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Don’t wait any longer to make decisions on new planes

It’s unfair to airmen and the taxpayers to put on hold decisions about new aircraft that need to be made now.

We need to unravel what many in the press are calling the “tanker mess” and decide on a new air-refueling plane for airmen who maintain and fly Eisenhower-era KC-135 Stratotankers.

We need to look squarely into the face of the Air Force’s fighter needs and make firm decisions about F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter production.

A combination of lame-duck politics and legalistic wrangling is causing decisions to be postponed, not because of neglect but on purpose. Airmen are being forced to make do with an aircraft fleet that is smaller and older than any in living memory.

The situation of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan today reminds me of Americans fighting in the South Pacific during our darkest hours in 1942. Walter D. Edmonds, who wrote a history of their desperate battle with overwhelming Japanese forces using outdated or poorly suited aircraft, titled his book “They Fought With What They Had.”

Decades later, when asked about flawed equipment, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” Today, troops are fighting with what they have. Today, we don’t have the Air Force we want.

The average age of an Air Force airplane is now approaching 24 years. Air Force leaders warn that the service will face a shortfall of up to 800 fighters in the decade ahead.

Pentagon leaders plan to buy 1,763 F-35s to replace both the F-16 and A-10 Thunderbolt II. But because the Air Force isn’t getting the number of F-22 Raptors it wanted at first, some planners fear they’ll be forced to substitute F-35s for F-22s in some squadrons. The two planes have very different missions and neither is a good surrogate for the other.

All of these problems are related to each other and must be resolved above the paygrade of the acting Air Force secretary or the chief of staff. The fundamental decisions on new aircraft need to come from the White House and from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and they need to be credible enough to win support in Congress.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t taking a break just because there’s a lull in decision-making in Washington. The Air Force’s crisis in its aircraft fleet is happening now, not next year.

Our troops are doing their job. Our leaders in Washington aren’t.

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The writer, an Air Force veteran, lives in Oakton, Va. He is co-author “Hell Hawks,” a history of an American fighter group in World War II. His e-mail address is robert.f.dorr@cox.net.

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