| By ERNEST BLAZAR
Ernest Blazar is a senior fellow with
the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.
It is now axiomatic that, as former
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said, the first question that a president of the United
States asks in times of international crisis is: "Where are the carriers?"
When attention does turn to the carriers,
the focus falls most often on the "pointy-nose" aircraft--the sleek missile- and
bomb-laden strike fighters--in the carrier's air wing rather than on the so-called
"support aircraft" that fly with and often ahead of the attack aircraft. Less
glamorous than the Tomcats and Hornets that receive the lion's share of publicity and get
more budgetary attention in Washington, the support aircraft are key elements of today's
aircraft carrier battle group (CVBG).
An air wing's support aircraft include
four types of fixed-wing aircraft, one of which, the EA-6B Prowler, is an aircraft
specially equipped for electronic warfare. The Prowler and its four-man crew specialize in
jamming and in destroying enemy air-defense networks. Their efforts allow the fighters and
other strike aircraft in the carrier air wings to operate more freely.
The EA-6Bs are armed with AGM-88 HARMs
(high-speed antiradiation missiles) and are considered essential to strike missions, so it
is not completely accurate to describe them simply as "support aircraft."
Downtown and in the
Suburbs
Unlike the Prowler, which goes
"downtown"--i.e., into the heart of enemy territory--with other combat aircraft,
the E-2C Hawkeye acts as "eyes in the sky" for the CVBG. Like its larger Air
Force cousin, the E-3 Sentry, or AWACS (airborne warning and control system), the Hawkeye
sports a large dorsal rotodome.
The third support aircraft is the S-3B
Viking, a plane that in the past has been assigned primarily to antisubmarine warfare
(ASW) missions, but now carries AGM-84 Harpoon missiles and bombs to strike enemy ships
and is also heavily engaged as an aerial tanker for other carrier aircraft. (The ES-3A
Shadow signals intelligence collection aircraft served a vital role this year in the skies
over Iraq and Kosovo, but is scheduled to be retired this summer.)
Last comes the C-2A Greyhound carrier
on-board delivery (COD) aircraft, affectionately called the "mail truck" by
Sailors throughout the fleet. It keeps far from the battle, but without the Greyhound the
battle group would seldom have all of the right parts, or all of the right people, needed
to win that battle.
Although all four aircraft do much more
than carry their fair share of an air wing's responsibilities, they often receive second
billing when it comes to appropriations decisions in Washington. Consequently, for those
who seek a better understanding of the health of all elements of carrier-based aviation,
the following brief review of the status of the Navy's four principal support aircraft may
be useful.
Cats, Traps, And Movable
Surfaces
The EA-6B Prowlers are in such heavy
demand these days that the Pentagon's Joint Staff has placed them on a list of specialized
military units that must be carefully husbanded. That list is described as
"Low-Density, High-Demand" and refers to U.S. military units that are few in
number but needed almost everywhere. However, despite the military's best efforts to
conserve these planes, crises like Kosovo and Iraq are placing heavy demands on the Navy's
fleet of jammers. Indeed, since the retirement of the Air Force's EF-111A Ravens, the
EA-6B Prowlers have been serving as the nation's only airborne tactical jammers.
Some EA-6Bs were built in the 1970s; the
youngest of the Prowlers in today's fleet is eight years old and the average age of the
123 Prowlers now in the inventory is 16 years. More than 30 of those planes are not flying
operational missions, it should be noted, but instead are receiving a number of structural
and electronic modifications at the Northrop Grumman plant in St. Augustine, Fla., and the
Naval Aviation Depot in Jacksonville, Fla.
Much of the modification work is focused
on building a new wing center section--the assembly that joins the wings to the fuselage,
which often is the first major component of the plane to require replacement, according to
EA-6B Prowler program manager Capt. Steven L. Enewold. "The 'pacing item' for the
fatigue limitation on the airplane is the wing center section," he said.
The Navy is now embarked on a major
effort to replace all of the wing center sections in the Prowler inventory. Current plans
call for 91 Prowlers to be "rewinged," as the Navy describes it, with the last
rewinging scheduled to be completed in 2008, according to a Navy spokesman.
