Grounding Comanche

Lt. Gen. Joseph Yakovac, the Army's top acquisition officer, rushed to Huntsville, Ala., on Feb. 23 to tell nearly 400 workers on the Comanche program that the service was scrapping its 21-year, multibillion-dollar effort to build the reconnaissance and attack helicopter. He hoped to beat the Pentagon's announcement, but the news had already reached the program office by the time he arrived. Yakovac was left to give a pep talk to program managers, administrators and contractors who would soon be out of jobs.

"This is not a performance issue. The program was terminated because the Army has tough decisions to make with a war going on," Yakovac told workers who gathered in an auditorium at Redstone Arsenal.

Since that day, Col. Michael Cantor, who had become program manager for Comanche about six months earlier, has had his own tough decisions to make. He had to find jobs for civilian workers and issue 60-day layoff notices to contractors. He had to review and close out thousands of contracts and purchase orders for Comanche. Then there was the question of what to do with prototype aircraft already built and how to save reams of technical data. Indeed, Cantor has been just as busy since the contract ended as he was when he was racing toward the Army's goal of building 121 Comanches by 2011.

"When you are running a program, you never really think about termination," says Cantor, adding that neither the Defense Department nor the Army has a guidebook on how to close down a weapons program. He's tracking lessons learned from shutting down Comanche and will work with the Defense Acquisition University to develop a handbook.

Almost immediately, Cantor learned that a daily Web site and weekly town hall meetings for employees were necessary to counter rumors about how and when employees would be let go. About 70 civilians and 160 contract employees worked on the Comanche program, and another 150 workers at the Army Aviation and Missile Command in Huntsville supported the effort. Cantor focused most on finding jobs for the civilians who worked for him directly.

The Army will save $14.6 billion by 2011 by scrapping Comanche, and most of the savings will go toward upgrading and buying more existing armed reconnaissance, utility and transport helicopters. The 70 civilians, many of them engineers and contract administrators, were asked which other program they'd like to work on. About 90 percent were placed in jobs they preferred and a few were assigned positions, but no one was laid off. Most of the support personnel from Aviation and Missile Command also went to new programs.

Many of the contractors also found jobs with the Army's other helicopter programs after being laid off, Cantor says. "There is not a glut of unemployed contractors in Huntsville," he says. "I see a lot of familiar faces in the hallways who are now working other programs."

About 20 government employees and contractors are assigned to a transition team that is closing down the program, Cantor says. They are reviewing the nearly 10,000 outstanding purchase orders and contracts to determine how much money is still owed contractors and what property is owed the government. Those contractors range from the Comanche's two main manufacturers, Boeing Co. and Sikorsky, to scores of smaller companies in 34 states that designed aircraft screws, wrote software for Comanche's digital system and provided technical expertise. All told, cutting those contracts short will cost the Army as much as $680 million by the end of fiscal 2005, Cantor says.

Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst with defense consultant Teal Group Corp. in Washington, believes the Army has grossly underestimated the cost of shutting down the Comanche program. "Nobody in industry really believes that figure," he says. Aboulafia predicts costs could push the price tag to $1.5 billion.

Cantor, meanwhile, is taking inventory of what contractors have built and developed. The designs for some of the Comanche's systems, such as the radar and flight controls, will be used for other Army helicopters. Contractors have until mid-June to say whether they want to keep the hardware they've manufactured or turn it over to the Army. Reams of test flight data and technical information will be collected and stored at Fort Belvoir, Va. As for the prototype aircraft, the Army began displaying one at its Aviation Museum in Fort Rucker, Ala., last month.