Army report: Military has spent $32 billion since ’95 on abandoned weapons programs (WP)

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/army-report-military-has-spent-32-billion-since-97-on-abandoned-weapons-programs/2011/05/23/AGwuqjCH_story.html

Army report: Military has spent $32 billion since ’95 on abandoned weapons programs
By Marjorie Censer

The Army’s Comanche helicopter was envisioned as “the quarterback of the digital battlefield,” a technologically superior aircraft that could hide from enemies, operate at night and in bad weather, and travel farther than any other helicopter. Gen. Richard Cody, a former vice chief of staff of the Army, called it the “most flexible, most agile” aircraft the country had ever produced. In 2000, it ranked as the most important planned buy for the Army. Four years later, the program — which had consumed close to 20 years of work and nearly $6 billion — was abruptly shuttered.

It is one of 22 major Army weapons programs that have been canceled since 1995, ringing up a price tag of more than $32 billion for equipment that was never built. A new study commissioned by the Army, though not publicly released, condemns the service’s efforts as “unacceptable.”

The study is the latest indication that the Pentagon — and the defense industry, in turn — is undergoing a seismic shift in its approach to new programs. As pressures mounted in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military retreated from its ambitions of building multibillion-dollar, technologically superior systems. Instead, it was forced to make better use of tried-and-true equipment.

For almost a decade, the Defense Department saw its budgets boom — but didn’t make the kind of technological strides that seemed possible. “Since 9/11, a near doubling of the Pentagon’s modernization accounts — more than $700 billion over 10 years in new spending on procurement, research and development — has resulted in relatively modest gains in actual military capability,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an address last week. That outcome, he said, is both “vexing and disturbing.”...

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$700 billion over the last 10 years on MIC corporate welfare...