I've just been writing about a new Army helicopter, the UH-72A Lakota. Flying with the Washington, D.C. Army National Guard's 121st Air Ambulance Company since spring 2009, it's a good piece of good news for   taxpayers. Delivered on budget, on schedule and mission-ready, the Lakota is a notable exception to the roster of bloated 21st century defense projects. It's also an example of how good leadership can make even the government and the aerospace industry fly right.

Launched in 2004, the Light Utility Helicopter program sought a single ready-made platform to quickly replace the service's aged multi-variant fleet of utility helicopters. Rather than developing a completely new utility helicopter, the Army embarked on a COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) program, asking manufacturers to submit militarized versions of extant commercial helicopters for evaluation. Four aerospace industry consortiums competed for the contract. EADS North America (a subsidiary of Europe's EADS consortium) prevailed. A $2 billion contract was awarded in June 2006. Just six months later, in December 2006, the first UH-72 was delivered to the U.S. Army.

That's stunningly quick compared to most defense procurement programs. To date, 90 of a planned 345 Lakotas have been delivered to units across the nation. Few hiccups have been encountered and Congress is so pleasantly surprised that completion of production has been pushed forward - from 2016 to 2015. Keith Roberson, the Army’s Deputy Project Manager for Utility Helicopters told me that clarity of purpose allowed the program to advance rapidly. Simply, the Army produced a well defined, fairly narrow set of requirements for the mission at hand, stuck by them and communicated continuously with its industry partner.

EADS North America CEO Ralph D. Crosby Jr., understood the Army's needs and offered a versatile, well proven design paired with a robust business/manufacturing plan which allows Lakotas to be rapidly produced and creates jobs here in the U.S.. Production recently shifted from EADS' Donauworth, Germany facility (where the first UH-72s were built) to EADS North America's new 220,000 square foot facility in Columbus, Mississippi where Lakota production employs over 300 people.

Pentagon procurement officials and our local defense employers should take a page from this effort.