As the U.S. Air Force nears a June decision on the path forward on the Northrop Grumman [NOC] LGM-35A Sentinel, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said on April 9 that the service risks not meeting the 2036 fielding date for the next generation ICBM to replace the Boeing [BA] Minuteman III at Malmstrom AFB, Mont.; Minot AFB, N.D., and F.E. Warren AFB, Wyo.
“Quite frankly, we’re running against, from my perspective, some real time issues if we’re gonna get these replaced at the three ICBM bases by 2036,” Tester, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense panel, said at a subcommittee hearing on the fiscal 2025 Air Force and Space Force budget request.
The Air Force requests $3.7 billion for Sentinel in fiscal 2025.
The service is examining cost saving alternatives for fiscal 2026, as it faces possible fielding delays to address a Nunn-McCurdy breach.
The latter occurs when programs exceed 25 percent program acquisition unit cost growth.
Tester also said at the Apr. 9 SAC-D hearing that he is concerned by development/fielding problems in two of the service’s top rapid acquisition programs–the Boeing [BA] E-7 Wedgetail to replace the E-3 AWACS air moving target indication plane and the hypersonic Lockheed Martin [LMT] Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW). In addition, the fiscal 2025 budget request does not fully fund rapid prototyping programs, he said.
“Before we entertain enacting a new budget and acquisition authorities, I want to understand how the Air Force is going to improve its performance,” Tester said.
At the hearing, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) raised concerns about a lack of Air Force spare parts and lagging availability rates for service planes.
“Air Force officials have said that, at any one time, 514 aircraft in the fleet are grounded due to a lack of spare parts,” Collins told the hearing. “Funding for additional spares to reduce that deficiency significantly was excluded from the budget request and instead has been included on the service’s unfunded requirements list.”
About $1.5 billion of the Air Force’s $3.5 billion fiscal 2025 “unfunded priorities list” (UPL) request to Congress is to buy spare parts for aircraft operation and maintenance, including $564 million for F-16s, $195 million for RC-135 Rivet Joints, and $167 million for B-52 bombers (Defense Daily, March 26).
The UPL said that the $1.5 billion spares request is to fund “a spare surge” outside of DoD’s working capital fund.
Capito said at the Apr. 9 hearing that she was surprised that the Air Force’s fiscal 2025 budget contends that the service had to accept risk in modernization to maintain “minimally accepted near term operational readiness.”
“The availability of our aircraft right now sits at around 60 percent,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told Capito. “To me, that’s a minimally acceptable number. It actually dipped a little below that recently, in part driven by the fact that the V-22 fleet is still not back in the air.”
Air Force Special Operations Command has CV-22s for exfiltration and infiltration missions.
Air Force aircraft availability “is driven by a number of things–largely by supply chain, availability of depot for throughput, and money as much as anything,” Kendall said.
Former Defense Secretary James Mattis “tried to get all of our fighter aircraft up to 80 percent availability,” he said. “That effort failed. The resources just weren’t there to do it. We’re not where we’d like to be in terms of availability and current readiness, but it’s an acceptable level because we can meet our commitments around the world…We can’t go below that [rate].”