the House enthusiastically approved over $5 billion for the F-22—and no one mentioned that just three years ago many of the same lawmakers wanted to eliminate the entire program.

Can the White House learn from past attempts to cut major weapons systems? The successful effort to cut the Crusader shows that, despite what some skeptics say, the military industrial complex—which rewards politicians who support wasteful weapons systems with campaign contributions and jobs at home—can be slowed.

But leadership must come from the White House. That's why the Bush administration's decision to strike out the Comanche is so laudable.

Now it's up to Bush and Rumsfeld to hold the line on the Comanche termination. Behind-the-scenes negotiations and polite—and even not-so-polite—discussion may not work. The aggressive lobbying tactics of the defense contractors and interests connected to the Comanche could easily overcome the behind-the-scenes approach, as we've seen in the past.

The best way to fight this weapons system—and others like it—is for the administration to take its case to the American people, and do so in a direct and high-profile manner. The president himself needs to explain that expensive, unnecessary weapons systems like the Comanche are damaging America's national security by siphoning scarce resources away from military programs we need to fight today's threats.

And the president should be candid about just how high the stakes are when it comes to these weapons systems and other wasteful spending at the Pentagon. The annual Pentagon budget is $400 billion and rising, accounting for half of congressional discretionary spending. And next year the Pentagon budget, if approved by Congress, would be more than half of what the rest of the world's nations combined spends on arms.

That's how Bush can defeat the military industrial complex – by being brave enough to confront the problem head-on. He needs to personally make it clear that to continue to build expensive and unnecessary weapons systems threatens our national security, and that the American people need to let their representatives in Congress know that this is wrong.

Shanahan, a retired vice admiral, is a former commander of the U.S. Second Fleet and heads the Military Advisory Committee of TrueMajority, a project of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities