Army Maneuver

Wickham spreads the blame

As senior military adviser to Secretaries of Defense over the years, Army General John A. Wickham Jr. learned much about the ways of Washington. For example: there are times when the military is expected to shoulder full responsibility for its snafus, and there are other times when it makes sense to spread the blame around. Last week, in his first meeting with reporters since being made Army Chief of Staff in June, Wickham deemed the climate right for straight talk. In any fair-minded parceling out of responsibility for the military's mounting problems with weapons systems that cost shockingly more than planned and still do not work, said Wickham, full shares should be assigned to both U.S. industry and the U.S. Congress.

The general blamed private industry for turning out weapons and other equipment riddled with faulty materials and shoddy workmanship. "There are some things I can get emotional about, and quality control is one of them," he said. "The Department of Defense could save billions if we could have better quality assurance." The failure of contractors to deliver on such assurances, Wickham said, has plagued everything from weapons systems to the most mundane materiel. The electronic weaponry of the Patriot ground-to-air missile was so failure-prone that the Army has decided to stop testing it for now. Until recently the Copperhead guided artillery projectile was beset with targeting problems. Even fatigue uniforms are not immune: one shipment shrank on being laundered.

The weapons system whose testing has recently caused the most embarrassment to the Army is the Pershing II missile, which is scheduled for deployment in West Germany four months from now but has failed in five of its 16 experimental firings. Every one of the misfires, Wickham charged, was the result of quality-control problems. Pershing's contractor is the Martin Marietta Corp., with headquarters in Bethesda, Md. Army officials familiar with the program explained that the most recent test, on July 27, was botched because of improperly placed shims, or washers, in the hot-thrust section of the missile. Glitches that have caused other failures include a faulty hydraulic pump and a misplaced wire that led to a short circuit. Officials of Martin Marietta declined to respond to Wickham's blast.

Turning to Congress, Wickham accused the legislative branch of having "aggravated" problems surrounding another of the Army's headache projects, the M-1 Abrams tank. Deliveries of the AGT-1500C turbine engines for the huge (120,023-lb.) vehicles have been so slow that the Army has been forced to cannibalize the power plants of field-tested units and use them on tanks coming off the production line. Under Secretary of the Army James R. Ambrose estimates that this rip-out process has cost "well over a million dollars so far." Yet a House-Senate conference committee refused to allow the Army to choose a second manufacturer. The apparent reason: members bowed to pressures from New England legislators to keep the jobs dependent on it with the current contractor, Avco Corp.'s Lycoming Division in Stratford, Conn.

The Army's agreement with Avco contains no penalty clauses for late delivery, a loophole Wickham called "a contract deficiency." Moreover, the Army waited so long before even considering the possibility of going to a second supplier that, given the two to three years start-up time, it may now be too late.

Noting that both Wickham and Ambrose were appointed by the White House, one Army officer summed up: "The Administration is shooting rubber bullets at Congress and the contractors. Nothing very lethal is involved." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.