Industry's Bird of Prey

Not your usual Thursday bird, the Osprey is surviving in the wilds of fiscal incompetence, flying on with all its flaws intact. As if things weren't dangerous enough, it's migrated to Iraq now.

The Osprey has been under fire from defense industry critics since it first tested badly, and has cost untold millions, in addition to the lives lost, in its many accidents. It has received enough attention in print that it has become an embarrassment to everyone involved - except its supporters in congress from the states that produce it, yep, you read Texas there. In 2001, it served as an early litmus test the occupied White House failed.

DoD manages the captive defense industry with a combination of socialism (inefficient government-owned facilities compete unfairly with the private sector), industrial policy (so called “competition” rarely lives up to its name), and the erection of high barriers to entry through excessive specifications for weapon systems (which discourages non-defense companies from bringing new methods and products into a stagnant industry). The Osprey is a typical product of the creaking defense acquisition system. If nothing else, killing the Osprey would have sent a message to the Congress, the defense industry, and the defense bureaucracy that George W. Bush was serious about radically transforming the nation''s defenses and was not going to tolerate business as usual. The new president has failed his first test as a defense reformer. (Emphasis added.)

In Iraq, it is stumbling along ferrying stuff to and fro, and now is being eased into some combat operations. Its supporters in the defense industry have had to pull several back as they advance its use, though. Just what our troops need, playing nursemaid to another disaster from our military industry.

As of Dec. 28, three months through a scheduled seven-month deployment, the 23 pilots of Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 263, known as VMM-263, had logged 1,639 hours of flight time in Iraq, carried 6,826 passengers and delivered 631,837 pounds of cargo without a mishap or even a close call.

That's good news not only for the Marines but also for Bell Helicopter Textron Inc. of Fort Worth and Boeing Co.'s helicopter division, near Philadelphia, which make the Osprey in a 50-50 partnership. About 2,500 Bell employees work on the Osprey in Fort Worth and Amarillo, where V-22s are assembled.
(snip)
"As long as they keep using it like a truck, I think they'll probably be OK," said Philip Coyle, a former Pentagon weapons testing director and a longtime Osprey critic.

In December, VMM-263 began to take on riskier tasks.

On Dec. 6, two of the Ospreys carried 24 combat-loaded Marines and 24 Iraqi troops on a raid near Lake Tharthar, 150 miles north of Baghdad, to look for suspected insurgents.

"It turned out to be a dry hole, there was nothing there," said Capt. Drew Norris, 30, of Dallas, a graduate of Jesuit College Preparatory School and Texas A&M University who was one of the pilots on the raid. As for the flight, he said, "It went off without a hitch."

Two days later, two Ospreys were included for the first time in a well-established mission called "aeroscout," a sort of roving raid in which troops aboard helicopters search for insurgents by air. The ground troops commander scrubbed the mission when one Osprey needed to turn back to base because one of its four generators failed.

The generator failure is symptomatic of one big question hanging over the Osprey in Iraq: Is the $70 million aircraft reliable enough, or does it break too often?

One of the squadron's 10 Ospreys had to land in Jordan on the way into Iraq in October and spend a couple of days there being fixed after a wiring problem led the pilots to make a precautionary landing. Others have been grounded for days at a time for similar problems in Iraq. (Emphasis added.)

Once again, our troops are guinea pigs for the defense contractors. Inadequate armor, humvees that left them sitting ducks, like the war itself are not designed to protect anyone, but to pay off lobbyists. The description of corporate welfare by the Pentagon which I featured above tells us all we need to know about actual 'respect for the troops'.

Guess which chicken hawk absolutely will not use the Osprey? If you guessed the Cretin in Chief, you were right, and a great judge of character or the lack thereof. AWOL has all the care in the world for his own hide, not a whit for those he routinely throws away to keep his friends rolling in public money.

The military industrial complex is all about war profiteering. We need to stop it before it kills again.