Posted on 05/27/2011 9:06:48 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
This Week at War: The Jet That Ate the Pentagon
The F-35 is cutting into the Defense Department's most important priorities.
BY ROBERT HADDICK | MAY 27, 2011
Policymakers get 11th-hour second thoughts on the Joint Strike Fighter
The troubled and long-delayed F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program came under renewed scrutiny this week. The Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and many foreign partners plan to buy thousands of the fighter-attack jets over the next two decades to replace a variety of aging aircraft, but the development schedule of the stealthy fighter has slipped five years to 2018 and the projected cost to the Pentagon for 2,457 aircraft has ballooned to $385 billion, making it by far the most expensive weapons program in history.
The Government Accountability Office reported that although Pentagon management of the program is improving, developers have only completely verified 4 percent of the F-35's capabilities. The program received another blow this week when the Senate Armed Services Committee learned that the Pentagon will likely have to spend $1 trillion over the next 50 years to operate and maintain the fleet of F-35s. Evidently reeling from sticker shock, Sen. John McCain demanded that "we at least begin considering alternatives." But is it too late to prevent the F-35 program from devouring the Pentagon's future procurement budgets?
Air Force officials themselves may now doubt the wisdom of the size of the commitment to the F-35. According to a recent Aviation Week story, Air Force Undersecretary Erin Conaton placed new emphasis on the importance of the Air Force's next-generation long-range
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignpolicy.com ...
It's a lot, I recognize that.
Heck, I'll say it: it's too much. We ought to be able to buy weapons more cheaply than this.
But consider this: $1 trillion over 50 years? Obama spent $1 trillion in a single year for a bogus economic stimulus that has utterly failed. How does the media feel about that? Well, they love him and they want more of the same for about 6 more years.
But money for national defense? Spread out over 50 years? Well ... that's completely crazy and irresponsible now, isn't it???
cut it or reduce the buy to a few hundred instead of the thousand
The Boeing folks must be working overtime.
I wonder how much in adjusted dollars they’ve spent on the B-52 in its first 50 years.
Economics not your strong point?
That's the thinking that gave us 187 F-22s instead of 450.
When you consider that most of the fighter/attack planes (OK most others too) in the inventory are either past their service life or are very close to it, something needs to be done like last year.
If our current planes start crashing in larger numbers over service life related issues, the same govt. people whining now will be screaming “Why didn’t we fund the Lightning II???
As a multi-role aircraft the F35 replaces many of these aging/over the hill aircraft and greatly (over it’s lifespan) reduces the overhead when compared to what it would cost to build the infrastructure for several replacement aircraft.
We’re going to have to spend big bux one way or the other and we are so invested in this plane now, we cannot just stop. Getting unions out of the biz would help greatly.
Well, we could like dim-bulb did with the F22 over politics. Not the brightest of maneuvers.
And no, I’m no aviation expert, but the above makes sense to me.
Just out of curiosity....
Wouldn’t have purchasing more F-22’s been cheaper than buying this overpriced mult-service jet that doesn’t really seem to be the best their respective services could procure?
I mean I know the navy needs new jets and can’t lean on the Hornet for everything. God knows the Harrier can be improved upon but can the Air Force really look us in the eye and say that more of these would be better than more F-22’s?
The estimates for how much it will cost to field the F-35 won’t hold to a trillion.
Everything about this program has gone up, up, up. They haven’t been able to hold to a date or budget since it started.
That’s the sign that it should get the axe.
Here’s the GAO report from about a year ago which gives good perspective:
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10382.pdf
The way that LM is blowing through money, blowing through schedules, etc... means that all estimates regarding final costs, timelines, etc - will be inaccurate. LM hasn’t been able to meet a deadline or hit a cost budget from the inception of the program.
The time to kill this program is now. Kill it dead, kill it now. The argument “well, we’ve already spent so much” is exactly like the “too big to fail” argument of why we should prop up bankers with bad books. It is a terrible argument that is part of what is putting us into irretrievable debt.
BTW, anyone who has even a passing interest in aviation like myself should have seen LM’s initial promises of the operating cost of this highly complicated platform as 50% to 80% of existing, simpler platforms as complete BS. That’s what initially twigged me to a) how ignorant Congress is, and b) how bald-faced the lies coming out of Lockheed-Martin are. There’s no way this platform will operation for any percentage of an F-16 less than 100%. No way.
BTW2: You do know that the JSF program was hacked and huge amounts of data from the project were siphoned out to enemies, right? ie, they’re probably designing countermeasures to the F-35 right now, rendering it mostly a moot point in survivability...
That’s $20B a year. It would be instructive to find out the comparable cost numbers for today’s fleet of F-15’s and F-16’s, because the F-35’s will be carrying the weight of replacing both sets of aircraft, given the limited run of F-22’s. Without those numbers, that $20B number is meaningless. Note that the 2010 USAF budget was $160B, excluding special appropriations for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Military spending is no different to any other government spending. Resources are mis-allocated by central planners. If we want a bigger private sector, we need a small government sector
If you’re gonne flush trillions ..the aerospace industry beats Wall St Toilets any day anytime....
The “service life” of aircraft is a very deceptive metric.
The B-52’s in inventory are serving wildly beyond initial, secondary and tertiary projections of the “service lifespan” of the B-52. Same for the C-130. Good designs have a way of doing that.
The F-15, F-16 and F-18 can be upgraded and we can build more of them for much less than we can buy the F-35. There is no way that anyone can claim (with a straight face) that the F-35 will have operational expenses lower than those of a F-16. A complicated two-engine fighter, with STOL capability, will fly for lower engine costs/hour than a simple one-engine jet? Utterly laughable.
The 22 was designed for air superiority where the 35 is a more ‘all-arounder’ depending on how it’s equipped.
The 22 was killed because Obama had voted against it as a Senator...a purely political move. In one of his speeches in an Air Force hangar his handlers made the AF replace a 22 with an F15 that was the ‘backdrop’ for his divine oratory. The great one wasn’t to be seen by the public with the evil F22.
Jet fighters are much more costly to operate than prop-driven fighters. Yet we moved to jet fighters as soon as we could. Because our potential adversaries weren't standing still. My guess is that the F-35 will live on, but aircraft count will go down. Both the Chinese and the Russians are coming out with stealth variants. We'll have to keep up or be left behind.
Frank Gaffney called this one years ago.
As I read it, the F22 is invisible or nearly so to radar, can cruise supersonic, and can shoot down adversary aircraft from over a hundred miles away. What exactly is the reason we’re screwing around with the 35 which apparently can’t be made to work and not building 22’s which work nicely?
The 35 is single engine. The 22 is the twin.
Very true, the 52 went WAY beyond design parameters/service life. The 16s seem to be experiencing age issues in the last couple years though.
As for the others, we can upgrade them, sure, but will they compete/defeat the newest hardware out of Russia/China? Today, probably. 3-5 years from now? There’s only so much that a 20-50 year old plane can be expected to do. and that’s even more age/stress on the airframe (on the refit planes).
When I refer to cost, I mean the cost of building a new infrastructure to handle 1 plane rather than 5 or whatever to handle 5 new planes since at some point we WILL have to replace them.
It is made by Lockheed Martin, so Boeing folks will not be working in it at all. (They are, however, building more C-17s than the DOD wants)
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