The $5 Billion Misunderstanding: The Collapse of the Navy's A-12 Stealth Bomber Program

by James P. Stevenson

In April 1990 the U.S. Navy's A-12--a replacement aircraft for the outdated A-6 Intruder--had the support of the Secretary of Defense before Congress. Nine months later Secretary Cheney cancelled the A-12, making it the largest weapons program ever terminated by the Pentagon and the first cancelled for default with the Pentagon making demands that the contractors return the money already paid them. Ten years later, questions remain unanswered and lessons are still to be learned. With access to a wealth of government and contractor documents and more than a hundred players at all levels of involvement, James Stevenson takes readers into the once-forbidden world of "special access" programs to examine the demise of the A-12, charging that the documents exposed fraudulent and even illegal activity. He faults the navy not just for mismanagement but for ignoring the statutes and regulations that require Congress to appropriate money before entering into contracts. Rather than a single big mistake, he finds the A-12's path from honor to derision to be littered with hundreds of mistakes and attempts to right wrongs or cover them up. In recounting the events that eventually led to the Stealth bomber's cancellation, Stevenson cites countless examples of the mismatch between perception and reality experienced by navy program managers, the defense department, Congress, and the contractors. In the process of telling the story, he takes on the entire defense acquisition process and its responsibility for the program that cost American taxpayers over $5 billion yet produced not a single airplane for their defense.

Genres: Nonfiction

483 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Troy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, in that I live in the professional community and acquisition structure under which this occurred - and I can totally understand how it did. My criticism is that Stevenson is so anti-Navy, with little irrelevant digs at the Navy every chance he gets, that it undermines his credibility as an impartial reporter of the events. He's clearly not really interested in being impartial, granted, as the whole book is a critique of "the system", but his overt anti-Navy sentiment, specifically in comparison to the other services and even OSD, leaves the reader wondering if he isn't exaggerating some events just to underscore his point. The bias is just too obvious.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazingly thorough work. This book, or perhaps a condensed version of it, should be required reading for anyone, civilian or military, involved with the design and procurement process. It shows how a flawed conception, utilizing bleeding-edge and immature technologies, inadequately-budgeted, managed by people more interested in protecting their reputations and careers than performing their jobs, is allowed to go unchecked. The inevitable programmatic failure resulted.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tremendously researched and well written. A must read for acquisition professionals.

[Jon Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in hardback, with the copy I read being obtained via interlibrary loan from the Neumann Library at the University of Houston Clear Lake campus. I owned a copy of the book years ago, never got around to reading it, and eventually donated it to the library. Now I have made a serious attempt at reading it, and got about 80% of the way through it before I had to return it (no renewals allowed on interlibrary loan books). The book tells in densely written detail the woeful tale of the US Navy's attempt to acquire a stealthy attack aircraft starting in the mid 1980's. The intention was that the new Navy plane, the A-12 Avenger II, would replace the aging A-6 Intruder. At that time the Air Force was developing 2 stealth aircraft, and the Navy felt they couldn't be left out of the stealth game. Per the author, the Navy mishandled practically every aspect of the procurement process and violated the US Constitution not once but many times. The book is extremely detailed, covering the minutia of the procurement process and the myriad personnel involved from the Navy, the defense contractors, and the federal government. I started the book hoping for technical details on the A-12 devolopment, design and manufacturing, and there is some of that in the book, but the majority of the book deals with the procurement process and how it was mishandled. By the time the program was cancelled in early 1991, 5 billion US taxpayer dollars had been spent and not a single flyable airplane was built. Four out of five stars.

[Sven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brutal takedown of the defense acquisition process. Many of the same problems persist, some 35 years after the A-12 program ended, and 25 years after this book was written. The final chapter, "What, If Anything, Can Be Learned," offers an excellent summary of the full story without getting into the fine minutiae that the rest of the book deals with. It also offers many recommendations for Congress to adopt to improve accountability and reduce conflicts of interest. These are still worth considering, and I don't think any have ever been adopted.