Northrop Grumman executives yesterday criticized a congressional subcommittee for recommending a cut of just over $400 million in the president’s budget for the RQ-4 unmanned aerial surveillance system.
Ed Walby, the company’s director of business development for high altitude, long-endurance systems, criticized a staff member of the House Appropriations Committee defense subcommittee for including in the panel’s version of the Fiscal Year 2010 budget a cut of $270 million for procurement of three RQ-4B Block 40 Global Hawks; $50 million for advance procurement of three more; and $85 million for one RQ-4N broad area maritime surveillance (BAMS) variant for the Navy.
“The program is not a normal acquisition program in the way it has been approached,” Walby told reporters at a briefing held at the AUVSI unmanned systems conference in Washington.
He explained that the system needs to be readily adaptable to rapidly changing needs for different types of sensors. The Air Force, therefore, is procuring the system in consecutive “blocks” containing various upgrades and changes to sensor systems. The aircraft have also been fielded prior to completion of rigorous testing.
“There are those who feel it’s very dangerous and risky to produce those systems in that way,” he said. “That perception tends to fuel the desire to be very specific and rigid in the method of ‘develop-test-build.'”
Walby said the HAC-D cut, if it survives final budget negotiations on Capitol Hill, would result in the loss of 14,000 “direct and indirect” jobs and would put U.S. troops in danger.
“It’s a good cut if you want to save the taxpayers’ money, but I think soldiers’ lives are more important than $300 million or $400 million,” he said.
The Block 40 aircraft was expected to begin operational testing in FY ’12. However, the Air Force prioritized Block 20 testing, pushing Block 40 evaluations until FY ’13 or later, according to Walby.
“Each year, the program gets attacked for its unconventional means of producing capability,” he said. “But we might not even be deployed yet if we were doing things in a very sterile fashion.”
Just before her resignation as assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition earlier this year, Sue Payton criticized Northrop Grumman for its failure to maintain the Global Hawk’s test schedule and for problems with one of the program’s sensor suites. The company, for its part, has maintained that any testing slip has been only partially a result of development delays caused by hardware or software adjustments. It has instead blamed the government for “changes in test schedule planning methodology” (Defense Daily, April 30).