HISTORY OF THE CONDOR MISSILE PROGRAM

The Navy's original requirement for a stand-off (longrange), air-to-surface guided missile capable of destroying heavily defended, high-value targets was first established in 1962. The basis of the need for a long-range or standoff missile was that this feature would allow pilots to stay clear of enemy defenses and thus save lives and aircraft.

Development of the missile began in 1965 and the prime contractor, Rockwell International, was selected in the following year after a competition with Northrop Corporation. A prototype of the television-guided missile was first launched in October of 1967.

A year later, however, the program encountered one of the first of the many termination efforts it was to endure when the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis recommended to then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Nitze (also a former Secretary of the Navy) that the program be cancelled because of cost increases, program delays, advances in dealing with enemy air defenses around high-value targets, concern about the warhead size, and the development of alternative weapon systems.

Experience in the air war in Southeast Asia had convinced the Navy of the need for a weapon like CONDOR and development was permitted to continue, despite Nitze's reservations. Still further delays occurred, however, in the course of efforts to develop a liquid fuel motor, an approach that was finally abandoned.

The complete weapon system consists of the missile itself (with solid propellant motors, flight control system, data link electro-optical (TV) target acquisition system, and warhead), a pod to be mounted on the launching aircraft for controlling and testing the missile, and special test equipment for checking the missile's operational condition before the carrying aircraft departs from the aircraft carrier. The Navy considered using the CONDOR system with several aircraft but finally chose the A-6 attack plane to carry the CONDOR. Use of the A-6, a two-place aircraft, would require its two-man crews and maintenance technicians to be trained in the use of the CONDOR before it could be operationally deployed.

In March 1970, the first powered flight of the missile was achieved. Later that same year, the General Accounting Office issued one of its periodic reports on this and other tactical, air-to-ground missiles and concluded that it was less effective in performance than the WALLEYE II. The Navy completed its flight demonstrations during August of the following year.

During 1972 and 1973, the Air Force conducted demonstrations of the missile. At the same time, an effort was undertaken to develop a new guidance system for the missile. A1though repeatedly asked to examine the CONDOR for possible joint service use, the Air Force decided at this time, as it would on all subsequent occasions, that the CONDOR did not meet its requirements in terms of range, all-weather capability, and warhead size and type, among others.

In August 1974, the Navy accepted the first pilot production missile and plans were made to conduct an operational evaluation of the CONDOR, which began in December of 1974.

Throughout its development the CONDOR has been the focus of considerable skepticism in a number of quarters, including the House Appropriations Committee, the General Accounting Office, the Office of Management and Budget, and several elements of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The skepticism about the CONDOR program was based on a number of considerations, which are summarized below:

Cost Effectiveness. The cost effectiveness of a weapon system is determined by a multivariate analysis of a number of factors such as the ability of the system to perform its mission, the availability of alternative systems at lower or higher cost, the urgency of the requirement, the numbers to be procured, the nature of the planned deployment of the system, its training and logistics support or maintenance costs relative to the cost of similar systems, and the per unit and total life-cycle costs of the weapon system. A change in one of these variables can have a significant impact on the others and, thus, on overall cost effectiveness. A decrease in planned procurement, for example, will increase the cost of each system per unit and could thereby make an otherwise cost effective system unable to compete with alternatives.

In the case of CONDOR, the long, drawn-out development program adversely affected its cost-effectiveness in two ways. First, the costs of the program went up in absolute terms and as a result of inflation beginning in the 1970s. The unit cost of CONDOR ballooned from $70,000 per copy estimates in the early phases of development to a cost of $415,561 per missile in inflated 1976 dollars. Total program cost reached an estimated $412.3 million dollars or more in 1975.

Secondly, during this same period, there was an explosion in the technology of tactical weaponry, especially in air-tosurface weapons. Several weapons were available to perform essentially the same mission as the CONDOR. Among them are the

Air Force's Electro-Optical Glide Bomb (EOGB), the WALLEYE II missile and the TV-guided MAVERICK missile. In addition, equally promising developments in remotely-piloted vehicles (RPVS) and longer-range, stand-off missiles, such as the seaand air-launched cruise missiles, suggested that the CONDOR might be obsolescent before it could be produced in quantity. Several of the current technology systems did not perform as well as the CONDOR in its mission, but they were so much cheaper to procure that it seemed more cost effective to some weapon system analysts to use several of these cheaper weapons rather than a single CONDOR.

It was pointed out, moreover, that the CONDOR's mission was a specialized one. Its primary purpose was to destroy heavily defended land targets such as bridges, power stations and dams; the secondary mission was against ships.' In terms of the first objective, the CONDOR was essentially a limited-use weapon, since the number of such targets in any tactical theatre in range of the Navy's carriers is limited. In terms of the second mission, there exist alternatives more capable than the CONDOR, such as the HARPOON. For this reason, some experts believed, CONDOR should be procured only in small numbers and only a limited number of squadrons should be armed with it or aircrews trained in its

use.

