The Air Force has good reason to feel conflicted as retirement talk swirls around its F-15C Eagle fighter jet.
The aircraft has a stellar combat record — zero combat losses and 100 enemies shot down worldwide, reportedly. For the Air Force, the jet’s speed and maneuverability have allowed it to dominate the skies and trounce adversary aircraft since it went into operation in the mid-1970s.
It still projects U.S. power in Japan and England and guards the homeland from threats such as cruise missiles.
Plus, Air Force pilots are enamored of it.
“Do those guys flying it love the F-15C? You bet they do. And why? Because they are really good [aircraft],” said Lt. Gen. Mark Nowland, the Air Force deputy chief of staff for operations and a former pilot of the aircraft himself.
But after four decades of flight operations, age and cost have begun to cloud the Air Force’s long romance with the F-15C, which is different than its newer relation the F-15E Strike Eagle.
“Guess what, it takes a lot of money and a lot of maintenance expertise to keep those airplanes flying like they are every day,” Nowland said.
That cost of the Boeing jet is rapidly rising, too. The Defense Department is working to upgrade the F-15 and other aging legacy aircraft such as the F-16 Fighting Falcon, which excels at dropping bombs on ground targets, in the hope that they will remain relevant into the next decade, according to Mike Cadenazzi, a solutions general manager for VisualDoD at McKinsey and Company, a global consulting firm.
The total F-15 program cost is projected to grow from $522 million in 2011 to nearly $1.8 billion in 2021, Cadenazzi said.
Over the next three years, the department plans to spend more than $500 million on upgraded electronics for the F-15, he said. The upgrades, called the Eagle Passive Active Warning Survivability System, are part of a program that could eventually ring in at over $5 billion. Add to that years of what the Air Force considers constrained budgets from Congress and a shrinking fleet of aircraft.
So, the Air Force now has floated a “predecisional” alternative to save money: retire the F-15. Publicly, though, it has been less than enthusiastic about the possibility.
“Occasionally you are going to see us looking at all kinds of options. I have not made any decision on the F-15,” said Gen. David Goldfein, the Air Force chief of staff, who reiterated that the Eagle would not be retired before 2020.
The service is playing key roles in Middle East, European and Korean peninsula operations even as it shrinks and struggles to maintain aircraft and retain pilots, Goldfein said.
“I mean air power is in higher and higher demand. So, right now, I’m looking at and looking very closely at capacity,” he said. “I have not made any decisions on any weapons systems.”
The question looming over any retirement of the F-15 is what will replace it.
The Air Force suggested recently that the F-16, itself an aging airframe, could take over some of the roles of the F-15 by getting radar upgrades that allow it to better identify air and ground threats.
But that could leave a dangerous hole in Air Force capabilities, said Richard Aboulafia, a vice president for the Teal Group, which conducts defense analysis.
“The strategic part of [the F-15 retirement] scares me stupid,” Aboulafia said. “We’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a peer or near-peer adversary and an awful lot of the strategic discussion is focused on citing Afghanistan and post-invasion Iraq, which is, historically speaking, unusual.”
He said the only aircraft that compares to the F-15 in air superiority is the F-22 Raptor. The Pentagon halted the F-22 program early in 2011 partly due to its cost.
“In other words, you get rid of the Cs and your dedicated planes that are optimized for clearing the skies are about 126 combat-coded F-22s and nothing else,” Aboulafia said.
Dave Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and former F-15 pilot, said the focus on cost when trying to decide whether to upgrade the Eagle misses the bigger picture.
“By the time those upgrades are complete, those aircraft are going to be completely eclipsed by modern threat systems,” Deptula said. “So when one is discussing this issue, you have to include not just costs but you have to include whether or not the aircraft’s going to be effective or not.
“If they all get shot down the first day of the war, how cost-effective are they,” he said.
Deptula said the F-15 and other legacy aircraft such as the F-16 and A-10 Thunderbolt II were designed during the Nixon administration and built during the Ford and Carter administrations and need to be replaced with new advanced aircraft.
“The fact of the matter is they are not going to be able to survive or be effective against the modern threats that we’ll be facing in the next major regional conflict,” he said.
