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Jura said:

check this bro:

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Air Force Brat said:

Yep, all the Amen I needed to that little sermon!

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Without a readiness-focused supplemental spending bill passed by lawmakers this spring, the Navy and Marine Corps would stop flying at home and ship and submarine maintenance availabilities would be canceled, the vice chief of naval operations and assistant commandant of the Marine Corps said at a hearing today.

The continuing resolution currently funding the government at last year’s spending levels is set to expire on April 28, 2017, and even if lawmakers could pass the Fiscal Year 2017 spending bill for the second half of the fiscal year, budget caps already in place mean that the Navy would receive about $5 billion less than it did in FY 2016. Having started the year, then, at a higher spending rate, dropping down to the FY 2017 budget would cause the Navy to almost immediately run out of operations and maintenance dollars in parts of its budget.

If the Navy did not receive a supplemental spending bill with additional funds for FY 2017, “within a month we are going to have to shut down air wings, we are going to have to defer maintenance on several availabilities for our surface ships and submarine maintenance facilities,” Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Bill Moran told the House Armed Services Committee today at a “state of the military” hearing.

“We would be just flat out out of money to be able to do that. I think everyone here knows in ’17 the Navy took a $5-billion cut in its topline, if that comes to fruition that’s $2 billion of readiness cuts we’re going to have to take, which is immediately applied to things like ship avails.”

Five attack submarines would see their maintenance availabilities canceled this year and be put at risk of being decertified if no supplemental were passed out of Congress, Moran added, in addition to similar cuts to surface ship maintenance availabilities.

Assistant Commandant Gen. Glenn Walters said “we would stop flying in about July” without a supplemental. He clarified that forward forces would continue to operate, but for units training at home, “all training would cease without a supplemental, and that includes the parts money and the flying hour money.”

Even if the supplemental – which could total between $30 and $40 billion for all the armed services – is passed in a timely manner, the Navy and Marine Corps still face massive readiness issues that money can’t immediately address. Shipyards and aircraft depots face work backlogs stemming from the 2013 start of sequestration and the hiring freezes, furloughs and funding cuts it brought. Though the Navy has tried to hire thousands of people to conduct maintenance on aircraft carriers and submarines at its four public shipyards, the yards are still unable to keep up with the workload the fleet gives them.

Moran described the cycle of effects the fleet sees from this workforce challenge, using aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush’s (CVN-77) 13-month maintenance availability – which was scheduled to last eight months – as an example.

“Bush was late for a lot of reasons. One was the junior nature of the workforce,” the VCNO explained.
“We had upwards of 7 percent of rework on Bush throughout that 13-month maintenance period. So until that workforce gains that experience, we’re going to continue to see rework issues. There are some training issues involved. We are starting to see some nice turnaround in the public yards, but again, until we see that workforce mature,” performance and on-time completion of availabilities will continue to suffer.”

Additionally, USNI News understands, the ship saw 42 percent growth in work compared to the original plans for the maintenance package.

With attack submarines being considered a lowest priority at the public yards, carrier overruns cause a chain reaction: USS Albany (SSN-753) spent 48 months in the repair yard due to repeated delays as the workforce focused its attention on CVNs and SSBNs, meaning an entire crew missed out on going on deployment. And USS Boise (SSN-764) wasn’t even put into the shipyard because the workload is so far over workforce capacity, so the boat is currently sitting in Norfolk and is not certified to dive anymore while it awaits maintenance. That attack submarine will eventually be sent to a private repair yard for maintenance, but USNI News understands that won’t be able to happen until at least FY 2019 and will cost much more than putting the ship into a public yard.

Moran said putting submarines in private yards is sometimes an option when the public yards are stuck on carriers or ballistic missile subs – USS Montpelier (SSN-765) is at General Dynamics Electric Boat currently for this exact reason – but the private yards are not guaranteed to have capacity to take on extra repair work, and in a cost-constrained environment, spending the extra operations and maintenance dollars can be a hard choice to make.

