THE US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has warned that the Department of Defense cannot afford the planned number of McDonnell Douglas F-18E/Fs, Lockheed Martin/ Boeing F-22s and Joint Strike Fighters (JSFs) without doubling the proportion of its budget which is traditionally spent on new tactical aircraft.
The CBO estimates that development and acquisition of 1,000 F-18E/Fs, 438 F-22s and about 3,000 JSFs will cost $350 billion between now and 2030. Based on past expenditure patterns, the CBO believes that the services will have about $6.3 billion a year to spend on new fighters, but will require $11.9 billion annually from 2002 to 2020 to fund the F-18E/F, F-22 and JSF programmes as they are currently planned.
The CBO has suggested several options to cut costs, ranging from cancelling US Navy and Marine Corps variants of the JSF, to reducing the numbers of F-18E/Fs, F-22s and JSFs acquired to stay within the $6.3 billion-a-year limit.
The latter option - the cheapest - would halve new-fighter deliveries between now and 2020 to just 1,700 aircraft, and increase the average age of the tactical-aircraft fleet to 19 years for the US Air Force and 14 years for the Navy.
The CBO report comes as the US Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) has criticised the Pentagon's fiscal year 1998 spending plan for delaying by a year the planned increase in weapons-procurement funding.
The Clinton Administration proposes spending $251 billion in FY1998, a 2.3% drop from FY1997. As a result, the US military will not reach the planned $60 billion annual procurement figure until FY2001. AIA president Don Fuqua says that another year of decline in procurement spending "-translates into a continuing, immeasurable, erosion of the industrial base".
Source: Flight International
