Gold plating is the tendency of our military services to require expensive and unneeded fancy equipment added to nearly everything they buy. For example, the WWII Jeep did the job. After the war we civilians could buy new Jeeps from the Jeep dealer for something like $3000. First thing they tried was the “airborne Jeep”, made as light as possible to make it easier to parachute it from cargo places. And it had the same swing rear axle from the GM Corvair that Ralph Nader condemned. The troops rolled a lot of airborne jeeps over, often killing them selves. And parachuting the “airborne jeep” would smash it up making it look like a beer can someone had stamped on. I remember walking by the Aerial Port where there was a long line of beat up jeeps. They had been used to practice parachuting them. The old WWII jeeps looked dirty and battered but they looked like they could be made to run again. The “airborne jeeps” were so bent out of shape that I don’t think they were good for parts, let alone getting them to run again.
And after the “airborne jeep” faded out of memory, the services decided they needed something a little bigger. They bought HumVees. A new HumVee cost $60,000. So expensive that only Arnold Schwarzenegger could afford one. A far cry from the $3000 for a WWII Jeep (Jeep CJ).
Then we come to USAF. I was maintenance officer in a squadron of F106 fighters. Basically a good fighter. Designed to shoot down Russian nuclear bombers coming at us over the North Pole. It was fast, Mach 2, so it could catch anything, good range, it could fly from Duluth Minnesota to Tyndall AFB at the southern most tip of Florida without air-to-air refueling, or making a fuel stop. It carried a big battery of missiles. The ones in my squadron were built in the late 1950s and kept flying into the 1980s.
One big piece of gold plate on the F106, the Tactical Situation Display (TSD). This was a 9-10 inch screen that was supposed to display your position, and the target’s position, like that groovy display in the Bond movie Gold Finger, the little display in the glove compartment that showed Bond’s car and Oddjob’s car at once. Trouble with the TSD was it was totally unreliable. Just the engine vibration from flying the F106 would break it. We couldn’t get replacement TSD’s, we couldn’t get parts to fix the broken TSD’s, and by the time I joined the squadron the boys had given up on the TSD. When it broke they just left it in the aircraft. What’s worse, the TSD didn’t do anything that needed doing. The F106 had very powerful radar in its nose that would show targets out to 200 miles. It had voice radio to the ground controllers who were more than happy to tell the pilot about the target’s position, course, speed, and altitude. Who needs a TSD with that kind of support?
Some things we could do. All these gold plate boondoggles are made in Pentagon meetings. Mostly procurement paper pushers attend them. We ought to require that specifications for weapons systems be reviewed and if necessary vetoed by operators, pilots, aircraft maintenance mechanics, submariners, navy officers, and others who actually know something.
W should insist that the armed forces buy stuff off the civilian market and not require (and get soaked for) a custom military only design.
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