A retired Air Force three-star general has refuted claims made by a private government watchdog group that a program to sell scaled-downed versions of C-17 transport aircraft to commercial air freight haulers is bad for taxpayers and the Pentagon.
Lt. Gen. Gary Mears, who is leading the effort to convince the Pentagon to go through with the program, said that contrary to earlier assertions made by analysts at the Project on Government Oversight in a March assessment report, there is both a “market and need” for the BC-17X program.
Mears, who runs his own consulting firm, is working as a consultant on the project, which, if successful, would see Boeing — the plane’s manufacturer — building at least 10 more C-17s that would then be leased to commercial air freight companies.
 C-17 Globemaster III aircraft taking off. The Air Force has long said it needs more airlift capability. |
The Air Force would sell the planes to private companies with an option to buy them back. Also, under the plan, Mears said, the Air Force would not incur the expense of training pilots to fly them or spend money to maintain them.
And, he said, the planes would have to be made available to the Pentagon in times of war, no questions asked.
“As long as the airplane that you’re putting into the commercial market best meets the needs of the military at the time, it may be a whole new way of buying airlift in the future,” Mears told WND.
Congress has authorized the Pentagon to buy 120 C-17s to replace aging — and smaller — C-141 cargo jets, at a cost of $232 million each. The planes sold for commercial use would be about $50 million less than what the Pentagon pays, but analysts said that’s because the commercial models will not contain all the military gear inherent in the Air Force models.
In its March analysis, the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, claimed — as quoted by the New York Times — that the “plan calls for the Air Force to provide an unusual array of financial incentives to encourage private carriers to buy the transport plane … including guaranteed government transport business, a Pentagon promise to buy back C-17s from firms that go bankrupt, and even subsidies up front.”
Also, POGO maintains that there is not enough commercial air hauling business to justify the subsidies and sales to commercial haulers, something Mears disputes.
“If we were just talking about 10 planes here, I guarantee we wouldn’t be pursuing this project,” he said. “We’ve identified the commercial market, and we also believe that market will grow” exponentially in the future.
Mears, who spent 35 years in the Air Force, said other large military airlifters are already taking much of the business that could be going to U.S. companies. He said the other airlifters, such as the Russian-built An-124, cannot take off and land on shorter runways and does not have the easy on-off load capability that the C-17 has.
“The Department of Defense, when it comes to airlift, has the same kind of problem that anyone in corporate America has,” he said, “within the transportation business — whether air, rail or whatever. That problem is how to match capacity with demand; in other words, if you don’t have enough capacity to meet demand, you’re losing money.”
At the same time, he explained, “if you have more capacity than demand, you’re also losing money because that asset isn’t getting used in the way it was designed to be used.”
“We’ve dealt with this problem in our national defense [planning] for years. We have a lot of airlift airplanes … sitting around, which are expensive to own and maintain,” he said. “It’s a huge resource issue. So if you can take the same kind of airlift, the same kind of aircraft — which is your most capable airlifter — and have that off your books, that’s a tremendous value to the country, especially if you’re going to get the same capability in wartime. …”
“You can’t do that with fighters, bombers and missiles,” he said, “because there’s no other applications for them. Commercial application is a key point here, because this is one of the few areas where the [Defense] Department can do this.”
Mears said the CRAF — Civil Reserve Air Fleet — can pick up some of the necessary cargo-hauling airlift requirements during wartime, but “the CRAF can never pick up oversize and outsized cargo,” such as tanks, armored personnel carriers and other heavy weapons.
“Thirty-five to 40 percent of our total ‘go to war’ capability resides in CRAF and commercial air freighters,” he said. “But since they don’t haul the right kind of stuff, they clog up a ramp because they take so long to off-load and on-load. You have to send several military airplanes in front of them to position the equipment properly to off-load and on-load” because those civilian crews are not used to those sorts of “missions.”
POGO described the program as “a highly speculative sweetheart deal that would put billions of taxpayer dollars at risk and provide little or no benefit to the federal government.” Analysts compared it to an earlier proposal to sell commercialized versions of another cargo plane, the C-130, which, POGO said, was a failure.
There are also design modifications that would have to be made to the plane to meet Federal Aviation Administration requirements and regulations that don’t apply to military aircraft, the POGO assessment report said.
“The Air Force proposal is essentially attempting to bribe commercial air haulers to use an aircraft that is ill-suited for their overall needs, tantamount to requiring a NASCAR driver to race a sport utility vehicle lacking in cornering characteristics,” said the report.
Mears disputed that, noting that the Pentagon — in an attempt to get the additional planes it needs to boost its airlift capability — could save the taxpayers a purported $1 billion spread out over 60 additional aircraft.
Also, Mears pointed out that the commercialized C-17 would enable commercial haulers to take off and land at thousands of additional airports all over the world that are too small to handle current heavy-lift airlifters with lesser capabilities.
And, Mears said, the C-17’s cargo capacity would eliminate the need for manufacturers of oversized products to have to disassemble them for shipment, requiring buyers of those products to spend money to reassemble them at the other end of the line.
In a written response to POGO from Darleen A. Druyun, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition and Management, said the Pentagon was also committed to finding “desperately needed military airlift capacity while delivering significant savings to the American taxpayer.”
“Leveraging the commercial air cargo market to meet military airlift requirements has proven its merits throughout the long-term success of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF). The CRAF fleet, however, does not currently include aircraft that can carry the largest military payloads that are in high demand in times of war and contingency,” Druyun said.
“Adding the C-17 to the CRAF, with a performance record that makes it the true workhorse of the strategic-lift fleet, would be a significant boost to the Department’s ability to respond to crises around the world. With ten BC-17s in the commercial marketplace, which the DoD would have guaranteed access to in times of need, this critical airlift capacity will be available when required, without burdening the taxpayer with large aircraft ownership costs,” she said.
“Our look at several possible business arrangements showed that even with significant government revenue going to the operator, the U.S. taxpayer would save billions of dollars compared to the costs of buying and supporting the aircraft organically,” said Druyun.
“Is this concept completely without risk? No, of course not. Is it worth exploring? Absolutely. The potential benefits to the taxpayers are simply too great to ignore,” she said, adding that the program is still under review by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
“Obviously, we’re all interested in resources and how to best use them,” Mears said. “How can we do that the best? This offers the opportunity.”
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