“The very late determination that we no longer have the capacity at the public yards, when we turn to the private yards at that moment it becomes a very expensive proposition,” he said.
“So the degree to which we can … try to drive down cost, it makes it easier for us to have to surge the private yards when (at the public yards) the work exceeds the capacity because of delays.”

These shipyard workforce challenges do more than just affect ship repairs lower on the totem pole, House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee ranking member Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) noted at the hearing. The Navy already faces a looming attack sub shortfall, and sidelining these SSNs for no reason other than lack of workforce capacity makes little sense in an increasingly dangerous world.

“We’ve heard from Adm. (Harry) Harris, [U.S. Pacific Command commander], Gen. (Curtis) Scaparrotti, [U.S. European Command commander], that they need more submarines now,” Courtney said.
“We’re not going to build a Virginia-class now because it takes five years, but if we could get the Albany, the Boise and those others out and underway, then we can respond to those combatant commanders.”

The sea services also face aviation readiness challenges that go beyond what supplemental funding can immediately fix. Moran said during the hearing that the legacy F/A-18A-D Hornets today take twice as many man hours as originally planned for repairs and maintenance, which only exacerbates the challenges at aviation depots. He said that “on a typical day in the Navy about 25 to 30 percent of our jets and our airplanes are in some kind of depot maintenance,” and overall just over half are unavailable for operations today.

“We can and we do put ready airplanes and ready aircrews forward” but “there’s no depth on the bench behind them if we had to surge forces,” the vice chief said. If a crisis broke out somewhere in the world, “we will be late to get there, if we want to have full-up equipment to get to the fight.”

On the Marine Corps side, Walters said the service requires 589 ready basic aircraft to train, workup for deployment and operate forward. The Marines have only 439 today, which is still 50 more than it had two years ago. He said readiness numbers are moving in the right direction – most pilots are now receiving between 12 and 14 hours of flight time a month, which is still short of the 16 to 18 minimum requirement but much better than at the height of the recent aviation readiness crisis. However, even reaching these ready basic aircraft and flight hour goals would put the Marines at the minimum requirement to stay current on their certifications, and still falls short of helping the pilots become proficient, or “the A-team” as Walters said. The assistant commandant said there was no correlation between the flight hours and fatal crashes that have occurred in recent years, but he said that an inability to build proficiency would hurt the service in a high-end fight.

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The

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t is in a “death spiral” and the only long-term fix is to buy new jets faster, both

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and the

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, a former Pentagon analyst told Breaking Defense. Two veteran Hill staffers agreed the situation is dire and new planes are needed, although they put equal emphasis on

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.

The number of planes that are not ready for combat has gotten “very bad,” said one Hill staffer. “If there’s a big war, it’s a serious problem.”

Currently, 53 percent of Navy and

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aircraft are unfit to fly. That rises to 62 percent of strike fighters and,

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, 74 percent of

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. Overused, under-maintained, and not replaced, the aircraft are simply wearing out.

“There will always be a portion of the fleet that will be out of reporting due to mods (modifications), depot maintenance, and other categories, but I think the historical norm is about a third,” said the second Hill staff. “Bottom line is the strike fighter situation is bad. I would say very bad.”

Why? First, the staffer said, “there has been a gutting of the aviation support accounts, (which) dropped to 52 percent of requirement in 2013” — the year

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sliced the Pentagon budget — “and (rose) only back up to 74 percent in 2015.”

Second, “consumption is outpacing procurement: Since 2000, we have struck 748 strike fighters and procured 573 for a delta (net loss) of 175 aircraft,” the staffer continued. More than half that net loss is due to delays on the Joint Strike Fighter program, the staffer added. “There were supposed to be something like 110

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by 2018. Since they’re not there, the older aircraft get used up more.”

