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To solve Air Force’s ‘fighter gap,’ buy Navy Super Hornets

Air Force leaders say the service faces a “fighter gap” soon.

Testifying April 19 in the Senate, Lt. Gen. Daniel Darnell dropped the bomb that the Air Force faces a deficit of “over 800 fighters between 2017 and 2024.”

The shortfall has many causes. Although progress is being made containing cost increases for the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, its low production rate means delays. The F-22 Raptor and JSF are costlier than fighters used by other air forces.

Selecting the costliest fighters and producing them at unrealistically slow rates serves neither the troops nor the taxpayer. Even if the Air Force gets the 381 F-22s it wants, rather than the 183 the Bush administration seeks, high costs and low-rate production make a fighter gap inevitable.

The Air Force must spend more money or choose fighters that cost less. No political leader is talking about raising taxes to pay for military hardware. So the service must find a plane with a lower sticker price.

Here’s my idea: The Air Force should buy the Super Hornet.

The F/A-18E single-seat and F/A-18F two-seat Super Hornet strike fighter Boeing is building in St. Louis for the Navy may be the only warplane that American industry is producing on cost and on schedule. The Navy has received 340 out of 493 aircraft planned by 2012, and some actually were delivered ahead of schedule.

Bob Gower, a Boeing vice president, told me Boeing has offered to solve the Navy’s fighter shortfall by adding 170 Super Hornets to the planned total. If the Navy agrees, Gower said the service can acquire the added Super Hornets for a “bargain” price of $49.9 million apiece.

That’s 30 percent less than a Super Hornet costs now and roughly a third of the price of an F-22, excluding research and development costs.

Writing in the April Air International magazine, retired British Royal Navy Cmdr. David Hobbs said the Super Hornet has net-centric capabilities that still haven’t been built into the F-22 or JSF. It has “a digital communications system capable of sending and receiving voice, data, and still or moving images [to and] from warships, ground stations, other fighters, and airborne surveillance/control aircraft,” he wrote.

The Air Force abandoned plans to install Link 16 on the F-22 because of stealth concerns. It recently tested a way to send data and imagery to command posts and other aircraft — while remaining undetected — by transmitting information via the Raptor’s Intraflight Datalink to another aircraft, outside enemy air defense networks, which would then forward the imagery via Link 16.

The Super Hornet lacks stealth features that make the F-22 and JSF difficult to detect on radar, but which add huge operating costs and may soon be obsolete. The Super Hornet is faster than the JSF. The Super Hornet’s big weakness is its short range; it requires air-to-air refueling on almost every mission.

But the Super Hornet is a solid, modern fighter that can handle every ordnance item in inventory. If the Air Force were to invest in half a dozen squadrons, it might be possible to drive the price down further.

The Air Force has purchased Navy planes before, including the F-4 Phantom II and A-7 Corsair II. Maybe the fighter shortfalls expected by the Air Force and Navy can be filled by taking an unusual action — buying the same plane.

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The writer, an Air Force veteran, lives in Oakton, Va. Dorr 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

DISCUSS: Are Hornets the "bee" all to end all?