Monday 28 December 2015

DID KENNEDY HAVE PLANS TO GO AFTER THE CONTRACTORS OF THE ANP?

R&D: Ill-Starred Nuclear Plane Project Is Subject of Hard Look by General Accounting Office
A post mortem on the nuclear-powered aircraft program, which was canceled by Presidential order in 1961 after 15 years and $1 billion had gone into the work, has opportunely appeared at a time when the TFX affair has centered public attention on federal procurement policies and management of research.
The review of the so-called ANP (Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion) project was carried out by the General Accounting Office, the auditing arm of the legislative branch, which was created by Congress to keep tabs on how the money the legislators appropriate is spent. Although much of the material in the GAO's review of the Joint Atomic Energy Commission-Department of Defense project has appeared before in Congressional hearings and committee reports, the new study, with its detailed chronology and allocation of blame in unemotional auditor's terms, makes a useful primer of how hot to conduct an R&D project. (A copy of the report, Review of the Manned Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Program, can be obtained for $1 from the Accounting and Auditing Library, General Accounting Office, 441 G St, N.W., Washington 25.)
The GAO review says that the ANP project suffered severely over the years from changes in emphasis and direction in the program. Sternest criticism, perhaps, is directed at the Department of Defense and the Air Force for failing to furnish "sufficient and timely guidance to those responsible for carrying out the ANP program." The record shows, for example, that an AEC request in 1948 to DOD for its views on the military worth of a nuclear-powered plane did not receive a reply until 1951, and then only under pressure.
The report goes on to relate how facilities costing more than $17 million were built but not used, or little used, and how expensive design and related work was wasted. The GAO says also that cost data obtained from prime contractors was unsatisfactory and that unallowable costs were charged to contracts.
The veering course which the project took and its failure to pay off in a prototype plane or engine brought it under constant scrutiny from Congress and the Executive, and it was subjected to a program review no less than 13 times in the last 6 years of its life. People familiar with the program in this period say these studies tended to turn into reviews of earlier reviews and to produce recommendations which were not put into effect.
Gao's major recommendation for future projects like ANP is for one agency to obtain congressional authorization for the cost of the project, since this would eliminate the problems inherent in dual control and "facilitate Congressional review and strengthen Congressional control."
Though many persons in Congress and the agencies remained convinced of the feasibility and value of the anp? Congressman Mel Price (Democrat of Illinois) is perhaps the best known of its advocates? The absence of visible results lost the project many supporters in Congress, and in March 1961, shortly after President Kennedy took office, he asked Congress to terminate the anp program because he said "the possibility of achieving a militarily useful aircraft in the foreseeable future is still very remote."
Congress complied with the President's request, the project disappeared from the budget, and the work was transferred to the aec budget as a non-defense research item.
Aec officials say that many of the lessons learned in the work on anp, particularly in reactor development and materials research, have proved valuable in the joint aec-nasa work on the nuclear space program, which has a budget of about $400 million for fiscal year 1963. No agency now is working on a nuclear-powered aircraft project.
The gao study centers on the administrative aspects of the anp program and does not delve deeply into matters of policy, which is quite natural in an organization concerned with Executive agency fiscal operations and scrupulous never to intrude in areas where its employers, Congress, may be directly involved.
The review does, however, make the essential point that the anp project was in competition with other defense systems, including missiles, and that over the past 15 years the project had suffered the common fate of manned aircraft? The shift in emphasis to missiles.
The project's ultimately fatal flaw was the failure to solve the central problem of developing a small, light, high-powered, adequated shielded reactor, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara last week underlined the point when he told the defense procurement subcommittee of the Joint Economic Committee that too much time and money was spent on an airplane and not enough on a reactor.
In retrospect, the anp decision seems to have been an early example, and perhaps a classic one, of the application of Secretary McNamara's "cost effectiveness" analysis of major research and development programs? That combination of technological, strategic, and budgetary considerations which Congress and the defense contractors are now suspiciously appraising?
-John Walsh






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