Congressional Quarterly reports this morning that Mr. Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is advising the defense secretary, Robert Gates, to delay procurement of a new aerial tanker for five years, and to cancel plans for a new long-range bomber. These are somewhat separable issues, so I will treat them somewhat separately.
Canceling the bomber would be big news alone. CQ quotes some “senior defense official” as saying that forgoing replacement of the B-52s would “surrender America’s capability to rapidly deliver and sustain power projection.” Maybe—or, those aircraft could be replaced with a stealthy long-range drone. The troops love their Predators, after all, and the USAF had briefly considered whether the bomber replacement should be unmanned. So, passing on the bomber could be one of those sensible procurement decisions that need to be made under constrained resources. As the aircraft wasn’t forecast to be ready until at least 2018, it wasn’t exactly a shovel-ready project.
Postponing the tanker, however, is surreal. As Jeff Sessions, federal senator from Alabama, put it,
for a group who has been in the OMB for just a matter of weeks to come in and suggest the cancellation of the No. 1 Air Force priority for procurement is stunning, and I don’t think Congress will accept that.
OK, perhaps stunning. Perhaps surreal. Perhaps, depending on one’s subsidiary priorities, intensely stupid. If one wants to stay in the business of dropping ordnance at long ranges, whether the bombers are manned or unmanned, one needs tankers. The aircraft that the new KC-Xs are intended to replace, the KC-135 Stratotankers, average 47 years of age. A fatal mishap with one of these in the next few years would be tragic, but also politically explosive. There’s just no way to spin an aging KC-135 smashing into some hamlet in Iowa with a load of JP-8, particularly if Obama’s people put off its replacement yet one more time.
Anticipate that Republican presidential candidates in 2012 will make urgent tanker and bomber replacement a campaign issue in the way that Ronald Reagan talked up the B-1 Lancer. That’s a ways out, but it suggests the possibility of conservative tacking towards specific, politically competitively military projects in the mid-term. That also suggests that the tanker advice is a Washington Monument strategy, the feigned sacrifice of an iconic priority which the responsible government department fully knows that the legislature will not permit. Shifting responsibility to the congress would, in theory, allow Obama’s government to avoid responsibility for at least one rather large spending decision.
The congress, that is, has the ultimate power to procure what it wants, and we all know the story of Dick Cheney’s inability to terminate the V-22 tiltrotor program. That aircraft brought, if anything did, what Donald Rumsfeld used to term a transformational capability. For all its expense and selected operational limitations, it’s easy to understand its marketability to appropriators. When one circled London in July 2006, on its way to its air show debut at Farnborough, people around the city looked up, stared, and then talked about it for days.
Tankers are not quite as sexy, but as CQ notes, there are congressmen whose districts have little to do with airliner construction that nonetheless strongly support the replacement effort, regardless of whether Boeing or Northrop-and-Airbus should win. There isn’t a long list of programs like that. The bomber is sexy, but as CQ notes, it lacks a constituency. I argue that alternatives from cruise missiles to stealthy drones have been discussed since the 1970s, and were brought to clear fruition in the 1990s. It’s all more evidence that the old approaches to product development and marketing will need some updating. The tanker may prove an exception, but other currently cherished lines of business may prove unassailable in the near future.
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