Marine Aviation Plan 2015

[neptune]

Maybe the Marines should have bailed out of the Hornet program after this beauty of a report --...

Not likely, the Navy buys the Corps a/c for them. They were not about to let the Corp escape with their F-18 quantity discount??!

This time (F-35B), strangely the Corp has been allowed to tag along (340 -B) with the Air Force program for their F-35A (2,000+ -A) and the Navy has dragged their feet by hanging onto the SBug (which hasn't been provided to the Corp).

The last of the Corp's EA-6Bs are effectively being replaced by the additional Growlers for the Navy. Oh Yeah!, eventually the Corp may resurrect their EA/ EW capability with the F-35B but in the interim they will depend on the Navy Growlers (so the story goes).

IMHO

[spazsinbad]

'neptune' you 'invent' some odd theories I reckon: "...SBug (which hasn't been provided to the Corp)...." It has been made clear to me (if not to you) over many entries in this forum. over the last several years, that the USMC did not want the Super Hornet - the USMC have wanted to have an all F-35B force - replacing all their legacy aircraft eventually. Only reluctantly it seems were they dragooned into replacing some of their F-35Bs - with F-35Cs - so as to fulfil a long standing agreement to have some of their FJs on CVNs (required by Congress) [these USMC FJs only Legacy Hornets]. Why no F-35Bs on CVNs (in an all F-35B USMC?) you will have to ask the USN (it seems the weak siblings in this arrangement). I can guess easily because the USN have made it very clear they do not want F-35Bs messing up their LUVerLy flight decks by any means whatsoever. HoHum - now they will have to contend with V-22s - so ROLL ON THE Bs BABY! [and muckup their flightdeckfinish]

Even so the original number of USMC F-35Cs has declined slightly over the last two years - the TOTAL of F-35s [Bs & Cs] for USMC has not changed however.

[neptune]

... that the USMC did not want the Super Hornet ...

The 500 SBugs have been flying in the Navy since 1999 (15 yrs); the last "D" model delivered in 2000.
Of the 35+ Navy squadrons, only 8 still fly the C Hornet, all others are SBugs.

USMC (USN "stepchild") hasn't been offered the SBug because....the Navy was still trying to "upgrade" their remaining "F/A-18Cs". Now that time has run out on the SBug production line, those will become the new F-35Cs.

The Corp has only 15 squadrons of the "older" Hornets (not SBugs) mostly C/Ds, flown off the carriers; as below-

CURRENT DEPLOYMENT:
CVN-71 Theodore Roosevelt, CSG-12: nine embarked aircraft squadrons of Carrier Air Wing 1: strike fighter squadrons VFA-11 (USN F/A-18F), VFA-211 (USN F/A-18F), VMFA-251 (USMC F/A-18C), VAQ-136 (USN E/A-18G), VAQ-137 (USN E/A-18G), VAW-125 (USN E-2D), VRC-40 (USN C-2), HSM-46 (USN MH-60R), HS-11 “(HH-60H)

IMHO

[spazsinbad]

You are reinventing history AFAIK IMHO. The USMC have said they do not and will not upgrade (in the past) to Super Hornets because?....? They wanted an ALL F-35B fixed wing force - thwarted as we know but still ALL F-35s. It is a simple as that. AND... from the current USMC Aviation Plan (thread title) we have this:

"...The Marine Corps will procure a total of 353 F-35Bs and 67 F-35Cs...."

TOTAL USN & USMC F-35Bs/F-35Cs = 680

And back in the dim dark past of machinations...

US Marine Corps to become 2nd F-35C customer
09 Mar 2011 Stephen Trimble

"...[Senator Joe] Lieberman: General, can you give me your reaction to this? Is that mix at this point acceptable to the marine corps? Am I wrong that you had originally hoped for a pure STOVL variant fleet?

[Biggest USMC Dog] Amos: Senator, you are correct that was the initial plan. Let me back up just a little bit. We've always been fans of TacAir integration [tongue in cheek eh]. As the secretary said, we have had marine squadrons on the navy carriers -- on the Enterprise right now, we have Marine F/A-18s. We do that. We like that. It's good for both our services and the naval force. But when we set the requirement in for STOVL aircraft our hope was we would be able to some day fly some of those aircraft off CVN aircraft carriers. That's yet to be seen whether that would be possible. So in the meantime it would seem prudent that we should buy some number of C variants even early on so we can begin to transition our force there. But it will be a proportional number to our overall buy of STOVL.”..."

http://armed-services.senate.gov/statem ... -08-11.pdf

Source: http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-d ... e-2nd.html

[popcorn]

Yeah, I think the Navy would have been thrilled, if back in the day, the Corps had expressed interest in SH. They would have prioritized USMC SHs IMO, if only to lock the Marines into the platform soonest.
But AFAIK the Marines were commited to JSF STOVL from day one and were willing to run their Classic jets ragged until it arrived.

