Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
8/28/15
The top officer and top civilian of the Air Force on Monday said neither a continuing resolution nor the service’s incorrect estimate of the Long-Range Strike Bomber’s research, procurement, and support costs in its two latest annual reports to Congress would affect internal planning for the new aircraft.
“The mistake was a regrettable error, but it’s been corrected, and so it’s not going to affect us internally,” Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said Monday during a Pentagon press conference. She added: “It occurred, in part, because of human error, and in part because of process error, meaning a couple of our people got the figures wrong, and the process of coordination was not fully carried out in this case.”
Analysts and congressional staffers have recently underscored that fiscal 2016 is likely to start with a continuing budget resolution. While James voiced concern for how that could impact some 50 Air Force new-start acquisition programs, she said she did not believe a CR would affect the LRS-B program, even though the nuclear-capable bomber is scheduled to shift from research and development to its acquisition phase next fiscal year.
Bloomberg originally reported on Aug. 17 that the Air Force last year estimated the cost of LRS-B at $33.1 billion for fiscal years 2015-2025 and that this year the service projected the 2016-2026 cost at $58.4 billion. The correct estimates were $41.7 billion for each period, according to that article.
“Our internal documents are drawn from two things—a [Future Years’ Defense Program] that’s submitted each year, and the long-range projections, cost estimates, etc., that are revised,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh said during the press conference. “The five-year number last year and this year were captured exactly accurately. That’s what we’re using as an air staff, and the updated projections and cost estimates or where the confusion came in, [stems from the fact that] we didn’t properly coordinate.”
James said the Air Force notified Congress of the LRS-B cost projection error, and added that the service is retraining the personnel involved and has “tightened up on the process of coordination to make sure something like this doesn’t occur again.”
One congressional staffer said the estimation errors are unlikely to impact acquisition, mainly because they were exposed in the program’s 10-year forecasts, beyond the program’s five-year estimates, where erroneous projections can have more bearing on acquisitions, the staffer said. “Internally, DOD was supposedly using the right numbers,” the staffer wrote in a Tuesday email to NS&D Monitor.
In a follow-up email Tuesday, the staffer added: “We all want accurate information, obviously. But the program impacts are likely nonexistent.” The staffer provided the comments on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak on the record to the media.
Amid reports that the expected award date for the LRS-B contract could be postponed from September to October, James said only the announcement would come “soon.” “We will do it when we are ready. The key thing is to make sure that we are doing it correctly, and so that is what we’re doing is making sure that we get this done correctly, so that’s point number one.”
The contract award was originally expected last spring, but the Air Force has extended that timeline at least twice. Earlier this year, officials said it could be sealed in August, and September now appears to be the earliest that the service will award the development contract to either Northrop Grumman or a Boeing-Lockheed Martin team. The Air Force intends to buy approximately 100 bombers at a cost of $550 million apiece, and to debut the first aircraft in the mid-2020s.
