Joint Strike Fighter: We Were Told This Would Happen
Winslow T. Wheeler
Director, Straus Military Reform Project, Center for Defense Information
Posted: November 20, 2009 11:52 AM

As the Pentagon's $300 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program continues to unravel, it is useful to remind ourselves who told us all of this would happen, and who might now be making foolish prognostications.

~snip~

Last Sunday, Bob Cox at the Fort Worth Star Telegram told us that the Defense Contract Management Agency has described some of the ongoing delays and cost overruns as a result of a painfully long list of serious production problems. Find the details here.

On Monday, Lockheed proudly announced to Reuters that its short take-off and vertical landing test jet has finally arrived at the Navy test facility at Patuxent, Maryland to resume the F-35 flight test program, now a few months or a few years behind schedule - depending on what baseline you use. But later in the week, the word spread at Lockheed that things didn't go as well as expected at Patuxent. (The specifics of this are sure to break in the news, given the close attention paid by the press.)

This weekend, the Pentagon's "Acquisition Czar," Ashton Carter, will convene a meeting to ponder how to rescue the program. The word is that he is contemplating a plan to accelerate the flight test program - which sounds good until you consider the program can't even maintain the delayed flight test program it is on now. The plan, nonetheless, will provide cover for moving around contractor engineers and other actions to feign big savings in the program. Carter is also contemplating a downsizing of the F-35's performance requirements, perhaps in a manner that will be hard for overseers, if any, in Congress to find and/or in a manner that may complicate the program for the Air Force and further dampen the already tepid enthusiasm for the aircraft in the Navy. As a result of all this, cost growth being predicted by a multi-service team of analysts in the Pentagon, known as the "JET," would be mostly wished away. (We know about the Joint Estimating Team's cost analysis thanks to reporting from Jason Sherman at Inside Defense.)

None of this would fix the program in any real sense, but it would pretend that the F-35 program is not going to breach some newly revised congressional reporting requirements for cost overruns (known widely as Nunn-McCurdy). Thus - it is hoped - the world would remain ignorant of the problems beneath.


Rest of article about this $239 million dollar wonder that still can't fly above 20,000 feet: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/winslow-t-wh...