Posted on 06/24/2002 7:52:33 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
A confrontation is brewing inside the Air Force over whether to relegate the B-1B bomber to a standoff role or maintain its ability to fly over defended targets and drop ordnance.B-1B backers fear that once the aircraft is consigned to a standoff role, senior Air Force officials will take the next step and retire the aircraft altogether. The B-1 is considered vulnerable because the B-52 already is dedicated to the standoff mission and can do it cheaper.
The controversy harkens back to last year's Air Force decision to reduce the number of bombers from 90 to 65, which B-1 advocates interpreted as the first step toward eliminating the aircraft. The reasoning put forward by service secretary James G. Roche was that the money freed up would be used to pay bills to improve the bomber.
But the service is now exploring spending a portion of the money on projects only tangentially related to the bomber, such as an extended-range version of the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, B-1 backers contend.
Moreover, the Air Force has reduced the amount of money it will pour back into the B-1 to about $800 million from the approximately $1.4 billion advertised last year, bomber advocates complain. "There were costs associated with the consolidation [in the B-1 force] that we had not anticipated that reduced the payback," acknowledges Brig. Gen. Jay Jabour, USAF's program executive officer for fighters and bombers. However, he stressed that Roche is "committed that money would get reinvested in the B-1. The number may change, but the equation is the same."
But B-1 advocates are bracing for another attack on funding this summer when some elements in the service are likely to target the budget for the bomber's defensive systems upgrade program. Without the electronic warfare enhancement, the B-1 effectively could only participate in combat in a standoff mode, remaining outside enemy air defenses.
NO DECISION HAS been made on changing the role of the B-1, although the issue is reviewed for that bomber and others every year as threats change, Jabour said.
How the Air Force acts will have far-reaching implications for the service's credibility in Congress, one industry lobbyist not involved in the debate said. If the service doesn't deliver on its commitment to spend money saved on the bomber, "that would really set a bad precedent," he said. It would likely mean that future deals in which the Air Force wants to trade force structure for system improvements would be nixed by Congress.
B-1 proponents note that the timing is particularly unfortunate since the bomber performed extremely well in Afghanistan and delivered almost 4,000 GPS-guided bombs. Mission capable rates for the B-1Bs were near 90%. Moreover, the bombers had a weapons release rate of more than 95% and have delivered 3,869 bombs dispensed so far.
A KEY FACTOR in the debate over how to treat the B-1 could be the success developers have in overcoming problems with one of the long-planned electronic warfare upgrades. At issue is development of BAE Systems' ALE-55 fiber-optic towed decoy that is supposed to broadcast signals to spoof RF-guided missiles.
Deploying the decoy and towing it behind the aircraft has proved more difficult than initially thought and has left engineers scrambling to fix the durability of the device on the B-1B, the F/A-18E/F and the F-15. The decoy is part of the Navy-led Integrated Defensive Countermeasures (IDECM) subsystem that is to be widely used. The F/A-18E/F was to be the trailblazer for the ALE-55, solving problems so other aircraft would not encounter them.
The B-1B effort didn't start until 18 months after the F/A-18E/F, but repeated IDECM delays have eroded the schedule margin. "Over the past six years, IDECM has slipped several times. So now the B-1B is on the critical path," a B-1B manager said. The latest hiccup is that in testing this spring, ALE-55 mass models deployed only a few feet, much shorter than intended.
B-1 crews are eager to field a sophisticated towed-decoy system to combat future air-defense threats. The value of towed decoys was driven home during the 1999 Kosovo air war. Air Force officials credited the ALE-50--a simple repeater system--with saving several B-1Bs that came under attack. The fiber-optic towed decoy would isolate the receiver from the transmitter and use the much more capable techniques generator on the aircraft.
The delays have led to much higher costs, which is one reason the Air Force is unsure about going forward with the effort. They have also given rise to a proposal to keep the ALE-50 and merely upgrade the ALQ-161 on-board jammer, which has been beset by problems for years. But by 2010, the threat will vastly outpace the capabilities of the ALQ-161, a system expert said, forcing the Air Force to upgrade the bomber then or limit its use.
