WASHINGTON — A continuing resolution signed by President Donald Trump on Sept. 8 will keep the military funded — albeit at reduced levels — until Dec. 8, but Defense Department leaders have warned that a longer CR could adversely impact the Air Force’s ability to buy new aircraft.

The Air Force’s biggest ongoing aircraft competition, the T-X trainer program, is one of the programs that could be caught in the crossfire of a longterm CR, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told Defense News on Aug. 31. However, other programs of record and technology development efforts also stand to be hurt if a continuing resolution is extended into the spring.

The service plans to award a contract in December to one of the three competing teams: Boeing-Saab’s clean sheet T-X, Leonardo DRS’s T-100 and Lockheed-Korean Aerospace Industries’ T-50A. However, it may not be able to do so if still under a CR, which keeps funding at the same level as the previous fiscal year and prohibits new programs from starting, Wilson said.

Asked whether the Air Force could announce a T-X winner without awarding a contract, Wilson responded, “Well, what’s the point? We don’t have the money to be able to do it.”

Some of the T-X competitors are already starting to voice concerns about the effect continuing budget turmoil could have on the program going forward.

“I think the issue really is not whether there is going to be a continuing resolution. There surely is,” William Lynn, CEO of Leonardo DRS, said at the Defense News conference on Sept. 6.

“Is it going to be short or is it going to be long? I think a short one, if it’s just to get their ducks in a row and do all the work that’s needed to get the defense bills passed and the budget finalized, I don’t think that will do damage. If it is a long CR that goes beyond the end of the year, I think that does have the potential for harming not just T-X but other programs.”

One of those programs could be the Air Force’s biggest procurement priority, the F-35 joint strike fighter.

If a CR runs only until December, the F-35 joint program office can manage its funding so that testing and development activities stay on pace, said Vice Adm. Mat Winter, the new head of the F-35 program. However, if Congress cannot hammer out an agreement on spending bills by January, the JPO will have to submit an “anomaly,” or a request for additional money, to lawmakers.

During the Sept. 6 conference. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry said that congressional defense committees were already discussing potential anomalies with the Defense Department.

Although Congress typically grants anomalies for critical programs, Winter noted that it will not be able to break the budget caps to award funding to any program.

If an anomaly isn’t granted, the results will not be catastrophic, he said. “We will just see slowing down, not as many tests, not as much development. It would slow down versus stop.”

However, the program has several big milestones coming up in fiscal year 2018, including the end of the development phase and the initial operational capability of the Navy’s F-35C carrier-launched variant, and slower-than-anticipated testing could potentially impact those events.

A long CR could have implications on the Air Force’s ability to hire and train airmen, particularly pilots and cyber experts, Wilson said.

“You probably have a hard freeze, if not a chill, on hiring,” she said. “We’re trying to hire people in cyber, in training. We’re trying to increase the number of pilots we’re putting through pilot training. ... This becomes very quickly an extremely difficult problem.”

It also would have ramifications on readiness, most prominently shown by a drastic cut in available flight hours.

“If you were in combat or spinning up to go to combat, you’d get to fly. Just about everything else would be grounded, and we have a problem now with retention of pilots,” she said. “If we have to ground the Air Force when the airlines are hiring, it would be devastating and it would be years to recover from it.”

About Valerie Insinna

Valerie Insinna is Defense News' air warfare reporter. She previously worked the Navy/congressional beats for Defense Daily, which followed almost three years as a staff writer for National Defense Magazine. Prior to that, she worked as an editorial assistant for the Tokyo Shimbun’s Washington bureau.

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