Filed at 9:11 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Air Force plans to end a Northrop Grumman Corp. program to develop an airborne surface surveillance system and a radar system to defend against cruise missiles, defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Virginia-based Lexington Institute said on Monday.
The Air Force had already scaled back the program, which was slated to cost $7.3 billion through 2013, driven in part by congressional budget cuts and a growing push to conduct surveillance from space.
Now it plans to cancel the project outright in fiscal 2008 to free funds for other weapons programs, said Thompson, who has close ties to defense officials.
``The service is abandoning its plans to build a next generation radar plane, and is also canceling the new radar that could have gone onto its existing (Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System, or JSTARS) plane,'' he said.
Air Force spokesman Don Manuszewski declined comment on the proposed cuts. He said the Air Force had spent $1.67 billion on the E-10A program and its radar to date.
Thompson said several Air Force officials confirmed to him that the E-10A Multisensor Command and Control Aircraft and its active electronically scanned array radar would be canceled.
Only a small part of the project, aimed at building a radar for the unmanned Global Hawk high-altitude surveillance plane, also built by Northrop, would continue, Thompson said.
``We've spent hundreds of millions to get this radar to the point where we're sure it would work,'' he said. ``Now the Air Force wants to terminate the program and waste that money.''
Thompson said Air Force officials planned to use existing equipment to upgrade the JSTARS radar and acknowledged that solution was less than ideal.
One senior defense official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters: ``It's all about finding the right balance between the things we really need, and the things that we would like.''
A top Northrop Grumman official said he had no orders to stop work on the program. He noted that the Pentagon's budget plans for fiscal 2008 were still under discussion.
Northrop on Monday announced the first successful flight test of the Multi-Platform Radar Technology Insertion Program airborne surveillance radar developed for the Global Hawk planes. It said the test aircraft flew for two hours at speed up to 100 knots at an altitude of 22,000 feet.
Raytheon Co. is a big subcontractor on the radar.
Dave Nagy, Northrop's vice president for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance programs, said the Air Force already spent about $700 million as part of a $1.2 billion program to develop the new family of modular radars.
Canceling the program now posed a risk to existing JSTAR radars, which were built more than 20 years ago and have dwindling supplies of spare parts and components. Moreover, the Global Hawk radar was too small to do wide-area reconnaissance and cruise missile defense, Nagy said.
Thompson said Air Force officials insisted the existing JSTARS aircraft, based on a Boeing 707, could fly several more decades. ``It's one thing to be able to keep flying, it's another thing to be able to actually find the targets,'' he said, referring to outdated radar technology.
Lawmakers have been skeptical about whether the program was needed. That resulted
in curtailed funding in fiscal years 2003, 2004 and 2005 and delays for the
system's test program and the E-10A's first flight.2015. Now, says Nagy, the
aircraft was projected to reach its ''initial operating capability'' in 2019.