Department of the Navy and Department of the Air Force Tactical Weapon Acquisition Programs
Federal News Service March 25, 2004 Thursday
HEADLINE: HEARING OF THE TACTICAL AIR AND LAND FORCES SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE
SUBJECT: DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY AND DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE TACTICAL WEAPON ACQUISITION PROGRAMS
CHAIRED BY: REPRESENTATIVE CURT WELDON (R-PA)
WITNESSES: PANEL I: ALLEN LI, DIRECTOR, ACQUISITION SOURCING MANAGEMENT - F/A-22, GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE; MIKE SULLIVAN, ACTING DIRECTOR, ACQUISITION SOURCING MANAGEMENT - JOINT STRIKE FIGHTER, GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE;
PANEL II:
JOHN J. YOUNG, JR., ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE NAVY (RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT & ACQUISITION), DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY; VICE ADMIRAL JOHN B. NATHMAN, UNITED STATES NAVY, DEPUTY CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS, WARFARE REQUIREMENTS AND PROGRAMS (N7), UNITED STATES NAVY; LIEUTENANT GENERAL MICHAEL A. HOUGH, DEPUTY COMMANDANT FOR AVIATION, UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS; MARVIN R. SAMBUR, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE AIR FORCE (ACQUISITIONS), DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE; LIEUTENANT GENERAL RONALD E. KEYS, UNITED STATES AIR FORCE, DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF FOR AIR AND SPACE OPERATIONS, UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
LOCATION: 2118 RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.
BODY:
REP. CURT WELDON (R-PA): The subcommittee will come to order. This morning the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee meets to receive testimony on tactical aircraft and related programs in the Fiscal Year 2005 budget request. We have two panels of witnesses: the first representing the General Accounting Office to provide the subcommittee with their views of the status of the F/A-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter programs; and the second representatives of the Departments of the Navy and Air Force to provide us an update on the F/A-22 and Joint Strike Fighter, and other major tactical aircraft and related programs.
I've maintained through the years, first as chairman of the R&D Subcommittee and again as chairman of the Military Procurement Subcommittee, and now today that the proposed Defense budgets were and still are insufficient to adequately fund the programs included the in the budget request. This is particularly true for the tactical aviation programs to include the Comanche Helicopter Program. Unfortunately, this is exactly what is happening. The Comanche has been cancelled and, I might say, it was cancelled in a manufacturing facility right next to my district.
But I support that cancellation, so let that word go out. I support the cancellation of a program right next to my district because we can't afford the Comanche, with all the other priorities we have and the budget pressures that we're facing. So for anyone to say that somehow I have a parochial interest, nothing could be further from the truth. And for my colleagues in the room who are out in favor of certain industries or contractors, let me just say we are in the midst of a massive train wreck financially. We need to understand that. The Comanche has been cancelled. The F/A-22 cost increases continue to result in a reduction in aircraft, with a total buy now projected at 218 aircraft.
Last year the Navy reduced its projected buy of Joint Strike Fighters by over 400 aircraft, and the first flight of the Navy Joint Strike Fighter is still well over three years away. Looking at the long term and overall DOD budget, CBO projects an approximate 30 percent shortfall in required funding to execute the long term defense plan. Given the overall national fiscal realities, this portends further program adjustments.
The F/A-22 program began in 1986 with a plan for 750 aircraft. With the subsequent reductions related to the end of the Cold War and much smaller defense budgets, the Air Force had a procurement objective in 1998 of 381 aircraft. Since that point in time, with continued program cost increases and with the congressionally imposed cap on the production program, the Department of Defense and the GAO agree that the likely buy is now approximately 218 aircraft. The good news is that progress has been made in the last year with the F/A-22, with apparent resolution of the vertical tail buffet problem and improved avionics software reliability, which is an issue we focused heavily on in last year's hearing.
Both the F/A-22 and Joint Strike Fighter are very complex systems and offer to provide our military services with superior capability. But both of these programs are costly to the American taxpayer and we must do everything we can to contain those costs. The F/A-22 R&D and procurement costs have increased well over 100 percent. The R&D estimated cost of the Joint Strike Fighter is already up 80 percent. In just the last year alone, the Joint Strike Fighter R&D program has gone up 22 percent.
