Strategies for Maintaining the Navy’s and Marines Inventories of Fighter Aircraft

The United States Navy and Marine Corps operate a fleet of more than 1,100 tactical fighter aircraft that provide air-to-air and air-to-ground combat capabilities. Those aircraft include Hornets (F/A-18A, B, C, and D), Super Hornets (F/A-18E and F), and Harriers (AV-8B); within the next few years, a new and more advanced aircraft—the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF)—will start being added to the fleet.

Although current plans call for the purchase of about 700 new fighter aircraft over the next 15 years, the Department of the Navy is projecting that purchases planned for the next 5 to 10 years will be unable to keep pace with the retirement of today’s Hornets as they reach the limit of their service life. In a report released today, CBO compares four alternatives for maintaining the Navy’s and Marine Corps’ fighter inventories.

The alternatives discussed in the report consist of different combinations of three approaches. One approach involves extending the service life of Hornets by up to 600 flight hours (roughly two additional years) beyond the current 8,000-hour limit by modifying and inspecting those aircraft in the high-flight-hour (HFH) program (comprising a series of structural repairs and more-frequent inspections).

A second approach would implement a service-life extension program (SLEP) of more-extensive modifications, which would enable Hornets to reach 10,000 flight hours, and the third would purchase more Super Hornets than current plans call for.

Some HFH modifications have already been done, and Super Hornets are still in production—but research and planning for the Hornet SLEP is not expected to be complete until 2014 (the Navy has indicated that it may begin SLEP modifications on some aircraft as early as 2012).

Interesting story.

In my VAO (Very Amateur Opinion), I like option 3 the best: Give the older Hornets a bit of a facelift, and buy lots of Superhornets.

The SuperHornet is a first rate aircraft, and giving up some of the still unproven JSF’s to buy more SuperHornets seems like a reasonable and prudent move at this point.

Option 4 (buying lots of both JSF and Superhornets) would be great in a perfect world, but I have no illusions about their being enough money in the budget for that come 2020.

We need more, lots more, fighter aircraft. Why?
In order of probabilty, IMO, here are three reasons.

1) Due to our decades long repeated involvment in foreign wars we should expect to wage war with adversaries against whom our air forces will be severely taxed. They will need to fight other 4th and 5th generation fighters. They will need to provide ground support.

2) CONUS defense. Who can reach us? IMO, within twenty years the Chinese could reach us with their carriers. Our carriers could be sunk by their subs. When we are attacked again is a little late to start building thousands of defense aircraft.

3) Then remember the reason for the 2nd Amendment. And remember the advice in the Federalist Papers about the States being able to deter or win against federal forces. There is potential of us fighting ourselves. Texas and other states fighting federal forces. That’s why I emphasize such aircraft in [i]state[/i] guard units.

We would need enough 5th or 6th or better generation fighters to deal with the most advanced threats. But those aircraft should not be used in multirole or ground support. For those roles we would need thousands, or tens of thousands, of multirole fighters. And tens of thousands of ground support aircraft such as the A-10.

The oldest F15s, the 40 year old F-15As, have been retired. The 500+ F-15Cs and F-15Ds are showing the increasingly threatening effects of age and flight hours. The 223 F-15Es are 10 to 20 years old. We have 168 F-22s. Of 4450+ F16s, the USAF, Reserves and Guards have about 1,250. The US Navy has about 400 F-18s. Totaling all those fighters, we have about 2,550.

Is that enough? Or should we have more depth with several thousand more multirole fighters dispersed among the states? IMO, we should have such increased fighters. Maybe a thousand new F-22s, and a couple thousand new F-15s, and several thousand new F-16s? Or some other fighter aircraft such as the F-35? But those four cost $100 to $200 million each. Ten thousand of those may cost one trillion dollars. Or maybe such mass production could cut those costs to a fraction of the present costs.

Besides, such mass production of fighter aircraft and dispersal to the States would make the States stronger militarily AND economically (if manufacture of those aircraft was also dispersed among the states.

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