THE WASHINGTON VIEW: With every crash comes a statement from lawmakers blaming the “crisis” in military aviation on the corrosive effects of the Budget Control Act of 2011, which sharply curtailed the increase in Pentagon spending. “What has been evident to me for some time is now becoming clear to the American people. The readiness of our military is at a crisis point,” said House Armed Services Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry in such statement last month.  

But now that the $700 billion Pentagon budget fully funds training and maintenance accounts, military officials are not as quick to blame budgets for high-profile deadly accidents like yesterday’s. Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense in the 1980s, expresses a contrarian view in an essay in The American Conservative.

AN AGING PLANE, ON ITS LAST LEG: At a news conference yesterday, the adjutant general of the Puerto Rico National Guard said the C-130 was more than 60 years old and was making its final flight to Arizona to be decommissioned. Brig. Gen. Isabelo Rivera said the Puerto Rico Guard has five other C-130s, two of which are down for maintenance. A surveillance video from a nearby business posted by the Beaufort Gazette shows the plane turning over in the sky and nose-diving into a fiery explosion. President Trump also tweeted that he had been briefed on the deadly incident. “Please join me in thoughts and prayers for the victims, their families and the great men and women of the National Guard,” he wrote.

IS THE BUDGET TO BLAME? Last month the Military Times, using records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, compiled a comprehensive database showing that manned warplane accidents spiked nearly 40 percent since 2013, the year the mandatory budget cuts took effect. At yesterday’s state of the Navy briefing, the publication’s Tara Copp put the question bluntly to Navy leaders: “What can you say to those families that really wonder if there’s an ‘I can’t say no’ culture in both the Navy and the Marine Corps that continues to send aviators out even if they’re not ready or their aircraft aren’t ready?”

The Navy’s top admiral insisted that all planes and pilots are mission-ready, or they aren’t sent into the sky. “These are controlled by strict regulations. We’re not violating any of those regulations. Those aircraft that we send pilots up in are fully certified to fly,” said Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations.

ALL ACCIDENTS ARE DIFFERENT: Military leaders say trying to blame accidents on a single factor can be an exercise in the classic correlation-causation fallacy. “There is not enough data right now to tell you that there’s an exact correlation,” said Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer, while admitting that with increased funding comes more pilot training hours and better aircraft maintenance, which should help. “But that,” he said, “is kind of a brilliant flash of the obvious.”

“There’s not one single thing. You can’t say, ‘It’s because of this,’ ” said Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller. “And so we’re looking at all these different things. We need more hours, we need better parts support, we need new airplanes, we’ve got to improve our procedures, and we’ve got to stop doing stuff on the ground that causes us to lose otherwise perfectly good airplanes. And we need to train, and it’s a dangerous — it’s a dangerous business.”

Neller cited the crash of a KC-130T, a Marine Corps version of the C-130, last year in Mississippi that killed 16. The result of that crash investigation has not been released, but Neller said it was due to a “mechanical issue.”

“I think we have a pretty good idea of what happened to our airplane last year. In that particular case, I’m not sure funding would have changed the outcome,” Neller said. Reports at the time suggested ammunition exploded on board, bringing the plane down in mid-flight.

THE NAVY’S OPAQUE TAKE ON TRANSPARENCY: The Navy is scrambling to quell a firestorm of criticism from within its own active and retired ranks based on the revelation — first reported by USA Today — that the service has ended the practice of making a widely-distributed  announcement of the names of commanders relieved for poor performance or misconduct

When I initially contacted several former senior Navy public affairs officials, they expressed outrage that it appeared the Navy’s long tradition of transparency and accountability was being compromised. “Shortsighted,” said one former top Navy PAO. “Not in keeping with our core value of earning the trust and confidence of the American people,” said another.

But later in the day, after expressing their concerns directly to Navy officials, many tempered their criticism based on what they said was a more nuanced understanding of the policy, which it turns out had been quietly implemented last year.

A CHANGE IN PRACTICE, NOT POLICY: “It is not a change in policy,” the Navy’s acting Chief of Information Capt. Greg Hicks told me last night. Hicks said the Navy will continue to announce high-profile, nationally-newsworthy firings through press releases, including disciplinary actions that result from major accidents and scandals. But other lesser actions will be released initially to a much smaller group of reporters who regularly cover Navy issues, and then to anyone else who asks about it, known as an RTQ, or response to query.

“The [past] practice was a very wide distribution utilizing social media channels to an ever-expanding network of reporters,” Hicks said. “And now what we are doing is making sure we answer the people who have expressed that they want to know, but doing so in a way where we can also provide the context and framing and properly relay what happened, why it happened, to a professional cadre of military reporters.”

And Hicks said the adjustment was prompted by the dynamics of social media, and the desire to have complicated stories reported first by experienced knowledge-based journalists, and was not, as some had suggested, related to the Navy’s embarrassing “Fat Leonard” bribery scandal. “It had nothing to do with that at all,” Hicks said. “We are still going to release all those.”

Hick insists beat reporters will not have to call the Navy every day and ask, “Have you fired anyone today?”

‘OVERBLOWN’: The CNO’s take yesterday was that the whole controversy was “being overblown.”

“I think there’s, you know, perhaps being more made of that than you’ll see in practice,” Richardson said at yesterday’s Pentagon briefing. “The thing that we value most of all is a relationship with trust and confidence … with the American people. … So we wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize that.”

Good Thursday morning and welcome to Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense, compiled by Washington Examiner National Security Senior Writer Jamie McIntyre (@jamiejmcintyre), National Security Writer Travis J. Tritten (@travis_tritten) and Senior Editor David Brown (@dave_brown24). Email us here for tips, suggestions, calendar items and anything else. If a friend sent this to you and you’d like to sign up, click here. If signing up doesn’t work, shoot us an email and we’ll add you to our list. And be sure to follow us on Twitter @dailyondefense.