12-11-1999

DEFENSE: The Military Scrapes for Spares

National Journal
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.


Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

National Journal