“This is one of the things that gets revisited again and again, and I’ll tell you now that I will fight for the same outcome as last Congress,” said House Armed Services Committee Vice Chair Elaine Luria, D-Va., said Monday at a Hudson Institute event. “We’ve invested a lot in our carriers, and it’s not time to decommission them halfway through their life.”

Retiring an aircraft carrier early would save the Navy several billion dollars in both planned maintenance, personnel and operating costs over the remainder of the ship’s life, but such efforts have repeatedly been quashed by Congress going back at least a decade.

The Pentagon is expected to propose a budget that is essentially the same as last year’s, and to save money it is revisiting a Trump Administration proposal to cancel the carrier Harry S. Truman’s mid-life overhaul and nuclear reactor refueling, according to a report from USNI News.

In 2019, the Navy said it could save as much as $1.5 billion just in planning costs for the refueling, and when the Navy tried to cancel the George Washington’s midlife overhaul in 2013, it was estimated that retiring Washington would save a total of about $5 billion total for the years-long maintenance period.

But retiring a carrier with a planned 25 years left of service has always been a bridge too far for Congress, and there is little reason to believe a renewed attempt to retire Truman would be any more successful than the last two times DoD tried.

To Luria, considering retiring an aircraft carrier is a puzzling move in light of a building consensus that the Navy will, in some way, need to grow to meet an ever-expanding Chinese fleet, which already surpasses the U.S. Navy in raw ship count.

With less than four months left in the Trump administration, then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper unveiled a new vision for the Navy, called Battle Force 2045, that eclipsed previous plans to grow the fleet to 355 ships to instead grow it to more than 500 manned and unmanned vessels.

“The bottom line is getting rid of ships when you’re trying to build the Navy is not a smart decision, and I would like justification as to why,” Luria said.

Virginia home fires

In 2019, President Donald Trump’s Pentagon proposed cutting Truman as part of a plan to pivot to more unmanned technologies and to free up money for a planned two-carrier block-buy for the follow-on Ford class. But Trump reversed course after a bipartisan group of lawmakers opposed it, arguing the Truman has more than 20 years of life left and that U.S. law requires 11 carriers be in service.

Then, as now, lawmakers from Virginia – home to the country’s largest naval base and where spending makes up more than 10 percent of the economy – were leading the charge.

“As was made clear to the previous administration, retiring the USS Harry S. Truman two decades ahead of schedule would be a serious mistake given the capabilities it provides to the Navy,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said in a statement to Defense News.

In broader remarks Monday, Luria recommended extending the service-life of older types of ships while new classes of ships are being brought online. As opposed to the Battle Force 2045 plan, which called for aggressively decommissioning cruisers, Luria wanted a deeper analysis.

“In our pursuit of a larger fleet and more presence in the Pacific, you need to build more ships, we also need to maintain the ships that we have, and operate them as efficiently as possible,” she said. “And we need to quit getting rid of the ships we have that still have operational life left.”

The Virginia delegation’s opposition to retiring carriers is long lived. In 2010, when then-Defense Secretary Bob Gates suggested that the Navy didn’t need 11 aircraft carriers, then-Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va.,

Senate Readiness and Management Support Subcommittee Chair Tim Kaine, D-Va., pointed to the cost of recycling the nuclear carrier Enterprise ($1.5 billion) and recent 11 month deployment of the USS Nimitz to the Mideast and Pacific as proof carriers are “expensive to retire and remain in constant demand.”

“I am skeptical this proposal will yield savings or avoid severe operational impacts,” Kaine said in a statement.

Both Luria and the House Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee’s top Republican, Rep. Rob Wittman, also pointed to recent, lengthy carrier deployments to meet the demands of combatant commanders.

“It is obvious based on deployment schedule that we are breaking the fleet trying to supply the COCOMs the volume of carriers being requested — and now the Department is mulling removing one from circulation earlier?” Wittman, of Virginia, said in a statement to Defense News on Monday.

“I understand looking for savings, but this doesn’t pass the smell test. If the Department decides to attempt a to cancel an RCOH again, I am confident they will be met with a strong Congressional rebuke.”

Luria and Wittman each represent districts that touch the Hampton Roads region of Virginia. The Truman is homeported there at Naval Station Norfolk.

At a hearing last week, Wittman asked U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s chief, Adm. Phil Davidson, if he thought it would make sense to remove a carrier from the fleet. Davidson replied, “There is no capability that we have that can substitute for an aircraft carrier in my view.”

Speaking at a recent Hudson Institute virtual event, House Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee Chairman Joe Courtney, D-Conn., said the Pentagon is at an “inflection point” over whether the Navy, Air Force and cyber “are going to take a larger portion of the pie chart” when the fiscal 2022 budget is released this spring.

“That conversation has to happen,” he said.

The comments align with a growing consensus inside the Pentagon that to meet the challenge from China’s rapidly expanding blue water fleet, paired with investments in long-range anti-ship missiles and bombers, the Navy must grow substantially.

In the waning days of the Trump administration, the Pentagon floated the idea of a Navy in excess of 500 ships, which would include a heavy investment in submarines, smaller frigates, and a suite of unmanned surface, underwater and aerial vehicles. Today’s fleet stands just shy of 300 ships.

In December, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said he would advocate for “heavy investment” in sea-, air- and space-centric platforms, suggesting there will be “bloodletting” in other areas of the budget.

Courtney and the sea power subpanel’s ranking member, Rob Wittman, R-Va., pointed to China’s emerging plans to further militarize its Coast Guard and grow its aircraft carrier fleet as the two lawmakers outlined where they want to see increased investments.

“I’m optimistic that we’re going to have a solid shift that is really overdue, but clearly that first budget [from President Joe Biden is where] we’re gonna do everything we can to make sure it’s in a good place for this Congress,” Courtney said.

Between the Obama administration’s goal of a 355-ship Navy and the 500-ship target, Wittman touted the idea of 405 manned ships by the end of the 30 years ― which also emerged in Trump’s final days in office ― as a more feasible path.

But that idea for 500-plus ships — which was a rhetorical 500-ship Navy that included unmanned vehicles that would not meet any reasonable definition of a battle force ship, but were intended as a means of framing the scale of the undertaking required — has not sat well with everyone in Congress.

