It is time for Congress to end the charade and throw out the Pentagon’s annual aviation report—or demand that it be fixed. Otherwise, the plan will remain an expensive waste of time for both its readers and its writers. It has changed over time, making comparisons from year to year near impossible and rendering the document indecipherable.
The report remains a messy and near-useless product that spurns the demand of Congress for a reliable assessment and outlook of America’s military aviation fleets. Further, these shortcomings are likely obscuring the extent of the problems of a smaller, older Air Force that faces currently insurmountable budgetary challenges in the next decade.
Even through the fog of inadequate data, policymakers can tell that the Air Force is in a far worse position than previous plans estimated it would be in at this point in time. Saving America’s Air Force should be the focus of Congress, as that is the only true way to turn its aviation health (and reporting) around.
Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan as a model
Five years ago, Congress required the US Department of Defense to submit a report on aviation across the services—similar to the Navy’s annual long-range shipbuilding plan. The value in the Navy’s document is that it takes a longer view toward modernization, capturing three decades of planning. While estimates for future years can be downright speculative, it is still a helpful planning tool that alerts Congress to the potential for problems years in advance. Just as the shipbuilding plan has given policymakers insight into the now-canceled cruiser replacement effort and the now-modified Littoral Combat Ship program, already the aviation plan has allowed Congress to peer into the Navy’s sixth-generation fighter, the F/A-XX, and the KC-46A tanker programs in earlier years.
Truly useful long-term planning documents can help Congress help the Pentagon. For instance, Navy leaders have convincingly leveraged the long-term shipbuilding plan in their increasingly successful plea to Congress to fund the Ohio-class nuclear submarine program outside of the Navy’s shipbuilding account before the service’s acquisition bill comes due early in the next decade. Presumably, the aviation plan would illuminate similar opportunities for the US Air Force, which faces an even worse budget outlook for its major modernization programs coming online in the mid-2020s.
Creating a relevant aviation plan is not difficult. The Marine Corps already does so. But before turning to what makes that report so instructive, it is necessary to catalog the shortcomings of the Pentagon’s aviation plan and identify what a successful one must include.
Inconsistent aviation plans have stalled out in usefulness
Broadly speaking, Department of Defense aviation reports can be broken into two periods of history. The first two reports—fiscal years (FY) 2011 and 2012—are wholly different products from those in 2013, 2014, and 2016. The Pentagon also managed to skip sending Congress a report at all for fiscal year 2015, thus defeating the purpose of a yearly effort and the comparative analysis that affords.
A major flaw among the submissions is that categorization is not systematic within and among the long-term aviation plans. The first two years of reports exclude rotary-wing aircraft, while the latter years add these in, albeit incoherently. For instance, the aircraft/cargo/utility category after FY13 is so broad as to be impractical. The platform list includes more than four dozen aircraft platform types. Thus, a C-5 strategic transporter is counted the same as a UH-60 utility helicopter—as a single cargo/utility aircraft. This is a step backward for the aviation plan, since the original version at least split these categories into intratheater lift and strategic lift. One gets the sense that the Pentagon is not really attempting to make a useful contribution to the debate over the size and composition of the US military aviation fleet.
For instance, someone looking at the provision of antisubmarine warfare (ASW) aircraft might think that the military is fairly well provisioned, as the overall numbers stay fairly close between plans for 2013, 2014, and 2016—generally around 640 aircraft. Yet the anti-sub/anti-surface warfare category includes not only the dedicated Sikorsky MH-60R Romeo ASW helicopter and the Boeing P-8A Poseidon fixed-wing ASW platform, but also the Sikorsky MH-60S multirole helicopter, which spends much of its time carrying out combat search and rescue, fleet replenishment, and mine-hunting missions. The MH-60S could credibly be classified as antisurface warfare or cargo/utility, but adding the platform to ASW totals obscures broader negative trends in the antisubmarine warfare aircraft fleet.
Additionally, almost all of the Navy’s MH-60 helicopters have been delivered—so while the year-to-year percentage change does not look worrying in the plan, in reality, the percentage change in number is likely borne by reduced P-8A buys, which results in a far greater percentage change in total fleet ASW capacity. This example might be chalked up as an honest mistake. Or not. Surely Congress does not know the answer. By contrast, the choice to add in RQ-7 Shadow drones to the 2016 Army intelligence and surveillance aircraft count without explicitly listing the addition is blatant obfuscation and deception.
In one year, the S-3 Viking shows up in the attack aircraft category—it is an ASW platform—and then is gone the next year. It was retired from frontline fleets in FY 2009. In the 2013 plan, the UH-1Y is in the attack helicopter category and utility helicopter category, but by FY 2016, it is found only in the utility aircraft category. Such changes increase uncertainty to an unacceptable degree.
Worst of all, because Pentagon leaders did not use consistent metrics over time, understanding and comparing aviation plans for the past half-decade proves exceedingly difficult and renders the information unusable. Only tankers and bombers can be tracked over time, and the report provides little else interesting about either fleet, such as operational readiness, annual maintenance time, or modernization rates.
