Air Force modernization at risk as maintenance costs continue to climb.

• Author: Versprille, Allyson

* Rising operations and support costs could affect the Air Force's ability to modernize as it prepares to fund the F-35 joint strike fighter, KC-46 tanker and long-range strike bomber in the mid-2020s, service officials and experts said.

One cost driver that has been scrutinized in recent months is the extension of aircraft beyond their anticipated life spans. The service's planes average more than 27 years in the fleet, according to Air Force Materiel Command documents.

"Some of the challenge with the rising costs is the fact that the parts aren't available,'' said Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, commander of AFMC. She noted that with older platforms many of the companies that once supplied aircraft components have gone out of business.

At the same time, skills that were required to sustain those aircraft decades ago may not be relevant anymore, she said. For example, some systems still use floppy disks, which may not be familiar to modem maintainers, Pawlikowski said.

"As the age of aircraft increase, the amount of maintenance they require goes up," said Todd Harrison, the director of defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "That's not much of a surprise. It's like if you have an old car, more things are going to break. That's part of what's happening because the average age of aircraft in the Air Force inventory has been getting older and older. Now it's the oldest it has ever been."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Another contributing factor is the expansion of Air Force missions. Current operations in Iraq and Syria, in addition to increased presence in both Europe and the Asia-Pacific, are putting a lot of stress on the service's fleet, Harrison said. It "is leading to more maintenance costs, and it is forcing the Air Force to make tradeoffs in its modernization programs."

The composition of the force can also increase operations and support costs. The Air Force today has fewer aircraft spread out over many different fleets, Harrison said. When there's a small number of a specific platform, "the maintenance cost per aircraft goes up because you've got all of that overhead of training, maintainers and the equipment that they need... that gets applied to a smaller number of aircraft."

Gen. Herbert "Hawk" Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command, used the controversial A-10 Thunderbolt II, fondly referred to as the "Warthog," as an example of this phenomenon.

"Keeping legacy fleets around when we've tried to divest them has an impact on modernization," he said at an Air Force Association Conference in February. "If we keep those, we're keeping maintainers, we're keeping [operations and maintenance] costs...