“When you talk about now 500 ships, sometimes some members of Congress kind of get turned off by that,” Wittman said. “I think we need to be talking clearly about the plan, [which] will have 405 manned ships, and what does that do for us to counter the Chinese. The communication needs to be simple and straightforward.”

‘The only way you do that is with ships’

Growing the Navy will be a challenge, especially as some high-capacity Cold War-era ships begin to retire over the coming decade.

In January, Defense News reported that a wave of ship retirements built at the end of the Cold War means the Navy is facing a decline in both the number of ships and the number of vertical launching system missile tubes it can field by the early 2030s.

Between the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, the first-generation Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, the Ohio-class guided-missile submarines and the Los Angeles-class submarines, the Navy stands to lose about 70 ships with nearly 5,500 vertical launching system cells. Today, based on the last official 30-year shipbuilding plan, it appears the Navy will replace those ships ― and their tubes ― with about 65 ships and submarines that have anywhere from 1,800 to more than 2,000 fewer VLS cells.

Both Courtney and Wittman have a significant stake in the Pentagon’s push to start building more Virginia-class submarines. The Navy has stretched the supplier base and labor force in the submarine-building industry just to reach two Virginia subs per year.

The Virginias, which are a joint undertaking between Connecticut’s General Dynamics Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News shipyard in Virginia, are seen as core to maintaining the Navy’s presence inside areas such as the South China Sea, which is within reach of Chinese anti-ship missiles and bombers.

In October, then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the Virginia class must be the Navy’s top priority.

“If we do nothing else, the Navy must begin building three Virginia-class submarines a year as soon as possible,” he said during an event at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Both lawmakers plan to continue pushing for an increase in Virginia-class submarine production, and they support planning for the next-generation submarine.

“The question is what do we need and the next generation of submarine that has the right extension of capability that gives us that continued undersea strike advantage,” Wittman said. “But how do we do that at a at a price tag that allows us to build the number of platforms that we need.”

In an interview with Defense News in early February, Wittman said he was encouraged by the Biden administration’s continued focus on China, but added he will continue to push for a larger fleet. That conclusion, he said, should be obvious to anyone who looks closely at the strategic situation.

“I have been pleased so far in the preliminary conversations that I have had with the secretary of defense, [Lloyd Austin], with the deputy secretary of defense, [Kathleen Hicks], and others in the incoming administration about what their plans are,” Wittman said. “I think if you look at Gen. Milley’s comments, you see that if we’re going to be serious about countering the Chinese threat, it’s going to be in the Pacific. And the only way you do that is with ships, and the capability to create a risk for China through the payloads on those ships.

“So I think that [the Biden administration] will probably come to the same conclusions.”

In its opening weeks, the Biden administration has signaled it will continue many of the Trump administration’s hardline policies toward China. And it has not backed off heavy naval presence in the Indo-Pacific region, after a U.S. ship conducted “freedom of navigation operation” (FONOP) earlier this month. Then Feb. 9 the Navy announced that two carriers were operating together in the hotly disputed South China Sea.

The destroyer John S. McCain transited the Taiwan Strait Feb. 4, which China denounced as a provocation, and the following day the McCain performed a FONOP challenging competing claims in the disputed Paracel Islands, a patrol that was accompanied by what experts noted was an extraordinarily detailed explanation.

On Feb. 9, China’s Foreign Ministry slammed the Navy’s two-carrier exercise in the South China Sea, saying it was “not conducive to peace and stability in the region,” and that China would “work together with regional countries to safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea.”

Just 21 days into Biden’s presidency, and with a remarkably small sample size, the emerging policy on China looks nearly indistinguishable from the Trump policy, which has led many China watchers to believe that a policy of strategic competition with Beijing — in the maritime realm and beyond — is here for the long term. Or at least for Biden’s.

“What we’re seeing across the board is a new administration that isn’t going to throw it out of the playbook of the last four years and that accepts sort of the logic of prioritizing China and competition towards Beijing,” said Eric Sayers, a vice president at Beacon Global Strategies and a former Asia hand at the Senate Armed Services Command and at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

“They’re saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to have our own grammar, we’re going to do things a bit different and put our priorities in different places,’ but at the same time they haven’t backed off from some of the areas that that their skeptics said they would.

“There is continuity in the South China Sea, but it’s its continuity of the Trump approach, not a return of the Obama approach.”

Critics have argued that the Obama administration failed to take stronger measures to oppose China’s increasingly aggressive stance in the South China Sea, and was slow to react as China began building military bases on disputed features there.

But Biden’s approach appears more assertive. In the wake of the McCain’s FONOP in the Paracels, the Japan-based U.S. 7th Fleet released a detailed statement Feb. 5, specifically calling out a Chinese claim that dates to 1996 and would extend China’s territorial sea out to the features there. By extension, this logic would grant them most of the infamous-yet-ambiguous “nine-dash-line” claim seeking expanded rights.

“Unlawful and sweeping maritime claims in the South China Sea pose a serious threat to the freedom of the sea, including freedoms of navigation and overflight, free trade and unimpeded commerce, and freedom of economic opportunity for South China Sea littoral nations,” the 7th Fleet statement said.

China has never fully articulated what rights it claims in the South China Sea.

China’s Parcaels claim led to a violent clash with Vietnam in 1974 that left China in de facto control of the features, though it has remained contested ever since. That claim almost certainly infringes on Vietnam’s rightful exclusive economic zone, which, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, extends 200 miles, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and former senior aid to the chief of naval operations.

“What they’ve been trying to do is argue that the Paracels are an extension of China and, therefore, allow you to draw a straight line around the features,” Clark said. “So, this essentially supports their argument about the nine-dash line, because the Paracel’s are south of Hainan Island. Essentially, you’ve got this extension of Chinese sovereignty well into the South China Sea as a result of drawing a straight line from the Paracels to Hainan to the Chinese mainland. And then it’s the same thing on the other end of the Chinese coast, which infringes on the [exclusive economic zone] that rightfully belongs to Vietnam.”

In response to the McCain FONOP, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs offered a muted response, saying China monitored the operations, and called on the United States to have a more constructive role in the region.