Production of the CONDOR was also not favored by some because of its relatively small warhead size. Although the CONDOR's expected precision accuracy was thought by the Navy to overcome this limitation, there continued to be doubt that one CONDOR missile would suffice to take out the designated targets, as planned. This situation raised an additional question of cost-effectiveness, since, if several CONDORS were required to destroy a specific target, more would have to be procured at CONDOR's high price. Furthermore, it was estimated, the necessity for using more CONDORS would require more A-6 aircraft to sortie and expose themselves to the enemy's interceptors or ground defenses. This requirement would likely result in the loss of more expensive A-6s, an occurrence which the CONDOR was supposedly designed to avoid. Though the CONDOR had a range nearly double that of the Air Force's TV-guided MAVERICK missile, some experts believed that, when slant range was considered, the CONDOR's stand-off capability was still not adequate to place the launch aircraft outside the range of hostile surface-to-air missiles (SAMs).

The CONDOR's special pod, its unique test equipment, the necessity for modifying the A-6 aircraft to carry CONDOR, the cost of training maintenance technicians and aircrews, the Navy's desire to purchase CONDOR in relatively large quantities for fleet-wide deployment and the anticipated costs of later design changes were factors which drove many experts to the conclusion that, at its price, the CONDOR was not competitive with other alternatives, especially during a period of pinched procurement budgets.

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Vulnerability. In the minds of some authorities, the CONDOR was excessively vulnerable to enemy defensive measures, though its primary mission was to hit heavily defended targets. The advantage of CONDOR was that, unlike glide bombs and other alternatives, it could be launched at low altitude, giving it a better chance of evading defensive missiles or anti-aircraft fire. However, in initial tests conducted by the Navy's Operational Test and Evaluation Force, the CONDOR was acquired and tracked by the radars associated with defensive surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems, suggesting that the CONDOR would require penetration aids to get to its target. Penetration aids are devices, such a decoys or anti-radiation missiles, that either delude or suppress enemy defenses. No provision had been made for penetration aids, though, and their addition to the cost of the CONDOR system would have increased its price tag still further, in comparison with other systems. Efforts to overcome CONDOR's supposed vulnerability by evasive tactics, it was thought, could be easily frustrated by altering target defenses or the defensive environment around the target.

Mission Effectiveness. Mission effectiveness, or operational utility, relates to the system's ability to carry out its assigned role--in this instance to acquire, reach and destroy hardened targets. It is closely tied to vulnerability in the case of CONDOR. Some CONDOR skeptics believed that the system was susceptible of enemy jamming, though measures had been taken to minimize this possibility. Others considered that CONDOR's problems in acquiring targets during periods of haze or low visibility seriously undermined its effectiveness and permitted a comparatively simple defense in the form of a smokescreen. Also at issue in the matter of mission effectiveness was the question of warhead size, addressed above.

Operational Suitability. Besides the basic performance of its mission, a weapon system is judged on its operational support requirements: the necessity for repair and maintenance in the field or in maintenance depots, the special parts and test equipment that are needed to keep it in an operating condition, the amount of additional, special training technicians and users must receive to be able to deal with the system, its storage and shipping requirements, its ability to withstand combat conditions with a minimum of injury, and the costs of these items. Some questions were raised about the operational suitability of the CONDOR, in terms of Navy estimates of operations and support (0&S) costs. In terms of these costs as related to the limited and special mission of the CONDOR, the system appears to have met major logistics standards.

Reliability. For the combat pilot, the reliability of his weapons is a major concern, perhaps the crucial one. During the operational evaluation of the CONDOR from December 1974 through the end of the summer 1975, a number of questions arose concerning the system's reliability. Questions of this kind are normal as pre-production models are tested and the contractors' ability to manufacture and assemble systems that consistently meet a high and uniform standard of reliability is examined and evaluated. Although the CONDOR did not perform in this regard as well as hoped and although both the prime contractor and the Navy received some criticism regarding the quality assurance program for the CONDOR, it was widely recognized that the solutions were readily available for the CONDOR's specific technical problems and that, in time, missiles could be manufactured in serial production that would meet all of the regular reliability standards.

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Nevertheless, during the operational evaluation of the CONDOR, the accumulated skepticism concerning the system on other grounds turned into open controversy and opposition. reason for this escalation of the debate lay in the impending production decision. While a system is in the research and development stage, it is difficult to do more than be constructively critical of it, since every problem encountered during R & D is theoretically susceptible of solution. As the production decision nears, however, the system must be able to overcome any lingering doubts.

After the production decision is made, the service will have to live with the system's defects or incur the greatly increased costs that are associated with making engineering design changes on a system that has gone into serial production.

In a report entitled "Cost-Growth in Major Weapons Systems," the General Accounting Office has estimated that these engineering design changes in the production phase are the largest single contributor to cost escalation. Usually, such engineering design changes result either from adding new capabilities to a basic system or from efforts to remedy defects not eliminated during the advanced engineering stage of development. Hastening an unready system into production or producing weapons at a rate so that lessons learned on initial models cannot readily be incorporated in subsequent models (called "excessive concurrency") can each be an invitation to this kind of cost-growth.

In the case of the CONDOR, considerations of this kind were very much in the forefront of the minds of its detractors, who estimated that even the high cost of the "basic CONDOR," as it was called, would climb still higher as a variety of options