Unmanned blimp crash helps deflate Army surveillance program

A U.S. Army surveillance program grounded in October after one of its tethered blimps broke loose and drifted hundreds of miles before crashing in the Pennsylvania countryside suffered another blow last week when Congress slashed its funding.

The controversial U.S. Army JLENS (Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Elevated Netted Sensor System) program employed twin tethered blimps to detect and track cruise missiles and other aerial threats to the U.S. East Coast. The blimps, tethered 25 miles northeast of Baltimore at Aberdeen Proving Ground, were part of a three-year Northern Command (NORTHCOM) homeland defense exercise.

Even without the October incident, the NORTHCOM exercise likely was the last shot for the JLENS program to prove its worth. CBS News reported the $2.7 billion system suffered a series of delays and cost overruns since its launch in 1998. Several recent Pentagon reports also questioned its reliability, and an initial plan for 32 blimps (at $180 million each) was scaled back to just two, according to a report last year in Popular Mechanics.

The Obama administration requested $40.5 million for JLENS in the 2016 defense budget, but Congress slashed the funding by $30 million, according to Defense Industry Daily, leaving the program with just $10.5 million. Lawmakers cited “test schedule delay” as the reason for the cuts, but the remaining funding level may not be sufficient to keep the program alive.

Although the escaped blimp caused no injuries, the long chain from the heavy tether dragged along the ground for several miles, causing some property damage and taking out power lines in its path. The event sparked a lively Twitter debate, with many ridiculing the program, including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

Even some presidential candidates couldn’t resist using the blimp incident as an excuse to poke fun at government programs.

“What we had was something the government made—basically a bag of gas—that cut loose, destroyed everything in its path, left thousands of people powerless, but they couldn’t get rid of it because we had too much money invested in it,” GOP candidate Mike Huckabee said during a recent debate. “So, we had to keep it. That is our government today. We saw it in a blimp.”