Government Accountability Office, from the new F-35 to the aging JSTARS, none of the 46 types of aircraft under investigation can meet the Pentagon’s goal, that is, the ability to "execute mission" reaches 80%. In fact, most of them are getting worse. In the new report of the Congressional Government Accountability Office, the red part (indicating a low level of combat readiness) is full of full screen, shocking!
Source: Government Accountability Office
The 46 types of aircraft listed in the report released on Thursday:
In the 9 years from 2011 to 2019, about 24 types of aircraft (more than half of them) never reached its combat readiness goals .
In the past 9 years, only two have reached the "ready" goal and received a "green" rating, namely the Navy's EP-3 Aries sub-reconnaissance aircraft and the Air Force's UH-1N Huey helicopter, which are the only ones Full marks. However, these are two rare and professional types, which represent only a small part of the entire fleet. The other two aircraft of
received an "orange" rating: the Navy’s E-6B Mercury command aircraft and the Air Force’s F-15 Eagle, which are the only fighters to receive a qualified rating.
Other aircraft-from the Army's AH-64 Apache gunship to the Marine Corps' UH-1Y Venom-are all marked in red. There are 18 types of these "red" aircraft, which only achieved one, two, or at most three combat readiness targets in the nine-year target. The other 24 species never reached the combat readiness goal during the entire nine-year period from 2011 to 2019. What are these goals for
? In most cases, the content was not made public, because the report released to the public on Thursday was a non-confidential version, in which specific combat readiness numbers were deleted. In September 2018, the then Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis (Jim Mattis) set an 80% "missionable" target for fighter jets. This is what he hopes to achieve by the end of 2019, but this The goal has not yet been achieved. The
report pointed out: "We found that none of these aircraft have reached the goal of 80% mission capability." Not just fighter jets, but all other aircraft. To make matters worse, the report continues: “Since fiscal year 2011, the average mission capability rate of selected Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps aircraft has decreased, while the average mission capability rate of selected Army aircraft has decreased. A slight increase." The most well-known problem of
is the tri-service F-35 joint strike fighter, which has only recently been put into mass use and has been struggling with a chronic shortage of spare parts. The report stated that the progress of the F-35 is obviously unbalanced. “The average mission capability rate of the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter has increased from fiscal year 2012 to fiscal year 2015, but has shown a downward trend from fiscal year 2015. There will be a slight improvement after the fiscal year.” Z1z
is not the only F-35 with supplier problems, and even the long-serving fleet of aircraft with a complete supply chain and support system is also struggling. The Navy’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and its electronic warplane EA-18G Growler are suffering from a shortage of spare parts, in some cases, because these aircraft entered service to suppliers in 1999 and 2009 respectively Stop production or stop production completely.
Some older airplanes are worse off. In a chart that compares the average annual operating costs of different types of aircraft, there are two types of Air Force command and control aircraft that cost astonishing costs, with high-tech electronic equipment installed in modified old Boeing airliners. The Air Force’s E-8C JSTARS small formation (only 16 aircraft, all modified from second-hand 707 aircraft) entered service in 1991, and the annual operating cost of each aircraft was $107 million. The four 747 aircraft of the E-4B that entered service in 1985 can be used as command posts in the event of a nuclear war. Now each aircraft costs more than US$127 million per year. This surpasses even the notorious maintenance-intensive B-2 stealth bomber and dwarfs almost all other aircraft listed. The
report also found several interesting phenomena: For example, the operating cost of the A-10 has increased in some way to be comparable to that of the F-15C. During the Cold War, this was less than one third of the cost of the same aircraft (no wonder the Air Force wanted to cancel the aircraft). The price of F-35C is more than twice that of Super Hornet, and the performance of F-35C is second only to F-22 and only slightly lower than F-22. Note that the scale of these two aircraft is not economically similar. The price of the Ah-1Z Viper is more than twice that of the Apache; the price of UH-1 Huey has increased to at least four times that of the Black Hawks; when the Black Hawks first joined the formation, the hourly cost of Hueys was half that of the Black Hawks . As a result, Huey’s relative costs have somehow increased by about 800%. The report is essentially a decade-long "maintenance and spare parts history" report, and has nothing to do with current defense deployment or aircraft capabilities. (For the original report, please refer to Knowledge Planet)
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