Jed Babbin usually makes sense on Military Issues. And this is the first rational explanation I have read about the Boeing tanker issue.
September 15, 2003, 9:00 a.m.
Holes in the Sky
Working with old bird.
-NRO Contributor Jed Babbin was a deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration, and is now an MSNBC military analyst. He is the author of the novel Legacy of Valor
ighters and bombers get pretty thirsty pretty quickly. An F-16 has a combat radius of about 575 miles, an F-117 about 650 miles. To fly from a base in Kuwait to Baghdad and back is about 700 miles, necessitating at least one meeting with an airborne gas station. During the Iraq campaign, our fighters and bombers were flying upwards of 2,000 sorties each day. And the tankers — those huge lumbering KC-135s and KC-10s — were right there with them, flying thousands of sorties. The operational pace is intense, and the tankers and their crews have to be able to keep up the pace. The question is, can they?
The Air Force's tankers were designed for a 25-year life. Of the 600-plus tanker aircraft we have, the average age is 43 years. The KC-10s were bought in the early 1980s. The KC-135 is a military version of the old Boeing 707 dating back to 1957. Some 22 percent of the KC-135Es — about 120 of them — are now under operational restrictions, meaning they can't fly most combat missions. Only about 38 of our KC-135Es were able to fly in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
A few sentences in last year's defense appropriations bill were aimed at getting the tankers quickly without taking money away from other Air Force needs. The provision said the Air Force could lease 100 new KC-767s from Boeing, the only wide-body aircraft maker that had an off-the-shelf tanker that wouldn't take ten years to put in the air. A noble idea, but not well-executed.
Sometimes that's how it works. Someone's lobbyists — whether it's the "legislative liaison" people from Fort Fumble or some industry guys — slip some language into an appropriations bill that hasn't gone through the authorizing committee. (I know. I've been guilty of it myself). Now, because of one Air Force misstep and a bunch of congressional egos, the lease program to put new tankers in the sky has become mired in one of those political bogs that will swallow it quickly unless someone works this out.
Congressional critics say they are concerned about two issues: cost and Boeing's reputation. The purchase price of one of the 767 tankers (according to the Institute of Defense Analysis) would be about $120 million, and Congress professes shock to learn that leasing is more expensive than cash purchase. Oh, come on. Anyone who has a mortgage on his house, or has ever financed a car should have learned that financing costs money. Forget lease or buy. The only issue is whether the Air Force needs the tankers now or not.
This is where things get a bit tricky. I spoke to Marvin Sambur, assistant secretary of the Air Force about just how urgent the tanker problem was. Seems that about two years ago, the Air Force told Congress that the tanker fleet was just fine until the year 2040. Sambur told me that he wished his predecessor hadn't sent the report because it was simply wrong. After the congressional report was submitted some of the old birds were found to have severe corrosion problems that were only revealed in tests that require partial disassembly of the aircraft. Now, the Air Force's insistence that new tankers are needed urgently is being received with more skepticism than it deserves.
The credibility problem is solved easily. According to my friend, former Air Force vice chief of staff Lt. Gen. Tom McInerny, (now Fox News senior military analyst), "If the tankers don't fly, nobody else does either." Tom knows, having been a no-foolin' combat pilot, and been up there flying on fumes, looking for a tanker when he wasn't shooting or getting shot at. I asked him what we should expect in very old birds like the KC-135s. He said, "In aircraft this old, the potential for that kind of hidden catastrophic problem is very high." Just like the corrosion problems Sambur said are being found "If a problem like that occurs, it could ground a significant part of the tanker fleet."
McInerny added, "If a problem grounded a large portion of the tanker fleet, it would put all our war plans at risk because we are so dependent on the tankers." That sounds urgent enough to me, but while the tankers age, and those problems get ever more likely, Congress stands on ceremony.
Sen. John McCain is really exercised about the fact that congressional proprieties weren't observed on the tanker lease. Congress has separate committees for authorizing major systems purchases and appropriating money to do it. They take time, lots of it. In this case the authorization was made part of an appropriations bill and wasn't passed by the Senate Armed Services committee. Sen. McCain sounds like he's not in the mood to compromise that process. He told me, "...it's a perversion and an obscenity to authorize a multi-billion dollar deal without going through the normal authorization process of hearings in the Senate Armed Services Committee and the House Armed Services Committee and (instead) putting it in a line item in an appropriations bill without so much as a hearing."
