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Gates plan may increase fighter gap

The so-called strike fighter gap may be growing under Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ new cost-cutting budget.

Gates said on Monday that the Navy will buy 31 “F/A-18s” in fiscal 2010. A Navy official said that includes F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets as well as EA-18G Growlers, which use the same Boeing-made airframe but is outfitted for electronic warfare.

Gates’ number is nine fewer than the 40 aircraft the Navy planned to buy in fiscal 2010, according to last year’s budget. The Navy said last year it intended to buy 18 Super Hornets and 22 Growlers.

“That would be a major cut in what we expected,” said Douglas Royce, an aviation expert at Forecast International, a Connecticut-based defense research firm.

Advocates for naval aviation have been warning about a looming fighter gap, a shortfall in tactical aircraft as the older F/A-18 Hornets wear out faster than the new F-35C Lightning IIs can replace them.

Last year, Navy officials estimated the fighter gap would reach 125 for both the Navy and Marine Corps starting in 2016 and extending for several years.

It is not clear if Gates’ plan includes an effort to speed up the Navy’s version of the F-35, which would help reduce the fighter gap. The plane, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter, is scheduled to become operational in 2015. The Navy’s carrier variant has been the lowest priority among the three versions of the F-35, after the A and B models designed for the Air Force and Marine Corps.

It also remains unclear how the cuts will affect the Growler. Last year’s plans called for the Navy to buy 85 Growlers by 2012, when the last EA-6B Prowler will be retired. The Growler is critical to the U.S. military because the Air Force has no primary electronic attack aircraft.

The declining size of the Navy’s aviation fleet has been a concern for Robert Dunn, a retired vice admiral and the president of the Association of Naval Aviation. On March 30, Dunn sent a letter to the group’s members saying the wartime demands are wearing out aircraft quicker than the Navy has acknowledged.

“If anything, things have gotten worse,” Dunn wrote, pointing to the fact that “aircraft are being over-utilized” in Iraq and Afghanistan and the “ongoing attacks in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.”

“At the current rate, given no further procurement, the Navy will be as many as 150, perhaps as many as 200, strike fighters short of what’s needed within five years, and that’s with the most optimistic projection of JSF production,” Dunn wrote several days before Gates announced the cuts.

Dunn said further cuts are a concern, but the full picture of the Navy’s plans will only emerge when the annual budget is sent to Capitol Hill later this spring.

“We really have to wait until we see the figures and what is presented to the Congress,” Dunn said on April 8.

A spokesman for Boeing declined to discuss the potential impact on the company’s F/A-18 contract with the Navy.