When To Fold 'Em

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) picked out the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle today as an example of the Defense Department's failure to pull the plug on foundering programs before making substantial investments.

"When it was started in 2010, the LEMV was supposed to deliver what was essentially a high-altitude and surveillance reconnaissance blimp in support of ongoing operations in Afghanistan," he said today at a McAleese and Associates and Credit Suisse-sponsored conference on defense programs at the Newseum in Washington, DC.

"As it turned out, program delays prohibited LEMV from ever leaving New Jersey," McCain added.

InsideDefense.com first reported the LEMV program -- a giant hybrid airship the Army was developing -- had been canceled last month.

"It was killed after the department sunk $356 million dollars into it," McCain said today. "It was supposed to cost $500 million."

The hybrid airship was built and inflated at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst and had its first flight in August 2012. It did not fly again before the program was canceled. The technical issues delaying the program caused the Army to miss its window to fly the airship in theater. LEMV's fate was in question since earlier last year as the Army continued to push back its first flight. The airship was once scheduled to deploy in Afghanistan in December 2011.

The decision to cancel the Northrop Grumman-built LEMV was correct, "but how did we get to that point? Maybe those decisions could have been made at a point when less taxpayers funding had been wasted," McCain said. "Critically, why were these programs allowed to continue beyond the point when senior acquisition management and their industry partners knew or should have known that their original cost, schedule, performance assumptions were no longer valid? What do these failures tell us about how the department manages its programs or activities and in particular the department's ability or, rather, inability to identify price and program risk, especially integration risk?"