As Congress weighs whether to buy more cargo aircraft for the Pentagon next year, military officials told a Senate panel yesterday they stand firmly behind a plan to reduce the size of the current airlift fleet.
Christine Fox, director of the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office (CAPE), and two senior Air Force officials made the case for retiring 32 C-5 aircraft yesterday to a Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) panel. Though the SASC already marked up its version of the fiscal year 2012 defense authorization bill, member Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) said she wanted to have the hearing to hear from the Pentagon about its stance that it has excess airlift capacity.
Lawmakers are fond of adding unrequested funding for Boeing’s [BA] C-17 cargo aircraft to defense budgets, and President Barack Obama has threatened to veto the FY ’12 defense appropriations bill that the House passed July 8 because it includes funding for an unrequested C-17.
Fox told the SASC’s Seapower subcommittee that the Pentagon stands by the latest Mobility Capabilities Requirements Study, released last year, that supports the retirement of 32 C-5 aircraft. The study found the Pentagon overall needs an airlift fleet capacity of 29.1 to 32.7 million ton-miles per day, which requires 264 to 300 aircraft, Fox said.
The Pentagon wants to do away with the current requirement for minimum of 316 such planes, because retiring the 32 C-5s would bring the fleet to 15 aircraft below that level.
“Without this change, the department would be required to maintain a strategic airlift fleet in excess of what is required, costing the department billions of dollars over the life of the aircraft,” Fox said.
She maintained the “retirement of these aircraft will not increase operational risk.”
Air Force Gen. Duncan McNabb, commander of U.S. Transportation Command, said he “fully” supports repealing the statutory requirement for the Air Force to have a strategic cargo fleet of 316 aircraft, a change the administration proposed this year following the completion of that latest mobility-capabilities study.
This change would allow the Air Force to retire an additional 15 C-5As and free up more than $1.2 billion over the next five years, McNabb said.
The Pentagon’s FY ’12 budget would support a strategic airlift fleet of 301 airfrcraft–222 C-17s, 52 C-5Ms, and 27 C-5As–which McNabb said is “far more modern and capable than any strategic-airlift fleet in our history.” Those 301 planes would provide the maximum capacity of 32.7 million ton-miles per day identified in the mobility-capabilities study.
The senators at the hearing–subcommittee Chairman Jack Reed (D-R.I..), Ranking Member Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), and Ayotte–did not challenge the Pentagon officials’ stance.
Reed, though, early in the hearing cautioned: “ I think one of the reason there was a (316-aircraft) floor placed with respect to strategic lift is there are strong intramural and extramural pressure sometimes to avoid buying airlift and buying other platforms. And I hope that’s not the …case before us. Because frankly…strategic and tactical airlift is essential to everything we do and everywhere we do it. And it deserves sort of premiere attention, not sort of secondary attention.”