Fate of F-15 Raises Questions about Procurement
By Evan Moore
CNSNews.com Correspondent
January 24, 2008

(CNSNews.com) - In November 2007, an F-15 C disintegrated in the air during a training exercise near Salem, Mo., prompting some experts to question Air Force procurement practices. At least one analyst is questioning whether the Air Force itself is an effective institution for modern war-fighting.

Following the incident, the Air Force grounded all F-15 A-D models for inspection and repair. The new F-15 E Strike Eagle model has not been affected. Currently, the Air Force is approximately 200 planes short of the necessary total to maintain air supremacy.

Some believe the failure of the F-15 C is the result of the plane being used far longer than was originally intended.

According to GlobalSecurity.org, the original model F-15 was designed in the 1960s and built in the 1970s. Originally, the A-D editions were intended for a service lifetime of 4,000 hours in flight at a rate of 270 flight hours a year.

In the 1990s, after metallurgical tests of the airframe, the expected service life was doubled to 8,000 service hours - enough to keep the fleet in service until 2010. The service life was extended again - provided that the planes were refit - to beyond 2014.

The F-15 E has purportedly been approved for a far longer tour - 18,000 flight hours. This should be enough to maintain the class until 2025.

'Time is not on our side'

Mackenzie Eaglen, senior policy analyst for national security at the Heritage Foundation, told Cybercast News Service, "The U.S. Air Force has been engaged in continuous combat for the last 17 years with fewer airplanes today than in 1990 - only increasing their age more quickly. Moreover, current Air Force plans call for retiring two F-15s for every new F-22 brought into service.

"The U.S. Air Force is currently recapitalizing its tactical aircraft at a 100-year recapitalization rate. Both Air Force and Navy tactical aircraft are at historic high averages for their ages of 19 and 15 years respectively," she said.

"The Air Force faces a $20 billion annual shortfall for modernization. To borrow from the Chief of Staff of the Air Force's white paper issued this month entitled, "The Nation's Guardians: America's 21st Century Air Force," the Air Force is at a strategic crossroads where time is not on our side."

She added: "As many senior Air Force officials have noted, it is nearly impossible to continue patching the patched-up older F-15 airframes any longer, particularly when the problem is systemic. ... The Air Force must instead continue to procure 5th generation fighter aircraft [the F-22 and F-35] instead of focusing on how long it could extend the service life of the F-15 fleet."

Ever since the "procurement holiday of the 1990s," following the end of the Cold War, Eaglen said, there has been a tendency for modernization programs to take up less and less of the military's budget compared to operations and support activities.

To remedy this, she advocates "a holy grail" initiative - "a sustained commitment to fund national defense programs at no less than 4 percent of GDP, given that this will clearly be a long war."

Fewer planes, higher cost

The F-15 A-D's replacement program, the F-22 Raptor, is now estimated to cost $62 billion over its 20 years, or $339 million per airplane. In 1994, the Air Force had planned to order 750 F-22s, but that number has been reduced to 183.

Were the Air Force to order an additional 100 F-22s, each would cost less than $120 million. With the development done and the production line in place, each additional plane ordered lowers the cost per unit.

"The most obvious real cause of increasing unit costs is the decline in the production rates of weapon systems, which generates negative economies of scale," Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in the American Interest. "That decline has been drastic, and so have been the industrial consequences."

Luttwak added, "These days, advanced production technologies allow labor-saving investments up to the limit of fully robotic plants, which require labor only for maintenance, not operation. But because so few weapon systems of any given type are purchased, very little investment in advanced production-plant technologies can be economical."

Eaglen agreed with Luttwak. "It is indisputable that economies of scale due to increased production would decrease the per unit cost of F-22s," she said.

"Purchasing only 20 F-22s per year costs about $130 each whereas buying 48 or more per year would decrease the cost per plane. Air Force leaders can and should ask the F-22 contractor to simply build an export variant of the F-22, which the contractor is capable of doing," Eaglen added.

Bureaucracy to blame?

Some have argued that the Air Force, as an institution, is unsuitable to the challenges of the 21st century and its role on the battlefield could be handed off to the Army and Navy without any harm to combat operations.

Robert Farley, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky, argued in The American Prospect that the U.S. Air Force does not fit very well into "the post-September 11 world, a world in which the military mission of U.S. forces focuses more on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency."

"While everyone agrees that the United States military requires air capability, it's less obvious that we need a bureaucratic entity called the United States Air Force," he wrote.

"The independent Air Force privileges airpower to a degree unsupported by the historical record. This bureaucratic structure has proven to be a continual problem in war fighting, in procurement, and in estimates of the costs of armed conflict. Indeed, it would be wrong to say that the USAF is an idea whose time has passed. Rather, it's a mistake that never should have been made."

Farley called the development of the F-22 "absurd" when its "sole purpose is the destruction of advanced enemy fighter planes, during the course of two counter-insurgency conflicts against low-tech enemies."

"The idea of an independent air force was not handed down on Mount Sinai," he said. "We have institutions because we've built them. When these institutions outlive their usefulness or fail as experiments, we can take them apart.

"In a post-September 11 world, we live with threats quite different from those that the Soviet arsenal used to pose. We can and should devise uses and a bureaucratic structure for American airpower better suited to our current challenges than those set out in 1947," Farley concluded.

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?P ... 0124b.html