The Navy is retiring its F-14D Tomcats in favor of the F/A-18E. Two strike fighter squadrons from NAS Oceana, Va., returned to base last week after completing a six-month deployment aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt. It was the last for the Tomcats. Navy officials said that decommissioning the Tomcats will reduce the maintenance workload for its sailors. Tomcats required about four times the man-hours per flight hour than the newer Super Hornet.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall doesn’t see great value in trying to break the Sentinel ICBM program off as a separate budget item the way the Navy has with its ballistic-missile submarine program, saying such a move wouldn’t create any new money for the Air Force to spend on other…