US defence companies need to focus more on ensuring the reliability of new weapons systems rather than just lauding their superior capabilities, Navy Secretary Donald Winter told Reuters Wednesday.
Winter, a former defense industry executive, cited several examples in which newly developed weapons were plagued by reliability issues, including a broken stern gate that caused a 48-hour delay in the deployment of the new San Antonio amphibious ship built by Northrop Grumman Corp.
Winter, a former Northrop executive, said the new ship was 'under way, finally', and that the delay was part of an overall shake-down for the ship that was taking longer than he wished.
Work on another amphibious programme, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle being developed for the Marine Corps by General Dynamics, had to be slowed down because it was not meeting the navy's reliability targets, Winter said.
"Having performance is important, but not as important in most cases, as having reliability," said Winter, who displays a Soviet AK-47 Kalashnikov rifle in his office because he says it symbolises the importance of weapons that actually work.
"The value of the AK-47 is not because of its performance, in terms of accuracy or range, or anything of that nature," he said. "It's because it always works, even if it's mistreated."
Introduced in 1947, the AK-47 is still the most widely used assault rifle, due to its durability and ease of use.
That kind of reliability is also important for US weapons, particularly in the kind of 'long war' that US troops are now fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, Winter said.
He said superior weapons production capabilities had helped the United States win World War Two, while the greater capabilities of US weapons offset the Soviet Union's sheer numerical advantage during the Cold War.
But the ability to maintain and sustain a new weapons system had emerged as a critical factor in the sort of long engagements that the country now faced, and especially for navy and Marine Corps units that are continuously deployed.
"If you can't get under way, if the aircraft can't fly, if we have issues of maintenance and sustainment, that's a significant limiting factor which can expose our servicemembers to a lot of risk," he said.
Winter said he got personally involved in another case, when problems surfaced with the engine being built by Pratt & Whitney, a unit of United Technologies, for the new Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet.
In the end, he said, Pratt developed a two-pronged solution that addresses the issue of engine blades snapping off, which Winter called a 'conservative' and 'robust' design approach.
"I am very optimistic that we will come out of this with a good usable engine and, in fact, an engine that probably has more margin than we would have otherwise gotten," he said.
Winter said he also remained concerned about the rising costs of weapons programs and that it was important to continue efforts to reform defense acquisition programmes.
Costs had more than doubled on the littoral combat ships being developed by Lockheed and General Dynamics, Winter said, pegging the cost of the first two ships in the new class 'on the order of $500m or so'.
That is well above early projections of $220m each, but below the cost of some other warships, he said. Winter cancelled contracts with each of the two companies for a second ship after costs rose sharply, but they have submitted fixed-price bids for work on three additional ships.
Winter declined to elaborate about the cost of the first two ships, or whether the Navy would need to get a $460m congressional cost cap lifted in the future, but said the service could realise significant cost savings once it begins buying larger quantities of the new shore-hugging warships.
The initial projections were probably not realistic, Winter said, but the Navy was sticking to its plan to buy 55 of the ships in total, which should help reassure contractors and spur them to make needed investments that could help lower costs.
"That should be more than adequate in terms of production rates to justify the type of investment that will afford significant cost savings in production," Winter said, adding that US shipyards were finally beginning to invest in new technologies commonly used overseas, but more work was needed.
Winter said the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia underscored the importance of preparing for a wide range of military conflicts and scenarios.
"It underscores a general view that we cannot design our forces for any specific adversary, location or engagement," he said. "We've got to look at the full spectrum of issues."
By Andrea Shalal-Esa, Reuters.
