As planners in the Pentagon dream of a "revolution in military affairs" with a new generation of microchip-driven weapons, a different reality prevails in the motor pools and aircraft hangars where the troops toil. Until the future force arrives, how does the military keep the old stuff running?
"Ninety-five percent of our equipment is a minimum of 15 years old; 50 percent of it is over 25 years old," said Army Chief Warrant Officer-2 John Freeman, who maintains trucks and other ground equipment at Fort Wainwright in Alaska. Such vintage vehicles, he added mildly, are "very maintenance-intensive."
Freeman's lament is common throughout the armed services. All four branches of the world's most powerful military must make do with surprisingly old equipment, everything from trucks to airplanes. "The average Army truck qualifies for vintage tags in Virginia," noted Loren B. Thompson Jr., the chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Virginia.
Ironically, the problems of aging are most pronounced in aircraft, the linchpin of American military success. The Navy and Marine Corps EA-6B Prowlers that jammed Yugoslavia's radar in Kosovo this spring, for example, have been flying on average for 17 years, with no replacement planned. The B-52s that bombed the Serbs are on average 38 years old, older than most of their pilots, and the Air Force will not even begin to replace them until 2034.
The problem is not so much obsolescence-the Pentagon periodically updates the key electronic innards of its aircraft. No, the problem is spare parts-specifically, the lack of them. "Try buying a black-and-white TV these days," said Robert P. Ernst, the chief of the Navy's Aging Aircraft Program. Some aircraft are so old that key components are no longer made. The manufacturers have gone out of business, the machine tools have rusted, and the engineers have retired.
"No one's making these parts anymore," said Master Chief Petty Officer Rick Phillips, who has repaired EA-6Bs at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington state for 23 years. In the case of one vintage radio tube, said Phillips, "the story is that the one guy that was making them out in his garage died."
As a stopgap, the military scavenges its own scrap heaps of retired aircraft. To get a vintage part, "they are actually pulling it off a plane that has been sitting in the desert for years," said Senior Master Sgt. Frank Foley of Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, who has worked on the B-52 for 17 years. Such salvaged spares can be in bad shape and take weeks or even months to arrive; paying private industry to reconstruct parts from old plans can take even longer and cost more.
So while units wait for parts, they cannibalize their own military equipment. "Squadrons will choose an aircraft and park it in the hangar, and that becomes the parts bin," said Senior Chief Petty Officer Timothy Johnsrude, a member of the Navy's aging aircraft team. "Cannibalization" is a long-standing practice in the military, but mechanics have had to fall back on it increasingly in recent years. That means, before a part can be put on aircraft A, it must first be pulled off aircraft B-doubling the wear and tear on personnel, on aircraft access panels, and on the part itself. Sometimes, sighed Airman First Class Michael Smith of McChord Air Force Base in Washington state, "it seems like we're doing more destruction to the aircraft than we are repairing."
Cannibalization hurts morale as well. A General Accounting Office study in August found that troops in key specialities cite spare parts shortages and other on-the-job frustrations as the No. 1 reason to leave the military. And as veteran technicians quit in disgust, the burden falls ever more heavily on the dwindling number of less-experienced mechanics left behind.
An even more vicious circle crunches the budget. As a piece of equipment ages, the cost to keep it running rises. The Navy's cost per flight hour for its aircraft is increasing 2.5 percent a year, Ernst calculates. To cover those near-term costs, the military must defer long-term modernization. But buying less new equipment means old equipment must be kept longer, which means operations cost even more, which means modernization must be cut again.
Dismayed defense insiders call this "the death spiral." The Pentagon's chief Cassandra is analyst Chuck Spinney, who saw the crunch coming years ago: "We had seven congressional hearings in the 1980s when we discussed these problems," he said. "It didn't have to be this way." Spinney says that the Pentagon could have broken out of the death spiral if it had continued buying current airplanes and not spent so much on developing the next generation of superplanes. That way costs would have been kept down, and spare parts problems lessened.
Now, even assuming that every new weapon stays on schedule and all planned budget increases materialize, Spinney calculates that by 2008 half the fighter fleet will be more than 20 years old-the age at which fighters have historically been put out to pasture.
Senior Defense Department planners are aware that their expensively aging inventory may strangle modernization plans. "If you continue to just maintain the old equipment as it wears out, you're spending more and more each year," said Jacques Gansler, the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and technology, the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer. "The way out of that is to enhance the old equipment." Why replace a worn-out vintage 1960s part with a new vintage 1960s part when private industry offers 1999 alternatives that do the same job, cost less, and break down far less often? asked Gansler. Modern microchips especially are far cheaper and more powerful than old electronics. To take advantage of the new technology, the Air Force, for example, is replacing the B-52's venerable navigation and mission-planning computers with new ones.
But such upgrades are less simple than they sound. "It's not just going to Radio Shack, [then] bolting it in," said the Navy's Ernst. A military aircraft's electronic systems interlock as complexly as a jigsaw puzzle. Figuring out just how to fit a new component into an old system costs as much as developing the new part in the first place, Ernst said, and the most efficient solution is often to rip all the old systems out and start again.
Despite these difficulties, the military has had real success upgrading older aircraft, albeit mostly support systems rather than front-line war machines. The KC-135 flying fuel tankers, for example, were built 39 years ago on average-but they have "a very reliable engine," said Tech. Sgt. Douglas Ford, a mechanic at McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas. That's because Ford's planes are among the 400 KC-135s given all-new engines in the 1980s. And because the new engine is also commonly used in commercial aircraft, civilian airlines have improved maintenance practices and kept the spare-parts market thriving.
The Army has likewise totally rebuilt its CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter. "Many of them saw service in Vietnam," said Chief Warrant Officer Dennis Busch, a CH-47 pilot at Fort Wainwright. "We've actually remade it piece by piece, [so] we don't really have that many problems because of age." Most of Fort Wainwright's CH-47s received all-new engines and transmissions in 1989-90-but less recently rebuilt Chinooks are fraying. The Army considered an all-new replacement, but at a projected cost of $20 million to $30 million apiece, "the new airframe was unaffordable," said Lt. Col. Timothy Crosby, a program manager for the CH-47s. So the Army will rebuild the old airframes yet again, with the aim of cutting operating costs by a quarter. In their third incarnation, the Chinooks will fly at least until 2033.
But how long can the military keep kicking this can down the road before the old systems reach their limit? Said Crosby: "There's a lot of conjecture about when you reach that point."
Such speculation is rife in all the armed services. The Air Force's mainstay F-16 fighter gave the brass a nasty shock this spring, when new data showed that its airframe was wearing out far faster than expected. Projected to endure 8,000 hours in flight, the F-16 proved so agile, so high-powered, and so versatile that pilots flew it harder and in more missions than expected. Analysts now predict that the plane, victim of its own success, will last just 5,000 hours. Newer F-16 models are sturdier, and manufacturer Lockheed Martin has an ambitious program to retrofit the fixes to the older planes. But even if the F-16 is repaired, similar surprises may await with other planes. "We don't have any operational experience with operating jets for more than half a century," said analyst Thompson. As military hardware ages to historically high levels, any predictions of how long it will last are shaky, Thompson said: "We're guessing." And on those guesses could ride the future of America's defense.