“China will continue to stay on high alert and is ready to respond to all threats and provocations at any time, and will resolutely safeguard its national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” said Wang Wenbin, the spokesperson. “We hope the U.S. side will play a constructive role for regional peace and stability, rather than the opposite.”

The competition continues

Despite radically different positions on a range of national security issues, when it comes to the China relationship, Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump have charted similar courses thus far.

Both Biden and new Secretary of State Antony Blinken have signaled the need for some cooperation, particularly on tackling climate change. But the Biden administration has also held the line on the 2020 decision by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to formally reject China’s expansive claims in the South China Sea and has backed Pompeo’s late-hour determination that China’s actions against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province constituted genocide.

During calls with counterparts in Vietnam and the Philippines, new Secretary of State Antony Blinken made clear the U.S. was not backing off its rejection of excessive Chinese claims of maritime rights and that the U.S. was committed to maintaining a rules-based order in the South China Sea.

In a State Department readout of a Jan. 27 call between Blinken and Philippines Secretary of Foreign Affairs Teodoro Locsin, Blinken said the United States rejected China’s maritime claims in the South China Sea “to the extent they exceed the maritime zones that China is permitted to claim under international law as reflected in the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention,” according to a statement from State spokesman Ned Price.

“Secretary Blinken pledged to stand with Southeast Asian claimants in the face of PRC pressure,” the statement reads.

It also made clear the U.S. would defend against attacks on Philippines military or government assets.

“Secretary Blinken stressed the importance of the Mutual Defense Treaty for the security of both nations, and its clear application to armed attacks against the Philippine armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft in the Pacific, which includes the South China Sea,” the statement reads.

The direct language and restating of U.S. policy so early in the Biden White House was a deliberate signal that there has been no significant shift in policy with the new team, said Bonnie Glaser, who leads the China Power Project at Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It is essentially a restatement of Trump policy, articulated by Pompeo in mid-2018 and mid-2020,” Glaser said. “It reaffirms that the Mutual Defense Treaty applies to the South China Sea and that the U.S. opposes Chinese maritime claims that are inconsistent with UNCLOS.

“The fact that U.S. policy was stated very clearly within the first week of the Biden administration demonstrates U.S. commitment to alliances and U.S. willingness to push back against Chinese actions in the South China Sea that undermine the interests of the U.S. and its allies and partners.”

Realigning priorities?

What remains unclear is how that will impact Defense Department acquisitions priorities going forward.

On Feb. 4, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin launched a force-wide posture review to address if the military has the right capabilities in the right places to address the threats the country faces. And in comments Feb. 10 at the Pentagon, Biden said Austin had ordered a China task force to ensure the DoD is pursuing the right concepts and technologies.

“Today I was briefed on a new DoD-wide China task force that Secretary Austin is standing up to look at our strategy, operational concepts technology and force posture and so much more,” Biden said. He added that the task force would map out the course that would incorporate allies and partners and a whole-of-government approach to meet the China challenge.

There have been some clues as to what the administration is thinking coming in the door. In response to a question about the Trump administration’s late-hour force structure assessment, new Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said she was inclined to support many, but not all, of the themes in the assessment.

“There’s some really interesting operational themes that I’m attracted to,” Hicks said. “There’s a focus on increasing use of autonomy. There’s a focus on dispersal of forces and there’s a focus on growing the number of small surface combatants relative to today.”

Hicks’ discussion of “dispersal of forces” is seemingly a reference to the Navy’s plans to fight in a more spread-out manner, using sensors on unmanned autonomous platforms linked to manned platforms to push capabilities to more places for less money than it would cost to spread those sensors around on manned platforms.

That likely means the Navy’s networking effort, Project Overmatch, upon which the whole concept depends will go forward. By extension, the broader Air Force-led Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control network will likely be a priority as well.

She also pointed to increasing investments in small surface combatants, which is another means of starting to reduce the cost of spreading around significant capabilities for less money.

The next-generation Constellation-class Frigate was awarded last April to Fincantieri and its Wisconsin shipyard Marinette Marine.

It is unclear if hypersonic missiles, a key Trump-era priority aimed at giving the military the ability to rapidly strike Chinese targets at extremely long ranges, will endure as a priority in the Biden administration.

‘A little tougher than what I thought’

But to date, national security-minded conservatives have welcomed the Biden team’s embrace of many of the Trump administration’s hardline China positions.

In his confirmation hearing, Blinken drew some distinctions between his views on the China relationship and the Trump administrations’ but largely said he agreed with many of the steps the previous White House took, including the recent declaration that China was engaged in genocide against the Uighur population in Xinjiang. The response seemed to catch Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, off guard.

“You do agree?” a seemingly surprised Graham asked, adding haltingly that “we’re on a good start here. So, this … Really, I … I just very much appreciate that.”

In the highest-level to date interaction between the U.S. and China since the new administration took office, Blinken released a statement saying the U.S. was not backing down on China’s destabilizing role in the region.

“Secretary Blinken stressed the United States will continue to stand up for human rights and democratic values, including in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong, and pressed China to join the international community in condemning the military coup in Burma,” Price’s statement read.

For its part, China released a statement saying it wanted the U.S. to “uphold the spirit of no conflict, no confrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation, focus on cooperation and manage differences, so as to push forward the healthy and stable development of bilateral relations.”

Seth Cropsey, a Reagan and George H.W. Bush-era DoD official who is now a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, said that so far Biden’s policies have been encouraging.

“They are a little tougher than what I thought I was going to see,” Cropsey said. “For example, I don’t think that any of Taiwan’s representatives to Washington had been invited to attend the inauguration and Biden did that. They have said that they’re going to continue to arm sales to Taiwan … and we don’t know that that means but it’s a positive thing to say.”

Cropsey said holding off on high-level engagements with China until consulting with allies in the region was a smart move, and he was impressed with Blinken’s upholding of Pompeo’s determination that China was committing genocide against the Uighur population in Xinjiang and the continuation of naval activity in the South China Sea.

“Look, it’s impossible to tell where this is going to lead and whether it is the keel of the Biden administration policy, but it looks encouraging so far.”

