Can 3, fly 8-the dysfunctional MOD supply chain

The UK has to cannibalize 3 Typhoons in order to keep 8 flying in the moronic sideshow which is the Libya operation.

Some are quick to say cannibalization is common. It depends. If it is too common, you always end up spending more taxpayer money to support flying operations. It points to incompetent flag-level management. It points to incompetent senior civilian military management.

When you pull a part from an aircraft to put on another, that part is not zero hours like the kind of part you pull off the shelf. This messes up your maintenance process; cascades, and causes other problems.

When you cannibalize an aircraft, you contribute to blowing out your maintenance man hour costs and creating bad side-effects. The person(s) assigned to pulling a part off of a can bird to put on another takes more time than going to a properly stocked parts bin. Also, when you source from your parts bin what you get is something that is fresh (no matter if it is new or refurbished) and you can predict the number of hours that it can fly on the aircraft before replacement.

So, when you pull a part off of a can bird you use more maintenance man hours that any unit can ill-afford and you “repair” the operational aircraft with a part that is in effect “used” and you will have to replace that part again on the same jet on shorter time intervals.

There is another danger of an improperly funded parts bin at the unit level. Consumable parts that you cannot cannibalize are also in short supply. Aircraft that would otherwise be on the flight training schedule sit on the ground. With either category of part, this  produces lost flight training hours.

Canning should happen in some extreme cases like remote airfields in combat. It should not happen with expensive aircraft that belong to air arms that supposedly employ proper logistics and finance people.

In the procurement holiday that was the post Cold War 1990’s, the U.S. military did a huge amount of cannibalization. It cost so much money in the budget due to lost maintenance/logistics man hours, extra budget administration man hours, lost flight training hours and loss of experienced people that Congress took notice.

Loss of experienced people? You see, when you stress out the pilot and maintenance community this much—pilots want to fly, maintainers can only take so many 12 hour/7 day shifts—they leave the service. The taxpayer loses good tribal knowledge that you have to then replace in the training pipeline with a green person. All because someone couldn’t budget money for the parts bin.

This happens in phases. It gets addressed (kind of). Then it gradually creeps up again. In an MRAP-one-war-wonder useless dirt operation era where UAV’s powered by uprated snowmobile engines are “air power” stars, I wonder how big the cannibalization problem is in today’s DOD?