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Airlift answers

American workers are busy manufacturing the most versatile airlifter ever built. But no new C-17 Globemasters were ordered in the 2008 budget. That means the C-17 plant and hundreds of its parts suppliers across the country will start planning to end production — even though not enough planes have been purchased for the Air Force.

Only 190 C-17s have been ordered to date. Though the Pentagon is pressed to find funding for other weapon programs such as F-22s and F-35s, purchasing less than 222 C-17s would disadvantage future presidents and future military missions that increasingly rely on airlift operations to respond to military contingencies and humanitarian crises.

Congress must immediately fund at least 10 C-17s for 2008 to keep the C-17 production line open for another year, and it needs to provide authorization for the secretary of the Air Force to retire any C-5 he deems necessary.

This is not rocket science. We can spend billions more to upgrade 30-year-old air frames intended to last another 20 years, or spend significantly less money for more capable aircraft that will last more than 40 years.

The C-17 has proven itself time and again. This highly reliable aircraft is the quietest and cleanest military cargo plane ever built. It can land on a short, 3,000-foot, unpaved runway. Unique among jet airlifters, the C-17 can back up and do a U-turn on a 90-foot wide runway.

By comparison, C-5As were first deployed in the late 1960s and require a large operating base with long, paved runways, which are harder and harder to find.

The C-17’s well-planned design allows it to carry just about everything in the Defense Department inventory, which is why it’s the workhorse of today’s mobility fleet.

C-17s have had a mission reliability rate of more than 85 percent compared to 50 percent for C-5As. The Air Force chooses C-17s for about 90 percent of the flights into Iraq and Afghanistan.

Consider the logistics of shipping 60,000 pounds of supplies from a C-5 base in the U.S. to a remote landing site in the Middle East. A C-5 would be loaded, flown to a U.S. base in Europe, then off-loaded and repacked into three slow-flying C-130s, which would then be flown into theater and unloaded. A C-5 requires a seven-man crew, and each C-130 requires three- to five-man crews.

That’s not very efficient. A single C-17 with a three-man crew could take a single trip directly to the location in a fraction of the time.

On top of that, well-intended efforts to upgrade C-5s are experiencing huge cost overruns.

Not all C-5s should be retired. In order to have sufficient airlift, we need all 49 of the newer C-5Bs — the model that was produced in the 1980s. They should be matched with the workhorse C-17s to give our country the ability to move large amounts of personnel and material reliably, anywhere in the world.

Shutting down an assembly line too soon is a costly mistake that is difficult to reverse. In the 1990s, we didn’t buy enough new refueling tankers before the KC-10 assembly line was closed. Now Congress finds itself saddled with the budgetary nightmare of replacing hundreds of tankers at the same time.

We must responsibly plan for our nation’s future mobility requirements. The only way to do that is to stop the costly re-engining of C-5As and buy more C-17s to meet our continuously growing airlift needs.

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