WASHINGTON: The Secretary of the Army defended today what he admitted was “an unconventional approach” to fielding the service’s cutting-edge AH-64E Apache Guardian attack helicopter, saying the only alternative to the current complex workaround would have been to “shut the line down” for a time.

“I will grant the unconventionality of it,” John McHugh said. “You could say it was an unconventional approach, but it was an unconventional situation.”

We’ve reported that the Army is doing flight tests on the the Boeing-built Apache, accepting them for service and then grounding them to strip out the transmission — a part whose production has fallen behind other components — to install on the next helicopters coming off the assembly line.

“What the hell IS going on?” McHugh interjected when I began to ask him what was up with the new helicopters, sending a ripple of laughter around the table at this morning’s Defense Writers’ Group breakfast. We’ve described this process as a shell game. “I might use a different phrasing,” McHugh said with a chuckle.

“We were facing a very challenging problem, as you know,” he said. “Boeing’s subcontractor Northstar [Northstar Aerospace] went bankrupt… It wasn’t able to produce the transmissions for the Apache in the kind of timely way that would’ve been necessary under the contract.”

“Frankly, the one option other than the path we’re on would’ve been pretty much to shut the line down,” McHugh went on. “That would have killed the delivery of the systems to the Army” — we presume he means temporarily, until transmission production could catch up — “and it certainly wouldn’t have inured to the economic beneift of either Boeing or the subcontractors’ efforts to try to get its fiscal house in order” — since stopping all work and all payments would make it even harder for Northstar to get back on its feet and making transmissions. “It would’ve laid off the workers totally,” McHugh added. And as Congress has told the Army repeatedly when the service suggested shutting down armored vehicle production for a few years and then restarting it, it’s often cheaper in the long term to keep a production line “hot,” even at the price of short-term inefficiency, than to try to turn it on and off again.

Doesn’t moving transmissions from one machine to another wear them out faster than would normally be necessary? “It doesn’t put wear and tear on parts,” McHugh insisted. “You’re not putting them into the field and putting them into operations,” he said: The transmission is used merely for a relatively short period of flight tests. McHugh, however, didn’t address the wear and tear from the act of installing, removing, and reinstalling a component.

“This is at no cost to the Army,” McHugh said, noting Boeing pays for the whole procedure and the the service withholds $900,000 of the contractor’s payment per aircraft until a transmission can be installed for good. And, he emphasized, “this has had the value of keeping the program on time, keeping delivery [on time] to Afghanistan and the warfighters, which is our key objective.”

There is, after all, still a war on, and in wartime you do inefficient things that may waste money but delivery combat capability — and sometimes even save lives. The Taliban respect the current model of the Apache so much they’ve nicknamed it “The Monster.” That said, in wartime Congress doesn’t abdicate its responsibility to conduct oversight, either — just look at an unassuming Missouri senator named Harry Truman during World War II. It’s Congress that alerted us to this story in the first place, and we’ll see whether Congress is content with the answers it’s gotten so far.