Lawmakers want to expand Super Hornet buy (aka It's only money) [View All]

Lawmakers want to expand Super Hornet buy
By John Reed - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday May 18, 2010 17:03:53 EDT

Fresh on the heels of the Navy’s move to buy 124 new F/A-18 Super Hornets and E/A-18G Growlers, Missouri lawmakers on Tuesday announced a renewed push for the Pentagon to purchase additional Super Hornets and C-17 Globemaster III cargo haulers.

Calling last week’s news of the Super Hornet buy “an important first step,” but just a first step in addressing the sea service’s looming fighter gap, Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond, R-Mo., and fellow Missouri lawmakers held a news conference on Capitol Hill to announce they will urge the Pentagon to buy additional fighters using savings garnered from the multiyear Super Hornet buy.

Bond was joined by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who added that she will insist the Navy use the nearly half a billion dollars in savings from the multiyear buy to “go right back into” buying more Super Hornets to address the Navy’s fighter gap.

The pending Super Hornet deal, unveiled last Friday, is worth about $70 million per airplane, according to Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo. Akin and McCaskill called out the Navy for issuing “perplexing” estimates regarding the size of the fighter gap, which have ranged from 243 jets to the current estimate of 100.

McCaskill also said that she is trying to get enough votes in the Senate to allow the Air Force to retire its 50 oldest C-5A Galaxys and purchase additional C-17s in the 2011 defense authorization bill, which the Senate is expected to mark up May 25.



unhappycamper comment: I call bullshit on the $70 million dollar number for an F/A-18. Each one of these bad boys cost $100 million dollars from the factory.

If we didn't have 11 daily cargo flights from Charleston to Afghanistan, we wouldn't be wearing out all this expensive hardware.

P.S. New C-17s cost somewhere between $200 ~ $220 million dollars each. And there's another anomaly in the OP.