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Crisis looms for aging fleet

No military service has an affordable modernization program, and no service has shown effective leadership in modernization and procurement at the level of the secretary and the chief of staff. Instead, there is an ill-concealed struggle to solve these problems by either raising the defense budget or somehow getting more funding at the expense of other services and programs.

However, the modernization of American tactical aircraft is at the crisis point. Current programs already have escalated in cost to the point where some act as “force shrinkers” rather than “force multipliers.” The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps have already made serious cuts in existing combat aircraft, in part to fund modernization plans they will never have the money to fully implement.

Tactical air capabilities have declined from 5,783 aircraft in 1992 to 3,985 in 2000 and 3,542 in 2008. The size of the Air Force’s bomber fleet has dropped by more than 30 percent between 1992 and 2008.

The lack of strategic guidance and failure of leadership is even more apparent in the F-22 procurement program. The 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review decided on a “buy to budget” approach, jettisoning all strategic considerations in F-22 procurement.

The numbers show only how many aircraft are affordable and how many are needed to keep the production lines open. The reason? Unaffordable! Costs spiraling out of control, lifting the unit cost to $200 million apiece, and a new defense secretary who does not believe that an air dominance fighter is needed when the U.S. is fighting counterinsurgencies. Meanwhile, the aging legacy fleet of F-15s will have to be maintained through its 45th year in service.

Unrealistic plans, cost escalations, failures in risk management and significant delays in delivery can tear widening gaps in the forces’ inventories. The Air Force and Navy may be able to solve some of these problems by extending the service lives of existing legacy platforms. However, there are neither feasibility studies of such extensions nor any cost plans to capture them in the budgets.

The defense budget funds the procurement of 30 V-22s a year, a program that took 25 years to develop, cost more than $18 billion and claimed the lives of more than 30 people in four flight test crashes.

Other programs that need strong leadership and tough decisions at the top level have simply been deferred to the next administration, such as the $35 billion aerial refueling tanker that has caused political uproar, or the combat search and rescue helicopter.

The result is that critical aspects of defense procurement have been turned into the equivalent of liar’s contest, to sell the program by overpromising and undercosting, and creating plans and budgets to match.

Unless each service secretary, each service chief, and the top leadership of the office of the secretary of defense are held personally accountable for achieving cost containment and presenting credible procurement plans and program budgets to Congress on an annual basis, the problems in military aviation procurement will continue — along with similar problems in virtually every other aspect of defense procurement.

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Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Hans Ulrich Kaeser is a researcher at the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy. For a full analysis of the problems in tactical aircraft modernization, see “America’s Self-Destroying Airpower — Becoming Your Own Peer Threat” at www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/081001_aircraft_modernstudy.pdf.