SECNAV: Not enough data to connect funding and mishaps

(Editor's Note: Following publication, the Marine Corps has clarified comments made yesterday by Commandant Gen. Robert Neller at a Pentagon press briefing.

Neller appeared to be referencing a KC-130 crash last year when he discussed an airplane's "mechanical issue" and the family notification process following a pilot's death.

Asked for further details, Marine Corps spokesman Capt. Christopher Harrison said Neller "was referencing the VMM-265 incident involving an MV-22 off the coast of Australia; the investigation and family notification process for this incident was just recently completed."

Harrison declined to comment on the KC-130 crash because that investigation is not finished.)

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Top Navy leadership today declined to correlate a lack of funding with aviation mishaps, citing a lack of data to make the connection.

"There is not enough data right now to tell if there is an exact correlation," Navy Secretary Richard Spencer told reporters at the Pentagon during a briefing on the state of the service.

"We are training people to the requirements necessary. Those additive hours that people have in the cockpit or doing their jobs [are] only going to help. So now we have the funds to do that," he said. But "I don't have data to give you a direct correlation."

The statement from senior leadership is surprising because it conflicts with coordinated messaging from Capitol Hill that repeatedly connected a lack of funding with aviation and ship collisions.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller, who spoke alongside Spencer and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson, also declined to make a direct correlation between the two subjects. However, the top Marine general did say the service recently briefed families of 16 servicemembers killed in an aviation mishap last year.

"I think we have a pretty good idea of what happened to our plane last year. In that particular case, I'm not sure funding would have changed that," Neller said. "I'm not going to talk about it because the families have just been informed, but that was a mechanical issue."

Neller said funding does affect the number of available airplanes and the number of hours Marines can fly. But he also stressed that top brass cannot point to a single issue as the cause of mishaps.

"There's not one single thing that [we can] say it's because of this," Neller said. "We need more hours, we need better parts support, we need new airplanes, we've got to improve our procedures and we've got to stop doing stuff on the ground that causes us to lose otherwise pretty good airplanes."