Going Public - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 90

Force, which served as executive agent of the joint program. When President
Jimmy Carter canceled the b-1 bomber in 1977, the Strategic Air Command
dropped plans to acquire six hundred gps receivers. The Air Force then post-
poned satellite purchases and delayed launches. 27 Whereas the original plan
would have yielded limited operational capability at the end of the test phase,
the decision to delay pushed any practical use of gps further into the future.
In January 1979, one month before a scheduled second dsarc hearing to
review test data prior to authorizing full-scale engineering development and
production, the General Accounting Office (gao; renamed the Government
Accountability Office in 2004), issued a blistering report to Congress. Its title,
The navstar Global Positioning System: A Program with Many Uncertainties ,
was more reserved than its findings. The validation studies, originally sched-
uled to run from December 1973 to March 1978, had slipped fourteen months
by early 1979, and their cost had risen from $178 million to more than $406
million. Together with full engineering and production costs, the total program
estimate had more than doubled, to $1.7 billion, $900 million more than orig-
inally budgeted. 28 Moreover, gao found that the program budget did not
include $2.5 billion in related future costs for user equipment, satellite replen-
ishment, and space shuttle launches. That raised the projected total program
cost to more than $4.25 billion, the report estimated. Beyond schedule slip-
pages and budget overruns, gao criticized the program for failing to justify its
high cost with hard data on the number of users or by identifying cost savings
that would come from replacing existing systems. By this time, Bradford Par-
kinson had retired from the Air Force and gone to work for Rockwell Interna-
tional, the contractor building the gps satellites. Col. Donald W. Henderson
succeeded him, and the deputy program manager, Col. Steve Gilbert, moved
to a post at the Pentagon, where he advocated for gps development. 29
gps survived the second dsarc hearing (finally held in June 1979), which
authorized full-scale production, but just six months later, in December 1979,
the Pentagon made across-the-board budget cuts of $512 million, or roughly
30 percent of defense spending, for fiscal years 1981 to 1986. This led the Air
Force to scale back the constellation from twenty-four to eighteen satellites—
too few to achieve the promised accuracy—and for three years, the Air Force
“zeroed out” the program, effectively mothballing it. 30 In June 1980, for exam-
ple, the Air Force requested $16.3 million, a mere 6 percent of the $234.5 mil-
lion the joint program office had requested. 31 Whether these cuts represented
simply a lack of support or a canny maneuver to shift more of the financial