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href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-022304copter_lat,1,2896519.story?coll=la-home-headlines">http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-022304copter_lat,1,2896519.story?coll=la-home-headlines</A>
<H1>After $8 Billion, Pentagon Shelves Helicopter</H1>
<DIV>By Esther Schrader<BR><BR>2:50 PM PST, February 23, 2004<BR><BR>WASHINGTON
— In a sign that the Pentagon is beginning to feel the budgetary heat, the Army
today canceled its Comanche helicopter program, bringing an end to the
development of a craft that had been 21 years and $8 billion dollars in the
making.<BR><BR>The cancellation is one of the biggest in Army history. And
unlike the landscape less than two years ago, when Secretary of Defense Donald
H. Rumsfeld ordered the Army's $11-billion Crusader artillery system canceled
over the protests of senior Army officials, this time the Army decided to take
the bullet.<BR><BR>The Army had little choice, senior officials of the service
said. The RAH-66 Comanche, widely derided as a Cold War-era design with little
utility in today's battles, was uniquely vulnerable to an argument made
repeatedly by Rumsfeld: that bloated, big-ticket projects conceived during
another era are putting Pentagon efforts to modernize at risk.<BR><BR>When the
Comanche was conceived in 1983, the Army was eager for a lightweight, stealthy
reconnaissance helicopter that would be able to move ahead of large tank
formations to gather and distribute intelligence and attack enemy
formations.<BR><BR>But since that day, the Pentagon has developed any number of
aircraft that can do all that — among them Blackhawk and Apache helicopters to
attack, and unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites to survey.<BR><BR>Meanwhile,
the Comanche program encountered one technical setback after another. It was
overhauled six times as the cost per helicopter grew. And two years ago,
Rumsfeld announced that the program, originally slated to cost $47 billion for
1,207 helicopters, would be cut in half. Under that plan, 650 choppers were to
be ready for use in 2009.</DIV>
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