Selling the P-8A Poseidon Short

At the end of June, the State Department’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency gave the green light to the Royal Canadian Air Force to purchase up to $6 billion worth of P-8A Poseidon submarine-hunting aircraft, the U.S. Navy’s most sophisticated land-based maritime patrol plane. The announcement came just two days after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau returned from a trip to Iceland to discuss common concerns about Arctic security. NATO’s Nordic states – including prospective new member Sweden – voiced increasing worries not only about the Russian presence in the far north but the meaning of China’s declaration that it considers itself a “near Arctic” nation with a regional interest. The United States, too, has long urged the Trudeau government to bolster its contributions to North American defense.

Right now, there are 161 P-8s in service worldwide. In addition to the U.S., the UK, Australia, Norway, New Zealand, and India are operating the plane. The bulk of the 161 are flown by the US Navy, with Boeing having delivered 117 and a total of 128 on contract.

In the spring of 2018, the Navy set a warfighting requirement for the P-8s of 138. So, the Navy is ten planes short of that requirement. That’s not great, but it could have been worse: the only reason the fleet was even close to what it should be is that, in the 2021 budget, Congress added 9 additional aircraft to the Navy’s acquisition program. The Pentagon’s intent was to stop procuring P-8s at 118—a full 20 planes short of what the Navy stated it needed.

This tightrope act has been repeated several times. For the past three years, the Defense Department’s budget request had no new monies for closing the existing gap. But, thanks to the budget deal struck in the course of negotiations between the White House and Congress over the debt ceiling, this could well be the year where the safety net is removed. While the House Armed Services Committee has added two new P-8s in its markup of the 2024 Pentagon budget, the Senate’s version of the bill accepts the administration’s decision to stop buying the plane. Of course, the final reckoning will come during the appropriations process, where Congress allocates actual dollars. However, to fail at the authorization stage would likely mean curtains for the program. Hence, the House needs to hold firm in conference to its addition of the two P8s.

Ionically, and in contrast to so many other defense procurements, the Poseidon’s program has been a relative model of management and engineering efficiency—being both delivered on time and under budget. Of course, it helps that Boeing has built more than 11,000 737 airframes, including the larger and more efficient 737-700, the platform for the P-8s electronics and weaponry. However, Boeing’s production lines have almost entirely pivoted to the 737-MAX family, a substantially different airframe. The Pentagon undoubtedly hopes that foreign sales of the P8s will keep the old production line at Boeing up and running until some magical time in the future when the Navy can get back to addressing the existing gap between the fleet size and the

existing warfighting requirement. But, as noted, there is no sure foreign contracts actually on the books right now and procurement of Lot 12 of the P8s will be completed this year and, with the lot’s completion, it is the end of the line. There is no successor system in sight. The shortfall in the P-8A fleet is especially troubling given the sorry state of U.S. Navy submarine readiness. In recent weeks, Ronald O’Rourke, the dean of naval analysis for the Congressional Research Service, released his periodic assessment of the state of the fleet. He found that fully 37 percent of the Navy’s fleet of 50 attack submarines – designated as “SSNs” – were undergoing long-term maintenance or waiting to do so and thus idle and unable to go to sea. The unreadiness rate has roughly doubled over the past decade and has risen above 30 percent every year since 2018. Wrote O’Rourke: “[T]he number of SSNs in depot maintenance or idle has substantially reduced the number…operationally ready at any given moment, reducing the…force’s capacity for meeting day-to-day mission demands and potentially putting increased operational pressure on SSNs that are operationally ready.”

It naturally also places increased stress on the P-8A fleet to be operationally present. Anti-submarine warfare is a complex of systems from underwater sensors, satellites to surface combatants to patrol aircraft to attack submarines. Handicaps or shortcomings in any one element can degrade the overall system. And while the Congress added P-8s in the FY 20and FY 21 budgets, those will go to creating two naval reserve squadrons—obviously useful in a contingency but less so to meet day-to-day requirements.

Since its introduction to active service a decade ago, the P-8A fleet has been busy—and increasingly so. The Navy keeps half of the planes on the East Coast, at Jacksonville, Florida, and the other half at Whidbey Island, Washington, just north of Seattle. As with Navy ships, these are “homeports,” not operational locations and the P-8s are deployed forward across both the Atlantic and Pacific. U.S. regional commanders have an almost insatiable appetite for the planes – and, indeed, for intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance systems of all sorts – which is already difficult to satisfy. In contrast with the P-3, the P-8A’s faster airspeed and longer range enable it to cover a wider area in a single mission. Nevertheless, the number of P-8A squadrons is less than half the size of the P-3 Cold War fleet, while—climate change notwithstanding—the world’s contested seas and oceans have not shrunk. Arguably, the stated requirement of 138 P-8s—a requirement set before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the uptick in Chinese maritime aggressiveness in the South China Sea and in the waters around Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines—is too low to start with.

