Defense Week
December 23, 2002
Pg. 7

Navy To Fund Electronic-Warfare Super Hornet

By John M. Donnelly

The Navy's budget plan for the next six years contains $4 billion to buy F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighters with electronic-warfare capability, according to service budget documents.

The program is a replacement for the EA-6B Prowler, the aging and overworked warhorse that jams enemy radars and fires missiles against SAMs. The replacement effort is colloquially called the Growler; formally it is dubbed the EA-18G, or the Airborne Electronic Attack (AEA) aircraft. The plane has 85 percent commonality with the Super Hornet—plus the electronic-warfare capability.

The Navy is going to buy fewer copies of its new fighters, because the service is integrating Navy and Marine Corps warplane squadrons. More specifically, the documents show the buys of Boeing Super Hornets will go from 548 to 460—or 88 fewer, including 22 fewer by 2009.

But the difference is mostly made up by the addition of EA-18Gs, also made by Boeing: The Navy plans to buy 90 of them altogether, including 65 by 2009.

John Young, the Navy acquisition chief, said in a recent interview with Defense Week that both the Super Hornet and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the future multi-service fighter, would be bought in smaller quantities because of the integration plan.

"You're going to see, under integration, that if we did nothing but buy out the E/F line, that line would probably terminate [by 2009]," he said. "It's not going to terminate, because I think we're going to buy Growlers," he said, adding that the issue was still under review at the defense secretary's office.

Young did not quantify things, but the Navy's September Program Objective Memorandum and Budget Estimate Submission summary does. The document is the Navy's budget proposal to the Pentagon for fiscal 2004 to 2009, most of which should pass an ongoing review at the defense secretary and White House level.

The electronic Super Hornet is one of the most significant parts of the Navy plan.

All told, the documents show, the Navy wants to buy 100 warplanes in fiscal 2004—including 42 Super Hornets, nine MV-22 Ospreys (four fewer than planned last year), and four KC-130J Marine Corps refueling planes (versus zero planned last year) and 15 T-45 Goshawk training planes (versus zero last year).

As for ships, the Navy will be flirting with going below the 300-ship line this year. The Navy wants to build seven ships in 2004, versus the five that had been planned last year. The 2004 plan includes a Virginia-class (SSN 774) sub, three DDG 51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers (one more than planned) and one LPD 17 San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ship.

Reshuffling the flight deck

In the interview, Young said the Navy Marine Corps integration plan "will allow some reduction in both E/F and JSF quantities. And it's driven by a war-fighting analysis that says, `Here are the right number of airplanes to service the targets and provide capability,' not ... as a budget drill.

"But it would have been very difficult for the Navy to buy the full program of record in E/F and the JSF," he said. "So I think reaching the right conclusion from a war-fighting point of view has provided some help in dealing with bow waves that loomed out in the Navy budget and were going to either be impossible to address or require significant new resources, and nobody knows if those are going to materialize. It's going to turn out that the war-fighting requirement now fits roughly within the aviation budget that we were able to project.

"We're still buying a substantial number of JSFs, so the fact that we might buy fewer is going to show up well beyond this POM," he said. However, he said, "I think the E/F [reductions] may show up within this POM.

"We ran some serious drills within the Navy," Young said. "... I started a drill called disinvestments, where we looked at systems that were becoming obsolete or providing limited capability or were costly in proportion to their capability, and we proposed those systems be retired to save money."

He cited the Phoenix missile as a program that was retired early to save money.

He acknowledged that the Navy is not reaching the goal its shipbuilders have set of making 10 warships a year.

"You will see progress in '04 and beyond '04 toward the goal" of buying 10 ships a year, he said. "These disinvestment things are important—they save money this year and every year after that. You can't get there in one year. You just cannot."