Internal Pentagon memo predicts that F-35 testing won’t be complete until 2016
Internal Pentagon memo predicts that F-35 testing won’t be complete until 2016
Posted Monday, Mar. 01, 2010 By BOB COX-Star Telegram
rcox@star-telegram.com
An internal Defense Department document that surfaced Monday confirms that the Pentagon’s own in-house cost, testing and manufacturing experts were much more pessimistic than top officials about the time and expense it will take to fix the badly lagging F-35 joint strike fighter development program.
The memorandum by Ashton Carter, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, spells out details of the F-35 program restructuring that Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced a month ago.
After a number of studies and analysis by internal Pentagon experts, Carter and Gates settled on a plan for adding $2.8 billion to the development budget in 2011 and extending the timeline by 13 months. That means they don’t expect all of the major flight and other testing of the airplane and its systems to be completed until about the end of 2014, if all goes well.
But the Pentagon’s in-house Joint Estimating Team (JET II), comprising technical, testing and cost analysts, submitted a review in the fall that predicted at least 30 more months to complete testing, or not until mid-2016. In 2008, a similar group (JET I) predicted a 24-month delay and cost increases of $7.4 billion.
Carter’s Acquisition Decision Memorandum, which amounts to a formal policy directive, acknowledged the more pessimistic forecast. But what Carter called “a revised JET II” estimate was made that took into account the increased funding and accelerated flight testing envisioned in his plan. That reduced the testing schedule delay to 13 months.
“I believe this revised estimate is a credible and realistic basis for the JSF program plan, and while the restructuring will likely be able to mitigate the slip from 30 months to 13 months, the contractor [Lockheed] will be incentivized to improve on the revised JET II schedule and cost further,” Carter said in the memo, which was issued last week.
Tom Christie, former director of the weapons testing office and longtime veteran of internal Pentagon acquisition battles, said he’s been told that lower level officials were not happy with Carter’s decision to adopt the more optimistic scenario.
“They thought that 30 months was pretty optimistic,” Christie said, but Carter “let Lockheed and the [F-35
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