I appreciate the technical challenges in these programs. But when we have senior DOD representatives testify before us as to the importance of accurate costing to the credibility and integrity of the acquisition system, tell us that all the major programs have been re- baselined for cost, and then we continue to incur double digit cost increases on an annual basis on many of our major programs, credibility does indeed suffer. If we are to make informed judgments on programs, we have to do a better job at estimating program costs.
Another area of concern is in the electronic combat mission area. DOD plans project going from one major platform, the EA-6, to at least four: the EA-18, the B-52, miniature air launched decoys, and a Joint Strike Fighter derivative. The Joint Unmanned Combat Air System, formerly the Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle, is a fifth platform mentioned for the electronic combat role. Unfortunately, it now appears that this program has been orphaned by the Air Force and Navy and is a $700 million program in DARPA. Without service funding, we may be missing an opportunity to address a variety of strike and electronic combat requirements with what would be a truly transformational capability.
We look forward to hearing our panelists about these programs today. And just a word before I introduce the panel. You know, you don't come to a hostile committee, but you come to one that is taking a very objective look at where we are right now. There's no sense in putting a sugarcoating on the difficult financial problems that we're facing as we attempt to do next year's authorization bill. There are no easy ways to go about fully funding three taxable aviation programs, increasing our ship surface and submarine fleet from its current status of 294 ships to somewhere in a range that's acceptable to the Navy, fully funding missile defense, which is a top priority of both the Congress and the White House, and taking care of all the quality of life issues that we have as a country, as well as other new programs like our work with UAVs and so many other areas.
So we have tremendous pressure, and you have to understand that we're going to look at these programs in a very careful and a very intense way. And, as I said before, we will take no exceptions.
And I can say that with full credibility because the cancellation of the Comanche-if I wanted to fight to save a program, that would have been it, and I'm not doing that. So I'm sending a signal to my colleagues in both parties. The time has come for us to be tough about the way we're spending money on programs that we can't see the ability to fund in the out years. And that may sound a little bit harsh, but that's the reality of where we are and you might as well understand the pressure that we're going to be under. And no amount of lobbying, no amount of personal conversation with individual members in both parties, in both bodies, is going to solve the problem of the dollar shortfall that we face.
On the first panel representing the General Accounting Office is Mr. Allen Li, director of Acquisition Sourcing Management for the F/A- 22, support by Mr. Mike Sullivan, director of Acquisition Sourcing Management for JSF.
Our second panel of John Young, assistant secretary of the Navy, Research Development and Acquisition, supported by Admiral John Nathman, deputy chief of Naval Operations, Warfare Requirements and Programs, and Lieutenant General Michael Hough, deputy commandant for Aviation. From the Air Force we have Dr. Marvin Sambur, assistant secretary of the Air Force, supported by Lieutenant General Ron Keys, deputy chief of staff for Air and Space Operations.
Thank all of our witnesses for joining us. We look forward to your testimony. Your statements will be entered as a part of the record. Before I begin, my good friend from Hawaii is not here; he had an emergency, Mr. Abercrombie. But we have an absolutely very capable fill in from the great state of Washington, and I'd like to ask him to make any opening comments he would like to make.
Mr. Smith.
REP. ADAM SMITH (D-WA): Certainly. Mostly I just want to agree completely with the statements of the chairman. I think he has correctly identified the challenges we face, and I agree with how we should approach them. You know, it's certainly not peculiar to the Defense budget that we have more demands than we have money. I mean, that pretty much is the operating procedure for the entire federal government as far as I can see. But choices have to be made at some point, and I hope we'll begin to make those choices so we can be smart about it, instead of having to do it at the last minute when there's absolutely no choice since we don't have the money. Certainly, you know, we hate to get as far down the road as we did on a program like Comanche. I believe the figure was $8 billion that was spent and we've got nothing for it. Advanced planning hopefully can avoid wasting that amount of money.
The other thing that I'm very curious to hear about, something that's been of concern to me, is the length of time it takes to put together these programs before we actually get something in the field. Now, I'm far from an expert in this area and it's possible there's something I'm missing. But I'm pretty that if you went to your average person in this country and said, you know, "We've been spending money on the F/A-22 for 18 years and we don't have a plane yet that the military can use," I don't think that they would think that that works very well.
I don't know off the top of my head what the amount of money is we've spent on the F/A-22, but I know it's not insignificant. A lot of money to spend for nothing. And I just want to know if there is some way to speed up the procurement process to get a better idea of what we're capable of? How can we go that long a period of time and not have a product? And, you know, F/A-22 is an extreme example but there are other programs in different branches that have same result. So I'm curious about that.