Mark Vandroff, the senior director for defense policy at the National Security Council and a retired Navy captain, did not cite a reason for his departure in a letter sent to national security adviser Robert O’Brien and obtained by Defense News.

Vandroff’s resignation follows the resignation of deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger on Wednesday. Media outlets have reported that several top national security aides are also considering resigning.

Vandroff declined to comment on his resignation. The White House did not respond to a Thursday afternoon request for comment on any resignations in the wake of yesterday’s violent confrontation at the Capitol between a pro-Trump mob and police.

In his year in office, Vandroff worked on the Abraham Accords, an agreement brokered between the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Israel that extended official recognition of the state of Israel. A former major program manager for the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer program, Vandroff was also instrumental in shaping the administration’s push to kick off a major buildup of the fleet as part of a naval arms race with China.

In a letter, Vandroff thanked O’Brien for the opportunity to serve on the National Security Council.

“In the last year is has been a great pleasure to work for you on the staff of the NSC to implement the President’s policies and work to make America and the world safer and more secure,” Vandroff wrote. “I was privileged to work alongside the most talented, dedicated, and patriotic group of colleagues a person could imagine, here at the NSC, within the broader EOP [Executive Office of the President] and across the inter-agency in the Departments of Defense and State, and the Intelligence Community. I will always be grateful to you for the opportunity you provided me to serve our great nation.”

Joe Gould in Washington contributed to this report.

However, major questions remain about the plan to grow the Navy’s strength, not the least of which is whether the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden will follow through or scrap the strategy.

The fiscal 2022 planning framework, released late Thursday alongside the 30-year shipbuilding plan, proposes a $759 billion top line for national defense, including $721.9 billion for the Pentagon, a 2.3 percent increase from the FY21 budget request. Pentagon leaders have repeatedly stated they need 3-5 percent budget increases to have “real” budget increases beyond inflation.

The plan outlines a fleet of more than the current stated goal of 355 ships by the early 2030s by investing in new classes of logistics ships for the Navy and Marine Corps, accelerating production of the newly awarded Constellation-class frigate, and boosting submarine production. The fleet would hit 405 ships by the end of the 30 years, documents showed.

But experts and analysts who reviewed the plan for Defense News were skeptical of the mechanisms that the White House Office of Management and Budget used to pay for the increases, including assuming a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, back office savings and cutting legacy equipment.

“This looks like they are trying to box in the Biden administration when it comes to the shipbuilding plan by showing that they can fund it even in a budget that is flat with inflation,” said Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But the savings they tout to pay for this will be difficult to achieve and/or are not realistic, like $35 billion from getting out of so-called endless wars and $6.6 billion from cutting unspecified legacy systems.”

In a call with Defense News, senior Trump administration officials said the long-delayed shipbuilding plan, originally due with the FY21 budget submission in February, was held up by an effort to piece together an affordable approach based on constrained resources.

“We didn’t want to provide it without the context that is going to be on the minds of those policymakers, which is: Is it affordable and is it credible?” the official said. “The work that we’ve done in concert with the nine months of study at DoD has been to answer that question: How do we pay for and what are the necessary resources that are needed to be able to scale in a realistic top-line framework?

“And so what we’ve put forward is planning guidance … with our fiscal assumptions about what we could be looking at. And that’s why, from the standpoint of the overall number, we think it’s very credible. The easiest thing that we could have done was to assume a large increase in the top line to pay for it. We did not do that.”

According to the plan, OMB is looking to pay for the fleet buildup by:

Withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan: Officials for the Trump administration have stated that they would like to be entirely out of Afghanistan in the next year. While it’s unclear if that will happen under the Biden administration, the Trump team estimates $35 billion in savings over the Futures Years Defense Program, or FYDP, through “planned drawdowns in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Africa.” Part of those savings would come through reducing the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund and eliminating the the Counter-ISIS Train and Equip Fund.

Notably, the Trump administration says it would like to eliminate the overseas contingency operations, or OCO, funding stream starting in FY22, with war costs shifted into the base budget.

Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, is skeptical that this would play out the way the Trump administration expects.

“Whether we have 5,000 or 150,000 forces overseas in any given country, so much of the costs are fixed. There’s no savings until the number is essentially zero,” she said. “Even after that happens, while OCO is appropriated through regular order, it is considered supplemental spending — so it’s debt-financed. You don’t save money by putting less spending on your credit card.”

Congress has been reluctant to fund a complete drawdown of troops in Afghanistan, and the lawmaking body has sent its 2021 National Defense Authorization Act to the president’s desk with a veto-proof majority blocking a partial drawdown there. In other words, until Congress has a change of heart, it appears unlikely it will allow a full withdrawal to reap those savings.

Cutting legacy equipment: The document calls for divesting $6.6 billion of legacy systems over the upcoming FYDP in order to put those resources elsewhere. “By discontinuing the use of older and less capable ground systems, surface ships, and aircraft, DoD can more effectively focus resources on modernized platforms and systems that support both high-intensity conflict and operations in highly contested environments,” the document read.

Eaglen pointed out that every year, the department tries to retire equipment, only to be turned back by Congress. She pointed to the recently completed National Defense Authorization Act, which was full of prohibitions on retiring gear such as the Air Force’s Thunderbolt II close-air support aircraft, as evidence that this is “wishful thinking.”

Find internal reforms: Although this section does not come with projected FYDP savings, there have been ongoing series of reform efforts inside the department. The Government Accountability Office has validated $37 billion in reform-driven savings since the start of FY17, while Chief Management Officer Lisa Hershman said she found more than $6 billion in FY21 alone. However, the CMO’s office is set to be disbanded by Congress, which could impact reform.

“The road to defense budget efficiency savings for modernization is paved with the skulls of erring Pentagon officials who believe this fallacy,” Eaglen said, noting luminaries such as Defense Secretary Bob Gates tried and failed for years to find real, meaningful efficiencies.

Cutting Army end strength: Compared to FY21 budget request figures, the plan would cut 900 soldiers from the active-duty component, 500 from the National Guard component, and 300 from the Reserve component — which the document claims would save $2.6 billion over the current FYDP.

“Constraining end strength is one means of protecting the rest of the DoD’s budget to ensure America’s servicemembers have the modernized equipment and weapon systems to defend the Nation and prevail on the battlefield,” the document read.

