Classics in Congressional Oversight of Defense Procurement

I have no clue why I missed this the first time, but I came across Steve Trimble's Flight International blog post, and I realized that this is a classic of its kind.

Truth be told, Congressional oversight of defense procurement is not a particularly broad category, but this classic. Keith Olbermann should be notified.

The background: the USAF and Army aviation are both purchasing same cargo aircraft to do transport to austere airfields, the Joint Cargo Aircraft (JCA), and the aircraft selected was the Alenia C-27J.

It's basically to serve the role as the C-130's little brother, see pic:


The problem is that their budgets Army is saying that it will cost $30 million a pop, and the USAF is claiming that it will cost $60 million a pop.

Obviously something is very very wrong here. While differences in cost between services can result from differences in how life cycle costs are viewed, with one service looking to assign more of the lifetime costs to the initial purchase price than the other, a difference of 100% simply does not pass the smell test.

There are two obvious reasons that this might happen:

• That one service is attempting to bring unrelated budget items in the procurement.
• That one service is attempting to kill or minimize the purchase.

Given that this is a joint program between the USAF and the US Army, my money would be on both. They like bigger planes, and the thought of their sharing a program with the Army must give them the hives.

So Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) notices this discrepency, and decides to ask the USAF acquisition chief, Sue Payton, about this.

In any case, here is the meat of the exchange:

REP. ABERCROMBIE: Ms. Payton, you are right on the edge of getting into the Blues Brothers.

MS. PAYTON: Sorry sir, I don't mean to be there. I --

REP. ABERCROMBIE: That's when -- when Jake says, Bill, but you lied to us about the band. They lied to me when I was in prison about the band. You haven't kept the band together. He goes, I never lied to you. I bullsh$#ted you a little bit, but I never lied to you.

MS. PAYTON: Sir, I would never give any misinformation --

REP. ABERCROMBIE: No, you are saying that the Army is doing that.

MS. PAYTON: No, sir. I believe that --

REP. ABERCROMBIE: You are trying to finesse us. You are telling me they've got a cost that they know about, but they are not telling us about it, and are trying to pretend their unit cost and given information to us is the same as your unit cost, and they know better.

(Emphasis mine)

Somewhere out there, John Belushi is smiling.

You can see the rest of the exchange here, and Ms. Payton gets the worst of the exchange.