Savage finds evidence that Obama's military budget-slicing contributed to the jet crash

U.S. Navy Aviation Budget Continues Descent
Mar 16, 2012
By Michael Fabey

U.S. Navy aircraft took the biggest hit among naval procurement and maintenance accounts in the Pentagon’s proposed fiscal 2013 budget request, continuing a trend that developed in the latter half of the previous decade.

The Pentagon cut about $14.6 billion from its fiscal 2013 request for Navy aircraft procurement compared to the proposed budget from the previous year. At the same time, the current proposal cuts about $3 billion from aviation operations and maintenance compared to fiscal 2012.

Navy aviation — especially its vaunted fixed-wing fleet — already had been on the descent since the middle part of the last decade, according to an exclusive Aviation Week Intelligence Network (AWIN) analysis of contracting data aggregated by the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting.

Between 1999 and 2003, Navy annual fixed-wing expenses ranked first or second for each of those years. Indeed, between 1999 and 2009, fixed-wing expenses ranked first among all Navy expenses with about $35 billion in contracts and contract modifications, the analysis shows.

Starting in 2004 — as wartime expenses began to eat into the budgets for the Navy and U.S. Marine Corps — fixed-wing procurement started a dramatic descent, failing to even reach the top 20 of annual expenses for the remainder of the decade.

While rotary-wing expenses started to climb and hover closer to the top in the latter half of the decade, vehicle and logistical costs began dramatic increases during those years, according to AWIN’s analysis.

In recent budget testimony, Navy officials acknowledged some risk in their aviation strategy, with some shortfall in the strike fighter force.

However, the Navy, like other services, was forced to re-evaluate its force structure — including its aircraft fleet procurement — to meet congressional mandates for fiscal cuts in planning immediate and longer-term budgets.

But aircraft-related cuts account for about half of the $34.6 billion the Navy cut from its fiscal 2013 request for procurement and operations and maintenance.