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Tanker travesty

The Air Force, which has failed to give airmen the tanker they need, is now considering using a civilian contractor for some aerial refueling duties.

Pushed by Congress, Air Force leaders may hire private companies to fly some refueling missions, apparently in modified versions of old aircraft such as the McDonnell Douglas MD-11.

As if to comfort us that this isn’t a stunning departure from the way a combat arm should operate, Air Force leaders assure us that a contractor would refuel aircraft only during training activities and not in combat zones. Moreover, contract refueling would be undertaken on a trial basis, for five years only.

But once Congress and Washington bureaucrats — including some in blue uniforms — get into cahoots, a temporary program can easily become permanent. To a contractor, this proposal is a way to get a foot in the door.

Contractors have been part of the Air Force team for generations. They perform much of our training and maintenance. Contract employees are usually highly skilled veterans, often retired senior noncommissioned officers. For jobs such as operating a simulator at a training base, a contractor offers institutional knowledge at a sensible price. Taxpayers and troops benefit.

But in recent years, we’ve gone too far in giving civilians jobs that ought to be performed by service members. Companies such as Blackwater International carry out quasi-military duties in the danger zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Depending on whom you count, there are more contractors in Iraq than active-duty troops.

We must reverse this trend. Civilians shouldn’t perform military jobs. But there’s a more important reason contract refueling is a bad idea.

It’s a cop-out.

It amounts to our leaders saying, “We’re too incompetent to give troops a new military tanker. This is the best we can do.”

Here’s a reminder of recent history: Last February, Northrop Grumman won the Air Force’s KC-X competition to supply 179 KC-45A tankers. Northrop was partnered to build a version of the European Airbus A330-200 in a new assembly plant in Mobile, Ala. Most aviation observers saw the award as a no-brainer: The Airbus was clearly the better choice for the Air Force’s needs than its competitor, a Boeing 767-200 — which is smaller, less flexible, and needs too much runway when landing with a full fuel load, as would happen in an emergency “rejected takeoff” situation.

Boeing protested to the Government Accountability Office, which upheld the protest on technical grounds. Although the GAO’s flawed ruling was nonbinding, Washington politics prevented the Air Force from moving ahead with the KC-45A. Airmen lost an opportunity to finally begin replacing 491 decrepit KC-135E/R Stratotankers.

KC-X wasn’t the Air Force’s first attempt to get a new tanker. I talked about tankers with then-Air Force Secretary James Roche in September 2001. That era’s plan for a new tanker was about to be finalized, Roche said. He used the words “done deal.”

The better part of a decade later, the proposal to privatize some aerial refueling is a measure of how little imagination today’s Air Force leaders have. Not that they can fix this by themselves.

“This is not a problem that can be solved by the Air Force’s leaders alone,” British author and analyst Jon Lake said in a telephone interview. “It involves industry, the Congress and the administration. All of those people have got to ask themselves whether the interests of the fighting men and women outweigh their own, pork-barrel interests.”

The contractor refueling plan isn’t a step in the right direction.

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The writer, an Air Force veteran, lives in Oakton, Va. He is co-author of “Hell Hawks,” a history of an American fighter group in World War II. His e-mail address is robert.f.dorr@cox.net.