Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

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204 • Long in Coming, the <strong>Acquisition</strong> Train Wreck is Hereearly 1990s. This spike in aircraft age can be traced to the procurement “good times”of the late 1970s, when the Air Force was able to produce close to 350 to 390 fighter/attack aircraft annually for a couple years, falling to around 200-220 in the mid-1980s.It is interesting to note that DOD spent roughly $7 billion (in FY 2008 $) per year tobuy those 200-plus aircraft compared to the $5 billion annual procurement bill for20 F-22s bought each year in the 2003-2009 time frame.This near-suspension of procurement traces its origins to the end of the Cold Warin the first Bush administration. Air Force fighter procurement fell from the more than200 a year discussed earlier to 20 or fewer aircraft per year starting in the mid-1990sduring the Clinton years and continued into the first decade of the 21st century withthe decision to cap the buy of F-22s at 183 aircraft, procured at an annual rate of 20aircraft. Thus, despite parallel major reductions in Air Force fighter force levels toroughly half those of the 1980s, the “procurement holiday” of the 1990s, added to thehigher-than-planned OPTEMPO of these forces in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts,has led to a major headache for the service’s leadership. The competing demands of anaging force, becoming more and more expensive to keep operational, and the need toreplenish these worn-out forces with modern aircraft is a planners’ nightmare.In order to reduce the average age of its fighter forces to its desired 10 to 15 yearslevel in the next five to 10 years, the Air Force would need a huge spike in procurementquantities to reach that goal and then require an annual procurement rate of between100 and 120 aircraft per year in order to sustain that average age. Unfortunately, theAir Force’s aircraft procurement in its budget request totals 93 aircraft in FY 2009,of which only 28 are new fighter aircraft – the last 20 of its planned 183 F-22s and 8F-35As – while 52 are UAVs: 38 Predators, nine Reapers and five Global Hawks.The F-35 Will Not Solve the U.S. Air Force’s ProblemThe replacement of F-22 procurement with the less expensive F-35 will not solvethe problem. The Air Force budget projection shows F-35A procurement rising to 48aircraft by FY 2013 (with actual and planned procurement between FY 2007 and FY2013 totaling 142 aircraft), still not enough to turn around the worsening force agingproblem. Even this total quantity and out-year procurement rate are questionablebased on the past unstable record of this program. For example, compared to the FY2007 FYDP, the Air Force FY 2009 FYDP procures 89 less F-35As through FY 2013.Furthermore the F-35 program office has reduced the F-35A peak production ratefrom the previously planned 110 aircraft per year to 80 aircraft per year in FY 2015and beyond. These relatively small quantities appeared even more questionable inlight of reported reductions in out-year funding in the fiscal guidance for the preparationof the FY 2010 budget combined with yet more cost growth as discussed in thefollowing paragraphs. In any event, even these planned procurement quantities arenot sufficient to attain the Air Force’s average age goal, much less maintain it into the
Thomas Christie • 205next decade. The obvious result will be either a further reduction in its fighter forcesor their ever-increasing age or a combination of the two.It should be noted here that subsequent to issuing its fiscal guidance to the servicesfor their FY 2010-2015 budget, the DOD added $5 billion to the Air Force’s procurementaccounts that would allow it to accelerate purchases of its planned 1,753 F-35As.Given these added funds become and remain a reality, the Air Force reportedly plansto use them to buy 100 or more per year by FY 2015, back up from the 80 plannedfor FY 2015 and beyond.On the other hand, rumors of significant cost overruns in the overall F-35 programcontinue to surface, affecting not only the Air Force’s F-35A, but the Marine CorpsF-35B and Navy F-35C as well. Depending on which “independent” cost estimate onebelieves, the program could be underfunded by as much as $30 billion to $40 billion,and the schedule likely to slip up to two more years. Such impending cost increaseswill obviously only make matters worse, most likely resulting in further schedule slipsand reduced procurement quantities in the coming years.Table 1, extracted from the GAO March 2008 report on the Joint Strike Fighter 8 ,summarizes the result of three independent cost growth and schedule slip estimatesfor the F-35 program.The F-22 Experience Made a Bad Problem WorseThis serious situation borders on a fiasco for all three services involved in the F-35program, but it is certainly a potential disaster for the Air Force. This is the inevitableconsequence of the Air Force having first put all its eggs in the super-expensive F-22program during the 1990s, and all but eliminating further F-15 and F-16 productionin order to protect its new fighter development. Approved for Demonstration/Validation(Dem/Val) in 1986 and Full-Scale Engineering Development (FSED) in 1992, theAir Force originally planned a buy of over 700 F-22s. By 2000 that number had beenreduced to 346 aircraft with a total acquisition costs projected to be $61.9 billion.F-22 procurement started in FY 2001 and, after encountering and addressing numer-Table I. Independent Estimates of F-35 Cost and Schedule Growth(GAO JSF Report: Recent Decisions by DOD Add to Program Risk, March 2008)Assessing Organization Projected Cost Growth Projected ScheduleSlipOSD Cost AnalysisImprovement Group (CAIG)Naval Air Systems Command<strong>Defense</strong> ContractManagement Agency$5.1 billion for RDT&E$33 billion for procurement$8-$13 billion for RDT&E/tradeoffsthat add to procurement costs$4.9 billion to Complete LockheedDevelopment Contract12 months19-27 months12 months
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AMERICA’SDEFENSE MELTDOWN★ ★
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America’sDefenseMeltdownpentagon
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Bruce I. Gudmundsson served in the
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James P. Stevenson is the former ed
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table of contentsPrefaceExecutive S
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PrefaceThe mere notion of a “melt
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Preface• xieffective national sec
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executive summaryChapter Summaries
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Executive Summary • xvThe militar
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Executive Summary• xviiRecommenda
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Executive Summary• xixobjectives
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Executive Summary • xxiThe chapte
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Executive Summary• xxiii• Analy
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2 • Introduction & Historic Overv
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10 • Introduction & Historic Over
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CHAPTER 2SHATTERING ILLUSIONSA Nati
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28 • Shattering Illusions: A Nati
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54 • Leading the Human Dimensions
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CHAPTER 4MANEUVER FORCESThe Army an
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82 • Maneuver Forces: The Army an
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98 • A Traveler’s Perspective o
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100 • A Traveler’s Perspective
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CHAPTER 6the navyWilliam S. LindTo
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120 • The Navy- signaling - would
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122 • The NavyAt the same time, t
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124 • The Navyforce: first, to de
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126 • The Navywarfare usually wor
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128 • The NavyEndnotes1 Andrew Go
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130 • Reversing the Decay of Amer
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Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

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