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Save the Lightning (F-35)
The Weekly Standard ^ | September 6, 2011 | Thomas Donnelly

Posted on 09/06/2011 9:56:30 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki

Save the Lightning

Why we need the F-35

By Thomas Donnelly

The Weekly Standard

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Thanks to the provisions of the Budget Control Act and the subsequent directions of President Obama's budget director, Jack Lew, the Department of Defense is figuring out how to trim $1 trillion from its current and planned budgets. Perhaps the principal target in the sights is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program (aka the Lightning II)—a fact that neatly encapsulates the Pentagon's severe budgetary, programmatic, operational, and strategic problems. It's only modest hyperbole to conclude that as fares the Lightning, so fares America's military power.

Taking away the F-35 would render the surface Navy and Marine Corps all but useless in responding to the kind of "anti-access" challenges China now presents and others like Iran are developing.

There are only three places they can go to harvest cuts of that magnitude: military personnel, operations and maintenance, and the "acquisition" accounts that reflect both weapons research and procurement. The costs of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have skyrocketed over the last decade. Even if the costs of combat or "hazardous duty" pay are factored out, Stephen Daggett of the Congressional Research Service has calculated that the annual per-troop price of the All-Volunteer Force has risen from less than $60,000 from 1972 to 2001 to almost $90,000 today. Thus, even though reductions in Army and Marine manpower are already baked into Pentagon plans, the overall personnel budget will continue to rise. Making the cuts contemplated in the Budget Control Act will likely mean further reductions of tens of thousands, but deeper troop cuts would be difficult—and extremely risky.

The "O&M" pot would appear to be a more lucrative target, and savings from these accounts are the dream of every good-government Pentagon reformer. The dream, but never the reality, as former Pentagon chief Robert Gates discovered in his quixotic 2010 quest for "efficiencies." Cost growth in operations and maintenance is staggering: Daggett estimates that even if defense spending remained the same (after inflation), O&M would consume half the Pentagon's budget by 2020. But the category is a catch-all: It includes elements such as the defense health service, which treats veterans, reservists, and families as well as active troops. And the effect of past O&M cuts has been felt in reduced training and unit readiness—the most deserving suffer first. The dream of big O&M savings will remain a dream. The best that can be hoped for is to constrain the rate of growth.

Much of the budget-cutting pain will thus inevitably be felt in acquisitions. Daggett forecasts that such spending, about $185 billion in 2010, will drop to less than $127 billion by 2020—and could be less than that, if the super committee either does its worst or simply does nothing. And here's how the F-35 finds itself in the center of the bull's-eye: It's where the acquisition money is.

Welcome to the world of the defense programmer. The first two rounds of Obama defense cuts eviscerated a generation's worth of weapons projects. The 2009 round, in particular, short-circuited big-ticket items like the F-22 Raptor fighter, the Zumwalt destroyer, and the Army's Future Combat Systems. The 2010 round policed up some of the smaller fry like the Marines' Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. By the reckoning of the Pentagon's last "Selected Acquisition Report," the annual scorecard for weapons programs, the F-35 dwarfs all other efforts. And if one simply calculates money planned but not fully programmed or spent—in other words, the most fertile fields for harvesting future savings—the F-35, with about $300 billion needed to complete the planned buy, is an order of magnitude larger than any other program on the books. Considering that it's long been planned to replace nearly the entire fleet of aging U.S. fighters and a good number of support aircraft, the cost is no surprise and still, in fact, a bargain. Nonetheless, the temptation to plunder the F-35 budget is overwhelming.

The Navy is almost eager to do so. On July 7, Navy undersecretary Robert Work told Navy and Marine Corps planners to develop alternative aviation plans that look at terminating both the short-take-off "B" model for the Marines and the carrier "C" model for the Navy. In standard Goldilocks fashion, Work called for three options: Cut $5 billion, cut $7.5 billion, cut $10 billion. And, ominously, Work directed his minions to divine "the best-value alternative, factoring in both cost and capability. .  .  . This relook must consider every plan and program. Even cuts to long-planned buys of JSF must be on the table."

Now to the operational rub. Since World War II, America's sea services have been, first and foremost, organizations built around the virtues of carrier aircraft—this includes the Marine Corps, whose big-deck "amphibs" are almost as large as any non-American aircraft carrier. Clever defense analysts have begun to castigate carriers as "wasting assets," too vulnerable to the kind of ballistic missile and other attacks that the Chinese military is developing. But it's equally the case that a carrier without a front-line aircraft—that is, the fifth-generation F-35—is an entirely wasted asset.

In sum, it makes no sense to retain massive carrier fleets with ever-more-limited capability. If the Navy and Marine Corps can't afford to put a China-relevant plane aboard their carriers—and a China-relevant "unmanned" aircraft is not on the horizon—they should stop building the carriers, too, and even mothball some of the ones they have now.