Today’s missions frequently take patrolling P-8s into contested airspace, such as Beijing’s claimed “East China Sea Air Defense Zone” or the skies over the Black Sea. There, they attract the attention of potentially hostile combat aircraft. Both Russian and Chinese fighters periodically “buzz” the planes in a menacing fashion, coming in some cases within a few feet. A Poseidon flying over the Black Sea in April 2022 was asked by Ukrainian armed forces to identify the cruiser Moskva, then the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and confirm its location. Shortly thereafter, two Ukrainian cruise missiles sank the ship.

In sum, it is also almost certain that the true requirement for sub-hunting and maritime patrol aircraft is substantially understated by the Navy. To begin with, there is the rapidly rising challenge of the Chinese navy, both in the surface and sub-surface domains. According to the Pentagon’s most recently published review of Chinese military, Beijing has “placed a high priority on modernizing its submarine fleet,” to become not just a regional but a global power. This means transitioning from older diesel designs augmented by a handful of nuclear-powered attack and ballistic missile boats to quieter designs with more modern acoustic systems and weapons, relatively quiet diesel-powered (air-independent propulsion) submarines and a higher proportion of longer-range nuclear-powered boats. Having expanded its nuclear submarine construction capacity, “The [Chinese navy] will likely maintain between 65 and 70 submarines through the 2020s, replacing older units with more capable units on a near[ly] one-to-one basis,” concludes the report. Chinese surface warships are also increasingly active – even in the South Atlantic – and, closer to home, the Chinese coast guard is becoming equipped with more powerful vessels. And, if that were not enough to worry about, Chinese “maritime militias” routinely harass commercial shipping and fishing boats of other regional nations, including those of U.S. treaty allies.

Russia, too, has taken care to maintain and modernize its submarine fleet of nearly 60 boats. In addition to traditional ballistic missile, diesel-electric and nuclear attack submarines, the Russians have built two massive “mothership” subs that carry one or two deep-sea submersibles that pose a threat to seabed communications cables – or pipelines like Nordstream 2. Russia has also upgraded newer boats, including its quieter diesel sub, with Kalibr cruise missiles, long-range weapons used extensively in the war against Ukraine in strikes against cities and civilian targets.

But perhaps most important, the number of potential maritime hotspots is increasing exponentially, as Canadian, and Nordic concerns about the Arctic and the war in the Black Sea indicate.  For the United States, what was the Pacific theater has become the “Indo-Pacific,” emphasizing the criticality of Indian Ocean sea lanes and communications cables – which hug the South Asian coastline – to international commerce; perhaps not surprisingly, India wants to purchase as many as 24 P-8s. Add in, US Navy concerns over Russian attack submarines once again operating in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and keeping track of Iranian and North Korean submarines, and the menu for P-8A keeps expanding and not getting smaller.

It’s true enough that unmanned underwater and above ocean vehicles and platforms may well contribute substantially in the future to the anti-submarine warfare mission. But when and how much is still not known. Moreover, those platforms are no substitute for the command and control and the integration of sensor data that the P-8A can provide. Add in the Poseidon’s capacity to carry stealthy, longer-range air-to-surface cruise missiles, along with a variety of other modern counter-surface and anti-submarine munitions, and you have a stand-off, naval Swiss army knife that can’t help but complicate an adversary’s operational planning.

In other words, the Navy’s myopic and budget-driven decision to terminate P-8A production is momentous, with geostrategic consequences far above and beyond the sea service’s immediate needs. Further, if there is a single lesson of defense industrial policy of the post-Cold-War years, it is that halting current procurements is either a false economy or a pretense of innovation; “divesting to invest,” as “Pentagon propaganda has it, is still divestment, a net loss of both capacity and time. It is also a strong disincentive to defense companies to spend their own money to sustain research, factories, or work forces.

The Congress seems about to make itself a party to this error; while the House Armed Services Committee authorized two P-8s in its version of the annual defense policy bill, it is anyone’s guess that such money will actually be appropriated, thanks to the caps on defense imposed by the recent debt-ceiling negotiations. And since the Senate’s version of the authorization act did not grant authority for additional P-8s, the candle is nearly snuffed out.

As a practical matter, to keep the line open and supplies coming from subcontractors, Boeing needs to be building approximately one P-8A a month. If the Congress can squeeze out the funds for two more Poseidon planes, and Canada responds with an order that follows on rather than aiming at the end of the decade, it’s possible the line can be kept open. But the Navy’s game of acquisition chicken is one that others should refuse to play. It’s a problem for U.S. maritime security and allies who, belatedly, have recognized the need to rebuild their anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare capabilities.

Giselle Donnelly and Gary Schmitt are senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute.