Tucson Forward

Changing course on the Joint Strike Fighter

Push is on to get program back on budget, schedule
By Michael Hoffman Air Force Times 2-15-2010

Game on.

It’s catch-up time for the F-35, defense experts say, if the Penta­gon wants to get its most expen­sive weapon system back on track. If it doesn’t play hard, the outside observers say the Defense Depart­ment risks backlash from taxpay­ers sick of delays and soaring costs.

The frustration with the pro­gram from the inside is evident. In a rare public display before the release of the fiscal 2011 budget, Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired the program’s manager —

Marine Corps Lt. Gen. David R. Heinz — and reprimanded lead contractor Lockheed Martin by withholding $614 million in per­formance fees.

“To now move forward in this program in a realistic way, one cannot absorb the additional costs that we have in this program and the delays without people being held accountable,” Gates told reporters at a budget briefing. “If I have set one tone here at the Department of Defense — when things go wrong, people will be held accountable.” Three services — the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps — are set to spend $300 billion on 2,456 F-35s over the next 25 years; nearly three-quarters — 1,763 — will go to replace the Air Force’s A-10s and F-16s.

The budget calls for $10.7 billion to be spent on 43 F-35s. So far, Lockheed Martin has rolled 15 F-35s off the production line as part of the program’s systems develop­ment and demonstration phase.

Any delay to the Pentagon’s most expensive program in history jacks up the costs because the ser­vices have to come up with stop­gaps, be they getting more life out of older planes or buying other new aircraft. In the last budget cycle, critics in Con­gress lectured Gates that he was betting too much on the F-35 after he chose to stop production of the F-22, a fifth-generation fighter. After reports of scheduled F-35 test flights not taking place, the ob­servers say, Gates was pressured to make a change at the top.

“The secretary firing the manag­er is just good politics at this point,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foun­dation, a Washington think tank.

Who’s next?

The next program manager must stick to the test flight sched­ule, avoid cost run-ups and hit the 2013 date for initial operation capability.

At the time he fired Heinz, Gates announced he intended to upgrade the position from a two­star billet to a three-star billet. Defense analysts predict Vice Adm. David J. Venlet, a three-star who leads the Naval Air Systems Command, will succeed Heinz. Air Force Maj. Gen. C.D. Moore remains the deputy program exec­utive officer.

The Navy’s support of the F-35 has been called into question in recent weeks because of the unau­thorized release of an internal NavAir report that criticized the Joint Strike Fighter program.

The report, leaked to aviation bloggers, stated the F-35’s cost per flight hour will be significantly higher than the flight hour cost for F/A-18 Hornets. Defense and industry officials had said the F-35 was cheaper.

“The NavAir position — not in the formal sense, but as a corpo­rate belief — is that they need and want out of the [F-35] program,” Winslow Wheeler, a defense ana­lyst with the Center for Defense Information, said in a January interview.

Whatever service the new pro­gram manager hails from doesn’t matter, according to a former Air Force official. What’s important is to find the right person to turn the F-35 around.

“This is clearly the sign that this program is having problems and it’s time to bring in someone who … will bring a new set of eyes,” said Michael Wynne, a former Air Force secretary.

Dry runs

Much of the attention has been on how few test flights the F-35 has flown.

The annual report of the Penta­gon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, released in Janu­ ary, showed the F-35 program flew 16 of the 168 test flights scheduled for 2009. Most of the test flights not flown were because of delays in aircraft deliveries, which set the program back another year.

It’s a delay that Lockheed Mar­tin officials acknowledged and promised to fix in 2010.

“We are all conscious of that fact that more flight tests are going to build confidence,” Daniel J. Crow­ley, the F-35 program general manager, told reporters during a conference call Feb. 2.

Lockheed Martin, according to Crowley, is about six months behind in aircraft production, which is reflected in the flight tests. The delay, however, is one that Lockheed probably won’t be able to make up immediately, he said.

“But the rate of flight tests we expect to follow, the scope of the flight tests remain the same, and we plan to get back to that same cadence,” Crowley said. “But it is staggered to the right.” As for cost overruns, the F-35 program risks a breach of Nunn­McCurdy cost-escalation limits if the unit-procurement costs exceed 150 percent of $122 million per aircraft, the estimated baseline amount.

A breach would subject the pro­gram to restructuring and would force the Pentagon to supply Con­gress with the costs for an alterna­tive solution.

The Pentagon’s Selected Acquisi­tion Reports are due in March or April and could signal a breech. At his Feb. 1 briefing, Gates said he is “not sure” if the F-35 is in violation.

The loser

If the flight tests continue to slip, the Air Force has the most at stake, said Eaglen, the Heritage Founda­tion analyst. Responsible for buying nearly three-quarters of the F-35s, the Air Force would get stuck with a bill for the next three decades.

The number, though, that the service will end up buying has been in question since the Feb. 1 release of the Pentagon’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review. The report, which lays out a vision for future defense spending, calls for the Air Force to maintain 10 or 11 tactical strike wings flying 720 and 792 jets in the coming decade — about 1,000 fewer than the ser­vice is scheduled to buy.

Lockheed Martin executives said they don’t expect the F-35 buy to drop drastically.

Joint Strike Fighter officials received extra pressure to get F-35 development on track after Russia announced Jan. 29 the first test flight of its fifth-generation fight­er, the Sukhoi T-50 prototype. The Air Force’s F-22’s first flight was in 1997.

China and Russia are not going to wait for the Pentagon to get the F-35 right, Wynne said.

Wheeler, though, said he thinks the U.S. is lucky Russia hasn’t moved faster to develop the T-50.

“We should thank God there is no wolf at the door of an enemy air force,” he said. ?