Washington Times
April 22, 1999
Pg. 22

A Solution To The Problem Of The Aging EA-6B Prowler

The April 16 Inside the Ring item "Prowler Problems" contained important insights concerning the excessive workloads being shouldered by crews of the Navy's EA-6B Prowler aircraft. Unfortunately, the situation is even worse than the column reported, as I noted in recent testimony before the procurement subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee.

Not only is the highly trained personnel for the Prowler resigning the service in near-record numbers, but the aircraft is being overburdened severely by too many missions in too many places. The head of aviation, plans and requirements, Rear Adm. John Johnson, warned in 1997 that the Prowlers were "flying their lives away" over Yugoslavia, and the situation has grown worse since then.

The carrier-based EA-6B is a system that seldom gets the media play given fighters and bombers, but it is essential to the success of joint air campaigns. With the retirement of the Air Force's last EF-111 Raven a year ago, the Prowler is now the nation's only airborne tactical jammer, a system that blinds and deceives enemy air defenses so that other aircraft can deliver their ordnance. Without such "electronic warfare" capabilities over Kosovo, the NATO allies probably already would have suffered considerable losses of aircraft (at least among the 95 percent of aircraft that are not stealthy).

But there are too few Prowlers, and they are aging rapidly. The average EA-6B today is 16 years old. The Prowlers also probably will suffer significant attrition from combat and training exercises, with the current inventory of 120 planes falling below operational requirements sometime around 2010.

The Navy is equipping the Prowler fleet with new wings and greatly enhanced electronic-warfare equipment, but it obviously can't fly the same tired old airframes forever. In order to be ready with a next-generation tactical jammer, the Navy needs to begin planning one today.

It probably is too late to develop a clean-sheet aircraft, but it is not too late to adapt some existing aircraft. The obvious candidate is the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet, the Navy's main strike aircraft for the next 20 years. Developing a derivative of the Super Hornet would assure timely availability, reduce logistics costs by sharing support efforts, guarantee that future jammers can keep up with strike aircraft and probably cut the average cost of all Super Hornets.

But if we don't get going now, this generation of leaders may well be remembered as the people who compromised America's air superiority by not thinking clearly about future requirements. The costs of acting are relatively modest, but the consequences of failing to act could be huge.

Loren B. Thompson, Chief operating officer, Lexington Institute, Arlington

Editor's Note: The article referred to appeared in the Current News Early Bird, April 16, 1999.