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Budget cuts could force tough aircraft choices

The prospect of budget cuts complicates a central dilemma for the Air Force: Its fleet is wearing out and replacement aircraft are proving more expensive than expected.

Gen. Philip Breedlove, the service’s vice chief of staff, told Congress late last month that cutting planned defense spending more than $400 billion — as is slated to happen unless a debt-reduction commission comes up with a viable plan — would reduce his service’s capabilities.

Retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula was more blunt.

“Without adequate funding, we are destined to go down one of three paths: We get smaller, we get weaker, or we get smaller and weaker,” said the former Air Force intelligence chief.

The Air Force is operating a geriatric force, Deptula said, with bombers and tankers more than 50 years old, and fighters and helicopters more than 30.

The average age of a U.S. airliner, normally subjected to far fewer stresses, is 10 years, he said, adding that an F-15C Eagle fighter he flew in 1979 was flown by his son in 2008. The Air Force buys about 118 aircraft per year, which works out to replacing the fleet every 48 years.

Observers offered several ways to help the Air Force out of its dilemma, from reformulating national strategy and redefining the service’s mission to merging the Pentagon’s various acquisition arms.

One of Breedlove’s predecessors suggested the service close some of its bases.

“Right now, there is too much infrastructure across the force,” said retired Gen. Howie Chandler, former Air Force vice chief.

But Congress has long been loath to close bases, and with many political wounds still raw on the two-decade-old base realignment and closure process, the prospect of more seems unlikely.

Chandler also alluded to lawmakers’ opposition to service efforts to retire or even transfer individual aircraft from bases in their districts.

“As we get into some of these fiscally constrained times, it’s going to be important that the chief and the secretary are allowed to manage the fleet in order to optimize it,” he said.

What shouldn’t be cut, he said, are people and aircraft purchases.

“We’re sized about right for the mission we’re being asked to do, so to take any more of those people out of the force will be difficult,” he said. “A lot of care is going to have to be taken so that we don’t just go after weapons systems because the Air Force is going to struggle to maintain as much capability as it can.”

The fighter fleet faces special pressure, Chandler said. Production of the F-22 Raptor, once slated to reach 750 aircraft, was capped at just 187 after a decade of delay and cost overruns.

Similar problems have beset the F-35. The service, which plans to buy 1,763 aircraft, wanted to buy up to 100 aircraft a year, but available funding has limited annual production to 48 for the foreseeable future, Chandler said.

Any delay or production stoppage on the F-35 would exponentially increase that risk even if the service attempted to fill the gap with modernized F-15s and F-16s, he said.

Meanwhile, the fighter fleet continues to shrink, by normal attrition, planned retirements and unusual efforts such as the service’s 2008 retirement of some 250 fighters to free up money for personnel, largely to operate the burgeoning fleet of unmanned aircraft.

Ultimately, Chandler conceded, the Air Force would have to choose among its various aircraft.

“Where the balancing is going to occur is how much we continue to modernize,” he said. “How quickly and how many F-35s we actually build. There is going to be a balancing between the new bomber and the fighter force structure. There is no doubt about that.”

The new bomber is the Air Force’s biggest new program, and, proponents say, a must-have as anti-access/area denial threats improve and proliferate. Such threats are emerging even in what were once considered “low-end” conflicts, which means the service must buy weapons, like the bomber, that can be used across the spectrum of war, said Mark Gunzinger, a former B-52 pilot turned analyst at the Center of Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C.

Chandler said UAVs might be scaled back.

“I would also tell you there needs to be a rationalization of how much unmanned activity is going to be required,” he said.

The Air Force has spent a lot of money on delivering intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to support the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the wars wind down, Gunzinger said, the Air Force needs to divest itself of unmanned aircraft that cannot operate in high-threat areas and instead invest in a new stealthier pilotless machine. The choices the service is being asked to make are draconian, said Marvin Sambur, former Air Force procurement chief. “What you’re asking is, ‘Which one of my children do I not feed?’” he said.

Instead, Sambur suggested merging the acquisitions branches of the Pentagon and three services, a move he said could by itself yield half of the desired savings.