The top officer and top civilian of the Air Force on Monday said neither a continuing resolution nor the service’s in accurate estimate of the Long-Range Strike Bomber’s (LRS-B) research, procurement and support costs in its two most recent annual reports to Congress would affect internal Pentagon planning for the new aircraft.
“The mistake was a regrettable error, but it’s been corrected, and so it’s not going to affect us internally,” Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said Monday during a Pentagon press conference. She added: “It occurred, in part, because of human error, and in part, because of process error, meaning a couple of our people got the figures wrong, and the process of coordination was not fully carried out in this case.”
Analysts and congressional staffers have recently underscored that fiscal 2016 may to start with a continuing resolution (CR). While James voiced her concerns for how that could impact some 50 Air Force acquisition programs slated to be new starts, she said she did not believe that a CR would affect the LRS-B program, even though the bomber is scheduled to shift from research and development to its acquisition phase next fiscal year.
Bloomberg originally reported on Aug. 17 that last year the Air Force estimated the cost of LRS-B at $33.1 billion for fiscal 2015-2025 and this year, the service projected the 2016-2026 cost at $58.4 billion. The correct estimates were $41.7 billion for each period, according to that article.
“Our internal documents are drawn from two things—a [Future Years’ Defense Program] that’s submitted each year, and the long-range projections, cost estimates, etcetera, that are revised,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh said during the press conference. “The five-year number last year and this year were captured exactly accurately. That’s what we’re using as an air staff, and the updated projections and cost estimates or where the confusion came in, [stems from the fact that] we didn’t properly coordinate.”
James said the Air Force notified Congress of the LRS-B cost projection error, and added that the service is retraining the personnel involved and has “tightened up on the process of coordination to make sure something like this doesn’t occur again.”
One congressional staffer said the estimation errors are unlikely to impact acquisition, mainly because they were exposed in the program’s 10-year forecasts, beyond the program’s five-year estimates, where erroneous estimates can have more bearing on acquisitions, the staffer said. “Internally, DoD was supposedly using the right numbers,” the staffer wrote in a Tuesday email to sister publication NS&D Monitor.
In a second Tuesday email, the staffer added: “We all want accurate information, obviously. But the program impacts are likely nonexistent.” The staffer spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak on the record to the media.
Amid reports that the expected award date for the LRS-B contract could be postponed from September to October, James did not lay out an explicit timeline for the award, simply saying the announcement would come “soon.” She added: “We will do it when we are ready. The key thing is to make sure that we are doing it correctly, and so that is what we’re doing is making sure that we get this done correctly, so that’s point number one.”
The contract award was originally expected in spring 2015, but the Air Force has extended that timeline at least twice. Earlier this year, officials said it could be awarded in August, and now, September appears to be the earliest that the service will award the development contract to either Northrop Grumman [NOC] or a Boeing [BA]-Lockheed Martin [LMT] team. The Air Force intends to buy approximately 100 nuclear-capable bombers at a cost of $550 million apiece, and to debut the first aircraft in the mid-2020s.