As You Sow, So Shall Ye Reap
In an editorial in the September 6–7 Wall Street Journal, “Can Trump’s ‘War Department’ Win a War?”, the paper quotes retired Air Force four-star Gen. Mark Kelly as saying,
“We’re facing an apex adversary now, today,” he said of China. But the Air Force is “doing so with half the combat power that we had 35 to 40 years ago.” The fleet, Gen. Kelly added, is “twice as old and operating at twice the op (operational) tempo, flown by aviators getting half the training sorties, at half the platform readiness rates.”
What a surprise! For at least forty years, defense analyst Chuck Spinney, a key figure in the military reform movement of the 1980s, has been warning that this would be the inevitable result of the way the Air Force designs and procures aircraft. Unless that changes, which it has not, the future will be more of the same.
At present, and for many decades before, the U.S. military as a whole has designed and bought new aircraft that cost more, are harder to maintain, and in many cases perform worse than their predecessors. (Not long ago, the Air Force pitted a new F-35 against an F-16, a fifty-year-old design, in mock air combat. The F-16 easily beat the F-35.)
The way the Air Force (and the Navy) design new aircraft is by throwing the latest, most complex technology at the wall and buying whatever sticks. Then, every sub-bureaucracy in the service, plus OSD, get to add their bells and whistles. As the design evolves, design changes proliferate, often after the aircraft has entered production. The production begins before the operational testing is complete, and the consolidations within defense industry means there is little real competition for the production contracts. The end result is that each new generation of aircraft is bought in fewer numbers because of their high price, they are harder to maintain than their previous generation, the pilots get less flight time because the cost per flight hour has doubled or tripled, the fleet gets older because the design process is so slow, and the rise of maintenance hours per flight hour means sortie rates fall.
It doesn't have to be this way. Decades ago, the Secretary of Defense cut through the usual design process and allowed some people, including John Boyd and Pierre Sprey, to design two new aircraft based not on the latest technology but on combat history. The result were two new aircraft that performed better and cost less than the aircraft they replaced. Those two aircraft were the F-16 and the A-10.
Nor are such results impossible in our time. The latest Swedish fighter-bomber, the SAAB Gripen, is a comparatively inexpensive aircraft both to buy and to fly. It has excellent performance. The countries that have it love it. If Sweden can make such an aircraft why can't we?
The answer is that our whole R&D and Procurement process is a hopeless mess. As a friend of mine who works in it says, “The process is so bad that it cannot produce a good product.” That process amounts to following millions of rules and regulations. We need in its place, a performance-based system, with real fly-offs and shoot-offs, all overseen by a small group of officials who can never go to work for defense industry and have wide authority to take what actions they think necessary to get the taxpayer his money’s worth. The French have a system like this, built around a small number of generals de finance.
The situation General Mark Kelly describes cannot be solved by giving DOD more money. That would merely reinforce business as usual. The country needs serious, wide-ranging reform of the whole system. That is a cause that should draw the attention of President Trump, who was elected to be an anti-establishment President.
In the meantime, if you want to understand why our Air Force has too few aircraft flying too little, just look at the briefings Chuck Spinney was giving forty years ago and more. As the Air Force sowed, so it now reaps