Weekly interest and loan rates | Home values Northwest stock contest 2004 | Consumer affairs

Boeing combat system backed

By Tony Capaccio
Bloomberg News

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

WASHINGTON — Boeing's $92 billion program to develop a family of armored ground vehicles linked by high-speed communications, unmanned drones and new combat radios retains strong Pentagon support, the former comptroller of the Defense Department said.

The Future Combat System (FCS) is benefiting from an unprecedented level of regard that civilian Pentagon leaders have for Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker, who backs the program, said Dov Zakheim, who retired Thursday as the Pentagon's top budget official.

"We haven't built a new tank in years, and the Future Combat System reflects everything we seem to know or think we know about 21st-century warfare," Zakheim said in an interview. He served three years as comptroller and before that was a senior defense adviser to then-presidential candidate George W. Bush.

The U.S. General Accounting Office said in an April 1 report that the Pentagon's second-costliest weapons program after Lockheed Martin's Joint Strike Fighter "is at significant risk for not delivering required capability within budget resources," as "three-fourths of the FCS's needed technologies were still immature when the program started."

"I haven't seen anyone in the department turning around questioning the viability of the Future Combat System," Zakheim said. "There was a question of whether the Army understood itself what it wanted, but where Gen. Schoomaker's coming from is a very clear conception of the Army he wants and how the FCS fits into this Army."

Schoomaker took over in August, coming out of retirement after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked him to transform the military into a force composed of smaller, more mobile brigades from one dependent on heavy equipment and the traditional army division.

It was Schoomaker, for example, who advocated canceling the Boeing-United Technologies Comanche helicopter program in February, a $38 billion system conceived during the Cold War.

"What I've noticed is that he's the blue-eyed boy" of the Pentagon's civilian leadership, Zakheim said. "He is seen as a truly out-of-the-box thinker."

That support "is being reflected and will be reflected in future budgets," with more consistent dollars and less likelihood of major budget cuts, he said.
 
Boeing and closely held Science Applications International, based in San Diego, received an eight-year, $14.7 billion research contract for the FCS program in December.

The Future Combat System work helped boost revenue at the Network Systems unit of Boeing's Integrated Defense Systems business by $1.2 billion last year to $9.38 billion, or 19 percent of total Boeing revenue, up from 15 percent in 2002.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company