It's More Than Changing the Oil
The question that was on
everyone's minds for weeks was "where are we going next in the war on
terrorism." The more appropriate question might have been "when."
Military
equipment is designed for one purpose: Bringing harm to the enemy.
Since it's not designed specifically to be maintenance limited (as
modern automobiles are) it tends to be maintenance intensive. If it's
not, it's making a tradeoff somewhere; the notable "durability" of the
AK-47 family is at the expense of accuracy.
That means
that whenever military equipment is used for any extended period of
time, there are huge maintenance "issues" the build up. It is probable
that it was the latter that caused the crash of the B-1 bomber towards
the end of the "hot" phase of the Afghanistan war. Along with the wind
that fell off of the C-141 (fortunately while still taxiing) and
increased "down" time for the Navy and Air Force fighters, the message
towards the end of the Afghanistan War was clear: Time to do some
maintenance.
And there's much to do. Many things like
replacing worn out engines in fighter aircraft and major structural
repairs on bombers and transport aircraft was avoided or
"administratively extended" during the Clinton administration. And
during Bush's first year the needs were not broadly addressed as the
DoD discussed what the needs of the future were. Then we were flung
into a war with air-wings that were using grounded planes for spare
parts (the military term for this is "cannibalizing") and Special
Forces units that hadn't been to the range in six months. All of this
put a tremendous toll on the maintenance "infrastructure" and that has to be rebuilt before any serious maintenance "issues" can be resolved.
Then
there's the whole problem of "supplies." Prior to the air war in
Afghanistan, there was an already depleted supply of JDAM GPS-tracking
bomb guidance units. By the last month of the bombing campaign, the
Navy was having to ship in Air Force JDAM kits, having shot off all
their own. And the Air Force numbers, while secret, are pretty easy to
figure out. I won't list them since I'm not that kind of journalist.
Lets just say it's a good thing we didn't have to fight for several
more months. We'd have ended up using knives.
And JDAMs
aren't made in your corner candy-store. Boeing, who is the prime
contractor, gets sophisticated parts from their suppliers. Each of
these suppliers has to be certified as capable of producing "mil-spec"
(military specification) parts and they are capable of producing only a
limited number. Prior to the War on Terrorism, that number, "max
production" was something on the order of 1000 per month. And the Air
Force had given Boeing a contract to produce something like 70,000 in
ten years.
Now the Air Force has asked Boeing to produce
more in the next nine months than have been produced in the entire
history of the program. Again, I'll let Iraqi intelligence do their own
leg-work, but by next October Boeing has to really pump them out.
That
will require each of the sub-contractors to increase their supply rate
markedly, while not slipping on quality. We've already had enough
"friendly fire" incidents; we don't want bombs that track to the side
because some guy was asleep while making and checking the wings. (And,
yes, I'm aware of the Eagle Pitcher situation. That's my point.)
It's
not just Boeing and JDAMs. From replacing crashed helicopters (Sikorsy)
to training Special Forces troopers in Kurdish and Farsi (Defense
Language Institute) to making more M-16A2s (Colt) to reinforcing and
inspecting wing-roots on C-141s (various groups) there are thousands
and thousands of Americans, and British, and Germans, and even
Japanese, Taiwanese and Chinese, who, knowingly or unknowingly, are
advancing the war on terrorism. All of them have a job. All of them are
necessary. And all of them are going to be working like mad for the
next nine months at least. Plan to see heavy defense material, training
and maintenance outlays for the foreseeable future.
And all the while the pundits are asking "where next."
Not where. When .