TO OFFSET SOME of the risk with the towed decoy, the Air Force has asked B-1B contractor Boeing to study whether an alternative decoy could do the job. The candidate is the Raytheon-developed FO-50. It is a derivative of the ALE-50 towed decoy already used on the bomber and other aircraft.
The FO-50 was designed and developed by Raytheon on company funds after it lost in competition to the ALE-55. The FO-50 and ALE-50 have a common aerodynamic shape and are almost identical in their center of gravity and weight; the ALE-55 uses a different shape. Moreover, the FO-50 was configured to fit into the same space as the ALE-55 to serve as an easy replacement. Raytheon has tested mass models of the FO-50 from leased aircraft, and, under the new deal, would assess the system from the B-1 to ensure it can survive the bomber's aerodynamic environment.
The Air Force has not decided whether it will switch decoy suppliers, and BAE Systems is trying to overcome its problems. "We are still committed to the ALE-55," Jabour said. But because of its problems "we thought there was a good rationale for doing this risk reduction."
BAE Systems engineers says they have spent the past several months trying to overcome a series of problems, ranging from the Raytheon-provided eject mechanism to differences in how the canister is installed on the B-1 compared with the F/A-18 and manufacturing problems with the braking mechanism. Flight testing on the B-1B with all the fixes in place is slated to resume on June 26, says Michael Williams, the company's director of countermeasures. Many of the changes were validated recently in three flight tests on the F/A-18, he added.
"If the ALE-55 matures, then I suspect that this contract will be moot. If it doesn't, then maybe we have a viable alternative," the B-1 manager said. Full-rate production for the towed decoy on B-1Bs is slated for 2004. Although the two decoys are different, Jabour said both provide similar protection for the bomber.
THE NAVY ALSO is eyeing the FO-50, but not as a replacement for the ALE-55. The Navy expects to be forced to use a mix of ALE-50s and ALE-55s because of low production rates on the BAE Systems device. If successful, the FO-50 would serve as an upgrade to the ALE-50. However, the Navy said that the FO-50 "would not provide the frequency range, field of view or output of the ALE-55." If the Navy could increase the budget to accelerate ALE-55 development and production, it would make the ALE-50 upgrade less compelling, the service indicated.
For the past few years the Navy has been struggling to overcome survivability issues with the ALE-55 on the F/A-18E/F. The decoy has been unstable during deployment, and engineers fear the towline would burn through because of its close proximity to the afterburner. Despite much engineering work, the Pentagon's test community still considers the project "high risk."
But BAE Systems officials say those problems have been overcome, and the Navy agrees. During recent F/A-18 tests, two times of 48-106 min. were achieved and 98 sec. of afterburner exposure, the service said. During that mission, the towline was in the afterburner three times as long as required and was exposed to 7.5g maneuvers, said Walt Wolf, BAE Systems' B-1B towed-decoy manager.
Pentagon test personnel note that effectiveness of the ALE-55 when assessed in hardware-in-the-loop facilities demonstrated the system achieved "excellent performance" against the four missile seekers it was pitted against. Wolf added that recently the Navy also completed flight tests of the decoy against threat systems and demonstrated the system's effectiveness. While some flight tests are being undertaken this year, serious assessment of the ALE-55 as part of the total IDECM system isn't slated until next year and 2004.
Saying theat the B-52 is cheaper in the stand-off role is very short sighted. How cheap will this 50 year old bomber continue to be as the years roll by? Besides having a radar cross-signature of a veritable flying barn, the years of stress on this aging super-structure will eventually cause catostropic failure. Everytime I hear of a B-52 going down I wonder if that might be the cause.
The REASON the old BUFF is still around, is that it's MODULAR. Pull out old modules, put in new ones. It does the job, takes a licking, and keeps flying. If you need extra parts, there are the numerous B-52 corpses in the "Graveyard" at Davis-Monathan in Arizona. As for stress, aircraft are designed for infinite service, given proper maintenance. The B-52's you see these days, about the only thing original left on them, are the control yokes and wires, and the ejection seats. MOST of the B-52s have been almost completely rebuilt not once, but several times. It carries a bigger load than a B-1, carries it farther, and is quicker to re-load and send back off to war than a B-1.
Yes, the B-1 is a sweet jet. But it was designed for one kind of war, a kind we don't fight anymore. . .
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