Off Beat: Global Hawk feasts on budget

When it comes to its toys, the Pentagon can certainly spend a lot of money on your behalf. Take the Global Hawk program, for example.

Global Hawk, the pride of Beale Air Force Base, is just burning up money, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, AKA the GAO.

The GAO watchdogs decided to take a look at the Department of Defense's 10 unmanned aircraft programs.

The GAO report was pretty grim from the beginning: "While proving successful on the battlefield, DOD's unmanned aircraft acquisitions continue to incur cost and schedule growth. The cumulative development costs for the 10 programs GAO reviewed increased by over $3.3 billion (37 percent in 2009 dollars) from initial estimates — with nearly $2.7 billion attributed to the Air Force's Global Hawk program."

According to the GAO report, "Global Hawk development cost estimates have increased more than 260 percent from original estimates, in large part to acquire a larger and unproven airframe with immature technologies."

GAO acknowledged that Global Hawk and three other unmanned crafts — Predator, Reaper, and Shadow — "have been used in combat operations with notable success and key lessons learned. However, in some cases, rushing aircraft into service has led to performance issues and caused delays in development and operational testing and verification."

The GAO noted that the Air Force began Global Hawk in 2001 "based on knowledge gained from a demonstration program and planned to incrementally integrate more advanced technologies over time. However, within a year, the Air Force fundamentally restructured and accelerated the program to pursue a larger and unproven airframe with multimission capability relying on immature technologies."

Global Hawk's problems continue, the GAO said. A few months ago, the Air Force "reported that initial operational testing for the larger, more capable Global Hawk aircraft and the program's production readiness review had schedule breaches."

That doesn't sound good. As a result, the GAO said, the Air Force has warned Global Hawk's contractor — Northrup Grumman — that the Pentagon "may have to consider deferring authorization of future production lots, (terminate) future modernization efforts, and (cancel) development and production of the aircraft that are planned to carry the (Multi-Platform Radar Technology Insertion Program) radar."The Air Force has big plans for Global Hawk. Planned investment from fiscal 2008 through fiscal 2013 is a bit more than $5 billion.

Meanwhile, the folks at Northrop Grumman were giddy earlier this month when they announced that Global Hawk "recently reached a major milestone — 25,000 combat hours — during an operational sortie July 8-9 from a deployed location."

There was no mention of the GAO report in Northrup Grumman's release, nor were there any indications of how much Global Hawk costs — your taxpayer dollars at work.