The real story emerging from aviation plan is dire state of US Air Force
Even with such little information of value and most of it obscured, it is clear from the Pentagon’s long-term aviation plan the Air Force continues to suffer, shrink, and age. Table 1 summarizes the decline in what DoD’s internally planned force looks like at the end of the 10-year period (FY22/23/25). Keep in mind that the FY13 expected fleet size was devised after the Budget Control Act became law.
While longitudinal data on notional aircraft by service are not included in the report, real total inventory aircraft are included from 2012 to 2015. The actual Air Force fighter fleet has shrunk by 49 aircraft, while the Navy and Marine Corps fighter inventory has grown by 42 aircraft. Similarly, the Air Force’s cargo, airlift, and utility fleet has shrunk by 79 aircraft to 793 in fiscal year 2015, while its aerial refueling fleet has lost 5 aircraft—despite the Air Force’s belief that it would gain 14 notional tankers over the same time period.
As Chief of Staff of the Air Force General Mark Welsh testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in January of 2015, “[A return to sequestration level funding] will make it impossible for us to meet the operational requirements of the Defense Strategic Guidance.” As a refresher, the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance mandated only that the US military be able to decisively defeat one adversary while “denying the objectives” or “imposing unacceptable costs on” an adversary in a second theater. Additionally, the guidance did not aggressively and clearly specify force structure levels for all the nonkinetic missions that the military conducts.
The fact that General Welsh believes that the Air Force cannot meet these modest requirements speaks to the true state of aviation fleet. The DoD aviation fleet is not well-postured to meet its stated or likely operational and campaign requirements. The current plan ramps down to 140 bombers by the middle of next decade—and that number is based on early deliveries of the Long-Range Strike Bomber program, which is already suffering schedule slippage. Further, while the force structure calls for 1,200 mission primary aircraft, the Air Force currently has only 1,141 and will continue to shrink, as the F-35A will not replace legacy planes on a one-to-one basis. Too few aircraft are coming online too slowly to replace an incredibly old aviation fleet, as seen below in Table 2.
The plan also omits consideration of personnel adequacy; for instance, the Government Accountability Office continues to warn the Defense Department that its method and pace of training pilots for unmanned aerial systems is inadequate. Recently, leaders announced that the Air Force will cut five of its 65 Combat Air Patrols (CAPs) since drone pilots are overtaxed. One CAP is generally comprised of four MQ-1s or MQ-9s; therefore, the Air Force will now have at least 20 aircraft sitting idle because of a lack of pilots. Conversely, the Army is experiencing a shortfall in MQ-1C Grey Eagle drones ostensibly available for partnering with Apaches to replace the Kiowa Warriors as part of the Aviation Restructure Initiative.
These are the key trends and programmatic pitfalls that policymakers would need to see vividly depicted or at least accessibly present consistently in the aviation reports.
Improve aviation plan, or throw it out
What would a more useful long-term military aviation plan look like? The Marine Corps’ aviation plan is well-designed and could easily help make the defense-wide report more valuable. It includes detailed categorization, program information, retirement timelines, delivery dates, and fleet upgrade information. A true defense-wide aviation analysis would also include average age and flying hours per aircraft. This is data Congress knows the Pentagon already has since officials regularly cite such metrics in testimony.
The plan would also measure current inventory against stated force structure requirements in a clear manner that avoids hiding decreases in squadron consolidations or the redesignation of what constitutes an air wing, for example. A true aviation plan would provide lawmakers and their staff with an independent ability to assess the state of military aviation and areas in need of increased appropriations.
Fleet ages and states of modernization should be required in any future correspondence with Capitol Hill. For instance, the DoD recently announced that it would upgrade 20 Air National Guard F-16s in response to a Joint Urgent Operational Need request from Northern Command’s Admiral Bill Gortney. These select homeland-defense F-16s will be provided with new radars that will make them far more capable the average F-16. The aviation plan also leaves out per-platform proposed retirement schedules and data on how reduced depot maintenance is affecting those schedules. While such data are complicated, the number of platforms could be credibly shrunk to cover the core platforms of the military to compensate.
The data that Congress would find most compelling—comparison of pre– and post–Budget Control Act aircraft fleets and composition—are virtually impossible to identify in current documents. The only logical conclusion is that defense officials are deliberately, or by apathy, muddying the data over time to minimize the perception of major problems. Congress must strongly reassert its oversight role and call out the Pentagon for its flawed analysis and demand that all previous reports be redrafted with the same data sets, as well as that future plans be consistent as directed.
Congress designed the aviation plan to be a long-term accountability mechanism for the Pentagon, but its leaders refuse to provide any meaningful analysis. Such obfuscation is not only insubordinate to the spirit of the law requiring the report but also unhelpful, as Congress might be more willing to grant top-line boosts to base defense budgets if it could step back and see the dire state of the military aviation fleet as a whole.
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