Polimeni: Pentagon U-2 decision a mistake

Michael Polimeni is chairman of the Defense Industry Advocacy Committee of the Association for a Better Long Island, a developers' group.

Our nation's enemies must be very confused, but more than a little pleased. Rather than continue the use of the Global Hawk, one of the most effective unmanned reconnaissance aircraft -- which is designed, in part, on Long Island by Northrop Grumman -- the Pentagon announced last week that it will heavily depend on the U-2 spy plane for a number of recon duties.

The U-2 was flying when Dwight Eisenhower was president. The same kind of aircraft was shot down by the Soviets during the Cold War. And the Chinese. And the Cubans.

Yet, as part of its budget-reduction program, the Pentagon says it will deploy the aging U-2, while discontinuing production of the current version of the innovative Global Hawk -- and potentially mothballing it. (The Navy will still use a small number of another version of the Global Hawk.)

Defense leaders claim the U-2 will be a cost-effective alternative for gathering intelligence. But the decision flies in the face of other Pentagon plans to expand the use of drones and reduce military staffing. It's not only confusing, it is disturbing.

The unmanned Global Hawk has never put a pilot in harm's way. The aircraft routinely flies 24-hour missions and has the means to stay aloft for 42 hours, long after the U-2 needs to get its pilot back home. Global Hawk, which first flew in 1998, can go anywhere, and then use its state-of-the-art technology to network with other spy platforms, creating an integrated approach to spot trouble and relay that information to the right people in real time. It is so good it's become the baseline for the next generation of remote-controlled reconnaissance aircraft. Most U-2s can't connect with our military satellites, and two-thirds of them are either used to train the pilots or are down for maintenance.

So why has the Pentagon decided to turn back the clock? Loren Thompson from the Washington-based Lexington Institute says the Air Force seems to be "counting the savings on paper, but the actual savings won't exist" -- because the Air Force appears not to have taken into consideration the higher cost of maintaining the aging U-2.

Last year Congress insisted that a number of U-2s remain flyable through 2016 -- but that was for the purpose of having enough reconnaissance aircraft available until a sufficient number of Global Hawks arrives. It was done with the recognition that Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk has been effective in Afghanistan and Libya and proven its value in helping direct humanitarian aid in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. It was also done in the recognition that continuing to use piloted planes -- which have been vulnerable to anti-aircraft missiles since as early as 1960 -- is unconscionable.

But rather than allow for a pool of reserve aircraft, the Pentagon's move to cancel the primary version of the Global Hawk creates dependence on an airplane that should be in a museum and not on the front lines of our nation's intelligence missions.

Long Island's Northrop Grumman will be hurt by this decision, as will other local firms: American Aerospace Controls, BJG Electronics, Wilco Industries, EDO Corp., North Hills Signal Processing and Ametek Thermal Systems, among others. That's not the reason to proceed with a strategic weapons system. But we need to appreciate that decisions inside the Beltway affect our local economy and industrial base. Long Island's defense industry is alive and well, and this reversal by the defense establishment will harm our ability to compete for other projects.

More important, someone in the Pentagon has made a strategic reconnaissance blunder. The cancellation of the primary version of the Global Hawk needs to be revisited and reversed.

The only good news about this dangerous Pentagon policy is that if a U-2 is shot down and the pilot manages to evade his captors, the only aviation technology the bad guys will get is what the Russians proudly put on display in Red Square in 1960.