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.