Cutting Pentagon Budget Red Tape
PANAMA CITY, Fla. - At $50 million a copy, this air cushioned vehicle is - barely a decimal point in the Pentagon budget. Called the LCAC - for landing craft, air cushion - it hauls marines and their equipment form ship to shore, reports CBS News correspondent David Martin.
It's been around for 25 years and when time came to buy new ones the chief of naval operations set out to cut away some of the red tape that ensnarls almost every new program.
"The testing requirements were, in my mind, excessive," said Admiral Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations.
It would have added $100 million to the cost of the program.
There is an incomprehensible chart of the Pentagon's outline of all the steps any new program must go through before it begins production. It practically guarantees a new weapon will take longer and cost more than it should.
In the case of LCAC the red tape would have required an extra three years to test a vehicle which deputy program director Tom Rivers says has the same basic design and dimensions as the old LCAC.
"We look at this as a replacement craft versus a brand-new state-of-the-art design," said Rivers. "This is something we think we have a lot of experience with."
The new LCAC will basically look like the old LCAC the Navy has been operating for the past quarter century. Yet the rules say it has to go through testing as if it were the first of its kind.
All that's changed are some of the components: a new shroud for the propellers made out of a single piece of composite material, which will be easier to maintain than the old one.
"(The) craft can reach speeds of up to 50 knots," said senior chief Michael MacDonald.
MacDonald took the LCAC out for a test flight - that's a real flight - beneath the newly designed black skirt. The hull is actually flying about five feet above the water.
"The skirt is amazing," said MacDonald. "I could tell as soon as we came on cushion it was a lot more responsive."
MacDonald imagines it would take him about 10 hours to get up to speed on the new LCAC.
But it will take years to get there. Even after shaving off $100 million and three years of testing, the new streamline will be ready in: "2019 time frame," said Rivers.
But the taxpayer might not understand why that amounts to a success story in the tortured annals of Pentagon spending.
