Air Force Fires Back at Contractors’ Complaints : Defense: Aerospace industry is caught up in a dispute over maintenance work amid shrinking Pentagon budgets.
The normally deferential relations between the Air Force and its major contractors have broken down into a testy exchange of words in recent weeks, prompted by disputes over who should perform about $1.6 billion worth of annual aircraft maintenance work.
Air Force Gen. Ronald W. Yates, the service’s procurement and research chief, has vowed to drive down repair and maintenance costs by increasing competition between government depots and private aerospace firms.
But Don Fuqua, president of the Aerospace Industries Assn., recently blasted the plan as “an inequitable situation” and part of “the growing nationalization of the U.S. aerospace industry.”
The controversy is one measure of the strains developing as Pentagon spending drops sharply. The Air Force’s budget for aircraft maintenance will fall by $1 billion, forcing the service to economize, Yates said.
More broadly, the service is wrestling with how to preserve a base of skill and knowledge in combat aircraft when so few new programs are coming along. Yates rejected an idea advanced by some experts that the service establish its own capability to design and develop aircraft--much as the Navy has done with tactical missiles.
Nevertheless, Fuqua sparked a controversy when he recently charged that the service is considering building its own factory to assemble the F-22 jet fighter, which Lockheed and two other firms are under contract to produce. Lockheed Chairman Daniel Tellep questioned the Air Force’s “good faith” in the program.
But Yates said the service has no intention of ousting the aerospace company from the program. Rather it is studying whether Lockheed should build the jet at an alternate government-owned factory.
Similarly, Yates said, the entire aerospace industry is misinformed about the maintenance issue.
He said the Air Force is opening up for bid $1.1 billion worth of annual maintenance work that traditionally has been done by the Air Force. In exchange, the Air Force wants to allow federal facilities to bid on another $600 million worth of work that previously was reserved for private contractors.
“The industry has a shot at over $1 billion of work they never had before. What are they (complaining) about?” Yates said.
The Air Force operates five depots employing about 75,000 people. Last year, Congress passed a law requiring that all federal depots perform at least 60% of the military’s maintenance work.
