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<a href="http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette">www.mca-marines.org/gazette</a> 31 M a r i n e C o r p s G a z e t t e • M a y 2 0 0 9 pod for the F–35B. Just slap a couple of pylons under the wings, hang an old F/A–18 fuel tank and ‘voila’—the ‘pod- ded WSO’ two-man F–35B. All you’ll need is a window, breathing tube, and wool underwear.” In 2006 one F/A–18D squadron had already been decommissioned, and the five remaining F/A–18D squadrons were sharing a rotation performing constabu- lary duty in Iwakuni, Japan. This, while the Marines were heavily engaged in Afghanistan, was hard to understand. Easy now realized that he held a false hope in the Marine Corps buying the F/A–18F given the fact that the F–35 was delayed another 2 years. The current administration had to make significant cuts in defense spending to pay for the fi- nancial bailout of 2008–09, and the F–35 was one of the bill payers just as other weapons programs that didn’t di- rectly contribute to winning the current war in Afghanistan. He even thought that maybe, just maybe, the F–35 short takeoff and vertical landing aircraft would be delayed requiring the Marine Corps to buy something in the near term, but he should have known hope was not a course of action. All of this was behind him now. His orders were the result of the recent deci- sion by Headquarters Marine Corps (HQMC) to precipitously reduce the number of F/A–18D squadrons from five to two. He should have seen this coming too. He and his squadron mates talked about service life issues affecting the F/A–18D all the time and even discussed the potential to combine the F/A–18Ds with single-seat F/A–18s as individual F/A–18Ds had to be removed from serv- ice to preclude the wholesale shutdown of F/A–18D squadrons. While the number of F/A–18Ds would obviously be reduced in each squadron, he knew his real value and hence the value of the F/A–18D was in the high-task-loading missions like FAC(A), a mission that comprised a smaller percentage of the total number of missions flown by F/A–18 squadrons. Despite the fact that the single-seat F/A–18 was performing the FAC(A) mis- sion, even the single-seat FAC(A) pilots now trained in the F/A–18C and AV–8B often admitted to him that they could never be as good as a two-seat crew. By forming composite squadrons of F/A–18C/Ds the inventory of serviceable F/A–18Ds could be better managed lo- gistically while still providing a critical mission capability to the Marines on the ground. The service life of the F/A–18D was originally designed for 6,000 flight hours among other airframe limitations like fa- tigue life expended. During the last 20 years the F/A–18D flew in just about every conflict and is quickly approaching the design life limit, so much so that ex- tensive and unplanned modifications are now required to extend the design life of the remaining F/A–18s to enable the transition to the F–35B without rolling up more squadrons. But, as typical with large defense programs and the political issues associated with them, all of the planning in the world couldn’t have pre- dicted the financial crisis that crippled even the most conservative production schedule of the F–35. Struggling to fill the gap between the current force of F/A–18s and the now further delayed F–35 production plans, HQMC and the Navy instituted an extensive service life extension study for the F/A–18D, and what they found wasn’t good news. The cost to modify the current F/A–18D air- frames in order to extend their service life to bridge the gap between the current F/A–18 force and the delayed F–35 pro- duction schedule was too expensive for the modest increase in service life. Addition- ally, the time the aircraft would spend in the depot and not on the flight line re- sulted in HQMC deciding to replace the F/A–18Ds with Navy F/A–18A/Cs as the Navy ramped up production of the F/A–18E/F to fill the gap between its cur- rent force and the F–35. So there he was, a WSO among an excess population of WSOs originally designed for five squadrons, now with only two F/A–18D squadrons to call home, and their future was tied to the Western Pacific—not a place he wanted to be with the Marine Corps heavily engaged in Afghanistan with an entire Marine expeditionary force on the ground. He thought it didn’t have to happen this way—if only he had written down a few of the ideas that were borne of the many conversations he had heard in the ready room. If only he had pushed them up the chain of command years before. There were some great ideas and others he thought were just crazy, but at least the leadership would have time to consider meaningful options other than an inter- Service transfer to the Navy or, worse, the USAF. More importantly, it seemed to him there was no plan by the Marine Corps to leverage his most important The F/A–18D is quickly approaching its design life limit. (Photo courtesy of the author.)
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