Air Force, after spending $500 million, sending fleet directly into storage

At least twelve C-27J Spartans, a medium-sized military transport
plane, have been removed from military service and sent to
Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. The base was
given the nickname “boneyard” after years of inactivity. Five
more planes are expected to be built and sent to the base by
2014, according to an investigative report by Ohio’s Dayton Daily
News.
“They are too near completion for a termination to be cost
effective,” said Air Force spokesman Darryl Mayer.

The Air Force has spent $567 million on 21 Spartans since 2007.
While 16 of that 21 have been built, 12 of them now sit at
Davis-Monthan alongside thousands of NASA and military flight
vehicles exceeding $35 billion in value.
“This aerospace fleet provides a unique savings account from
which military units throughout the world may withdraw parts and
aircraft,” stated Davis-Monthan’s website. “The government
earns additional income by selling aircraft to our allies.”
The C-27J gained favor in the military for its ability to land on
and depart from rough landing strips. The aircraft, which began
production in 1997, has also been ordered by the militaries of
Australia, Greece, Mexico, and Romania, among others. But the
nagging threat of sequestration coupled with the government
shutdown has convinced the Pentagon that Spartans are an
unaffordable luxury.
“When they start discarding these programs, it’s
wasteful,” Ethan Rosenkranz, a national security analyst at
the Project on Government Oversight, told the Dayton Daily
News.
Ohio lawmakers were among the most passionate defenders of the
C-27J, in part because of the 800 workers at Mansfield Air
National Guard Base who would have been employed to build the
transport planes. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, along with six
other Democratic senators, wrote a letter to the Pentagon in 2011
asking for 42 aircraft, warning that choosing to do otherwise
would “weaken our national and homeland defense.”
Mike O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute said the situation
seemed to be the result of narrow-mindedness.
“It’s too bad, and a waste,” he said. “I’m not sure the
program was ever a white elephant, and yet given the budget cuts
I’m not sure it should be saved now.”
General Norton Schwartz, a former Air Force Chief of Staff, told
Congress last year that the military was seeking to cut its C-27J
investments in anticipation of federal budget constraints. The
C-130, he said, can fulfill all of the Air Force’s current needs
and costs $213 million to fly and maintain over 25 years. The
C-27J costs an estimated $308 million per aircraft, according to
the Daily News.
“In this fiscal environment it certainly caught our
attention,” Schwartz said.
Davis-Monthan Air Force Base itself has become another casualty
of the government budget crisis. While US Defense Secretary Chuck
Hagel ordered hundreds of civilian employees back to work at
bases across Arizona, the unpaid time off has certainly impacted
morale.
“There were a few employees who were exempt from the furlough,
so the ones that were furloughed, there was a lot of animosity
toward the ones that weren’t,” Harley Hembd, president of the
American Federation of Government Employees, told KJZZ radio in
Arizona. “And, now some of the employees that are coming back,
the others aren’t happy because they’re thinking somebody got
paid for time off.”
Materiel Command spokesman Ron Fry categorically denied the base
in question is a bone yard, saying “they have a very robust
mission to turn aircraft and equipment back into service.”

Copyright: RT