[spazsinbad]

Here is the text in more fullness than above - probably if the original link is still online there will be more:

viewtopic.php?f=22&t=15247&p=192517&hilit=Lieberman#p192517

ORIGINAL: http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-d ... ecome-2nd/

[spazsinbad]

Some more unfun unfunded fun: http://news.usni.org/2015/03/31/navys-2 ... craft-buys

USN-USMC unfunded priorities 2016
27 Mar 2015 USN/USMC

"USN
F/A-18F Super Hornet Fighter Aircraft (+12 Aircraft)
The Navy remains challenged in managing the Strike Fighter inventory predominantly described by the balance between the end-of-life planning for F/A-18A-D legacy aircraft, and the requisite integration of F-35C aircraft. The risk is considered barely manageable in PB-16, and is based upon the success of the service life extension programs for F/A-18A-D legacy aircraft. Procuring 12 additional F/A-18F Super Hornet aircraft will reduce near-term Strike Fighter inventory gaps and risk, and address a long term inventory by assuring aircraft with useful life to 2035. The F/A-18F aircraft can be manufactured with the required wiring and infrastructure to be converted to an EA-18G aircraft, the only Department of Defense (DoD) tactical aircraft for Airborne Electronic Attack (AEA). This option would provide Navy with future flexibility to increase the EA-18G inventory as we continue to analyze the Joint AEA mission requirements in a DoD study this Spring.

F-35C Lightning II JSF Aircraft (+8 Aircraft)
Fiscal constraints compelled us to reduce F-35C Lightning II, the carrier-based variant of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), procurement by 16 airframes (from 54 to 38) across the FYDP (when compared to PB-15). The F-35C, with its advanced sensors, data sharing capability, and ability to operate closer to threats, will enhance the air wing's ability to find targets and coordinate attacks. Procuring eight additional aircraft in FY 2016 will mitigate transition risk to the F-35C IOC in 2018, while also assuring the transition timeline of the next two JSF squadrons, by returning their stand up from FY 2021 and FY 2022 to FY 2020 and FY 2021, respectively.

USMC
AVIATION PROCUREMENT, NAVY (APN) F-35B Aircraft Procurement (Quantity 6) $ 1,050.0

OPERATION AND MAINTENANCE, NAVY (OMN) F-35B Visual/Optical Landing System (OLS) $ 3.5 "

Source: http://news.usni.org/2015/03/31/documen ... ities-list (PDF 2.3Mb)

http://i1.wp.com/news.usni.org/wp-conte ... .07-AM.png

[neptune]

Marine Corps Identifies $2.1B in Unfunded Priorities, Mostly in Aviation
By: Megan Eckstein
March 31, 2015

The Marine Corps would purchase 10 new aircraft, improve the digital interoperability of existing aircraft and boost connectivity through additional communications systems and unmanned aerial vehicles if Congress provided additional funding..Fiscal Year 2016 Unfunded Priorities List, .items .would “further enhance our combat readiness and effectiveness should additional funds above those already requested … be made available.”

The contents of the UPL .
1- . six Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters (JSF),
2- two Lockheed Martin KC-130J tankers,
3- one Bell Helicopter H-1 attack helo
4- one Hawker Beechcraft UC-12W Huron transit plane.
5- .Link 16 digital interoperability upgrades for the Boeing AV-8B Harriers and Sikorsky CH-53K heavy lift cargo helicopter
6- .digital interoperability, ballistic protection and integrated aircraft survivability upgrades for the . MV-22 Osprey.

In the research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) account,
1- $17 million for CH-53K Link 16 improvements
2- $10.7 million for MV-22 digital interoperability upgrades.

In total, . $1.4 billion in aviation procurement projects and $52.7 million in aviation-related RDT&E ...

1- .$49.5 million in aviation-related O&M funding,
2- .$33 million of that going to a general “aviation readiness” line item.
3- .$25 million for aviation readiness in the RDT&E account.
4- . RDT&E request - $9 million for work on BAE System’s Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) rocket guidance kit..

little more at the jump.

http://news.usni.org/2015/03/31/marine- ... more-11894

[popcorn]

USMC
AVIATION PROCUREMENT, NAVY (APN) F-35B Aircraft Procurement (Quantity 6) $ 1,050.0

Those cost-reduction measures are starting to pay off..

[USMilFan]

I also note that in another report on the same media round table by Bogdan, that the much bally-hoo'd 55-year O&S estimate that spawned the 'trillion dollar jet' meme is actually something on the order of 530B in constant-year dollars.