“What we are seeing is a classic death spiral,” said the former OSD analyst. “We have talked about this for years as being theoretically possible, but it never has actually happened. A platform death spiral occurs when you have too few of a given platform — airplanes, tanks, ships — but you continue to use them at the same or increased pace.” That creates a vicious circle. Fewer aircraft doing more work will wear out faster, which means you have even fewer aircraft working even harder, repeat at nauseam until the last plane breaks.

“The bottom line is that the naval air force is in a bad way,” said the analyst. “We need to continue producing

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like SA-300/400s (advanced Russian-made anti-aircraft missiles) and reopen

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with Boeing to take pressure off the current force now.”

Deep Roots

The roots of today’s crisis

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, when the Navy and Marines decided their new F-18 Hornets didn’t need the traditional protections against corrosion. They were wrong, as depot mechanics have repeatedly discovered on opening up early-model Hornets to discover time-consuming and unplanned-for problems.

The next fateful decision came in the 1990s, amidst the post-Cold War drawdown, when the Navy decided to buy fewer of the upgraded F/A-18E/F Super Hornets than planned and the Marine Corps decided not to buy them at all. Instead, the Marines resolved to keep their early-model Hornets — F/A-18As, Bs, Cs, and Ds — until the Joint Strike Fighter came along.

Not only did the F-35 not arrive on schedule, but the post-Cold War peace didn’t last. Suddenly the services had to meet high wartime demand with a smaller and older fighter fleet than planned — which meant the aircraft were flown harder and wore out faster, triggering the death spiral.

In fact, the demand for aircraft over Iraq and Afghanistan was so intense that the services didn’t give the planes enough time in maintenance depots. “In order to meet high OPTEMPO (Operational Tempo) demands over the past 10-15 years, (they) skipped a lot of depot maintenance with F-18s or didn’t do all the work when they went to depot,” the first staffer said. “In short, they burned out the F-18 fleet and took shortcuts on maintenance. They did that to meet operational demands, which is certainly justifiable, but the cost for that is now coming due.”

Even as the need for maintenance grew, the budget for it got cut — particularly after the

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passed in 2011. “The depots themselves have faced budget cuts, hiring freezes, etc. since 2011, which has reduced their throughput capacity. So, even if an F-18 is at a depot, it is taking much longer to get them through the process,” the first staffer continued. “The downward trend in O&M (Operations & Maintenance) funding, personnel cuts, and less

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funding has had an impact on the F-18 fleet’s readiness. If it takes longer to get parts, planes are going to be down longer. If you have fewer mechanics, it takes longer to fix everything.”

“To fix it, they mostly just need more O&M money over a sustained period of time, and it needs to be provided in a more predictable manner,” without BCA caps or

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, the staffer said. “(But) a lot of the F-18s, especially in the USMC, are just plain old and worn out. No amount of maintenance can make a very old aircraft brand new.”

“The ways to get out of this are increase depot throughput,

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the enabler accounts, especially spares, (and) buy more new aircraft,” agreed the second staffer. “Procurement does help readiness.”

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Jura said:

Jan 5, 2017
related:
US Air Force glides toward B-52 engine replacement plan

common: "But despite the support of high-ranking officials such as Global Strike Command chief Rand, the service cannot afford a traditional engine procurement program, which clocks in at an estimated cost of at least $5 billion to $7 billion.

Thus, the Air Force’s acquisition organization (SAF/AQ) and its Office of Transformational Innovation have led a separate charge on alternative financing options. Leaders have floated ideas such as leasing or creating private-public partnerships, and the service in 2016 issued another RFI seeking information from financial institutions about options, Noetzel said."

the Pentagon thinking of leasing bomber engines ... does Trump know? source is DefenseNews

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The

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wants new engines for its venerable

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bomber fleet, but there’s no money in the budget to pay for them, Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Stephen Wilson said Tuesday.

Proposals for replacing the eight Pratt & Whitney TF33 engines on the B-52s, which burn about 3,000 gallons of fuel an hour, have been around the Pentagon for years. Replacement “makes great sense,” Wilson said. “If we had it in our budget, we’d buy it, but we don’t have it.”

