Nicknamed the “flying Dorito,” because of its triangular shape, the A-12 Avenger II was to be the advanced carrier-based stealth bomber.
Instead, it became an exemplar of procurement failure. The aircraft was overrun with excessive cost overruns, plagued by technical difficulties, and it caused strategic misalignments.
The A-12 Avenger II was a next-generation advanced replacement for the aging A-6 Intruder, powered by next-generation stealth and futuristic design.
The aircraft had internal weapons bays, negligible tail surfaces, and low radar cross-section.
With all these potentialities, A-12 failed to live up to its promise. It was a bomber that could hardly carry 5,000 pounds of ordnance when compared to the Intruder’s capacity to haul 18,000 pounds.
In addition to this, it was also fitted with internal missile bays for air-to-air combat, which further complicated its mission profile.
Preliminary design on the project started in 1983 as the Advanced Tactical Aircraft with the contract, under its development, awarded in 1988 to McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics; although the Navy and Marine Corps were highly interested at this point, plans for the acquisition of over 1,200 units combined were underway.
However, by 1991, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney canceled the program. It was canceled because the aircraft was substantially overweight, 18 months behind schedule, and massively over budget.
From its very beginnings, a host of mistakes plagued the A-12 Avenger II program. Too-optimistic contractors, unwarranted secrecy, and a “don’t-rock-the-boat” mentality in the Pentagon bureaucracy had sealed the program’s fate.
All the while, the contractors were touting the project as being on schedule to Congress when, in fact, the opposite was true.
It would never fly into service, and post-cancellation, serious litigation followed, involving what ended as the largest project termination in U.S. Defense Department history.
Then the debacle of the A-12 became a cautionary tale for the U.S. defense acquisition community: it underlined all the complications and pitfalls of creating advanced military technology.
As one publication phrased it very aptly: “The A-12 walked so the F-35 could fly.” The lessons learned from the A-12 program can be said to have smoothed out that path indirectly, which later projects like the F-35 Lightning II came to tread.
Although it never flew, the A-12 Avenger II marks a kind of critical nexus in the development of America’s stealth platforms.
It became the connective tissue between the Air Force’s F-117A stealth bomber and the eventual fifth-generation warplane, the F-35 Lightning II.