Hello, quicksilver. I'm interested to look at this report about $530B because it's the first report I've heard about that estimates O & S in constant-year terms. As you probably know, the media fixates on those utterly meaningless trillion-dollar figures like drug addicts jonesing for that next fix. I would deeply appreciate if you would please provide a link to the 530 estimate. Thanks in advance for your help here.

[quicksilver]

http://www.defensenews.com/story/defens ... /70392734/

I was a little off...535B

The un-reported reality is that even the DoD SAR for 2014 showed a decrease in the O&S estimate -- from 617B to 597B in base-year dollars. At this link, somewhere around pg 95 -- http://breakingdefense.com/wp-content/u ... 13-SAR.pdf

CAPE and JPO differences are explained in the SAR.

[spazsinbad]

I wonder if USMC Brass Sent BS an RSVP? Bring all you can eat including lunch (BSs).

Pacific seabasing exercise will highlight new ships
06 Apr 2015 Hope Hodge Seck

"...The exercise will serve as a proof of concept for Navy and Marine Corps officials, who have hailed seabasing as a way to expand global reach, improve crisis response and enhance the capabilities of amphibious platforms.

I am pretty excited, and so is the commandant of the Marine Corps," Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert said of the seabasing concept during a round-table discussion with Military Times in late March. "This is why I feel really good about Marine Corps/Navy integration. We are going to have an exercise with the JHSV with an MLP and with an ARG, to work out their concept of ship-to-shore, and the connector's piece in the future. We are going to get a really good look at that."

Rotklein said the exercise will be schedule-driven, rather than scenario-based, although details of what would take place during the exercise were still being developed...."

Source: http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story/m ... /70851664/

[spazsinbad]

How Marines Plan To Survive Littoral Warfare
08 Apr 2015 Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

"...The Marines will also be the first service to field the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, although when their F-35B first goes to sea in 2018, Fanta noted, it won’t boast all of its capabilities. Add ongoing upgrades to the amphibious ships themselves, especially self-defense systems, sensors, networks, and other command-and-control. Finally, add escorting Aegis destroyers for wide-area air and missile defense, and the amphibious squadron goes from a method for delivering Marines to a means of dominating sea- and airspace. Such an enhanced amphibious task force won’t have the reach of an aircraft carrier battle group, Fanta said, but it will be much more capable of operating close to shore.

In such littoral areas, it’s artificial to divide operations at sea from operations on land, said Rear Adm. Cynthia Thebaud, commander of East Coast-based amphibious forces, who oversaw last fall’s Bold Alligator wargames. In one recently revised field manual, for example, she said, “it’s a Marine general that’s in there saying, ‘my concerns are mines, missiles, and subs'” — all traditionally seen as the Navy’s problem. The Marines can’t get ashore if their Navy ships get sunk en route, and the Navy’s best way to destroy an anti-ship missile battery may be to launch Marine raiders in V-22s.

“We are joined at the hip,” Thebaud said. “We’re realizing that it is not either ‘land’ or sea’ [and] looking at it as a single integrated naval battle.”

“That is a slow process,” Fanta said, “a reeducation process” for the officers of both services. (There’s a very old joke that the Marine Corps and the Navy are like brothers — specifically Cain and Abel). “Marines naturally tend to save their bullets to protect Marines on the beach and Navy guys tend to not worry about something once it hits the shoreline… but in a high end fight you don’t survive without each other.”

Fixing Up The Fleet
The Navy’s amphibious warships need significant upgrades to execute these concepts fully. Those modifications range from improved command-and-control networks to reinforced flight decks to handle V-22 Ospreys and F-35B jump jets.

“A lot of it is structural flight deck work,” said Rear Adm. David Gale, the Navy’s program executive officer for ships. Based on F-35B testing aboard the USS Wasp, the Navy will spend 40 weeks modifying its newly commissioned USS America (LHA-6) by, for example, removing recently installed piping, lighting, and so on in order to weld reinforcements underneath the flight deck. As inefficient as this sounds, interrupting production of America in the shipyard would have been worse, Gale said. The future USS Tripoli (LHA-7) will have the necessary accommodations for F-35B built in from the start.

Amphibs also need new electronics to accommodate the F-35, which can fly farther from the ship and send back vastly more data than the AV-8 Harriers it will replace. The F-35 itself has years to go before its software is fully capable. So in the F-35B’s first deployments in 2018, “we will not be able to bring that data fully aboard,” Fanta cautioned. In fact, when the F-35B and other aircraft are sending back the amount of intelligence the military envisions, he said, there’s a danger with some older classes of “driving the ship to its knees.”...

