Pentagon Budget Still Contains 6 High-Priced Systems

There are still a handful of pretty pricey systems that the Pentagon is buying.

The Pentagon told Congress on Tuesday the Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter program and five other big weapons programs were vital to national security and should continue despite big cost overruns that triggered live-or-die reviews.

The U.S. Defense Department told lawmakers that all six programs met five conditions required to keep them going under the Nunn-McCurdy law which requires detailed reviews once a program's unit costs rise 50 percent above initial estimates.

The other systems?

-- the DDG-1000 destroyer built by General Dynamics Corp, where the unit cost jumped by 86.5 percent due to the Navy's decision to buy just three ships instead of the 10 planned. To cut costs, Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter ordered removal of a radar from the design, and a one-year delay in the initial use of the program to fiscal 2016.

-- Boeing Co's Apache Block III program to upgrade the AH-64 helicopter, which saw its unit costs increase by 25.5 percent due to the addition of 56 new aircraft to an existing program to upgrade 634 existing helicopters.

-- a remote mine-hunting system for use on a new class of coastal warships, which saw its unit cost increase by 79.5 percent after the Navy decided to buy 54 fewer systems.

-- Boeing's Wideband Global Satellite (WGS) program, whose unit cost rose by 27.2 percent due to a production break of three years and a decision to buy two more satellites.

-- a U.S. Army common missile warning program run by BAE Systems Plc, where unit costs nearly tripled after the Pentagon cut the quantity from 2,618 missiles to 208, spreading development costs over a much smaller overall number.

The Pentagon said the missile warning program was technologically immature and faced unrealistic performance expectations, but it needed to continue since the system was urgently needed in Afghanistan on CH-47 helicopters.

By: Brant