Wilson was responding to questions at a House Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday from Rep. Ralph Abraham, a Louisiana Republican, who said that new engines would increase the B-52s’ range by about 30 percent and boost loiter time over targets by 150 percent.

The general agreed and confirmed that new engines would also boost fuel efficiency and lower maintenance costs. “Operationally, it makes great sense,” he said. “If we had the money, we’d do it.”

Despite the budget problem, the Air Force has sent out requests for information (RFI) to engine manufacturers about coming up with replacements for the TF33 engines.

Wilson said an Air Force team is exploring the possibility of “third-party financing.”

Two years ago, Lt. Gen. Mike Holmes, deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and requirements, described third-party financing for Defense News: “The idea is in a public-private partnership, somebody funds the engine and then we pay them back over time out of the fuel savings, which are generated out of the new engines.”

Current estimates on the more than 70 B-52s in the fleet have them flying until 2040 or possibly 2050, depending on the development of the next-generation Northrop Grumman

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bomber.

However, B-52 retirement plans have been scrapped several times previously. The planes supposedly were headed to the boneyard in the 1990s as Northrop Grumman

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stealth bombers came online, but the skyrocketing costs of the B-2s cut planned deliveries from 132 aircraft to 21.

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Jura said:

now I read

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source:

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Air Force Brat said:

There ya go, now that the Liar in Chief can't force the troops to "shut up", and they are free to talk, they are singing like canaries. Barack Hussein Obama is a "Bully!" and his team did not and will not play fair.... and as AFB has been warning, the "upper crust" has nearly "starved" Nav Air to death....all the services are hurting, but its just more obvious when the Navy has a problem, kinda like B-52s dropping turbo-jets from the sky??

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In Wake of Army Handgun Contract, Senator Calls For Rifle Upgrade

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FEBRUARY 8, 2017

An Iowa lawmaker congratulated the Army’s vice chief of staff on inking a contract for a new Army handgun in January–but lost no time in pressing him on further small arms upgrades.

Sen. Joni Ernst, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army National Guard, addressed Gen. Daniel Allyn during a readiness subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill today. The Iowa Republican reminded him that other world powers were also investing in sophisticated weapons.

“I do commend the Army’s recent action on upgrading its handgun. The fact remains that it took far too long to happen, but we are underway,” she said. “Russia continues to upgrade its rifles and this really needs to be a priority as well for the Army. So again to you, besides more money, what can we do to upgrade other small arms and how can we do it faster?”

Allyn opted not to address the question of additional rifle upgrades directly, but noted that the Army was struggling to maintain modernization programs amid ongoing budget limits.

“I know that we are aware that we have a soldier enhancement program that is part of our Program Executive Officer soldier,” he said. “And we are focused on a number of initiatives to ensure that our soldiers have the best possible equipment as they go into combat in the future as we have been able to do in the past … we have a number of lighter, better human dynamic and next-generation capabilities that we need to get to the force. But we’ve got to have money to enable that to happen.”

The Army is in the process of upgrading its M4 carbines to M4A1s, an improved design that offers a more durable barrel and a fully automatic fire option instead of three-round bursts. They expect the process of fielding M4A1s to the force to continue into 2020. Last June, officials announced they were

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, saying they did not add enough additional value.

The Army announced in January it had

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, granting the New Hampshire company a $580 million contract. Initial operational testing is set to begin this summer, officials said.

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1. Shoot with a straight elbow: The requested forward Picatinny rail, according to the Army specs, would be 12 inches long. That makes it about four inches longer than the current standard, and with reason.

The M4 and M4A1 are designed to be held with a bent front elbow. But many soldiers utilize a technique in which they extend their arm and lock their elbow for better stability. That technique is a bad idea on current carbines because of a shorter rail, Russell said. For most shooters, extending the forward arm would put the hand past the end of the rail and require the shooter to hold the barrel instead — a good way to burn that hand.

