BUDGET FORETELLS AGING, SHRINKING OF AMERICA’S AIRPOWER
by Fred Edwards
Oct. 10, 2008

Billy Mitchell, often called “The Father of the Air Force,” proved in 1924 that an aerial machine could sink a battleship when his crews sent the “unsinkable” German prize-of-war Ostfriesland to the bottom. In Mitchell’s vision for a nationwide air force, he wrote that there is no lead time for procurement of military aircraft: “The country that is ready with its air force and jumps on its opponent at once will bring about a speedy and lasting victory.” He warned that “Once an air force has been destroyed, it is almost impossible to build it up after hostilities commence.” Mitchell, whose farsightedness prepared the United States for victory at the Battle of Midway, should be heeded today.

So fast forward and listen to retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael M. Dunn’s October 2008 update of Mitchell’s warning. According to the Air Force procurement budget for this year and the coming five years, the Air Force would buy 750 aircraft, or 125 per year. Dunn, president of the Air Force Association, says that such a rate would take 46 years to replace every airplane in the inventory. This would raise the average age of the planes in the Air Force fleet to 46 years.

But if you consider that 270 of the 750 platforms would be unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the remainder would total about 80 new piloted aircraft per year, and their replacement rate would spike to 72 years. Dunn concedes that perhaps not every airplane must be replaced, and says that, if the force replaces only about two-thirds of its fleet, it will still take 50 years.

Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the new Air Force Chief of Staff, recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee that, in order just to maintain the fleet’s average age, the service would need to acquire some 160 aircraft per year. This would be about 50 more than it is buying now. And to reduce the average age would take 200 new platforms a year.

To exacerbate the problem, the aircraft in the aging fleet have been operating on a wartime basis since Desert Storm in 1991, and some are “falling out of the sky from fatigue,” as a retired Air Force general officer recently told me. Furthermore, the Air Force had hoped to help finance its aircraft procurement by sharply reducing the size of the personnel force, thus trading people for hardware, but planners have found that they must jack the end strength back up in order to sustain Air Force commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and back up contingency commitments in other danger spots.

Dunn says: “We, as a nation, need to wake up to the extent of this recapitalization problem. This is not rocket science. If we want to have a world-class Air Force in the future, we have to fund it.”

The men of Billy Mitchell’s air crews who sent the Ostfriesland to its grave were many years older than the planes they flew. Do we want to put today’s crews into aircraft that their fathers flew — or maybe even their grandfathers — and send them into an enemy environment dominated by 21st-century technology?
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The content of Crosshairs - Military Matters in Review may be copied or retransmitted for information purposes, but may not be used for any commercial purpose without my written permission. Please credit the source as “Crosshairs - Military Matters in Review” at www.milmat.net by Fred Edwards.

Fred Edwards is a military columnist and journalist. He has contributed articles to more than two dozen periodicals and has written six books. His most recent are The Buffie Brigade and The Bridges of Vietnam: From the Journals of a U.S. Marine Intelligence Officer.

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