For defense industry, lure of shiny objects rapidly fading.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra L.
• Position: Defense Watch

* The erstwhile dependable moneymakers in the defense industry no longer look like safe bets. Big-ticket weapon systems are being delayed, terminated, investigated or mired in endless reviews.

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A cursory glance at the current Pentagon weapons-modernization plan suggests that the next generation of military whizbang technology is not arriving any time soon, and neither is the dependable cash flow that industry came to expect in new hardware production contracts.

For arms manufacturers, the future looks uncertain, at best. Various attempts over the past decade to design replacements for current weapons have failed. After the sense of urgency that existed during the Cold War evaporated, the Pentagon's bureaucracies and Congress created a regulatory maze that, over the years, has turned procurement programs into Kafkaesque exercises of milestone reviews and requirements scrubbing. The problem, in this case, is not so much ponderous oversight but rather the absence of a dearly defined threat that guides the development of new technology. No replacement has yet emerged for the Soviet "evil empire" that spawned the development of most of the tanks, ships and airplanes that are still the mainstay of the U.S. military inventory.

The budget is always cited as a reason why programs are delayed. Yes, some relatively modest cuts are coming. But projections show the Defense Department still plans to spend anywhere from $110 billion to $120 billion annually on the procurement of new weapons over the next five years.

It's Pentagon indecision and unhappiness with the state of currently available technology, more so than budget cuts, that are holding up production contracts for new weapons.

In the Army, major modernization programs--a new ground combat vehicle and an armed helicopter--are moving at a snail's pace. The Navy's largest class of surface combatants--the Littoral Combat Ship--keeps lurching from one crisis to the next. The mother of all problem-plagued Pentagon programs, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, can't seem to escape trouble more than a decade into its development. The amphibious vehicle that the Marine Corps billed as its top modernization priority is back on the drawing board nearly two decades after it was conceived.

Amidst this cloud of confusion, some contractors might decide to wait for the good times to return, but most others are going to be following the money to what is increasingly becoming industry's more...