Byline: Leslie Wayne

WASHINGTON: -- It is hard to imagine an airplane with more problems than the C-130J, the latest version of the venerable workhorse that the U.S. Air Force uses to drop cargo and paratroopers into global hot spots.

The C-130J has so many flaws that it cannot fly its intended combat missions. It can't drop heavy equipment or perform combat search-and-rescue missions, and it doesn't operate well in cold weather. Paratroopers cannot jump out of it without risk of banging up against the fuselage.

Still, the C-130J has one important fan: Congress. Powerful members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate want to spend $5 billion to acquire even more C-130Js for the air force, at a cost of $66.5 million a plane

For all the C-130J's shortcomings, lawmakers love to buy the plane and dole it out to National Guard and Reserve bases around the country, using its deployment as a justification for keeping local bases open.

But, in what could be the nastiest Pentagon budget battle this year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has vowed to kill the C-130J as part of a larger plan to upgrade the military. In doing so, he is backed by two recent studies i from the Pentagon's inspector general and from its top weapons tester i that concluded the C-130J is unfit for duty.

"It's going to be a battle royal," said Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's comptroller and chief financial officer from April 2001 until May 2004.

"In other years, Congress went and put money back in the program in spite of the Pentagon."

The U.S. Air Force and the Marine Corps have acquired 50 C-130Js, at a cost of $2.6 billion, out of a planned total purchase of 117. The...