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 .