Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

162 • Reversing the Decay of American Air Powerpercent smaller than the current model of the F-16, the avionics suite is three timessmaller and half the complexity of the radar-/radar missile-based F-16, and the annualproduction rate would be a large multiple of the current F-16 rate.Final ThoughtsThe simple aircraft procurement outline presented here can release us from the airpower morass that the U.S. Air Force and our country have been experiencing fordecades. If we fail to make the kind of changes outlined, we will continue to face avanishing close-support capability, a rapidly diminishing air-to-air force increasinglyunable to control the skies over our ground and naval forces, and a continuing failureto support ground forces and special operations with the emergency remote-area airliftthey always need. Every military objective then becomes inordinately more difficult oreven impossible. We will have no air power options other than bombing the enemy’sheartland, albeit less and less every year.The Air Force is awash in money (approximately $150 billion each year), morethan it had, on average, during the Cold War. Despite this, it is being forced to cut thebuy of every major program and to stretch schedules in order to pay for cost overrunsand technical failures. So few airplanes are being produced that the average age of thetactical force has increased from 15 to 20 years in just the last seven years. Either agefor a fighter inventory is intolerable.A frightening example is the B-2 bomber program, right at the heart of the strategicbombardment mindset. The Air Force planned for 132 B-2s. It doubled the fundingand bought 21. When the B-2s finally went to war in the Kosovo air war, the entire$44 billion fleet was able to support, on average, only one sortie per day. The B-2proved completely irrelevant.In contrast, the A-10 program developed and procured 715 aircraft of unprecedentedclose- support capability at the equivalent cost of three B-2s. Even though theAir Force leadership sent only 132 of the several hundred A-10s available in 1991 tothe first Gulf war (and only under duress from the secretary of defense), this handful ofaircraft generated over 200 sorties per day and may well have destroyed more tacticaltargets by themselves than all the remaining combat aircraft combined. As soon asthe war ended, the Air Force’s reward to the A-10s for their superb results was to getrid of as many as possible by sending increased numbers to the National Guard andto the Air Force’s “bone yard” at Davis-Montham Air Force Base.If we continue to rely on Air Force procurement wish lists and 90-year-old strategicbombardment theories, there will be more and more fiscal and military failures likethe B-2 and the F-35. If new leadership in the Congress and the executive branch canfind the courage and the open-mindedness to examine the combat history and thecombat results of the last 70 years, they will find a simple solution to the air powermorass written there loud and clear.