Both House and Senate authorizers believe that the Navy should be buying F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, but the lawmakers actually holding the purse strings — the House appropriators, in this case — have unveiled a bill that would push the service to buy EA-18G Growlers. Either way, however, lawmakers are pretty united in thinking the Navy needs to be buying something.
Both the the House and Senate Armed Services Committees passed bills authorizing $1.15 billion for 12 Super Hornets, as concerns persist among Congress that the Navy isn’t doing enough to fix an impending shortfall in strike aircraft in the coming years as legacy F/A-18s retire and the F-35 still drags its feet in arriving ready for service.
Senate authorizers said in their report that they had included the buy in order to “reduce near-term strike fighter inventory gaps and risk,” further pointing out that it was included in the unfunded priorities list the Navy submitted to Congress.
The House Appropriations defense subcommittee didn’t disagree in its mark-up of the bill released earlier this week, but they proposed one small change to that idea: buy EA-18g Growlers instead.
The HAC added $660 million for seven electronic attack jets. The committee didn’t elaborate on the reasoning behind this move, but based on previous bills, Congress has repeatedly added either Super Hornets or Growlers in an attempt to make up for some of that shortfall, and either aircraft — both are based on the same airframe, after all — appears to be just fine to lawmakers.
Richard Aboulafia, vice president of analysis at the Teal Group, said he wasn’t surprised with the move as Congress “was bound to extend the line’s life for a year or two.” The only question was whether to buy more Growlers or to focus more on the purely strike-focused Super Hornets.
“It’s just a question of priorities,” he said. “Growlers also help take care of any strike fighter shortfall. You just get fewer of them for the same amount of money.”
As far as how Congress is paying for these extra aircraft, that’s a trickier question, but Aboulafia suspects it may be from the controversial Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund, which the Republicans have been seeking to inflate, much to the chagrin of the Obama Administration.