A long-awaited Pentagon study on future military airlift needs
should help the Bush administration decide how the nation will cope
with growing demands for airlift and with an aging aircraft fleet,
said the nation’s top military official in charge of transportation.
“The need for airlift is increasing,” said Air Force
Gen. Charles T. Robertson Jr., chief of the U.S. Transportation
Command. Strategic airlift—the capability to transport massive
amounts of combat troops, equipment or humanitarian supplies around
the world—“is the most talked-about subject by the CinCs
[U.S. regional commanders]. ... It is among their top five priorities,”
Robertson said during a Washington D.C. conference on military airlift,
sponsored by Defense Week.
Strategic airlift requirements, which are measured in ton-miles
flown per day, were curtailed by about one-third after the end of
the Cold War. In 1993, the Clinton administration established a
requirement for the United States to have 49.7 million ton-miles
of strategic airlift. The standard was based on the U.S. military
strategy of being able to fight two regional wars nearly simultaneously.
Million ton-miles per day (MTM-D) is a commonly accepted measure
of performance across the transportation industry. It reflects how
much cargo can be delivered over a given distance, in a given period
of time.
Currently, said Robertson, “we are about 5 million ton-miles
per day short.” And that shortfall is expected to double to
10 MTM-D because a new study on future air mobility needs, called
MRS-2005, will set the U.S. strategic airlift requirement at more
than 54 MTM-D. “The MRS-2005 will say that 49.7 million ton-miles
is not enough,” he said, “so the shortfall would be
greater than 5 million ton-miles.”
Of the total, the U.S. Air Force must provide 29.2 million ton-miles
per day. The remaining 20.5 are supplied by commercial air freighters
under the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) program.
The failure to meet the standard set in 1993 can be attributed
to inadequate infrastructure—fuel systems and ramps, for example—and
the low reliability of the C-5 aircraft, Robertson explained.
The C-5As are showing corrosion and fatigue cracks on the horizontal
tie box, which is a “2,000-pound slab of steel that holds
the tail together,” Robertson said.
Another factor to be considered, he said, is that the U.S. Air
Force is replacing 270 C-141 cargo planes with 135 new C-17 Globemasters,
which have a much bigger cargo box. Nevertheless, this will leave
the Air Mobility Command with fewer aircraft to go around.
The problems outlined by Robertson should not be interpreted, however,
as symptoms of a “crisis” in U.S. air-mobility capabilities,
he said. Whether such a crisis materializes in the future, “depends
on the response to MRS-05 by the [Bush] administration. The solution
depends on the top-line that comes out of the [Defense Department’s]
Quadrennial Defense Review.”
Bridging these shortfalls in air-mobility will demand a large investment
in both airlift and air-refueling platforms, said Robertson. The
Air Force’s workhorse tanker, the KC-135, is showing its age,
he noted. Within many of the KC-135s in the fleet today, he explained,
there is corrosion and stress fractures in the stabilizer trim assembly—which
controls the pitch of the aircraft. Recently, 193 KC-135s were in
repair depots. There are 544 KC-135s in the active duty, reserve
and National Guard fleets. The service also owns 59 KC-10s cargo/tanker
aircraft.
The Air Force plans to replace the existing KC-135s between 2013
and 2040, Robertson said.
But those plans could be in jeopardy if the Pentagon does not provide
more funding for air-mobility programs, he added. “If you
only fund what is in the budget right now ... it will take $14 billion
a year, over and above what the Air Force budgets right now,”
Robertson said. “And, if you want to start to get well, [an
additional] $20 billion to $30 billion a year [would be needed].”
The mobility force on average is more than 30 years old, he said.
That compares to an average of 15 years of age for the fighter force.
AMC operates six of the seven oldest aircraft in the U.S. Air Force.
In 1989, the Air Mobility Command had 40 overseas bases and 15,000
employees to remove cargo and refuel airplanes. “Now, I have
12 bases (six in Europe and six in the Pacific) and 4,000 people,”
said Robertson. But he also noted that the cutbacks were justified.
The current force size, he said, is “enough.” The problem
is that the fleet of aircraft is aging and the infrastructure is
inadequate.
“We are putting in new warehouses and new fuel systems. That
will fix half of the gap problem,” said Robertson. “The
other half is [poor] C-5 reliability.”
Neil Curtin, associate director of the General Accounting Office,
the congressional watchdog agency, said the C-5 has a mission-capable
rate of 55 percent. The Air Force standard is 75 percent. That shortfall,
he said, is equivalent to 21 aircraft. For the C-17, the Air Force
standard is 87.5 percent, and the current mission-capable rate is
66 percent, the equivalent of 10 aircraft.
The C-5 prime contractor, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co., has
laid out a proposed remanufacturing program for the aircraft, that
would extend its life to 2040 and increase its mission-capable rate
to 80 percent, said William E. Arndt, the company’s vice president
of strategic airlift. He explained that the C-5 airframe has 80
percent of its structural life left, so it would make financial
sense for the Air Force to invest in refurbishing the fleet with
new engines and advanced avionics.
But it is not clear when the Air Force will be able to move forward
with this program, given the competition for funds within the service’s
various communities.
Robertson explained that the three or four C-5s could be remanufactured
for the cost of a single new C-17. A new C-17 costs between $180
million to $200 million.
“In the C-5 upgrade, there are no certainties,” said
Robertson. But he cautioned that the Air Force should make the C-5
a top priority because it needs to have an alternative to the C-17.
“This country should never become dependent on one strategic
airlifter for outsize cargo,” he said. “It needs both
the C-5 and C-17.”
More money also should be spent on defensive systems for air transports,
said Robertson. The threat of “hostile fire” against
a large airplane full of troops “keeps me awake at night,”
he said. “I fly about 240 very vulnerable large gray airplanes
that carry a lot of troops.” The more compelling threat, he
said, are shoulder-fired missiles, which are available worldwide.
The Pentagon has funded a program for large aircraft infrared countermeasures.
“But we are only buying 12 for the C-17s and eight for the
C-130s. We need 65 or so to do one small-scale contingency in a
high-threat environment.”