Faulty Hardware

High bids and dud missiles

The Army's Sergeant York antiaircraft weapon, made to shoot down enemy helicopters, has proved a lemon. Known also as DIVAD (Division Air Defense), the system has two radar-guided guns attached to an M48A5 tank chassis. DIVAD has had trouble detecting decoys and hitting helicopters that do not have radar reflectors attached. Nonetheless, the Pentagon has invested $1.5 billion in 276 DlVADs, and last week Richard DeLauer, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, was preparing a report for Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger on whether to buy 117 more. While DeLauer was at work, a study by the Defense Department's inspector general surfaced: it revealed that the Pentagon had paid $84 million more than necessary for the expensive and useless weapon. The study was released by Oregon's Republican Congressman Denny Smith, a fierce opponent of DIVAD. According to the report, the Pentagon was too concerned with producing the weapon swiftly to bargain carefully with the manufacturer, the Ford Aerospace and Communications Corp. of Newport Beach, Calif., a division of Ford Motor Co. Said Smith: "Not only are we buying a DIVAD that doesn't work; the taxpayers are being ripped off by excessive charges."

Sidewinders and Sparrows are the bread and butter of America's air-to-air fighting capability: the $59,000 Sidewinder missile can zoom toward targets within an elevenmile range at twice the speed of sound; the $169,000 Sparrow missile is able to hit a target 31 miles away. But according to Frank Conahan, an investigator for Congress's General Accounting Office, one-quarter of the Navy's and Air Force's Sidewinders and one-third of their Sparrows are "unserviceable." Conahan's congressional testimony last week was just another in this year's endless stream of reports on military unreadiness.

In a rebuttal, Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb later testified that defects crippled only about 21% of the Navy's missiles. Korb's estimate for useless Air Force missiles was 15%.