The Army spent about $6.9 billion over 21 years on the RAH-66 Comanche stealth helicopter and ended up with two test aircraft that never served in a combat unit.
Story Snapshot
- The Pentagon canceled the Comanche on Monday, Feb. 23, 2004, after about $6.9 billion had been spent on it.
- Only two prototypes, or test aircraft, were ever flown, and neither joined the Army’s combat fleet.
- Divided by the two prototypes, that program-wide spending works out to about $3.45 billion each. That is blunt math, not a sticker price.
- Government auditors found the program’s research and development cost estimate grew 231 percent.
- Both prototypes are held by the U.S. Army Aviation Museum in Alabama.
Why The Army Pulled The Plug
The Army killed the Comanche because its costs kept climbing and the enemy it was built to fight had changed. The helicopter was designed in the Cold War to face the large Soviet and Warsaw Pact armies. An Army review found that its stealth features and built-in self-diagnosis systems were not vital for the wars the Army was fighting, and that helicopters already in service needed protective upgrades right away. “It’s a big decision. We know it’s a big decision, but it’s the right decision,” Gen. Peter Schoomaker, then the Army chief of staff, said at the time.
The Comanche was meant to be a stealthy scout and attack helicopter, built to be hard for enemy radar to see. It was to replace the OH-58 Kiowa and AH-1 Cobra and fly ahead of the AH-64 Apache. Boeing and Sikorsky won the job to build it in April 1991. The first prototype flew on Jan. 4, 1996, and the second joined flight tests in March 1999. Six test aircraft were once planned, but budget cuts after the Cold War trimmed that to two.
Billions Spent, No Fleet Delivered
By the time it was canceled, the whole program was valued at $38 billion. The expected cost of each helicopter had risen to $58.9 million from an original target of $12 million. The planned order had already been cut from 1,213 helicopters to 650. Early plans had called for 2,096.
An Army article on the museum says the Comanche “never quite made it into the Army’s operational inventory.” In plain terms, it never became part of the fleet that soldiers fly on missions. The two prototypes flew test flights, but no Comanche ever flew a combat mission.
Costs Spiraled Before The End
The Government Accountability Office, Congress’s budget watchdog, found that the program’s research and development estimate grew 231 percent and the time to deliver it stretched 120 percent. Auditors also warned the Comanche could eat up about 64 percent of the Army’s projected aviation budget in fiscal 2008. The date for the first combat-ready unit had slipped to September 2009.
About $14 billion set aside from 2004 through 2011 to buy 121 Comanches was moved to other needs. The plan called for 796 new helicopters, including Black Hawks and Apaches, upgrades to more than 1,400 helicopters already in the fleet, and more unmanned drones. A senior Army official said at the time that the Pentagon expected to pay Boeing and Sikorsky $450 million to $680 million to end the contract.
Part Of A Pattern At The Pentagon
The Comanche came two years after the Pentagon canceled the $11 billion Crusader artillery program in 2002. “It took so long to get into production it was simply overtaken by new threats and new capabilities,” Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, a research group, said in 2004. A former senior Pentagon official put it more bluntly to a defense writer: “What a waste of time.”
That pattern matters for the taxpayers who foot the bill. A helicopter meant to give American soldiers an edge became a case study in cost growth and slipping schedules. Visitors to the Army Aviation Museum can see one of the prototypes up close. For conservatives who have long warned about runaway Pentagon spending, the Comanche is a hard lesson: advanced technology means little if a program never reaches the troops it was built to protect.
Sources:
19fortyfive.com, en.wikipedia.org, globalsecurity.org, army.mil