EA-6Bs are allowed no more than 4,500
"cats and traps" (catapult launches and arrested landings); only a few Prowlers
have accumulated between 1,8002,300 to date, so the limit on cats and traps probably
will not be a factor in determining how long the Prowlers can serve.
Spare parts usually are not hard to find
for these electronic warfare planes, but there are some parts that are much more difficult
to replace than others--locating movable flight control surfaces, for example, and/or
landing gear parts can sometimes be "difficult," the Navy admits.
The Replacement Question
Ten carrier-based Prowler electronic
attack (VAQ) squadrons, each with four aircraft, are assigned to Electronic Attack Wing,
U.S. Pacific Fleet. The Marine Corps has four tactical electronic warfare (VMAQ)
squadrons, each with five Prowlers. In addition, there are four extra VAQ squadrons
designated as "expeditionary." These Navy-run squadrons are manned in part by
Air Force fliers and navigators and usually deploy to land-based airfields when they serve
as a component of expeditionary forces.
How to replace these squadrons after the
Prowlers run out of useful service life is one of the most important questions the Navy
faces today. The need for an electronic-warfare capability will undoubtedly continue, but
the planes carrying out the EW mission today will reach the end of their service lives
shortly after the turn of the century. One option is for the Navy to keep making
structural and electronic warfare improvements to the Prowlers. Doing this would avoid the
costs involved in building a new airplane, but also would create the risk of saddling the
Navy with an antiquated platform that would be increasingly less capable as time goes on.
Another option is to equip the two-seat
F/A-18F Super Hornets for the electronic combat role. This would offer two main benefits:
(1) The aircraft so modified would be able to keep up with the strike aircraft they escort
into hostile territory; (2) The Navy would not have to build an entirely new plane or
logistics structure to carry this essential mission forward. Whatever decision is made is
important for the Navy's future--but it must be made soon if the Navy is to retain the
EA-6B capabilities as the Prowlers retire.
Three Options for
Hawkeyes
Unlike the Prowlers, which are no longer
in production, E-2C Hawkeyes are still being built--the Navy is now buying the last 21
Hawkeyes as part of its ongoing effort to keep the battle group's eyes and ears as sharp
as possible. The new E-2C Group II versions of the aircraft are equipped with better
engines, a more powerful radar, and the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System
(JTIDS), a data network better known in the fleet as Link-16. Older Hawkeyes are being
retired as the new Group II Hawkeyes enter the fleet, at a rate of about one every three
months. The fleetwide inventory of Hawkeyes once numbered about 109 aircraft, but over the
last several years that total has fallen to 75 aircraft.
The current Hawkeyes are flying about 40
hours per month, on average. That means that none of the oldest Hawkeyes in the fleet
today, the so-called Group 0 versions, will reach its 10,000 flight hour limit for many
years, according to Casey Bahr, the Naval Air Systems Command's E-2C Hawkeye program
manager at the Naval Air Station in Patuxent River, Md. "We should be good into the
20132015 time frame," he said. Until then, he added, the Navy "should be able
to maintain sufficient inventory."
What also should not be a problem with
the Hawkeyes for many years to come is the limit on the number of catapult launches and
arrested landings made by these aircraft. On average, the E-2C fleet is registering about
1.5 cats and traps for every flight hour. Each takeoff and landing puts great stresses on
the plane's airframe, and often fatigues it to the point that it must be retired sooner
than if it had operated from land-based runways.
The Navy is closely watching the
7,500-hour limit imposed on a section of the Hawkeye's wings. The outer wing
panel--basically all of the wing outboard of where the wing folds--is allowed to
accumulate no more than 7,500 flight hours. To date, however, no Hawkeye has flown
anywhere near that limit.
Unless its current force structure is
changed, the last of the Navy's new Hawkeyes will be delivered in 2003. In the years after
that, the Navy must decide whether to build additional Hawkeyes, buy a new aircraft to
replace the Hawkeye, or merely overhaul those flying today.