This is one area where Eaglen thinks cuts are realistic, as the shift toward the Pacific combined with the extreme costs of personnel make the Army a ripe target for cuts.

Realistic changes?

Ultimately, this budget document is more of an exercise than prescriptive, as the Trump team will be replaced Jan. 20 by the Biden administration. It is unlikely the Biden team will follow through with the ambitious shipbuilding increases laid out in the document.

But defense budgets tend to be largely put together by the end of the calendar year, and while a new team at the Pentagon will be able to tinker with the details, a wholescale rewriting of the budget request seems unlikely until it is in the hands of Congress.

Speaking last week, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged the need for realistic budget planning going forward.

“I suspect that, at best, the Pentagon’s budgets will start flattening out. There’s a reasonable prospect that they could actually decline significantly, depending on what happens” with the broader economy, Milley said. “So we have to — we the uniforms, we here at the Pentagon, civilian and military alike — we’ve got to do a quick reality check on the national budget and what is likely to happen in the not too distant future.”

Said Eaglen: “Most of the budget cake is baked, but that’s true every year — not just when one administration hands off a budget to another. The new team will tweak the ’22 [program objective memorandum] and ‘put its stamp on it,’ but I doubt there will be major [tweaks] — aside from shipbuilding.”

At the same time, she does expect at least one similarity to play out between this document and the incoming administration.

“I do think the Biden team will try some of this magical math to balance the defense books, too,” Eaglen said. “These tricks are employed by both parties regularly once those in power see how hard it is to even manage a defense enterprise that doesn’t grow with inflation.”

Ultimately, though, the administration believes the primary threat to U.S. security is a maritime threat from China, and that to combat it effectively under limited budgets, a realignment inside the DoD is necessary.

“The safest assumption is that we’re going to be spending at freeze levels going forward,” the senior administration official told Defense News. “So at that point you’re talking about a reallocation. You can’t really say something’s not affordable if all that is required is trade-offs.

“If there’s a bipartisan commitment to preparing and modernizing for the China threat and providing for the needs necessary in [the Indo-Pacific region].”

Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Plehn told a virtual audience at the annual Defense News Conference Sept. 9 that increasing involvement in the region by Russia and China could have consequences, even comparing their behavior to the kind of transnational criminal organizations that SOUTHCOM regularly combats.

“I would reinforce the point that the United States of America derives tremendous security benefit from a peaceful, stable, secure Western Hemisphere.” Plehn said. “But in respect to great power competition, China and Russia don’t value the same things as our Western democracies value. They don’t cherish the same principles we do and that we steadfastly defend with our partners.

“They thrive – China and Russia – much like trans-national criminal organizations on non-transparent political and business decisions. And they use that to their greatest advantage.”

Russia has longstanding ties in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. In 2018, Russia made headlines when two Tu-160 bombers visited Venezuela in the middle of political upheaval in the country. And China, as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, has been seeking to pour money into projects in the region, with Chinese President Xi Jinping setting goals as high as $250 billion for infrastructure projects.

But countries in Asia and Africa have been wary of the terms of the Chinese investment deals, a fact Plehn made reference to, adding that Chinese and Russian interests could be destabilizing to the region.

“Certainly I think the world is coming to realize that some of these non-transparent political and business decisions are occurring and they certainly are occurring in this hemisphere and we need to shine the light of day on that,” Plehn said.

“So, buyer beware, if you do business with them make sure you read the fine print because I guarantee that the contract is not written with the security and stability of the Western Hemisphere in mind, it’s written with the interests that they want to extract from us.”

China has signed memorandum of understanding agreements with more than a dozen Latin American and Caribbean countries for Belt and Road participation.

In its FY21 budget, the Air Force requested permission from Congress to retire 17 of its oldest B-1B bombers and a total of 29 aerial refueling tankers, comprising 13 KC-135s and 16 KC-10s.

However, the House hopes to block the Air Force from mothballing any of its 398 KC-135s until after FY23, according to the HASC’s Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee’s markup of the FY21 defense policy bill, which was obtained by Defense News.

It also would require the service to retain a total of 50 primary mission KC-10A aircraft in FY21; 38 primary mission KC-10A aircraft in FY22; and 26 primary mission KC-10A aircraft in FY23.

The Air Force currently has 56 KC-10s that are considered primary mission aircraft, so the HASC’s language would allow the service to retire six aircraft in FY21 and a total of 30 tankers over the next three years, said a source familiar with the bill. That will allow the service to retire roughly the same number of tankers as it proposed, but over a longer time period.

For the B-1B, HASC would allow the Air Force to retire the 17 B-1B bombers as planned, as long it maintains a force of at least 24 combat-coded planes, meaning the aircraft designated for conducting a wartime mission. Currently, Congress mandates that the service keep at least 36 combat-coded B-1s, out of an inventory of 62 B-1s.

The changes proposed by HASC will be debated within the Senate Armed Services Committee, which wrapped up its version of the defense authorization bill last week. SASC staffers told reporters June 11 that their proposed legislation does not stipulate what kind of aircraft the Air Force needs to keep, but does set a primary aircraft inventory requirement of 92 bombers and 412 tankers.

The House committee’s reluctance to begin retiring tankers was expected given U.S Transportation Command’s concerns about a tanker shortfall and ongoing complications with the Air Force’s newest tanker, the KC-46. TRANSCOM listed $110 million in its unfunded priorities to buy back 13 KC-135 and 10 KC-10 tankers that the Air Force wanted to retire, claiming the divestments would create a “capacity bathtub” and limit options for military mobilization if military leaders were “confronted with a crisis.”

Worries about the tanker fleet being too small were also compounded by the slow pace in resolving ongoing KC-46 deficiencies, particularly with its remote vision system. Prime contractor Boeing has agreed to completely redesign the RVS, which is used by the boom operator to see outside of the aircraft during the refueling process. However, the new system will not be ready until at least 2023.

Without it, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein has said the aircraft will not be ready to deploy in normal operations, though it would be used in combat if necessary.

The Air Force argued that retiring some of its legacy aircraft — including the KC-135, KC-10 and B-1 — were necessary to free up funding to invest in future modernization priorities in areas such as space and joint all-domain command and control, with many of those efforts classified. However, with the B-1 bombers, leaders also argued the aircraft were becoming too difficult and expensive to maintain.

