Expensive tastes: how the military has spent years gold-plating itself out of a cheap and effective unmanned aircraft - that could save lives - unmanned aerial vehicle

Washington Monthly, June, 1997 by Adam Piore

Why didn't the army just remove some of the requirements, rather than scrapping the whole thing? "The Army in some cases has been its own worst enemy," says one Army Combat Development officer familiar with the Aquila. "The UAV comes along and then every little proponent wants to have its own piece of the UAV to do a certain mission and so you start adding all these gizmos and gadgets -- pretty soon vou've lost the focus ... You become really involved in trying to get a particular system to meet your particular requirements and you become very insistent on it."

Gold-Plated Washers

While the Army was working on Aquila, the Navy decided it also wanted a UAV.

The Navy's experience in its own skirmish with Syria in 1983 had provided a potent argument for the technology. Manned airplanes from two U.S. carriers attacked the same installation that the Israeli UAVs had flown against so successfully the year before. Without the advantage of drones, the U.S. was unable to replicate Israel's success. This time two piloted American planes were shot down. One pilot was killed and another was captured by Syrian forces.

In 1985, the U.S. Navy and Marines began to look into purchasing planes from Israel for "temporary" use while the U.S. developed its own drone aircraft. The Pioneers purchased were the successors to the models used by Israel in the Bekka Valley.

Eager to get the planes in production, the Navy, unlike the Army, ignored the traditional U.S. development and testing phase. They brought nine Pioneer systems, each with five air vehicles, for about $87.7 million -- a relatively paltry sum when compared to the $1 billion Aquila debacle. But the costs soon grew.

It soon became apparent that Pioneers were ill-suited for use at sea. The main problem was trying to get them back onto the aircraft carriers. That meant the Navy had to shell out an additional $50 million for research and development to get the systems up to speed. "It's a pretty sad story," says Louis J. Rodrigues, a GAO official in charge of defense acquisition issues. "The idea was to catch [the drones] in a net. But the net broke. So you strengthened the net and that bent the propeller. You change the propeller and that busts the net again -- we ended up having to redesign the whole thing."

Despite the problems with the Israeli drones it became clear that, given the U.S. military's failure to develop an alternative, for the forseeable future it would have to rely on Pioneers. That meant they needed spare parts, which the Pentagon hadn't thought to buy with the Pioneer because the system was supposed to be temporary.

Instead of soliciting competitive bids for the contract to provide the parts, the Pentagon handed the job to Pioneer's U.S. contractors -- the Maryland-based Aircraft Armament Incorporated (AAI) and the Israeli manufacturers of Pioneer, Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI). The two companies formed a joint venture to provide spare parts and service and named the company Pioneer UAV Incorporated (PUI).