Sen. McCain has enlisted colleagues Carl Levin and John Warner to help block the lease. Wobbly Warner cosigned a Levin letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on September 4, which says that the Armed Services committee won't grant the necessary approvals for the tanker lease until the Air Force analyzes changing the lease to obtain only twenty-five of the tankers by lease and buying the rest. (What a peachy idea. Every time you cut the quantity, the price for the individual aircraft rises. The metal-bender has fewer items to amortize his fixed costs over). Warner also demands a justification of the decision to pay the $10.3 million more per aircraft by lease over and above the purchase price. What he doesn't mention is that there's no money in the budget to buy the tankers. Because of that, there's no alternative to the lease.
Warner's letter serves only to obscure the real issue: Is there an urgent of the need for the tankers or not? I asked Sen. McCain if he believed that the Air Force was exaggerating the urgency of the need. He said, "I can't say that, but I do know that the Air Force has not done any kind of thorough analysis that would indicate that's the case."
So we're stuck. No one in Congress — not Sen. Warner, not Sen. McCain, or anyone else — is telling the Air Force that they will pony up the money for the Air Force to buy any of the 767s. I asked Sen. McCain if he would support legislation to authorize and appropriate money for the Air Force to buy the tankers if the urgency was really there. He said he would, "…if an analysis of alternatives was completed and the tests and studies were completed and proved it was the case…Sure I would support it. Absolutely. But I also would try to do away with the kind of relationship that is obvious by these communications that were given us by Boeing where everybody's on a first-name basis (and) the Boeing company was basically setting the conditions for the lease as opposed to the Department of Defense. It's everything President Eisenhower warned us about."
So we're left with the bad old Military-Industrial Complex problem. Or not.
Judged only by a few recent news stories, Boeing's reputation is a problem. When there is significant reason to believe a company has violated the law, in a manner that reflects on its business integrity, it can be suspended: i.e., temporarily prohibited from receiving new federal contracts. One of Boeing's missile divisions was recently suspended when they admitted obtaining confidential documents from competitor Lockheed Martin. I asked Sambur how the Air Force was dealing with this.
First, Sambur personally had conversations with senior Boeing officials and made clear that any further problems would be something that would "put them on the canvas for the count of ten."
Second, the Air Force required Boeing to present a "get well" plan to ensure that their ethical business practices were at "the A+ level" and without any further issues. That Boeing adheres to this plan is being "closely managed" by the Air Force general counsel and inspector general. Third, and most importantly, Sambur told me, "The group of people who have been charged to monitor that and make sure that a policy and a real substance associated with that policy is put in place, have come back and said that…(Boeing) have solved the problem." From my own experience in that sort of mess, I have to conclude Sambur is doing it right.
What happens next should happen quickly. We are in a lull in the war, but we can't count on it lasting very long. First, the Air Force has to make a better case for the urgency of the requirement. Sambur shouldn't do one of those elaborate consultant efforts to test every aircraft in the fleet. Take the 22 percent of the KC-135Es that are under flight restrictions, and write up what's wrong with 'em. Gen. John Handy — commander of Air Mobility Command, which owns the tankers — should be directed to gather a few aeronautical engineering RSGs (real smart guys in Pentagonese) from around the military and analyze all available data, and report to Congress. Ask Warner and Levin to hold a special hearing on the report. And then ask Congress to put up the money or shut up on the lease.
At that point, McCain, Warner, and the others should have to make a choice, and the Pentagon should push them on it. The urgency of the requirement, proven easily, cannot be ignored. After that, the money to pay for the aircraft — $14 billion for the outright purchase over a few years, or that plus the leasing differential of at least $150 million — has to be put in the Air Force's till one way or the other.
The defense-budget process — aside from the direct costs of the war — has been a zero-sum game for almost two decades. It can't be any longer. When a pilot starts looking for that big juicy tanker, we can't let him down. He deserves to find something more than an empty hole in the sky.
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