The Project That Wouldn't Die

The goal was to put a submarine's machinery on a 60-by-100 foot raft and use magnets to levitate it, cutting the vibrations that reached the hull and making the craft less detectable to enemy sonars.

Congressional staff members were impressed, Conkling said, and with Dickinson as an investor and helping spread the word, the project "built its own constituency."

In 1995, the House authorizing committee recommended spending $7 million on Project M. Appropriators agreed. VSSL's first contract, for nearly $12 million, was signed two years later. Yearly funding continued until 2001, when the Navy delivered a report to Congress that was both laudatory and damaging.

It praised Project M for results "not achievable by any other means." But it added: "Unfortunately, the price for this high level of performance is that this technology creates significant impacts to the design of the ship that cannot be economically overcome at this time."

The Navy concluded that it would not use the technology.

Instead of being a death knell for the earmark, however, Conkling said Rear Adm. Jay M. Cohen, chief of Naval Research, suggested that he take the anti-vibration idea and try it on a new problem: the rocky ride that special-operations sailors encountered maneuvering their speedboats in high seas.

Conkling said Hunter and Moran backed the new idea and he filled out an earmark form in Moran's office. "A ton of SEALs are getting cashiered for injuries on boats," said Hunter, whose district includes a major base for the elite Navy team. "So remedying it became important to me."

In 2003, VSSL suffered another blow when a competing earmark directed the Navy to pick a Long Island company to build a seat to protect its SEALs. The VSSL seats have been installed on a prototype of the Navy's X-Craft, another project supported by Hunter.

As a result, Conkling's company was hurting for cash again, according to e-mails made available to The Washington Post. In late 2003, Conkling sent an e-mail to Cohen that said that the "lack of funding is now critical" and that he was considering closing the company.

In May 2004, Hunter wrote to Gordon England, then secretary of the Navy, asking him to take time for a demonstration of the company's technology, while acknowledging that its immediate use in the SEAL patrol boat "may not be realistic."

VSSL shifted gears again last year, announcing that it was adapting its technology to build seats for a Marine road vehicle. The idea was Cohen's, Conkling said, and the goal was to mitigate the effect of blast and shock from roadside bombs.

The company has not received any earmarked funding for next year. Conkling said VSSL is now "restructuring" to focus on selling its seats.

Dickinson, now retired from VSSL's board, said he went to Hunter several times to help VSSL get funding, and though the company had good ideas, it "could never get a substantial contract from the Navy."

Battista said he tried but couldn't get in to lobby Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, on behalf of the company. He still thinks the technology "would have helped the military."

Cohen, now retired from the Navy, said the good news about VSSL's technology "is that the money invested in Project M is owned in large part by the taxpayer and when the time is right it will be utilized" by all the services.

At the Office of Naval Research, he said, his job was to take risks. "With risk comes the chance of both success and failure."

Staff researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.