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Defense Focus: F-15s' old-age crisis
Washington (UPI) Dec 31, 2007 The crisis afflicting the U.S. Air Force's F-15 domestic defense fleet is far wider, more serious and more deeply rooted than the American public seems to realize. It is rooted in more than 15 years of systematic neglect of U.S. air power by Republicans and Democrats alike. The U.S. Air Force moved quickly to pull some 450 old McDonnell-Douglas F-15 fighter aircraft after one of them crashed in Missouri on Nov. 2. USAF investigators concluded that there were significant defects in the metal framework that held the body of the plane together. Because the problem was caused by excessive wear and tear on the fuselage of the plane over its decades of service, the USAF team warned this could cause "fleet-wide airworthiness problems." Even now, the entire grounded F-15 force has not been cleared for active duty, and it remains an open question if and when that will happen. The Air Force is filling the gap by pressing its other old workhorse, the F-16 Falcon fleet, into increased duty. But that can only hasten the day when accumulated stress and wear problems become a serious issue for it, too. Meanwhile, the crisis is forcing the U.S. Air National Guard into emergency deployments that has forced the California Air National Guard, for example, to take over responsibility for air defense and interception duties over Oregon and Washington as well. The Vermont ANG has been forced to assume similar responsibilities over the northeastern United States. After the huge increases in military and Air Force procurement and spending during the Reagan administration, the collapse of communism at the end of 1991 seemed to usher in a "peace dividend" for the rest of the 1990s. Defense spending, already slashed when President George Herbert Walker Bush was still in the White House, was cut even further by Democratic President Bill Clinton during his two terms of office. The United States fought no major wars during the Clinton era, but the Air Force was involved especially in major logistics operations and bombing campaigns in the brief Kosovo conflict in 1998 and in maintaining the U.S.-brokered end of the conflict in Bosnia in 1995. Wear and tear on the aging USAF fleet, especially its transport aircraft, was already a serious consideration by the time of the 2000 presidential election campaign. Indeed, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney campaigned on the promise of restoring needed funding to the over-stretched Air Force. The terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, resulted in Congress approving unprecedented, gigantic budgets for the U.S. Department of Defense, but surprisingly little of this actually got to the aircraft the Air Force flies. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top lieutenants poured hundreds of billions of dollars into ambitious , long-term super-high-tech programs like Future Combat Systems, the Space-Based Infra Red Spectrum program and the Future Intelligence Architecture. But they neglected the basic bread and butter of approving sufficient funding to keep the Air Force's aging heavy transport fleet and combat aircraft in top condition. Planned replacement aircraft like the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Aircraft were developed more slowly than planned and proved to be extraordinarily expensive per unit. Current Defense Secretary Robert Gates has more modest and focused goals. He slashed a lot of the funding from Rumsfeld's wilder programs, and he has sought to boost urgently needed maintenance funds for the existing USAF fleet. But the job is an enormous one. So many interceptors and fighter-bombers have now been in service for two or even three decades. And there are limits to the stress that airframes can accumulate. Also, supersonic strike aircraft like the F-15 accumulate much more wear and tear than subsonic bombers like those magnificent old workhorses, the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress strategic bomber and the legendary Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules transport aircraft. The failure to differentiate between the much more rapid pace of wear and tear on supersonic combat aircraft like the F-15 and the highly successful continued upgrades on existing B-52 and C-130 airframes lulled congressional legislators, both Republican and Democrat, into taking the USAF's old F-15 and slightly younger F-16 fleet for granted. Rumsfeld and his policymakers were so obsessed with their concept of "military transformation" that they paid no attention to the important job of just replacing the aging air fleet they inherited with affordable aircraft that could be produced on schedule in large production runs. The current F-15 crisis shows that the problems they ignored are now coming home to roost. Community Email This Article Comment On This Article Related Links The Military Industrial Complex at SpaceWar.com Learn about the Superpowers of the 21st Century at SpaceWar.com
Thompson Files: A good year for Bush
Arlington, Va. (UPI) Dec 27, 2007 When Operation Desert Storm ended with a crushing defeat of Iraqi forces in early 1991, many pundits opined that U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush was assured of re-election. Military success had made the president so popular that it was hard to see what could derail his re-election bid. But Bush's popularity declined rapidly after Desert Storm, and in 1992 he lost the White House to Bill Clinton in an election that had little to do with national security. |
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