Defense · Satire
WASHINGTON — The Department of Defense has opened a formal investigation into contractor Halberd Systems after the company delivered its new transport aircraft three weeks ahead of schedule and $40 million under budget, a sequence of events officials describe as 'unprecedented, unexplainable, and frankly alarming.'
'We have procedures for overruns,' said procurement director Vince Callahan, standing before a wall chart of the acquisition process that resembles a subway map for a city designed by an enemy. 'We have procedures for delays, for cancellations, for the thing where the program is technically alive but everyone agrees not to look at it. We have no procedure for this. The aircraft is here. It works. It was cheap. Every alarm we have is ringing.'
The investigation will examine several theories. The leading hypothesis is clerical error — that the aircraft is actually the long-overdue deliverable from a different, older contract and has simply arrived very, very late, which would restore order. A second theory holds that Halberd built the plane wrong, and the missing $40 million represents features that were skipped; inspectors have so far failed to find anything missing, which one official called 'exactly what you'd expect from something extremely wrong.' The third theory, considered the darkest, is that everything is fine.
'If everything is fine, we have a serious problem,' explained retired General Marcus Webb, now a procurement analyst. 'The entire ecosystem is calibrated for overruns. Budgets assume them. Careers are built managing them. Congressional hearings are scheduled around them — there are members whose whole personality is being mad about a helicopter. If a program can just work, people will start asking why the others don't. Halberd hasn't delivered an aircraft. They've delivered a comparison. In this town, a comparison is a weapon.'
Halberd Systems, a mid-sized firm that won the contract after two larger competitors submitted bids described as 'aspirational,' seems bewildered by the reaction. 'We read the requirements and built the thing in the requirements,' said CEO Diane Fasano, in what investigators have flagged as a suspiciously simple account. 'We used the schedule to plan the work. When parts were expensive, we found cheaper parts that met spec. I keep explaining this and people keep waiting for the rest. There is no rest.'
Fasano's methods, detailed in documents subpoenaed by investigators, include several practices foreign to the industry: a meeting every Monday where problems are stated out loud; a rule that nobody may describe a delay as a 'schedule refinement'; and a policy Fasano calls 'the thing costs what it costs,' under which estimates are generated by asking the engineers rather than the sales team. Experts warn these techniques, while effective, 'do not scale to a company with 40 lobbyists.'
Rival contractors have responded with public concern for safety. 'We simply couldn't cut corners the way Halberd apparently has,' said a spokesman for a competitor whose own flagship program is nine years late and has caught fire twice, in both senses. 'When we deliver an aircraft, the taxpayer knows every dollar of the $340 million was spent on something.' Asked what, specifically, he concluded the interview.
Congress, meanwhile, has scheduled hearings, though members admit uncertainty about their angle. 'Usually I hold up a chart of the overrun and get angry,' said one representative. 'My staff made me a chart of this and it's just a bar that's shorter than the other bar. I can't yell at that. My district doesn't send me here to be pleased.'
At press time, the Pentagon confirmed its response to the situation would take the only form it trusts: a comprehensive review of how the aircraft came in under budget, commissioned at a cost of $60 million, expected in four years.