Source: http://breakingdefense.com/2015/04/mari ... l-warfare/

[spazsinbad]

Information Overload Could Complicate F-35 Deployments Aboard Ships
08 Apr 2015 Sandra I. Erwin

"The Marine Corps is eyeing the first real-world deployment of F-35Bs aboard big-deck ships around 2018. Marine and Navy officials are confident the ships will be ready to handle the next-generation aircraft, but there are still questions about how the fleet will manage the massive loads of data that will be generated by the joint strike fighter.

The F-35 has been called a flying supercomputer, as it is underpinned by 8 million lines of code, in addition to several more million lines of code associated with its support systems, notably the software that manages fleet logistics.

“The systems are eye watering,” said Rear Adm. Peter Fanta, the Navy’s director of surface warfare. Fanta is a key member of a high-level team that is overseeing the daunting task of making sure big-deck amphibious ships are properly equipped for F-35B operations....

...Marine aviation will be jumping ahead several generations of technology.

New ships will be built with the necessary bells and whistles to be F-35 compatible. The USS Wasp was used for F-35B development testing and received new upgrades for upcoming operations tests. One of the Navy’s brand-new amphibious assault ships, the USS America, will be retrofit beginning next month. It will spend 40 weeks in the shipyard to receive F-35-specific modifications, including a host of advanced new weapons, sensors and flight deck upgrades, said Rear Adm. David Gale, Navy program executive for ships. The next ship in the class, the LHA-7 USS Tripoli — now under construction and due for delivery in 2019 — is being built with F-35-specific features.

Ships will require vastly improved information and communications systems so they can receive and process unprecedented loads of data — not just from the F-35 but also from new Marine helicopters that are being equipped with advanced targeting and data collection systems. “I need to integrate more data, that’s what I’m going to concentrate on next,” Fanta said. “We are in the early phase of studying how to integrate that.” A group of Navy and Marine Corps officials from across the aviation and surface warfare communities have formed an “F-35 integration council” to deal with these issues....

...Fanta said he is certain that there will be “disappointments” in those first deployments as the fleet goes through a learning curve. “And we will not be able to bring that data completely onboard in that first deployment,” Fanta said. “We will learn where our holes are in our first deployment.” Aircraft will “talk to each other, will pass data back and forth to the ship,” but there will be many information-intensive operations that “we have to figure out how to do without driving the ship to its knees.”

Marine aviation experts said that a potentially huge challenge for F-35 operations at sea will be the integration of the aircraft maintenance support system, known as ALIS, or autonomic logistics information system. It is a highly complex system that also requires massive bandwidth, which is a tight commodity aboard ships. ALIS, regardless of where a ship might be at sea, would have to continuously update and talk back to F-35 maintainers in the United States. If ALIS is not properly integrated aboard ships, industry sources told National Defense, it could create crushing maintenance headaches for the fleet. They caution that Marines should address this problem so they don’t relive the painful early deployments of the V-22 Osprey, which had many logistics and readiness problems because the support systems were not in place and the logistics system was not mature enough to handle operations."

Source: http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/ ... px?ID=1794

[spazsinbad]

U.S. Marines vow tough review of F-35 combat readiness
08 Apr 2015 Andrea Shalal

"(Reuters) - The U.S. Marine Corps plans to carry out a tough, separate "inspection" before declaring the first squadron of 10 Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter jets ready for initial combat use, the Marine Corps' top aviator said on Wednesday.

Deputy Commandant for Aviation Lieutenant General Jon Davis told Reuters he was keeping close tabs on 13 items required to approve combat use of the jets, now ready after years of delays and cost overruns. He said he remained optimistic that the service would meet its July target date for the milestone.

"We're targeting July 15," Davis said in an interview. "We're hell-bent on getting this airplane into service correctly. We're not going to declare IOC unless they're ready and they can do all the things that they've said they can do."...

...Davis said the Marines planned to deploy the first F-35 squadron to Japan in January 2017, but it could respond to crises around the world as soon as the IOC declaration was made.

He said he planned to carry out an unprecedented "operational readiness inspection" before approving the first squadron for combat use, including academic tests for officers and enlisted personnel, simulator flights and test flights.

"I want to prove to people that we are very serious about this, and that we have no intention of putting an airplane in a combat theater that's not ready to go," he said, adding that the inspection would likely take "a couple of weeks."

He said the biggest issues still to be resolved included the purchase of sufficient spare parts to allow deployment of the new jets; completion of modifications to the first 10 jets to incorporate design changes; and additional work on software, mission data files and a few dozen test points....

...By July, the Marines will have over 50 trained F-35 pilots and more than 400 maintenance personnel, a spokesman said."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/ ... C220150408