St. Louis Post-Dispatch
February 6, 2003

Navy Will Seek $569 Million To Develop F/A-18G Growler

By Philip Dine, Post-Dispatch

WASHINGTON - The Navy will seek $569 million in the combined defense budgets for the next two years to develop the St. Louis-built F/A-18G, or Growler, as the service's pre-eminent electronic-warfare plane.

The decision will be announced Friday.

This week, the new defense budget included an item indicating that the Pentagon planned to move ahead with the Growler, a variant of Boeing Co.'s F/A-18 Super Hornet, to replace the aging EA-6B as the Navy's chief radar-jamming aircraft.

The Pentagon plans to seek $210 million for next year's defense budget and $359 million for the 2005 budget to do further research and development on the Growler.

"The Growler initiative will optimize the core capability of naval aviation," Navy Lt. Cmdr. Danny Hernandez said Thursday. "It will greatly improve our capabilities, our efficiency and effectiveness."

In all, about 90 Growlers are expected to be built. A schedule for 56 aircraft has been devised for the first four years of production, starting in 2006, Hernandez said: four the first year, 12 in 2007, 20 in 2008 and 20 in 2009.

Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, has led the effort in Congress to have the F/A-18 replace the EA-6B. Two years ago, he was instrumental in getting $10 million in the defense budget for a preliminary study of the project's technical feasibility.

"This is tremendous news, both for the future security of our country and for the greater St. Louis area," Akin said.

"Our office is excited and enthused. It's a project we've worked on for a couple of years that's coming to fruition. We are proud of the people at Boeing, for the fine aircraft they're building that was chosen by the Navy."

The 90 or so extra Super Hornets will help beef up the Hornet program, a key defense contract for Boeing. Akin said he would now focus on "seeing it through to completion."