“We flew the B-1s very hard in the [U.S. Central Command area of responsibility], and that’s what’s caused some of the challenge they’ve run into,” Pacific Air Forces Commander Gen. Charles Brown told Defense News at Singapore Airshow on Feb. 10. Brown was confirmed as the next Air Force’s next chief of staff earlier this month.

“So part of the discussion here is: Do you put a bunch of money in to preserve that at the expense of some other things you’re going to be able to do to give you other capability?” he said.

If approved, the proposal would potentially lower the price by promising General Dynamics a steady stream of work at its shipyard as the Pentagon and its network of suppliers grapple with COVID-19’s economic shocks. General Dynamics and the Navy have been negotiating the terms of a two-ship purchase, but nothing can be finalized until Congress authorizes the block buy.

As the House and Senate Armed Services committees ready their drafts of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, it’s customary for the Defense Department to send legislative proposals for the annual policy bill. It was unclear how Congress will ultimately react to this one, but at least one key lawmaker would “seriously consider” the proposal.

Senate Armed Services Seapower Subcommittee Chairman David Perdue, R-Ga., “certainly supports and has been working toward better business practices in the Department of Defense. He would seriously consider any proposal that achieves cost savings or increases efficiency,” said his spokesperson, Jenni Sweat.

The Columbia-class program is meant to design and build 12 new ballistic missile submarines to replace the Navy’s current force of 14 aging Ohio-class boats. The president’s budget estimated the cost of the lead Columbia-class sub at $14 billion, the second at $9.3 billion, and total procurement costs for all 12 at $110 billion.

The Navy wants to procure the first Columbia-class boat in fiscal 2021, the second in fiscal 2024, and the remaining 10 at a rate of one per year from 2026 through 2035. The Navy has already spent about $6.2 billion in advanced procurement for the Columbia, which leaves about $8.2 billion remaining for the first boat.

A summary of its new legislative proposal, obtained by Defense News, said the move is intended to “permit the Navy to enter into one block buy contract for up to two Columbia-class submarines (SSBN 826 and SSBN 827), providing industrial base stability, production efficiencies, and cost savings when compared to an annual procurement with options cost estimate.”

Complicating matters is the potential for the coronavirus pandemic to create construction or funding issues that delay SSBN 826’s first scheduled patrol in 2031, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report. To boot, it was unclear whether the Navy had accurately projected costs or whether stable funding would be available across the Navy’s procurement portfolio.

The Navy is confident the program is on track and negotiations are ongoing in line with what the Navy has previously disclosed, said Capt. Danny Hernandez, spokesman for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition.

“The Columbia program is on track, it is our top acquisition priority,” Hernandez said in an email. “Per the Navy’s Budget Submission, the Navy plans to award a contract modification for construction of the first two Columbia-Class ships as a priced option in FY20.

“Formal option exercise and SSBN 826 construction start are planned for October 2020, following required Congressional authorizations and appropriation of funds.”

This week, the Navy and General Dynamics were still negotiating on the terms of the two-ship buy, but what the ultimate savings would be for contracting for two together was not clear yet, according to a source familiar with the talks. No final deal can be negotiated until Congress has authorized the contract.

Also unclear is how perturbations in the system from the COVID-19 outbreak might impact the supply and labor system, the source said.

Indeed, the potential impact of COVID-19 on an already stressed submarine industrial base is one reason the strategy could be important, said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer a senior fellow at the Conservative Hudson Institute think tank.

“There has already been advanced procurement money provided by Congress that has been used to build missile tubes, nuclear reactors and propulsion plants,” Clark said. “But there is a bunch of other equipment on the ship that you would like to buy in quantities: Pumps, valves, fans, a lot of habitability systems.

“If you double the number of ships, you double the number that you buy and maybe you reduce your costs, but more importantly you support your industrial base.”

To date, disruptions to the submarine supplier base and the Electric Boat shipyard have been comparatively mild, two sources familiar with the situation said.

General Dynamics is interested in locking in a larger block buy for the remaining ten boats, and a source familiar with the company’s thinking said the precise savings would be clear once the company gets further along with construction of the first boat. The third ship will officially be procured in 2026, so it gives the parties time to understand the program better.

The Navy has been public about its desire to buy the first two submarines as a block but given that it’s a new start program, that seemed premature, said Project On Government Oversight military analyst Dan Grazier. He noted that a multi-year procurement, under the law, would require a stable design, while a block buy would not.

“The Navy claims the Columbia’s design is much further along in the process than the Ohio was at this point, but the Navy’s track record of designing and building ships recently is quite poor,” Grazier said.

“The Zumwalts, LCSs, and the Ford-class ships were designed using similar methods and the results have proven to be both costly and disappointing. It would be better to build the first boat and make sure the design actually works as intended because if it doesn’t, then the money we save now will actually cost us much more in the future.”

Clark, on the other hand, argued that while early multi-ship buys on new classes of ships are usually a bad idea, Columbia might be a special case where the risks associated with early block buys are sufficiently offset.

“You wouldn’t want to do a block buy if you thought the design was going to change significantly, as in you were going to buy one or two hulls and then revise it based on the results of testing or production issues,” Clark said. “On this one, more of the design is more complete so they are confident it is mature.

“And with the experience General Dynamics has with submarine construction, they are confident in their path to build it without significant design changes.”

The Navy is aiming to have more than 80 percent of the Columbia’s design complete prior to construction starting later this Fall, double where they were at the start of construction on the lead boat of the Virginia class.

The Columbia class is not the only big-ticket weapons program where the Pentagon is seeking latitude from Congress in pursuit of savings. For the Lockheed-made F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, DoD has separately proposed to use department funds to again bulk buy F-35 components ― “material and equipment” in “economic order quantities,” the proposal synopsis says ― for Lot 15 in fiscal 2021 through Lot 17 in 2023.

Lawmakers have historically been supportive of such moves, and Congress authorized the purchase of F-35 economic order quantity buys in the fiscal 2020 defense policy bill.