The other thing I'm curious about is if it's going to take this long for the F/A-22, probably for the Joint Strike Fighter-you know, I think at this point it's pretty good money to bet that that will be extended out further than even currently is planned. You know, what do we do in the meantime? If in fact we thought we had to have the F/A-22 by-I forget what the original date was, but it's long since passed. If we had to have it by then, what are we doing?
What's Plan B? Do we build more F-16s, more F-15s? Have we changed what our mission is? And if we've changed what our mission is, why are we continuing along the same path? So those are a few things that I'm curious about as you testify. And, again, the most important points were made by the chairman. We have significant challenges in terms of money, budgets, and we need to be smart about that so that we don't waste that money on programs we can't finish. So I look forward to your comments and I thank the chairman.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
REP. SMITH: You know, we've talked a little bit about what would happen if we cancelled the programs and everything, the F-22, Joint Strike, F/A-18E/F.
But from hearing what you said in terms of where we're at in terms of our contractual commitments, certainly on the F-22 -- it also sounded like, if I was reading your comments correctly, even on Joint Strike-we have contractual commitments that have put us pretty far down the road. Are we even in a position to contemplate that? Aren't we at the point where we've sort of-we've jumped and now we're trying to fill the pool up with water before we land?
There's no turning back. We're at the point now where, you know, it starts to be cost effective to buy these things. We've done the development, we do all that, and then we get to the point where we buy one wing and then when we start to get a greater return on our dollar we stop.
Help me out in terms of how that would work out? Even if we hit the brick wall that the chairman has correctly identified, we just flat don't have the money and we're trying to back out of it. It strikes me that it would be a pretty big disaster because we would have wasted all this money and now we're not getting the benefit. But how would that even work? I mean, we're much further down the road than we were even with Comanche at this point?
MR. LI: The F/A-22 is at a different point in its life than the JSF. The F/A-22 has been in low rate initial production and that's the reason why we have about 50 of them and we will soon have 70 of them. On the JSF, they are still in development and in that particular one the complexity of it-trying to build three variants, you know, using one basic configuration is extremely difficult, especially when you consider-Mr. Schrock, we've discussed this before-when you have a short takeoff/vertical landing type of aircraft and one that is a conventional landing and one for carriers, that's extremely difficult.
REP. SMITH: Well, we had a hard time building the one variant of the F-22, so --
MR. LI: Yes. But in terms of-it's not in production. We do have these commitments. They are commitments made by our international partners on the range of $4.5 billion. And we know that if this thing does not go further, that would be a death knell for future cooperation with our allies. I think that's an extremely important thing. We have a credibility issue here also.
REP. SMITH: Plus the JSF fills a lot of requirements. I mean, it's a lot of --
MR. LI: Yes, sir.
REP. SMITH: I think, what is it, 2,400 planes --
MR. LI: Yes, sir.
REP. SMITH: -- we're talking about getting. I mean, to pull out of that we'd have to do something to try to make up for that.
I'm sorry, you had a comment?
MR. SULLIVAN: And with regard to the Joint Strike Fighter program, where that's at in development now, obviously that's a lot earlier in its development. And I think some of the things that we've seen recently that the program is contemplating are things really that are-you know, there are some very hard decisions that I think they're getting ready to make at a time in the program that we feel, you know, we need to look at this a little bit more closely.
But this may be the most appropriate time for them to actually be looking at things like-you know, the design weight of the aircraft right now is becoming a big issue. That needs to be dealt with as soon as possible. That's a tough thing to do for these programs in the environment that they operate in. But, really, if they are given the time to do that now and solve problems now, we tend to believe-and I think this bears out on the F-22, for example. They had similar problems.
Once they got further along in development they were dealing with design issues that cost them probably a lot more money and a lot more inefficiency with their time than they would have liked. So in a way the JSF is in a position, if managed properly, to maybe solve some of those problems early. But that is-those are tough choices that have to be made now in a program like the JSF.
REP. SMITH: Quick questions on the F-22. What is its mission at this point? I mean, because when it came out it was, as I remember it-and the chairman is right. I was first here in 1997 and people were asking these questions, most prominently Chairman Weldon. That's one of my first memories of the Armed Services Committee is these very difficult questions about what to do about all these different TacAir programs. But it was supposed to be an air superiority fighter.
