Thanks to the cancelation of the F-22 program, a two-year delay on F-35 development, and an upcoming QDR likely to shortchange F/A-18 sustainment, the Pentagon is projecting gaping holes in our active-duty Navy and Air Force fighter forces for the next 6-9 years. With fewer active duty airframes available for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Air National Guard will be shouldering an extra heavy homeland air defense role. Unfortunately for the Guard (which will retire 250 F-16s in FY 2010), America’s air sovereignty may have to standby for the Joint Strike Fighter.
“All options are on the table” for U.S. Air Guard officials struggling to fill a gap in the number of fighters available for units in the near term to fly missions protecting the homeland, says Lt. Gen. Harry Wyatt, director of the Air National Guard (ANG). “I am basically platform agnostic,” Wyatt says. “I don’t care.” This could include stealth aircraft — more F-22s or earlier fielding of F-35s — or the purchase of older, fourth-generation aircraft such as F-16s or F-15s. Technologies needed for the mission include an active, electronically scanned array radar (which can be used to detect small and stealthy air threats including cruise missiles), infrared search and track systems and beyond-line-of-sight communications, Wyatt told reporters during a Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington this morning. Congress appears amenable to the president’s request to close Lockheed Martin’s F-22 production line in fiscal 2010, capping the buy at 187 of the twin-engine fighter. Most observers expect the testing and delivery schedule for the single-engine F-35 Joint Strike Fighter to experience slips, possibly widening the gap for receipt of the new aircraft. F-35s aren’t due to the Guard until the middle of the next decade, he says. Many of the 250 fighters being retired early in FY ‘10 are F-16s assigned to the Guard, and many of them are apportioned to the air sovereignty alert (ASA) mission. Some of those units will lack a flying mission until the F-35 is introduced into the fleet.
The Air Guard is our primary defense against another 9/11 style attack. The layman’s version of the quoted text is that by 2011, there may be large swaths of the continental US unprotected by friendly air cover. That was unthinkable during the Cold War and is unconscionable post-9/11.
