Senior Air Force leaders are now drafting plans to retire as many as half of the approximately 1,200 F-16s currently on the flight lines of USAF active-duty, Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard units. The first planes to be cut over the next decade would be the oldest models of the venerable fighter, which made its combat-operational debut at Hill in 1979.
"It's not a done deal," said Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, whose district includes Hill. "My sense is it is still in the discussion stages."
Leaders of Utah's coalition of business and community leaders working to boost Hill's chances of surviving the 2005 Base Realignment And Closure (BRAC) round said they had heard of a 2010 target to start F-16 retirements and are trying to find out if the plans being developed by Air Force leaders mean the timing has advanced.
"It's too early to speculate on any impact to Hill, but we do have a lot of the older models that would be among the first to go," said Vickie McCall, president of the Utah Defense Alliance. "It's one thing to retire 600 fighters out of the force but you can't do that unless there is something ready to fill in, because our fighters are being tasked more than ever and certainly our deployments have not gone down."
Hill is virtually a parking lot of aging F-16s. The active duty 388th Fighter Wing is composed of 72 F-16s from the defense contract order known as Block 40, built from 1989 to 1991. The Air Force Reserve 419th Fighter Wing flies 15 older Block 30 F-16s built between 1986 and 1989. Several active Air Force wings have the later Block 50 models, while all the newest F-16s coming off the Lockheed Martin assembly line, Block 60, are being bought by the United Arab Emirates Air Force.
"We can't sit on the F-16s forever because the world is catching up to that technology," said Bishop. "Replacement has to take place at some time. But we want a fighter wing to replace the 388th when those planes are retired, and I think the F-35 would be a perfect fit at Hill."
The multirole F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the stealth F/A-22 Raptor are the next generation fighter jets. The first training squadron of Raptor pilots recently started in Florida, while the F-35 won't be ready for a test flight until 2006. Still, the advanced capabilities of the new jets are a major reason the Air Force wants to dispose of so-called "legacy tails" like the F-16 and F-15 Eagle.
"We used to buy airplanes based on the fact that it took several, in many cases several dozens of airplanes, to take nonprecision munitions in there and kill one target," Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper said in a recent briefing. "Now, we're buying airplanes that can kill multiple targets with one airplane."
Plans to begin phasing out old F-16s have started a political scavenger hunt to find new missions for rusty Falcon units. Besides active and reserve F-16 wings, some state Air Guard units - which traditionally fly the oldest warbirds - have joined a crowded field vying for a piece of the nation's shrinking airpower inventory.
"Because of the way weapons systems are distributed between the active, Reserve and Guard units, and because the Guard is now a player in the BRAC process, communities that have F-16 missions are for obvious reasons concerned about possible cuts and realignments," said base closure consultant Paul Hirsch, president of Madison Government Affairs in Washington.
Several factors are driving the retirement plan. Older planes cost more to maintain and money saved by retiring the earliest F-16s could be spent on upgrading newer Falcons. The service has 20,000 more airmen than its congressionally mandated manpower ceiling allows and must reduce its personnel numbers.
Current airpower needs - such as the close-in warfare to secure Iraq - have much of the fleet of traditional combat aircraft grounded while unmanned aerial vehicles such as the Predator have become vital to assist ground forces.
Above all, weapons technology has advanced to the level that pilot expertise and aircraft performance are less critical, with future "through-space" weapons platforms eventually making "atmospheric delivery" of bombs by aircraft obsolete.
"The F-16, when it first came out, it had general-purpose bombs, the radars were very short range, you could only lock on one guy at a time and you had to be within three or four miles of a target before you could shoot," said 419th Operations Officer Lt. Col. Mike Brill, who has flown the F-16 more than any pilot in history. "Now, with precision bombs, you can engage and you never even see the bad guys because they're dead before you even get in visual range."
Brill, who began flying F-16s at Hill in 1980 and has since logged a record 5,300 hours - the equivalent of circling the globe more than 67 times - believes despite the age of the F-16 airframe, the continued advancement in targeting, navigation and communications technology aboard the aircraft should keep it out of the retirement home for several more years.
"It's similar to the A-10 that was built for Vietnam and is basically just two motors, a stick and a gun," said Brill. "It was on its deathbed and then Desert Storm happened and everybody realized the A-10 is the best tank-killer we have. So even as the technology grows, I think the F-16 will still remain viable and I see no problem with it being capable of flying any mission that is needed into the 2020s."
