Repairing the F-35 Program

“I think we have succumbed on the F-35 program to adding too many things too quickly,” says a veteran Pentagon program manager.

Moreover, the Joint Strike Fighter’s problems have been compounded because the development effort was launched without a complete test plan.

Paul Kaminski, speaking as a private citizen, picked out three aircraft programs – the F-16, the F-117 and the F-35, all products of Lockheed Martin – to show how some programs function smoothly, others become delayed and some are repaired along the way. He is CEO of Technovation, Inc., a former under sec. of defense for acquisition and technology, a former director for low observables technology and the current chairman of the Defense Science Board. A DSB research effort is looking into how acquisition can be speeded up, made cheaper and better aligned with military missions.

Another problem involves a lack of coordination between the interrelated demands of acquisition and test and evaluation. A particular issue for F-35 was the undefined nature of the test program that has cost the 10-year-old program five years of delays.

“It’s amazing to me how many programs we start and sign contracts for that don’t have a test plan,” he says. “That’s the rule, not the exception.”

"Put the thing in the trash and leave it there."

Here we go again.

And your expertise is?

These college boys have done pretty well over the years to keep the USA on top.

Current cost estimate is what 225,000,000: per copy and 65,000 per hour. For 10 seconds over target. Just damn. And the damn thing cannot get with in a hundred miles of the new Russian anti aircraft missiles. They do have phase radar, so end of stealth game.

For me, it isn’t just the cost. Heck, let’s even put the cost completely aside. The B-2 cost a boatload of money, and I think it was worth the cost relative to the capabilities we have in return.

We’ve been down this *exact* road with an aircraft project in the US before, even with the NATO partners as joint customers.

Anyone remember the cost and problems in the F-111 program? What a C-F that project was.

From the get-go, we (the taxpayers and the services) were told that the JSF program’s aim was to develop a low-cost, multi-mission platform for all three services (USAF, USN, USMC) flying fixed-wing aircraft. The problem for all engineering projects with this large a constituency is “mission creep,” which begets “feature creep,” which means that schedules keep getting pushed out, features are added in at a very late point in the design cycle, etc.

For engineers, these kinds of projects are the ones that task your very soul at times. I count myself lucky that when I worked in the defense sector, I never had to deal with this kind of crap.

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