F/A-18, 임무 준비율 80% 달성, F-16은 69%

[위종민]

2018년 제임스 매티스 미 국방장관이 미공군과 미해군 전투기들의 준비태세 강화를 지시한 지 6년만에 미해군의 F/A-18은 80% 목표를 달성했네요. 

미해군은 F/A-18 각 항공기의 포괄적 데이터베이스 관리, 사전예방적 유지보수, 물류 및 부품 공급기업 간소화를 통해 임무준비율을 높일 수 있었다고 합니다. 

미공군은 2020년 80% 목표를 포기했고, 기존의 임무준비율은 준비상태를 나타내는 좋은 지표가 아니라고 말했다고 합니다. 2023년 F-16의 임무준비율은 69%였다고 하네요. 그러나 미해군이 도입한 기법도 많이 받아들였다고 합니다. 

One USAF and Navy Fighter Fleet Has Hit Readiness Goal: F/A-18

A U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet taxis at an undisclosed location in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, Aug. 3, 2024. U.S. Air Force photo

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Years After USAF and Navy Were Told to Up Fighter Readiness, One Fleet Has Done It: F/A-18

Dec. 3, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

The Navy is keeping its fleet of F/A-18 Super Hornets at 80 percent readiness, six years after former Defense Secretary James Mattis ordered both the Air Force and Navy to raise their fighters’ readiness levels. The Air Force, meanwhile, has abandoned that goal and its fighters’ mission capable rates are still lagging.

Speaking at the Stimson Center on Dec. 3, Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti said her service couldn’t afford to throw “more money and people at the problem” when Mattis ordered the increase in readiness rates, particularly for the Navy and Air Force’s biggest respective fighter fleets, the F/A-18 and F-16.

The Navy reached its goal with the F/A-18 “by unpacking the challenge,” Franchetti said of her aviation command, which looked for “the root cause, and started working on that.”

Service officials previously said that they succeeded with F/A-18 readiness by maintaining more comprehensive databases on each aircraft, using proactive maintenance, and streamlining the logistics and parts supply enterprise.

The Air Force dropped the 80 percent mission capable rate benchmark in 2020. The service said then that it had different challenges than the Navy, and that traditional mission capable rate metrics weren’t a good indicator of readiness anyway. For fiscal 2023, the most recent year for which the Air Force supplied data, the F-16 mission capable rate was 69 percent. The Air Force has, however, adopted many of the same practices that the Navy used to raise the F/A-18’s availability.

The Navy’s definition of aircraft readiness may also differ from the Air Force’s, which distinguishes between aircraft able to do some of their assigned missions, or “mission capable,” versus all its assigned missions, or “full mission capable.”  

Broadly, the Navy’s goal is to have 80 percent of all its forces “surge ready” by 2027, when Chinese President Xi Jin Ping “has told his forces to be ready to invade Taiwan,” Franchetti said.

Her approach is getting those forces “in and out of maintenance on time … making them ready to go. So when we need them, we can call on them.”

Franchetti has 33 focus areas across the surface, subsurface, and aviation domains to increase Navy capability and readiness.

“Another one is integrating robotic and autonomous systems,” she said. “We have a lot of different experimentation going on, but how do we bring that capability and that mindset into our regular formations?” Her other main pushes are “investing in our people and high-end quality training [and] investing in our Maritime Operations Centers so we can command that broader fleet fight that we know are going to need to do in the future.”

She’s asked her service-wide Navigation Plan implementation team to focus on “things like long range fires; protection; logistics; live, virtual, constructive training” as the ways to “get after those enduring capabilities.”

Like her Air Force counterpart Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin, Franchetti said the character of war is rapidly changing, and “you can see that we are going to fight in a system-of-systems way. It’s really a joint warfighting ecosystem. … We are going to have capabilities that we deliver through the Navy that enable other services to use their capabilities, and it’s this ecosystem of interdependent capabilities that we need to be able to contribute to.”

Her plan will be different from previous ones in that “It has a date. So we are all focused on getting after these capabilities by 2027.” She said that year is “not a cliff, it’s a waypoint on the way to being more ready every single day.” Also, for each initiative, “there’s a single accountable individual,” and she said she herself will be accountable for the plan’s overall success.

“And we’re using metrics and data to understand where are we in getting after them,” she said.