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Roughead defends Navy aviation plans

The Navy’s top officer defended the service’s request to reduce this year’s planned buy of F/A-18 Super Hornet strike fighters as a budgeting decision, and proclaimed his support for the plane’s successor.

“The Joint Strike Fighter is extremely important,” Adm. Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations, said Tuesday in response to questioning at a Capitol Hill hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee. “We have to get to the JSF.”

The service’s decision to ask for nine fewer F/A-18s than called for last year was a result of multiple requirements. “We are stretched in our obligations to meet our demands,” Roughead said.

Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., said he was “baffled and concerned about the budget recommendation to underfund the Super Hornet.”

Boeing’s McDonnell division builds the F/A-18 at its factory in St. Louis in Bond’s home state.

Three versions of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are under development in Fort Worth, Texas, by prime contractor Lockheed Martin. The Air Force is buying the F-35A conventional version, the Marines are gearing up for the first flight later this year of the F-35B short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing (STOVL) variant, and the Navy is asking for the first four developmental examples of its F-35C carrier variant in the current budget request.

The carrier version is scheduled to go into service in 2015, around the time a shortage of fighter planes — the so-called “fighter gap” — begins to take hold as older Hornets wear out before replacements can be purchased.

Calling the new plane the “Joint Strike Failure,” Bond said the Navy’s choice to cut the F/A-18 in 2010 is “a bad decision.”

“It looks like you’ve made a bad bet if you’ve not proven something can take its place and you’ve cut it off,” Bond said.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway said he was satisfied with what the Marines are seeing in the development of the F-35B.

“The initial vertical flight has slid right six or seven months; [it’s] going to happen this fall,” Conway told reporters after the hearing. “But the most recent information we have out of Fort Worth is that the engine is developing even more power than we thought it might for vertical lift, so we’re encouraged by what we hear.

“We reach initial operating capability in 2012,” Conway said. “We are the first of the services to have that capability. We’re anxious to put it aboard ship and see how it performs there. Then we will make a joint Navy-Marine Corps decision in terms of what the resulting numbers of our buy needs to look like. But we’re fairly encouraged by what we see.”

Asked why he didn’t use a stronger term, Conway was pragmatic.

“It hasn’t flown yet. We’ll know more after the airplane flies,” he said.

Unrelated to the hearing, the Pentagon on June 2 awarded Lockheed a $2.1 billion contract modification for low-rate initial production of the JSF. The modification buys seven Air Force planes, seven for the Marine Corps, one conventional JSF for the Netherlands and two STOVL versions for the United Kingdom.

The hearing marked the first Capitol Hill appearance for new Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who as a young man served as a Navy officer.

“The Navy has changed a lot in the 40 years since I was a surface warfare officer aboard the [guided missile cruiser] Little Rock. And it’s changed for the better,” Mabus said. He described “the caliber of recruits, the education they’re getting once they’re in, the commitment they have to the Navy and the country.”

Observing that “the deployment tempo is much higher and more flexible” and that “maintaining our fleet has improved so dramatically since that time,” Mabus declared, “what I hope I have brought with me is the importance of the sailors.”

Of the committee’s 18 members, only three attended the once-yearly opportunity to question the Navy Department’s top officials. Bond was joined by Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, the committee chairman, and ranking member Sen. Thad Cochrane, R-Miss.