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Multiple Launch Rocket System. The MLRS, which is mobile and can rapidly fire surface-to-surface missiles more than 20 miles, had also been doomed to no new purchases next year. Now 20,286 of the rockets used by the launchers will be bought for $152 million. The Army already has 312,057 of the missiles on hand.
Maverick. These air-to-ground guided missiles proved less effective than some others, often missing their target, and no new buys had been scheduled for next year. But $370 million has been appropriated to buy 5,000 new Mavericks to join the 11,500 in Air Force stockpiles.
Hellfire. Carried by the Apache, only 112 of the antitank missiles were to be bought next year. Though 29,500 were still in the arsenal, that number was deemed insufficient and $42.4 million has been assigned to purchase 1,063 more of them.
Beyond the new money already voted, the battle to keep other endangered species alive has gained new support. Congressmen from New York and Maryland are trying to save the Navy's possibly obsolescent F-14 fighter, even though the Pentagon warns that will mean cutting production of more versatile F/A-18 fighter-bombers. The Apache, the Bradley, and the M1A1 Abrams may also escape the knife wielded by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. He wants to stop their production as part of a drive to slash defense spending by 1996 to 34% under that in 1985.
The sudden public adulation of American technology, long seen as sinking under Japan's rising sun, has even revived the Northrop Corp.'s hopes for its flawed and perhaps missionless B-2 bomber. The California company has launched a furious campaign to get more money for an aircraft that carries an $865 million price tag. The company and the Pentagon claim that the B-2 can destroy Soviet mobile missiles dispersed in millions of square miles of thick forests. Never mind that Saddam Hussein launched Scud missiles for weeks from sites in the open desert while a huge force of allied warplanes tried to find them. When it comes to buying weapons, it seems, cost is no object and logic goes out the window.