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Sensible acquisition

In making a bold new call for sweeping cuts in some of the military’s most high-profile weapons programs, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is striving to bring to America’s military posture an ingredient that too often has been lacking in recent years.

It’s something called reality.

Gates said his plan aims to “reshape the priorities of America’s defense establishment” and better balance both the short- and long-term security needs of the nation.

Translation: We need to apply discipline to an acquisition system that has been allowed to run amok.

In Gates’ cross hairs are programs that share an essential characteristic: They won’t help the troops who are slugging it out in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The list includes:

• The Air Force’s F-22 fighter, which, while unrivaled in the world, is designed to take on Russia or China, not the Taliban. Indeed, the plane has not flown a single mission in Iraq or Afghanistan. At $140 million a copy, 187 is enough.

• The Army’s $160 billion — that’s billion, with a “b” — Future Combat Systems family of armored vehicles, which couldn’t survive the low-cost, improvised-explosive-device tactics of today’s insurgents. Indeed, Gates himself said the vehicles are designed to avoid attacks rather than withstand them.

• The Corps’ VH-71 — the presidential helicopter — a program whose original $6.5 billion budget has more than doubled as new high-tech requirements have been added, making the helicopter more expensive than Air Force One, the president’s Boeing 747 jet.

• And the missile defense program, the Pentagon’s most expensive project, which remains unproven and is costing $10 billion a year.

In their place, Gates wants to accelerate the stealthy joint-service F-35 fighter and the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship, which will be useful in coastal counterinsurgency operations.

He also wants to invest $2 billion on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets, including 50 more Predator drones, add more than 2,000 special operations troops and take back thousands of jobs that have been shifted to contractors in recent years.

Gates does not get the final say on any of this. His plan is a starting point, and will face fierce opposition from lawmakers who will seek to protect jobs in their states and districts.

Beware, then, those who wrap up their arguments in a cynical claim to “support the troops” or even a concern for our national security. America expects to have the best equipped and best trained troops in the world. But that doesn’t mean we want, need or can afford every gold-plated, pipe-dream system that comes down the pike.

Gates’s plan takes a practical, common-sense approach to investing in the capabilities that will help meet America’s real-world security challenges.

As he noted: “Every defense dollar spent to over-insure against a remote or diminishing risk, or in effect to run up the score in a capability where the United States is already dominant, is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in, and improve capabilities in areas where we are under-invested and potentially vulnerable. That is a risk I will not take.”

Well said, Mr. Secretary.