2. Attach more gear: Along with hand placement, the longer rail would allow soldiers to attach more enablers to the weapon, such as laser sights and pointers, forward grips, bipods, optics and lights.

"Right now, there's limited space," Russell said. "This allows you to put more than you are currently able to put on them."

Russell said part of the reason for seeking enhanced mounting capacity comes with an eye toward the future: the Army's ongoing development of a rifle fire control system.

The Army remains a few years away from a working prototype that meets its requirements, Russell said. But eventually, the system will effectively adjust the crosshairs in a scope to account for factors like distance, wind, humidity, barometric pressure, and ammunition characteristics. The longer rail of the M4A1+ will better facilitate the new tool, which Russell said the Army hopes will compare in size to today's optic systems.

3. Floating for accuracy: Encased in the new extended rail would be a floating barrel. In other words, the wrap-around rail would not touch the barrel.

A rifle's barrel vibrates naturally when it fires, and altering the harmonics on the barrel can impact accuracy. When a rail is attached to the middle of the barrel as it is now, forces exerted on the rail do just that as they are exerted on the barrel. Forces can include the rigidity of the rail itself, weight of enablers, the pull of a sling mounted to the rail, or a tight grip by the forward hand on the rail.

"A soldier holding it with a rigid grip can have an effect, and that causes some accuracy degradation," Russell said of an accessorized, non-floating barrel. "By having the floating barrel on there, it takes all those things out of the equation, which allows better accuracy."

4. Removable sights: The Army, Russell noted, wants to take weight off the soldier wherever it can. That's part of the reason the call to industry specifies removable front and rear iron sights.

That feature would also allow for lower-profile enablers (that don't stick out as much). That would make for a less-bulky accessorized rifle with a lower center of gravity. It also would reduce the silhouette signature, Russell said, making it harder to spot.

For soldiers who want the sights, there will still be a small, fold-down front and rear sight that can clip to the Picatinny rail, Russell said.

5. Better accuracy: In terms of system accuracy, the specs require a 5-inch mean radius from 300 meters, throughout barrel life. That means shots average no more than 5 inches from the target.

Additionally, the Army hopes the weapon can limit the extreme spread of 5 inches at that distance and 10 inches at 600 meters, with a 90 percent probability. That goal, listed as "desired" rather than "required," means 90 percent of shots fit into a circle 5 inches in diameter (a 2.5-inch radius) at 300 meters, and a circle twice as wide at 600.

6. Flash suppressor. The specs request an improved flash suppressor to reduce both day and night firing signatures. That new muzzle brake, Russell said, should make a fired M4A1+ a little more difficult to see and hear.

The suppressor should, according to specs, include a blank firing adapter compatible with M200 ammunition. (The adapter is the muzzle-blocker used in blanks-based training to minimize injury should the gun accidentally fire a live round).

7. Optional sniper trigger: One modification won't go on every M4A1+, but the squad marksman will appreciate it.

A specialized trigger will offer sniper-like sensitivity, Russell said. Current carbines have double-stage triggers, with some slack to pull before the weapon fires. The specialized trigger module will be single-stage: the gun will fire basically once the trigger moves.

"It's very sensitive to the touch. When pulling the trigger you don't have to pull it as hard, which allows you to maintain accuracy on the target," Russell said. "At shorter distances it (the difference in accuracy) is not that significant, but at longer range, it becomes more significant."

Specs call for a "single-stage trigger, free of creep, with consistent trigger pull weight" of 4-5 pounds. It should work on both semiautomatic and automatic settings.

The trigger module would be procured separately, meaning a different company may produce it, rather than the one that supplies the rest of the upgrades.

8. Stealthier: To reduce visual detection, the Army wants the colors of the new parts to be "neutral (non-black) color" of a "rough, dull, non-reflective, coating/finish that retains paint." The request specifies a brownish color, one between Coyote 498 and Light Coyote 481.

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