Coming soon to an aircraft carrier near you

Sea Power,  Jun 2000  by Thompson, Loren B

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

The U.S. Navy is in the midst of one of the most massive peacetime transformations in its history. So many of its basic features are changing simultaneously-its operational doctrine, its core technologies, its organizational structure, and its business culture-that the term "revolutionary" seems like the best default setting for any description of recent service developments. But some changes matter more than others, and the ones that have a major near-term impact on warfighting capabilities arguably matter the most.

By that standard, the Boeing F/A-- 18E/F Super Hornet strike fighter may be the most revolutionary "development" that the Navy assimilates in the current decade. The transition in carrier air wings also will be somewhat ironic, because the multirole Super Hornet is one of the few technology leaps that the service still prefers to describe in evolutionary terms.

But, as Rear Adm. John B. Nathman, the Navy's director of air warfare, emphasized in an October 1999 essay in Sea Power, the F/A-18E/F is "the most significant component of the revolution in strike warfare." Strike warfare, in turn, is at the heart of the service's growing emphasis on littoral operations-which makes the Super Hornet hugely important to the Navy and the nation.

One would not know that from reading much of the general news media's writings about the aircraft. But the overarching geopolitical reality comes down to this: The pace of U.S. military operations around the world has accelerated rather than slowed since the end of the Cold War, while U.S. access to overseas bases has continued to decline. A growing share of the burden for enforcing global peace will necessarily shift to sea-based forces, and the Super Hornet will be the principal conventional strike platform available to those forces for at least a generation to come.

It is really that simple. Whatever other schools of thought might prefer, no amount of fanciful theorizing can change the fact that the Super Hornet is likely to be the preeminent expression of American air power during the early decades of the new century. Fortunately, the plane is up to the job.

The Super Hornet will have a 40-percent greater unrefueled range than its predecessor and 25-percent greater payload. Because it will carry precision munitions such as the Joint Direct Attack Munition and Joint Standoff Weapon, it will be many times more effective against surface targets than any naval strike asset of the last generation. Because it will incorporate stealth technology and advanced electronic countermeasures, it will be five times more survivable than earlier Hornets. And it will have the internal space to evolve freely as new mission requirements emerge, while retaining the high reliability and maintainability for which all Hornets are well known.

But most importantly, the Super Hornet will be there in the fleet-- forward-deployed around the world with carrier air wings, ready to enforce the peace. Unlike so many of the notional upgrades and proposed platforms of recent years, the Super Hornet is a real aircraft, fully developed, tested, and in production. It has successfully completed a six-month operational evaluation and has been certified as "operationally effective." According to the Pentagon's most senior acquisition official, the Super Hornet is "meeting or exceeding all key performance parameters."

The Navy plans to purchase 219 of the planes between fiscal years 2000 and 2004 in a cost-saving multiyear procurement. This month, the first class of Super Hornet pilots begins training for an initial operational deployment aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln now slated for 2002. Clearly, the F/A-18E/F is the future of naval air power until such time as the Joint Strike Fighter joins the fleet.

Complex History

The F/A-18 Hornet has come a long, long way from its genesis in the 1970s as the low end of a high-low mix of carrier-based tactical aircraft. One reason why the Navy's leadership today is so committed to Super Hornet is the tortuous history of efforts to modernize carrier-based aviation over the last 20 years-a history that consists mostly of false starts and unpleasant surprises.

Today's Super Hornet traces its origins to the U.S. bicentennial in 1976, when the Navy chose a design designated the YF-17 over a variant of the General Dynamics F-16 to replace its carrier-based A-4 Skyhawks, A-7 Corsairs, and F-4 Phantoms. Both aircraft had been conceived to compete in the Air Force's Lightweight Fighter Program, which the F-16 won. The YF-17 design, initially developed by Northrop, was then modified by a Northrop-- McDonnell Douglas team for the Navy competition. The original proposal called for two aircraft, a fighter and an attack variant, but there was sufficient commonality between the two that they were merged into a single multirole airframe dubbed the F/A-18 Hornet. The first Hornets were delivered to the fleet in 1980 in both single-seat "A" and two-seat "B" versions.

At the time, the high end of the carrier airwing mix consisted of Grumman F-14 Tomcat interceptors and A-6 Intruder medium bombers. The plan called for the F/A-18 to provide a more flexible, affordable, maintainable "lowend" airframe that could accomplish multiple missions while also simplifying the logistical challenge of supporting so many different aircraft on each carrier. It fully satisfied these expectations; as noted in the 2000 Almanac of Seapower, "F/A-18s have consistently flown three times as many hours without failure as other Navy tactical aircraft, while requiring only half the maintenance time."