Your $300-billion fighter-jet program is over-budget and out of money, so what do you do? Well, if you represent the brain trust that is Lockheed Martin, you do the one thing that is guaranteed to result in more cost over-runs: you cut back on testing. Aero-News reports:
In what could be viewed as a ‘money vs. safety’ compromise, Lockheed Martin is seeking Defense Department approval to reduce the number of personnel, test aircraft and flight tests for its F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, because it is over budget. … Lockheed’s proposal calls for removing at least two of the 14-plane program and about 700 testing sorties from the 5,000 planned for avionics, communications, radar and weapons integration testing. The company contends these tests can be conducted just as well, and less costly, in ground simulators and a flying software laboratory now flying on a Boeing 737.
The F-35 test program was flawed even before the cut-back, as CDI explains:
Actual performance of the F-35 is currently unknown, and it will remain so for a long time to come. The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps are now rushing to pay for production units before they know just what it is they are going to get for their money. Initial operational testing is expected to run through 2013, at which point a planned 275 production aircraft will have already been delivered to DOD. This is an even worse degree of concurrency than the F-22, which evidenced multiple performance compromises, even structural problems, deep into its acquisition. However, the F-22 had many more hours of developmental test flying under its belt when the first aircraft were delivered to the Air Force than will be the case for the F-35. In fact, data now being generated on F-35 performance are not even being provided by a production representative aircraft, which has not yet been delivered. This plan to acquire significant numbers of production aircraft well before the completion of operational testing has been the subject of significant criticism by various parties, most prominently the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
Sadly, the F-35′s problems are nothing new. The Pentagon’s tacair acquisitions strategy is fundamentally flawed. CDI has more:
This is not the first time the Air Force promised that new, more complex aircraft would have an affordable procurement cost and an even cheaper cost to maintain and operate than aircraft being replaced. The F-15 was promised to be less expensive to support than the Vietnam era F-4; however, reality proved otherwise, and the F-15 was significantly more expensive to operate. The Air Force promised the F-22 would in turn be 40 percent less expensive to operate than the F-15; information from the Office of the Secretary of Defense indicates it is actually 30 percent more expensive to support. Being significantly more complex than the F-16 it purports to replace, the F-35 is virtually sure to follow this well beaten path.
The same trend marks the F-35’s acquisition cost, which the Department of Defense (DOD) has failed to control. Compared to early cost estimates of $35 million per copy, DOD currently predicts the development and production of 2,458 F-35 aircraft for $299 billion. Each F-35 would cost $122 million. For this reason, the F-35 can already be said to have failed to achieve its primary objective: low cost. Furthermore, the current cost estimate assumes no further cost overruns from the current immature state of the aircraft. We can expect even more cost growth, which is already about three times the original promise. We can also expect more shrinkage in the total number DOD plans to buy; which is, after all, a typical way DOD manages cost growth.
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TFX all over again?
[...] Just goes to show: when you rush weapons development, cost grows. Take LCS. Or MRAP. Or the F-35 fighter. Cost is largely a function of planning and testing. Get those right, and everything else is a lot easier. No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI Leave a comment Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong> [...]
[...] The Korean and Australian vessels are, strictly speaking, amphibious assault ships first and aircraft carriers second. They feature floodable wells for landing craft and swimming armored vehicles, and are planned to carry mostly just transport helicopters. The Japanese ship doesn’t have an amphibious role; she carries anti-submarine warfare choppers. Although all three ships are theoretically capable of carrying the F-35B jump jet, all the navies deny that they’ll ever fly fixed-wing planes off the vessels. [...]
[...] Fed up with unnecessary gold-plated fighter jet programs, the service’s impatience with counter-insurgency and its anti-China rhetoric, back in August I proposed the disbanding of the U.S. Air Force. The air service’s missions could be folded into the Army, Navy and Marine Corps without any loss in national power — and we’d benefit from cuts to Pentagon overhead. [...]
[...] Lately I’ve spilled a lot of electrons bashing the U.S. Air Force for being strategically blind, bureaucratically inept and addicted to tech for tech’s sake. But could I put together an air service any better? [...]
WAR IS NOT BORING F-35 RULES
Well, of course the F-35′s capabilities are not fully made public. That would be a stupid thing to do. You can’t go tell everybody what your weapons systems can do. And how stupid can you be to expect a newer, with state of the art technology aircraft, to be less expensive than the previous one? That’s not even possible in a socialist regime. Of course, the F-35 is more expensive than the F-16, but its also much more effective. So is the F-22. How can you expect an aircraft that is stealth and has the newest technologies on it, to be cheaper than a 30 years older aircraft? How dumb can you be? Only radar waves absorbing materials makes the F-22 & F-35 more expensive to maintain. The point is that these aircraft have state of the art technologies, technologies that others would do anything to obtain. What matters is that they are more technologically advanced than any other aircraft in the world. And with the Chinese and the russians doing everything they can to surpass you, you need these technologies. You can’t just cut back on military spending when others are openly arming them selves against you. That’s a real stupid thing to do, that only some pathetic liberals would like to see.
We DO NOT need the F-35. The USAF already has plenty of toys to fly, we cant afford these things when we have more trouble at home with jobs. Any excuse to get new toys when we have F-15s, 16s, etc. No Mig cant best these.
You’re only half correct Ed. You do have a jobs problem, but that has nothing to do with military procurements. I don’t think it’s a good idea to cut military spending, in specially in weapons procurement area, and in specially when Russia and China are continuously increasing their procurement budgets. And you’d have to be a complete idiot not to realize who are they arming themselves against. Canceling the F-22 was stupid enough. That was a mistake. Canceling the F-35 too, would be the beginning of the end for you. Your legacy fighters are no match for the Russian and Chinese newest Flanker variants. The Indians already kicked your F-15′s and F-16′s asses in Cope India 2004. And they did that by using the Su-30 and their improved MiG-21 Bison. How do you think your legacy F-15s and F-16s would cope against the Su-35 and the PAK FA if they coudn’t eve defeat the MiG-21? If you continue to butcher your military in this manner, soon you won’t have a country to fight for. Don’t think that Russia or China won’t take advantage from an opportunity if they will see it. Right now, they are watching you very carefully and they will take advantage of any opportunity comes in their way. You have a great potential, but if you continue with this anti-military attitude, soon, finding jobs will be the last thing you will have to worry about.