Soldiers die as Pentagon cash 'war' rages on

By ROGER FRANKLIN Herald Correspondent

NEW YORK - Since the United States is not at war just at the moment, the families of the 19 Marines who died this month when their V-22 Osprey heli-plane crashed in Arizona will not receive any of the special medals reserved for those who perish on the field of combat.

But perhaps they should, because a very definite state of war has existed inside the Pentagon for more than 50 years.

As the military's rival branches battle for turf, and the lion's share of the defence budget, servicemen keep dying and vast sums - untold billions of dollars - are poured into projects destined to finish their days as gold-plated curios.

You can find whole gaggles of ruptured ducks at places like the US Air Force Museum. There is Tacit Blue, for example, a streamlined shoebox with a tail like a devil's horns that was conceived as a high-altitude radar surveillance platform.

It cost well over $2 billion to develop. Now it makes an expensively photogenic backdrop for the snapshots of awestruck tourists, who do not realise its real purpose was to make sure that money which might have gone to the CIA's surveillance satellites stayed in the Air Force budget.

Then there is the mock-up for the Orient Express, the space plane powered by a hydrogen-burning "scram" jet which Ronald Reagan promised would be ferrying businessmen from New York to Tokyo in less than two hours by 2001.

At the Pentagon, which invested another $4 billion into the fantasy, the concept was seen as a means of rapidly deploying the squadrons of "Star Wars" satellites that were supposed to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles.

And don't forget the nuclear-powered bomber, which was to be powered by twin reactors as it roamed over the Soviet Union irradiating the countryside with its lethal exhaust. That cost $6 billion and didn't get airborne either.

The generals' chief allies are congressmen - who don't seem to care if the latest gee-whiz hardware actually works as long as it is assembled in their electorates - and the defence contractors, who relish the rewards for letting their techies' imaginations run riot.

Meanwhile, taxpayers pick up the tab and military undertakers collect the remains - which required five days to sift from the downed Osprey's mound of ashes and fire-fused metal.

The institutionalised rivalry inside the Pentagon is the sole reason an aircraft like the Osprey - a weird, ungainly creature with windmill-sized tilting propellers on stubby wings - took to the air in the first place.

Apart from the engineers at Boeing and Bell who put the beast together, it is almost impossible to find an independent aeronautical expert who does not regard the Osprey as a $40 million death trap.

Three times in the past decade, outside audits by the US Government Accounting Office (GAO) have concluded that the concept of an aircraft taking off like a helicopter, tilting its rotors and then flying with the speed of a turbo-prop plane is not a viable proposition.

Even inside the Marine Corps, those senior officers more concerned with winning wars than spending money don't like it one bit.

While the Osprey sounds great in theory, the sceptics argue that the practical realities of such a complex machine doom it to constant and tragic failure, particularly under battlefield conditions.

Of the six prototypes built so far, three have crashed, with the loss of 30 lives.

Yet despite the GAO's urging that the Osprey be scrapped, it continues to fly - at least when it is not colliding nose-first with Arizona, as happened on April 8.

Its supporters on Capitol Hill - people such as Congressman Curt Weldon in whose Pennsylvania district much of the craft is built - trace the Osprey's birth to the Marine Corps' decision in the early 1980s to replace its heavy-lift Chinook helicopters, which have been used since Korea to ferry men and equipment from ships to beach.

The Marines wanted something with a greater range that would permit ships to stay further out to sea, where there is less chance of falling victim to a surface-to-surface missile.

But the Osprey's genesis actually goes back to 1948, when what was then the US Army Air Corps won a bitter bureaucratic battle to become an entirely independent branch of the armed forces.

The newly re-christened Air Force was riding high at the time. After its planes ended the Second World War by delivering the nuclear bombs that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war-gamers and strategists of the day concluded that the Navy and Army would play only minor roles in future conflicts.

The Air Force, to quote its fire-breathing General Curtis LeMay, was "the winning weapon."

In the Navy, the loss of prestige caused such anguish that Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal suffered a nervous breakdown and flung himself from the 10th-floor window of his hospital room.

The Army, which had just lost all its fixed-wing aircraft, tried to circumvent the rules by turning helicopters into the ground-attack weapons it needed to support troops in the mud below.

This is a job the Air Force should have performed but was loath to do since it saw ground-support missions as a drain on what the generals regarded as their real purpose: trucking nukes to Moscow in flashy and expensive supersonic bombers.

Fifty years later, the consequences of this rift became apparent in Kosovo, where the Army's $30 million Apache helicopters were prohibited from venturing more than 500m into enemy territory.

For more than a decade, the Army had been assuring congressional committees that the Apache's death-dealing potency matched its staggering expense. But when faced with the acid test of actual combat, the generals bowed to reality and withdrew the Apaches from the field of fire. The Marines, while permitted to keep their fighter planes by the 1948 accord, were left without transport aircraft. Since helicopters can lift only so much, the political consequences of that long-ago agreement between the services led eventually to the Osprey - a transport plane masquerading as a chopper.

Will it survive another burst of flak from critics, particularly those in the Army and Air Force who would love to see the money for 350 additional Ospreys re-assigned to their own pet projects?

Logic says no. Political precedent indicates otherwise.

With parts of the Osprey being built in a full 40 of America's 50 states, few congressmen will be brave enough to vote down a programme that keeps many of their constituents employed.

"The defence game is like no other," said Ernest Fitzgerald, a dissident Pentagon engineering analyst sacked from the Defence Department for pointing out that early models of the C-5 transport plane were so plagued by problems they seldom left their hangars.

The Supreme Court eventually reinstated Fitzgerald, who spent the remainder of his career exposing waste, fraud and contractor abuse.

"The generals get an idea that won't work, the contractors can't build it, the test pilots keep ejecting and the public keeps paying," he said.

Particularly unfortunate, a cynic might add, for those 19 Marines on board the latest Osprey to lose its battle with gravity.