USAF Throws Contractors At The Angry Army

[Valin]

Strategy Page:

 

May 31, 2012:

 

The U.S. Air Force is trying to get rid of its twin-engine propeller transports and is running into resistance from customers (the U.S. Army in Afghanistan) and Congress. To keep the army happy, the air force is hiring civilian contractors to bring in their own twin-engine transports and make deliveries to the many small army airfields in Afghanistan that cannot support the larger C-130s.

 

The air force is planning on selling off 13 recently acquired C-27J two-engine transports but Congress is not happy with this. The air force points out that they have to cut their annual budget by at least $10 billion and the cuts have to come from somewhere. Since the U.S. is withdrawing most of its forces from Afghanistan in two years, there will be little need for twin-engine aircraft after that. So let contractors fill in until then, while the air force gets rid of the few C-27Js it already has.

 

(Snip)

 

According to half a century of agreements and Pentagon turf battles, the army should not be able to operate two engine transports. But because of a special deal in the 1980s, forced on the air force by Congress, the Army National Guard was allowed to operate 44 two engine C-23s (a freight version of the British Shorts 330 passenger airliner). The 12 ton C-23 can carry up to 3.5 tons of cargo or up to 30 troops. But as the C-23s got older, efforts to get a replacement, especially a larger and more numerous replacement, initially ran into air force opposition. After all, the air force has 500 75 ton C-130s. But in Iraq the army C-23s proved invaluable in getting priority army cargoes where they were needed, often to places the C-130 could not land. With a war going on the army had lots of recent evidence of how difficult it sometimes was for army commanders to get a C-130 for some urgent mission. The army originally asked for 128 C-23 replacements, but the air force protested and a deal was worked out. This forced the air force to tolerate the army owning over sixty C-27Js. This only happened because there was a war going on and wars are great for quickly settling peacetime squabbles that seem to never end. But when the Iraq fighting suddenly died down (after the 2008, defeat of al Qaeda there) the C-27J became vulnerable, the order was sharply cut and the air force got control of the new transports. In the end, the air force, as the army feared, decided that it did not really need the C-27Js. Now they are up for sale, to anyone but the U.S. Army.

 

(Snip)