In October, the Defense Department and Lockheed finalized a deal for F-35 lots 12, 13 and 14, but the order is structured so that lot 13 and 14 fall under separate contract options, differentiating it from a block buy.

Lt. Gen. Eric Fick, who leads the F-35 program on behalf of the government, has said that arrangement would likely continue over the next several production lots.

“To date, we are pursuing a base-plus-options production contract vehicle for [lots] 15 to 17,” Fick said in March at the McAleese and Associates conference. “The business case that supports a three year multi year has not been there. We have not seen from Lockheed a business case that merits tying up three years of appropriated funds.”

Clarification: The story has been updated to clarify the specific transaction for which the Navy is seeking authority from Congress.

The deficiency, first reported by Defense News in 2019, means that at extremely high altitudes, the U.S. Navy’s and Marine Corps’ versions of the F-35 jet can only fly at supersonic speeds for short bursts of time before there is a risk of structural damage and loss of stealth capability.

The problem may make it impossible for the Navy’s F-35C to conduct supersonic intercepts.

“This issue was closed on December 17, 2019 with no further actions and concurrence from the U.S. services,” the F-35 JPO statement read. “The [deficiency report] was closed under the category of ‘no plan to correct,’ which is used by the F-35 team when the operator value provided by a complete fix does not justify the estimated cost of that fix.

“In this case, the solution would require a lengthy development and flight testing of a material coating that can tolerate the flight environment for unlimited time while satisfying the weight and other requirements of a control surface. Instead, the issue is being addressed procedurally by imposing a time limit on high-speed flight.”

The carrier-launched “C” variant and the short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing “B” version will both be able to carry out all their missions without correcting the deficiency, the JPO said.

The potential damage from sustained high speeds would influence not only the F-35’s airframe and the low-observable coating that keeps it stealthy, but also the myriad antennas located on the back of the plane that are currently vulnerable to damage, according to documents exclusively obtained by Defense News.

The JPO had classified the issues for the “B” and “C” models as separate category 1 deficiencies, indicating in one document that the problem presents a challenge to accomplishing one of the key missions of the fighter jet. In this scale, category 1 represents the most serious type of deficiency.

While it may seem dire that an aircraft procured for flying at supersonic speeds will be unable to do so for extended periods, the F-35 may not need to do it that often.

For the F-35, as opposed to the F-22 where supersonic flight is baked into its tactics, the ability to fly supersonic is more of a “break glass in case of emergency” feature, said Bryan Clark, an analyst with the Hudson Institute and a retired naval officer.

“Supersonic flight is not a big feature of the F-35,” Clark said. “It’s capable of it, but when you talk to F-35 pilots, they’ll say they’d fly supersonic in such limited times and cases that — while having the ability is nice because you never know when you are going to need to run away from something very fast — it’s just not a main feature for their tactics.”

In fact, going supersonic obviates the main advantages of the F-35, Clark said. “It sort of defeats all the main advantages of the F-35,” he explained. “It takes you out of stealthiness, it burns gas like crazy so you lose the range benefits of a single engine and larger fuel tank. When you go into afterburner, you are heating up the outside of your aircraft.”

That creates all kinds of signatures that can be detected by an adversary, Clark said.

What if?

But a retired naval aviator told Defense News last year that the limitations on the afterburner could prove deadly in close-combat scenarios.

The concept of operations for the F-35 is to kill an enemy aircraft before it can detect the fighter jet, but relying on long-range kills is a perspective that, for historical and cultural reasons, naval aviation distrusts. In the Vietnam War, when air warfare began heavily relying on missiles and moved away from the forward gun, it caused a spike in air-to-air combat deaths.

The lesson naval aviation took away was to prevent the latest and greatest technology from offsetting the learning of fundamentals, and it was the impetus behind the formation of Top Gun 50 years ago, a naval strike fighter course for training and tactics development.

“The solution is: ‘Hey, we’ll just limit the afterburner to less than a minute at a time,’ ” a retired naval aviator said when told of the issue. “Which, with what the aircraft is supposed to do and be capable of, that’s a pretty significant limitation.”

Primarily it would be an issue if the aircraft had to maneuver at high speeds to avoid a missile or survive a dogfight.

The issue is compounded for the Navy, which must operate forward for months at a time, because any significant issues with coatings or the structure of aircraft would require a depot-level repair. And so a damaged aircraft would remain damaged until its host ship returns to home port, reducing the combat effectiveness of the air wing.

“We might have to be operating at sea for eight months, so if you damage something on week one, guess what? It’s damaged for the rest of the deployment,” the aviator said. “And it affects your ability to evade detection by the enemy — you just degraded that asset permanently until you can get it somewhere where it can be fixed, at great expense and time.”

Other deficiencies

Three other category 1 deficiencies have also been officially designated as “closed,” meaning they have either been fixed or the performance of the aircraft is being accepted as is, the JPO reported.

The so-called green glow deficiency has been closed out as of last July. Green glow refers to a green light emitted by the helmet-mounted display’s LED lights. That glow obstructs a pilot’s view of an aircraft carrier’s deck lights during landing operations at sea in very low light, such as that experienced at night.

The issue was closed “as a result of incorporating an improved Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) Helmet Mounted Display (HMD),” the JPO told Defense News.

“The Generation III F-35 OLED Helmet Display Unit (HDU) significantly reduced the ‘green glow’ experienced by pilots during night operations. The F-35 JPO has taken delivery of the first order of F-35 OLED HDUs to support the U.S. Navy (USN) and U.S. Marine Corps (USMC), and a second order of OLED HDUs has been placed,” the office’s statement read.

An issue created when the F-35A and F-35B blow a tire, which can result in a severed hydraulic line, will remain uncorrected, the JPO statement said, but it has not come up again since the program switched tires.

“The DR [deficiency report] was closed under the category of ‘no plan to correct’ based on the fact that the landing gear system design meets all F-35 safety standards,” the statement read. “Issues related to premature bursting of tires were resolved by tire design changes during early F-35 development and no instances of dual hydraulic system loss caused by a tire burst have ever been observed on an F-35.”

And an issue that forced the F-35 to land in cold weather because of battery trouble has been fixed, the JPO said. The issue was caused by extreme cold entering the plane when the doors to the jet’s nose landing gear were open, setting off alarm bells, according to “for official use only” documents exclusively obtained by Defense News.

