Defense Department to spend $5.6 billion on
74 more F-35 fighter planes
By Aaron Gregg July
10 at 4:55 PM
The Defense Department has announced that it is paying $5.57
billion to expand the U.S. military’s arsenal of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters by
74 planes.
The contract action is seen as an early stamp of progress
for the next “lot” of planes, which the Defense Department Joint Program Office
and Bethesda-based defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin are negotiating. Joint
Program Office spokesman Joe DellaVedova said that the round of planes is set
to include 50 planes sold to foreign governments, bringing the total to 141
planes in this sales lot.
“We appreciate the actions taken by the JPO to ensure
delivery of F-35s to our warfighter customers,” Lockheed Martin said in a
statement.
What remains to be determined is the unit cost of the
plane. Price disputes have derailed the program in the past, such as when the
F-35 Joint Program Office unilaterally
imposed its own pricing for the ninth lot of planes after more than a
year of negotiations.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is designed to be the
next-generation fighter jet that will replace the F-16 as the most advanced air
asset of the United States and its allies. It can take off and land vertically
and can carry munitions inside the body of the plane. Its $400,000-a-pop helmet
has an augmented reality display that gives the pilot a view through
the bottom of the plane.
It is also the single most expensive military program in
the history of the Pentagon, accounting for about a quarter of Lockheed
Martin’s annual revenue and considered critical to its status as a top-tier
defense contractor. A spate of program delays and ballooning development costs
have made “the plane that ate the Pentagon” into something of a poster child
for bureaucratic waste, drawing criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.
Then President-elect Donald Trump joined that debate
before he was sworn into office, suggesting
in a tweet that the plane should be replaced with Boeing’s cheaper
F-18 Super Hornet. The Pentagon subsequently ordered
a review to weigh the two planes’ competing advantages.
The Pentagon and Lockheed Martin subsequently agreed to
sell the 10th lot of 90 planes at about $85 million per plane, a price that
was roughly in line with what the Pentagon had planned before Trump took
office. A Joint Program Office statement said the unit price for lot 11 is
expected to be less than that.
Advocates of the program described the new contract order
as a sign that the program is moving past its history of delays and false
starts. Industry experts have generally credited the Trump administration with
speeding along negotiations.
“The program certainly seems to be moving faster than it
did during the Obama years,” said Loren Thompson, a defense consultant with the
Lexington Institute, which receives funding from defense firms, including
Lockheed Martin.
Source: washingtonpost.com
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