There’s an interesting post on military aircraft procurement over at Winds of Change today (interesting if you’re interested in such things, that is).
Norm Augustine, former head of Martin Marietta (now part of Lockheed Martin) wrote an amusing (and insightful) book back in the eighties called “Augustine’s Laws” (it’s now on its sixth edition
, last published about a decade ago). One of the things he did was to plot the growth in cost of military fighters over the decades since the war, and extrapolate it out. He predicted that in some year of the twenty-first century, the military would be able to only afford a single multi-purpose aircraft, and the Air Force and Navy would have to share it.
One point made in comments over there is that the reason these things cost so much per unit (I was shocked to read that the Raptor is a third of a billion dollars per unit) is because it includes amortization of the development and fixed production costs–if they had decided to purchase the originally planned seven hundred, the price per aircraft would be much lower. The problem is that, though we get more bang for the buck, we never want to spend that many bucks.
We did the same thing with the Shuttle. It was about a five-billion-dollar development program, in seventies dollars, but when the fleet size was cut from seven to five during Carter-Mondale (Mondale actually wanted to completely kill the program) as a cost saving, the price per orbiter went up a good bit. It would have probably only cost an additional billion or so to get the two extra vehicles, and we’d be in a lot better shape now (all other events since being equal) with a remaining fleet of five, instead of three. Having had two more might have made us more willing to continue to press forward even in the face of the losses, because even if the president hadn’t decided to end the program next year, we’d probably have to do it anyway, particularly if we lost one more, and had only two left. In fact, one of the few smart moves made on the program in the eighties was to order “structural spares” (things like the titanium keel and spar) before the production was shut down and tooling dismantled. That allowed us to build Endeavor after Challenger, something that would not have been possible otherwise, and in the absence of that new vehicle, we’d have been down to two after the Columbia loss.
We’re not just penny-wise pound-foolish in production. The Shuttle has a similar problem in ops. If we’d had more vehicles, and made the investment in facilities for them, we could have doubled the flight rate, without that much of an increase in annual fixed costs (perhaps a billion more a year). Which would have been a better deal: four flights a year for three billion a year (a typical number), resulting in a cost of three quarters of a billion per flight, or eight flights a year for four billion, with a cost of half a billion per flight?
Neither number is attractive, but the taxpayer would have gotten a lot more for the money if the purse strings had been loosened on the program. It might have made it a lot more sustainable.