Among the weapons scrapped were Boeing’s ground-based vehicle network for the Army, a Northrop Grumman mini-submarine for Navy SEALs and a chopper from Textron’s Bell Helicopter unit.
The tally published this week is the latest edition of a yearly report measuring the effectiveness of the process for spending billions of dollars annually to develop and build new weapons and outlining improvements. The updated list of canceled projects represents 17 percent of the 136 major weapons in advanced development for which the military had set cost, schedule and performance milestones from 1997 to 2015.
The individual cancellations all had been announced previously. The most recent was the Navy’s decision this year to kill Lockheed Martin’s underwater drone, which was supposed to hunt down mines for the service’s Littoral Combat Ship. It was scrapped as unreliable even after the Navy spent $700 million, 44 percent more than its original development budget, according to the report. – READ MORE
