by Jamie McIntyre | Feb 20, 2018, 12:01 AM
The U.S. military is all in on the F-35 joint strike fighter, the most expensive weapons program in Pentagon history, with plans to buy more than 2,400 over the next quarter-century.
In the fiscal 2019 defense budget request released this month, the Pentagon is requesting $10.7 billion to buy 77 planes next year, on top of the 70 ordered this year, and 74 last year.
The original concept behind the high-tech fifth-generation multi-role fighter was to save money by having a common airframe with custom features for each service, a tail hook for the Navy, a vertical takeoff model for the Marines, and a runway takeoff model for the Air Force.
And sales to U.S. allies were going to keep the price down.
But since its inception in the late 1990s, the price tag for the stealthy plane has skyrocketed from a vastly over-optimistic estimate of $40 million a copy, to more than $100 million, with projected costs topping $1 trillion to keep the aircraft flying over its projected 60-year lifespan.
The plane the U.S. is banking on as the “future of tactical aviation” has taken unrelenting flak from critics over the years even as it has yet to see combat.
A Google search for “F-35” and “boondoggle,” turns up 65,000 hits with headlines such as, “What went wrong with the F-35,” (Scientific American) and “Military Admits Billion-Dollar War Toy F-35 Is F**ked,” (Daily Beast).
But the $400 billion program keeps chugging along, seemingly evading potshots from its many critics as easily as enemy radar.
“The F-35 is a remarkably successful program. It has met all of its requirement for stealth and provides superior situational awareness,” said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the nonprofit Lexington Institute, a Washington think tank that receives some of its funding from Lockheed Martin, builder of the F-35.
Thompson says he’s been following the program since Lockheed got the contract in October 2001.
“This is a jet that is more survivable than any fighter in history, and it can do more things than anything we are flying today,” Thompson said.
And the cost, he says, is coming down, expected to be about $85 million for the most common version of the plane flown by the Air Force, which Thompson argues is not much more than the cost of a brand new F-16, also made by Lockheed.
That’s just the kind of overly-optimistic prediction that has plagued the program from its birth, argue critics.
“This program is deeply troubled,” said Dan Grazier, a senior military fellow with the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington watchdog group. “This program was deeply flawed from the very beginning. There were some really bad assumptions that were made, and some really bad decisions that were made before the contract was even awarded.”
The biggest knock against the F-35 program is that it violated a sacrosanct acquisition axiom: “fly before you buy.”
Lockheed has been building the extremely complex fighter jet, which relies on more than eight million lines of software code, while still testing and working out the bugs.
And there have been many bugs.
The F-35 is already in service, deployed both on land and soon on U.S. ships in Japan.
In a report last month Robert Behler, the Defense Department’s new director of operational test and evaluation, said the plane is still not ready for prime time.
“Finally and most importantly, the program will likely deliver Block 3F [full war fighting software] to the field with shortfalls in capabilities the F-35 needs in combat against current threats,” Behler wrote in his annual report.
“That says this program is not going to deliver on all of the capabilities that were promised to the American people,” argued POGO’s Grazier.
The planes being deployed now are “really expensive prototypes,” he said. “It’s not verified that this design is actually combat-capable.”
There are other complaints about the F-35’s basic design. Because of the emphasis on stealth, which reduces the plane's radar signature, but doesn’t render it invisible, the F-35 proved to be not quite as maneuverable as an older F-16 in a visual range dogfight.
But advocates of the plane say many of the critics are missing the big picture.
The F-35 isn’t designed to go mano a mano with an adversary. It’s not just a plane; it's a whole system of systems.
“The thing about the F-35 is it’s never just about the F-35. And people will say, ‘Well, how would the F-35 do against,” you know, fill in the blank. It’s not a one-on-one fight,” Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said in an interview with the Washington Examiner last month. “One of the things that the F-35 brings is the ability to link other things together. And so, it is a node on the network. It is the quarterback of the fight.”
The F-35 features a high-tech helmet that allows the pilot to actually look down and see through the plane.
“If you are flying an F-35, you will be able to see your enemy first. You will be able to shoot your enemy first. And every other F-35 in your vicinity will be able to see what you see,” Thompson said.
The Pentagon insists that while delays and cost overruns were out of control six or seven years ago, it’s now on track to be a game changer.
“The basic design of the F-35 is sound, and test results reinforce our confidence in the ultimate performance the U.S. and its partners and allies value greatly,” said a statement from the F-35 Joint Program Office in response to the latest internal review.
And the reality is, unlike the F-22 raptor, whose production was cut short when the cost spiraled off the charts, there is no Plan B if the F-35 were to be canceled or curtailed.
“Part of the justification of cutting shorter the production of the F-22 was, 'Hey, we have the F-35 coming up right behind it.' Well, we don’t have the next aircraft coming up right behind the F-35, so pushing forward with the F-35, unfortunately, is the only option we have at the moment,” Grazier said.
The program, he says, is just too big to fail. “They kind of baked in an inevitability to this, because we have invested so much time and money into this whole process.”
The Pentagon insists the F-35 will prove itself over time, and Thomson says it’s a winner that has consistently confounded its critics.
“The F-35 will be several times more survivable than any legacy fighters. It will be several times more effective at air-to-air and air-to-ground combat. It will be better at electronic warfare. It will be better at reconnaissance.”
In short, he says, “Lockheed Martin has a winner on its hands — a really big one.”
Original post: washingtonexaminer.com
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