Rollover-Plus: A Great Way to Build Second-Rate Fighters

The shrinking defense budget and the ill-defined threats of the post-cold war world, have given rise to alternative acquisition strategies. These strategies seek to maintain America's technological and qualitative fighter aircraft superiority, while simultaneously saving the cost of large-scale procurement. This paper compares two of these strategies. On the one hand, Rollover-plus purports to maintain US superiority by building technology-advancing prototypes. The technology would then roll over into a production fighter at some later date, as dictated by the threat or the current aircraft's obsolescence. On the other hand, Silver Bullet proposes building a small number of operational aircraft and integrating them into the existing fighter force structure. By examining the contributions operational F-15 flying made to developing the Advanced Tactical Fighter, this paper demonstrates that Silver Bullet should be the Air Force's future acquisition strategy. Rollover-plus is an inadequate strategy because it does not provide the critical feedback that DOD and industry need to define and produce successive generations of advanced aircraft. Without this feedback, the US can build new fighters but they will not be as good as they should be. Given that our National Military Strategy relies on a dominating fighter force, we cannot afford second-rate airplanes. Lastly, Silver Bullet can maintain our technological edge and save procurement costs, but not without change. Both industry and DOD need to pursue specific initiatives that will enable aircraft manufacturers to achieve rate transparency, i.e. the production of small numbers of aircraft (less than 100) at unit costs comparable to those of large production runs. There are certain lead production methods that when combined with better DOD requirements, open production lines, and reduced government oversight, will help make rate transparency a reality.