On average, the Army’s aircraft are 14 years old, and the Department of the Navy’s are 16 years old; the Air Force’s aircraft, on average, are 28 years old.
CBO projects that DoD has about 80 upcoming aircraft procurement programs through 2050, but a comparatively small number of them may account for a disproportionate share of future costs:
Two Air Force programs, the F-35A fighter and the Penetrating Counter Air (PCA) air-superiority aircraft, account for about $280 billion in procurement costs through 2050. As such, they represent more than half of the Air Force’s projected costs for procuring aircraft and more than a quarter of DoD’s projected total costs between 2020 and 2050. The Air Force’s KC-46 tanker program also has larger projected costs than any of the Department of the Navy’s or the Army’s aviation programs.
That was from a nice report from Edward Keating and his team at the Congressional Budget Office, “The Cost of Replacing the Department of Defense’s Current Aviation Fleet.” Read the whole report; it’s only 5 pages long. One thing I would have liked to have seen is the expected force structure that accompany the cost figures.
It is interesting that of the DoD’s top 17 programs listed in the report for 2020-2050, only one of them is unmanned (MQ-9, ranked 16 out of 17 at ~$20 billion over 30 years). Perhaps a large number of UAV programs are in the plan, but cost much less. You might assume, however, that if they prove cheap and effective, demand would shift toward UAVs. If that happened, it would hurt the economics of manned aircraft — lower production rates leads to higher unit costs.
Another observation is that the long-term future already appears settled in DoD plans. They think in terms of logical follow on programs, like F/A-18E/F replacement, V-22 replacement, and C-17 replacement. More than half of the top 17 programs are flying today.
A new concept ready to get scaled would face an already jam-packed budget of legacy programs, each with their own constituents. This makes it less likely for the services to experiment and explore. The distant future should never appear settled unless we close ourselves off to innovation.
If this analysis uses the same methodology as the Department of the Navy aircraft replacement cost analysis that CBO released earlier this month, it has a couple of major problems:
1. They assumed 1-for-1 replacement of aircraft, forever
2. They accepted SAR cost and schedule estimates uncritically
3. They made optimistic assumptions about the relative cost of replacement aircraft vice current aircraft
As you note, the force mix matters a lot. Also, for their defense budget top line analyses, CBO typically multiplies official estimates by a historical cost growth factor — but they did not do that here.
Perhaps most importantly, this is only Procurement. The real affordability challenge is Operations and Support, which has been growing steadily both in absolute terms ($ per flying hour, $ per tail per year) and as a proportion of the DoD budget.
All excellent points, thanks for making them!