Thorny questions about Air Force's pronounced 100 years of savings

The U.S. Air Force has stripped 100 years out of the schedules of its acquisition programs, the service’s top civilian announced Thursday.

“The Air Force has taken advantage of the authorities that Congress has given us to try to do things faster and smarter,” Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said during an event on Capitol Hill. “[Having] unnecessary schedule[s] delays getting capability to the war fighter, and speed matters in an era of reemerged great power competition.”

A number of Air Force programs shrunk their schedules to challenge acquisition personnel to get weapons to airmen quicker. For instance, the B-52 engine replacement program cut more than three years from its planned development cycle. The “F-22 Capability Pipeline,” a suite of upgrades for that jet, cut out two years from that program.

That was from a DefenseNews article. I remember when the call for estimates came out from the Air Force, to determine how much time they could shave off schedules. The real question is whether that 100 years of schedule savings actually amounts to anything, because of course, at this point, it is all just estimates. For example:

The Air Force shed five years off each of its major hypersonic weapons programs… simply by using Section 804 authorities to build the schedule.

We hear these nice pronouncements of efficiencies, but we will never hear the results I’m sure. Will these new targets revise downward all the acquisition program baseline dates in the schedules, even the existing programs? Does that set the Air Force up for potentially unrealistic targets and higher-than-normal schedule growth in the future?

For these existing acquisition program baselines, I would like to have seen official reductions in schedule targets (like, Operational Evaluation Complete moved forward X years), and then we could actually measure performance. This also brings up the awkward question of, “what schedule”? Are we measuring Contract Award to Fight Flight, or to Dev Test, or to Milestone C, or to Initial Operational Capability, or what?

I presume a lot of the schedule decreases are those negotiated into contracts, which will only then affect program schedules on the back end. However, even if these contracts had no schedule growth, that doesn’t mean that program schedule is reduced as well. There could have been deficiencies and other rework put onto new contracts, which we’ve seen some of with the KC-46 and F-35. To my knowledge, the original 2002 F-35 SDD contract is still open (or it was in 2018). Still, many of the block upgrades to make the aircraft combat ready are done on different contracts.

For new programs like hypersonics, would it even be possible to know the assumptions it took to get to a schedule if it went through the regular acquisition process, and then compare that to their new aggressive schedule? What’s the basis? Couldn’t this be an opportunity to have one of the projects use the regular process as a sort of experimental control?

Another thing we often see is that if you incentivize schedule on a compressed timeline, then the contractors will do anything to meet their targets without producing the required capability. The Russians called this “storming the gates”, and refused to make arbitrary schedule incentives that can be gamed.

This is exactly what we saw with the Air Force’s GPS OCX program. Raytheon underbid its competitors by a wide margin. The Air Force at that point could proclaim all sorts of cost and schedule savings. But then, the amount of concurrency in development skyrocketed, and eventually the rework became far too much. Its already double the cost and 5 years over schedule.

The point of the matter is that even determining “what is schedule” is a hard enough question to answer for already completed programs. The Air Force proclaims 100 years of schedule savings based on estimates primarily from the program offices. Those officials who approved the estimates of savings will in almost all cases not be around to be held responsible for the actual results. Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson is already on the way out.

We are left with paper promises, unknown incentives, and no way of following up to determine whether the savings are real. Of course, in 5 or 10 years we will be able to subjectively grade the Air Force on whether overall performance has improved, but this 100 years of schedule savings probably won’t be an objective measure that can be verified.