MR. LI: Yes, sir.
REP. SMITH: Basically, you know, we were going to fight off all those other planes up there and dominate the air. Well, things have really shifted. I mean, who out there is going to be fighting us in the air any time soon plane to plane? In light of that, I guess what is contemplated the mission of the F-22?
MR. LI: When the F-22 was first conceived at the ATF fighter, you're right, it was an air superiority, air dominance aircraft. We were worried about Soviet Bloc aircraft coming in large numbers. Since then the threat has changed. And I will let DOD witnesses tell you about this, but the concerns that they have now are not only in the fighters themselves but also in other threats such as the missiles-the guided missiles and cruise missiles that potential adversaries may have.
REP. SMITH: That the F-22, frankly, wasn't designed to deal with as --
MR. LI: Not originally. Not originally.
REP. SMITH: Didn't we-and I could be showing my ignorance on this, didn't we add the "A" here not long ago?
MR. LI: Yes, sir. A few years ago it became the F/A to stress the attack capability.
REP. SMITH: Can you really do that, by the way? I mean, I'm not sure how the design works, but if something is designed to be a fighter --
MR. LI: The F-22 always had an internal capability to carry bombs. That's not something new. But some of the new things that they're trying to do in terms of hitting moving targets-as you know, in past wars we've had concerns about things being mobile, assets that the adversaries having that would be mobile, and the F/A- 22, when it would be enhanced, would have those capabilities.
REP. SMITH: The last question is something I asked about in the opening, and this-maybe this is just the way it has to be. But, you know, to go from the point when we start a program to the point when we actually use it, to have such an incredible spread of time -- 18 years. I mean, that is staggering. Now, a lot has happened during that 18 years, I think perhaps unprecedented in history in terms of the changing nature of the threats that we face. But it seems almost impossible to properly design a plane over that long a period of time.
Things are going to change. Is it possible to compress that? I mean, because you can get it down in five or six years you're within the timeframe of your planning. But if you plan something and all this time passes-I mean, putting aside for the moment the threats that are out there, just the sheer development of technology. I mean, think about where we were technologically in 1985 and '86, which is where we are now, and we'd obviously build something different. Mar 30, 2004 10:32 ET .EOF
I guess I'm asking smarter-is there any way to get around that?
MR. LI: Mr. Smith, that is an issue that many people have looked at and GAO has really tried to look at many of those issues associated with, let's try to understand why is it taking so long? And Mike Sullivan on my left here, he has done so much work in the best practices area.
So I'd like for you to briefly explain that.
MR. SULLIVAN: I think, yeah, we've done a lot of work looking at product development and technology development and the issues that you have with transitioning technologies and products and things like that. And in fact we worked fairly closely with the department when they were working on their acquisition policies and trying to solve the exact problem that you're talking about. In other words, you know, 18 years from conception to fielding the product is not doing a whole lot for the warfighter right now. So there's that. You know, that's where-all of the new policies stress evolutionary acquisition and knowledge based acquisition, having a more vibrant tech base perhaps that's more --
REP. SMITH: Well, couldn't we build a few of them and like, okay, this is what we can do right now. Boom, let's build it. I mean, I would think it would be pretty good even if it was based on 1988 technology. And then, okay, then we'll try to upgrade it.
MR. SULLIVAN: The idea, I think, with the evolutionary type policies that they're trying to put forward now is to get-you know, this is where the requirements process and the acquisition process tie together. So they've been looking at their requirements process as well and, you know, we have the operational requirements documents on the old systems. They've put in place a new process that would look at the quantum leap where you would want a weapons system to get to and write a document for that. But then break that into increments that are manageable as product developments with available technologies, and then try to in an incremental way make that revolutionary leap.
So in other words, if you took something like the F-22 and you looked at the key performance parameters of that, which are stealth and super cruise, high maneuverability range and things like that, you could break that into maybe perhaps five year increments and try to build a plane that eventually gets to that. In some ways it makes it more complex, but in some ways it makes it a lot more simple and makes a business case for something that you can deliver to the warfighter in some relevant time period a lot easier to do.
So, you know, if you do that you've got to pay a lot more attention to your technologies as well. Your S&T community has to get a lot more disciplined also. But those-I think they-right now the department, at least policy wise, understands that and is trying to move that way. And it's just awful difficult to drive that all the way through the organization.
REP. SMITH: Thank you very much.