JSF Delays Vex Marines

The Marines put all their tacair eggs in one bas­ket when they decided, in the early 1990s, to pass up the F/​A-​​18E/​F Super Hornet and wait for a ver­ti­cal take-​​off plane instead. That plane turned out to be the F-​​35B Joint Strike Fighter, and the Marines have com­mit­ted to buy­ing as many as 500 to replace around the same num­ber of sin­gle– and two-​​seat F/​A-​​18 legacy Hornets, AV-​​8B Harriers and EA-​​6B Prowlers — neck­ing down to one tac­ti­cal air­frame and sav­ing loads of cash in the process.
Sounds great, right?
The prob­lem is that the F-​​35 ini­tial oper­a­tional capa­bil­ity keeps slid­ing right thanks to weight, soft­ware and engine prob­lems. It’s unlikely the Marines will be able to field a squadron before 2012, sev­eral years later than orig­i­nally planned. Meanwhile, in Iraq, the Marines are fly­ing the life out of all their air­planes, putting as many hours on a deployed jet in just seven months as they would in two years back in the States.
By the time the JSF enters Marine Corps ser­vice in large num­bers, the service’s jets will be around 25 years old on aver­age. That’s old for a naval jet. But when you talk about air­craft age, there’s cal­en­dar age and then there’s fatigue age. What with all the hard use in hot, sandy Iraq and on the Navy’s car­ri­ers (to alle­vi­ate Navy force cuts, the Marines con­tribute sev­eral Hornet squadrons to car­rier air wings), the Marines jets “feel” a lot older than they actu­ally are.
The result is pre­ma­ture retire­ment for dozens of tired jets, mostly Hornets. As the fleet shrinks with­out a hot pro­duc­tion line to replace losses, the only way the Marines can keep its squadrons fully equipped is to decom­mis­sion a few squadrons and redis­trib­ute their jets. Which is exactly what will hap­pen in March 2007, when the Corps shut­ters VMFA(AW)-332 and VMFA-​​134 fly­ing the F/​A-​​18D and F/​A-​​18A+, respec­tively.
I embed­ded with 332 in Iraq this year, report­ing on the great work they were doing sup­port­ing the ground troops in restive Al Anbar province. 332 is a fine unit with one of the best safety records in the entire Marine Corps, hav­ing last crashed a jet around 30 years ago. It’ll be a shame to see them go.
On the other hand, these force struc­ture cuts them­selves don’t actu­ally reduce the num­ber of jets in Corps ser­vice. They just con­sol­i­date the exist­ing jets into fewer, larger units that can fly and main­tain the planes more effi­ciently. This is mak­ing lemon­ade out of lemons from trees planted a decade ago when the Corps pinned all its tacair hopes on a paper air­plane that is only now tak­ing shape, years late.
Here’s to hop­ing the F-​​35 pans out. If it doesn’t, the Air Force can buy new F-​​16s and F-​​15s from pro­duc­tion lines sus­tained by for­eign sales and the Navy can boost its Super Hornet order (as has already been rumored), but the Marines are screwed. As long as nobody at HQMC is inter­ested in the Super Hornet, there’s no con­tin­gency plan.
Pay 332 a trib­ute by check­ing out some of their Iraq snap­shots at Flickr.
–David Axe

June 27th, 2006 | Planes, Copters, Blimps | 19803 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/06/27/jsf-delays-vex-marines/JSF+Delays+Vex+Marines2006-06-27+23%3A00%3A00hambling You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.