C-130 News: USAF Threatens Cuts Over C-130 Upgrades

[casey]

WASHINGTON — The US Air Force is looking for allies on the Hill to rework a major C-130 upgrade program, while warning that it may look to cut entire fleets of airplanes if it does not get relief from the program over the next five years.

But the service may find itself facing tough opposition, if a Wednesday hearing of the House Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee is any indication.

The C-130 Avionics Modernization Program (AMP) has become a flashpoint in recent years. While members of Congress have fought hard for the program, the Air Force has said it is too costly and slow to do the entire, wide-ranging suite of upgrades.

Instead, the service wants to focus on a smaller upgrade package that will allow the service to meet Federal Aviation Administration requirements by 2020. That would be followed by other upgrades over future years.
William LaPlante, USAF acquisition head, and Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Plans and Requirements Lt. Gen. Mike Holmes attempted to lay out the case for moving on during the hearing, arguing that the fleet would be best served to focus on meeting the FAA requirement first before trying to do the larger upgrade program.
If AMP is not reworked, Holmes warned, parts of the C-130 fleet would be unable to fly domestically without obtaining a series of waivers.

Among the upgrades for compliance are new radios, the addition of a digital flight recorder and an enhanced air traffic alert system. Holmes estimated the upgrades could be managed for about $2.5 million a plane, significantly less than the $2.8 billion price tag he assigned to the AMP program.

Holmes said that $2.8 billion figure was roughly the equivalent of operating the KC-10 tanker fleet, C-5 cargo fleet or 150 KC-135 tankers, and hinted that if Congress does not give the service relief on the AMP issue it may look to cut those fleets.

"In the same way that we tried to save money by retiring the A-10 fleet, we'd have to do something like that," Holmes warned journalists after the hearing.

The hearing, which totaled just 24 minutes due to called votes, largely breezed by under direction from Chairman Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va. The only real hiccup came at the end, when Rep. Jim Bridenstine, an Oklahoma Republican, began pushing LaPlante and Holmes on the AMP issue.

Talking quickly to, and frequently over, the two men's responses, Bridenstine hammered home the message that he was prepared to fight the Air Force on the issue, at one point demanding to know if the service planned to "follow the law" or not.

Bridenstine has fought to protect AMP in the past, including pushing an amendment that would prevent Secretary Deborah Lee James from spending on Pentagon staff if the AMP program is not enacted.

In a May 2014 news release on his website, he was quoted as saying, "Air National Guard aircraft are always the last to receive upgrades. Air Guard C-130s are flying with equipment from the 1960s. AMP modernizes a fleet of transport aircraft that the Air Force will use for decades. Congress wants AMP."

The Air National Guard, it should be noted, has backed the active duty's call to move in a different direction than AMP.

In July, the Adjutants General Association of the United States wrote a letter to the Hill warning that "a fully funded AMP program, even if immediately restarted today with zero programmatic delays, would modernize only a small fraction of the C-130H fleet by 2020. This is unacceptable."


After the hearing, LaPlante downplayed the incident, expressing confidence in the Air Force's legal interpretation of the AMP language in last year's National Defense Authorization Act.

"The interpretation we have right now from the general counsel is, you can apply the prior year dollars towards that compliance issue," LaPlante said. "You heard a member speak what he thought the intention of the
language is. This is a classic thing where you have language that's written and then you have general counsels that read the language and advise officials, to the best of their knowledge, what they can and can't do with that language. That's what I see this as. We'll resolve this."

Both LaPlante and Holmes expressed hope that they could work with Congress on the issue to find a resolution that allows the majority of the fleet to be FAA compliant by the 2020 deadline, although Holmes acknowledged that there is no way to get every C-130 in service upgraded before 2022.

View Original Article: http://www.defensenews.com/story/def...-amp/24391383/

View full article