Vikings and Greyhounds
Much older than the Hawkeyes are the S-3B
Vikings, with an average age of about 21 years. All were produced in a high-rate
production run in the 1970s. The oldest Vikings are now 25 years old. The Navy plans to
keep the 113-strong Viking inventory around until about 2015, which is about when the
aircraft's service-life limits begin to be reached.
The number of cats and traps accumulated
by the Vikings now in the inventory falls between 1,5001,700, on average--much lower
than the Navy's limit of 4,300. The Vikings have accumulated about 8,000 flight hours on
average; some have as many as 13,000 hours.
Because of the additional warfare roles
picked up by the Viking in recent years, it is no surprise that they are extremely busy
aircraft. "They are being used as much as, or more than, ever before, because one of
the roles they have is as tanker," said Cdr. Robert LaBelle, deputy for Viking
programs at the Naval Air Systems Command. "When they retired the A-6 that gave us
[the Vikings] quite a bit of additional usage in the air wing." Beyond its tanker
role, the S-3B wields the AGM-84 Harpoon and AGM-65 Maverick antiship missile to carry out
its antisurface warfare mission.
The C-2A Greyhounds, with a slightly
lower number of average flight hours than the S-3Bs, were built between 1985 and 1990 to
replace older aircraft built in the 1960s. The 38 C-2As now in service have accumulated an
average of 5,0006,000 flight hours--about half the 10,000-hour limit set for them. While
that would indicate many more years of useful service life remaining, another limit draws
closer. C-2A Greyhounds are built to withstand no more than 15,000 landings. But one
strong indicator of how useful these planes are is that the average number of landings in
the C-2 fleet is now nearly 13,000. "Right now we are more concerned about the
landing limit in the short term than the flight-hour limit," said Casey Bahr, who
manages the Greyhounds as well as the E-2C Hawkeye program.
Because the Navy wants the Greyhounds to
stay in the active fleet for at least an extra ten years, it is subjecting C-2A to some
careful testing to see if the landing and flight hour limits can be extended. At a
Northrop Grumman facility in Bethpage, N.Y., one C-2A Greyhound is being subjected to the
equivalent of 15,000 flight hours and 36,000 landings in an effort to determine just how
much life is really left in the Greyhound airframe. The C-2 at Bethpage is shaken,
rattled, and pressurized to simulate a hectic life in the fleet. Engineers survey the data
to predict what parts and assemblies are most likely to require earlier replacement or
fixing. When testing concludes later this year, the Navy thinks it will know just how many
years of useful life are left in the planes.
There already are early signs, however,
that extending the C-2A fleet beyond its current limits will not be a problem--which means
that the Greyhound likely will be carrying parts and passengers to the fleet of
20132015.
Congress: Definitions
First
That date seems distant, but is actually
quite close, particularly when one considers how much time it takes to design, test, and
build new airplanes. Because the E-2C Hawkeyes, C-2A Greyhounds, and S-3B Vikings all will
reach the ends of their service lives around 2015, the Navy must begin now to think about
how it will replace those invaluable assets.
There have been a number of studies and
efforts over the years to do just that by using one common airframe to perform all of the
missions now separately assigned to the Viking, Greyhound, and Hawkeye. Despite the
obvious logistical and financial advantages that would accrue by replacing three airframes
with one, the Navy has yet to gain sufficient support elsewhere in the Pentagon, or in
Congress, for the replacement program. Congress has, in fact, declined to fund the Common
Support Aircraft (CSA) program until the Navy's requirements are further defined.
The ability of the United States to
project power abroad will rely in large part upon the Navy's CVBGs for the foreseeable
future--certainly well into the next century. And, although budgetary and media attention
will continue to focus on the attack aircraft in the air wing, success in any future naval
operation also will require major contributions from the Navy's jammers, tankers,
early-warning, and COD aircraft. Further delay in the identification of, and funding for,
a replacement aircraft--in the form of the CSA or other aircraft--will only further
postpone the inevitable. Program decisions are needed now, the Navy says, to avoid
expensive ad hoc fixes in the future. |