The cold would enter the plane and overwhelm the battery heater blanket, which is installed to keep a 28-volt battery running at peak condition. The battery would not shut down, but because of the cold, the blanket could not heat the battery as quickly as intended, triggering warning lights in the cockpit that the battery was going to fail.

A software upgrade fixed the problem, the JPO said.

“This issue was resolved on July 22, 2019 due to improvements in the battery charger’s firmware,” the statement read. “The firmware changes were developed by the battery charger supplier, and integrated and tested by Lockheed Martin and the F-35 Lightning II Joint Program Office.”

Last June, Defense News reported exclusive details about 13 major technical issues, known as category 1 deficiencies, impacting the F-35. The JPO has since quietly downgraded five of those issues to the lesser category 2.

A category 1 deficiency is defined as a shortfall that could cause death, severe injury or illness; could cause loss or damage to the aircraft or its equipment; critically restricts the operator’s ability to be ready for combat; prevents the jet from performing well enough to accomplish primary or secondary missions; results in a work stoppage at the production line; or blocks mission-critical test points.

Click here for more on the hidden troubles of the F-35.

In comparison, a category 2 deficiency is of lesser concern — something that requires monitoring, but not something that should impact operations.

But downgrading the category doesn’t mean the problems are solved, said Dan Grazier, who tracks military issues for the Project on Government Oversight.

CAT 2 programs are still “definitely cause for concern. They are going to have an impact on how the aircraft performs,” Grazier said. “It really depends on what the issue is, but every design flaw has a potential issue on the mission. … You want to not have flaws, you want these things can be fixed so pilots can get out and do what they need to do.”

Aside from a few basic statements on which projects were downgraded to CAT 2, a JPO spokesperson said the office “cannot disclose any information about how these deficiencies were resolved or downgraded due to their security classification.”

The ALIS sovereign data transfer solution does not meet information assurance requirements.

The Autonomic Logistics Information System, or ALIS, provides the backbone of the F-35, used by the aircraft’s operators in virtually all stages of flying and sustaining the Joint Strike Fighter. The system is used to plan and debrief missions, order spare parts, walk maintainers through repairs, and view technical data and work orders. (A potential replacement, named ODIN, is in the works.)

But some international partners on the F-35 program have expressed concerns that data flowing through ALIS to the United States government — and to Lockheed Martin — could give both the U.S. military and the American defense contractor a window into that country’s flight operations, including when and where its F-35s are flying.

Those concerns were so high that two countries threatened to leave the program entirely if a fix was not quickly applied, according to the original documents viewed by Defense News.

That fix is now in, according to the JPO, which said that on April 29, 2019, an update to ALIS included an initial version of a new Sovereign Data Management tool.

“The SDM tool permits F-35 operators more control over the types of Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) data that are transferred to the F-35 Operations Center,” the JPO said.

Incorrect inventory data for complex assemblies continues to result in grounding conditions.

This particular deficiency involves supplies or components that, upon installation, are not actually listed and tracked in ALIS as designed. Those require specific, almost daily requests to software engineers to have data corrected in the system. While those requests can catch some problems, the issue is not always detected by the user.

These “holes,” as the JPO calls them, do not collect data on how parts are used after installation, which means a part might be breaking down from heavy use. Yet, that part won’t be flagged by ALIS as an at-risk piece.

As a result, it’s less likely that issues developing from wear and tear or a lack of replacement parts will be discovered until such an issue has become an acute problem, possibly leading to a grounding of the aircraft.

The issue was downgraded to a CAT 2 deficiency on Jan. 13, 2020, “due to ALIS data quality improvements that have been made in the two years since this DR [deficiency report] was written,” according to the JPO. “The quality improvements have reduced the frequency and magnitude of issues that have impacted operational units’ abilities to quickly release aircraft for flight following maintenance.”

The F-35B and F-35C experienced incongruous lateral and longitudinal control response above a 20-degree angle of attack.

One of the most eye-opening issues identified in the initial report was that the F-35B and F-35C models used by the Marine Corps and Navy become difficult to control when operating above a 20-degree angle of attack — which would be seen in the extreme maneuvers a pilot might use in a dogfight or while avoiding a missile.

Pilots reported the aircraft experiencing unpredictable changes in pitch, as well as erratic yaw and rolling motions when coming in at that angle of attack..

“It has random oscillations, pitch and yaw issues above [its] 20-[degree angle of attack],” a longtime naval aviator told Defense News last year. “[So] if I had to perform the aircraft — if I had to maneuver to defeat a missile, maneuver to fight another aircraft, the plane could have issues moving. And if I turn around aggressively and get away from these guys and use the afterburner, [the horizontal tail and tail boom] start to melt or have issues.”

The issue was important enough that it accounted for two CAT 1 issues, one each for the two variants impacted by the design issue.

However, the JPO downgraded this issue to a CAT 2 on May 28, 2019, for the F-35C and on July 8, 2019, for the F-35B. The solution involves “improvements in flying qualities that were implemented in software. The improvements provide pilots with an intuitive reference indication for AOA [angle of attack], which allows pilots to more quickly optimize lateral maneuvering during air-to-air maneuvering. These software improvements have been released to all F-35 operators.”

There were unanticipated thrust limits in jetborne flight on hot days.

This particular issue only occurred once, but was so significant that it was identified in the original document as the “No. 1 priority” for the Marine Corps.

The issue was identified aboard the amphibious assault ship Essex, where a Marine pilot performed what is known as a “mode four” operation. That is where the jet enters hover mode near a landing spot, slides over to a target area and then vertically lands onto the ship. It’s a key capability for the “B” model, which was designed for its short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing abilities.

The engine — working hard on a day that temperatures cracked 90 degrees Fahrenheit while trying to lift a plane that was heavier than most returning to base — wouldn’t generate the needed thrust for a safe, ideal landing. The pilot managed to land, but the issue set off alarm bells in the Marine aviation community.

The JPO initially expected a fix for this issue to be out sometime in 2019, but it wasn’t until March 2020 that a mix of nondescript “software updates and procedural adjustments” brought the “propulsion system performance back to original specified performance levels.”