Terminating the "B" and "C" models of the F-35—let alone reducing the numbers of "A" models intended for the Air Force—would have dire strategic consequences. The F-35 is an international program, and the roster of countries who have contributed money to the development of the Lightning or who want to buy the plane is a veritable who's who of America's allies. Britain alone has committed about $2 billion to the project, and the Italians, Dutch, Canadians, Danes, Australians, Norwegians, and Turks are already on board and will build parts of the jet. The Israelis want to get F-35s by 2014 if they can, and the Singaporeans are lined up just behind; both countries—states little larger than aircraft carriers—are interested in the short-take-off "B" variant on the assumption that their current air bases are increasingly vulnerable. Japan and South Korea—absolute linchpins of U.S. posture in East Asia—are likely candidates for sales, assuming there's still something for them to buy in a few years.

A big hit on the F-35 program would also be catastrophic for the defense aviation industry, both in this country and in the West generally. A generation ago, seven companies made airplanes for the U.S. military. Now Lockheed Martin, the only firm to have made a fifth-generation aircraft, leads an international consortium of companies who make pieces of planes. The F-35 factory in Fort Worth is enormous, with the capacity to accommodate the Pentagon's original plans to buy over 230 Lightnings a year. But with past reductions keeping production at just 30 or so airplanes annually for the next couple of years, and talk of making similar cuts beyond that, the capacity will be increasingly unused—and the workers laid off.

Defending the F-35 program is politically incorrect. It's been a favorite punching bag for congressional overseers and often in "breach" of the cost-growth targets of the so-called "Nunn-McCurdy" law—a 1982 provision that was a grandstand play back then and is entirely outdated and irrelevant now. Senators John McCain and Carl Levin, the leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have proposed a new amendment that threatens to end the program while also renegotiating past contracts. Even Gates put the F-35B on "two-year probation," whatever that means.

But preserving the program is essential for America's defense for the foreseeable future. We've put an immense number of eggs in this basket, and it's just about the last basket we have—there are no short-term alternatives, and taking away the F-35 would render the surface Navy and Marine Corps all but -useless in responding to the kind of "anti-access" challenges China now presents and others like Iran are developing.

Memo to super committee: Save the Lightning!


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: budget; budgetcuts; cuts; defense; f35; jacklew; jointstrikefighter; jsf; military; militarycuts; navair; nunnmccurdy; obama; usaf; usn

1 posted on 09/06/2011 9:56:32 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
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To: sukhoi-30mki

Obama wants to gut our advanced weapons systems it looks like.


2 posted on 09/06/2011 10:13:59 PM PDT by GeronL (The Right to Life came before the Right to Happiness)
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To: GeronL

Obama wants to gut our advanced weapons systems it looks like.


Of course he does.

While in the US senate, I’d bet he voted against all military matters, including whatever included the Navy SEALS.


3 posted on 09/06/2011 10:18:18 PM PDT by unkus
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To: magslinger

ping


4 posted on 09/06/2011 10:19:30 PM PDT by Vroomfondel
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To: unkus

My Brother runs an aerospace company and he is so good at waht he does that he is a Federal NoBid supplies.
He has told me that from the beginning the JSF program is a disaster and should be dropped. However the fighter that should have been kept in production is the Raptor.


5 posted on 09/06/2011 10:22:22 PM PDT by Wooly
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To: Wooly

Your brother should know.
I have heard the same thing about the F-22 Raptor. I think there will be ~186 produced which is not enough.


6 posted on 09/06/2011 10:28:15 PM PDT by unkus
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To: sukhoi-30mki

sukhoi, do you know how many F-22 raptors will be produced Thanks.


7 posted on 09/06/2011 10:29:36 PM PDT by unkus
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To: sukhoi-30mki

The DoD is the biggest welfare program going. We don’t need to spend half of all military spending. Maybe we should give up our dreams of never ending military superiority and try to live in peace with the world.

This not the first generation to be hung on a cross of iron, but no we can no longer afford it.


8 posted on 09/06/2011 11:04:33 PM PDT by starvosan
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To: starvosan

Some people like to knock the Lockheed Martin F-22 for costing $140 million a piece, excluding all expenses for development and spares (which takes the price all the way up to $350 million/copy?).

But not to worry! The next fighter coming along — Lockheed’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — is supposed to be based on affordability, with a (formerly projected) flyaway cost at roughly one-third of the F-22’s price tag using 2001 dollars.

So, let’s see how the F-35 measures up.

The US Navy and US Marine Corps plan to buy a total of 680 F-35Bs and F-35Cs over the next 15-20 years. The FY2009 budget contains budget projections for the remainder of the program. Note that this includes only procurement (flyaway) cost. Amortized development and spares costs are excluded.

Year Aircraft Average unit cost/aircraft

FY2008: 6 $184.2 million
FY2009: 8 $200.2 million
FY2010: 18 $172.3 million
FY2011: 19 $146.4 million
FY2012: 40 $124.4 million
FY2013: 42 $115.1 million
Remainder: 547 $109.3 million
Total: 680 $115 million

(A little more than one-third of an F-22’s cost. But that’s just Navy/Marine figures. Our Air Force is buying the most, in the A version. We’re on schedule for almost 2500 of ‘em for all service branches; we likely won’t be able to afford 250 total, w/ about 68 going to the Navy/Marines. Guns or butter, eh?)

http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2008/02/how-much-does-one-f35-cost.html


9 posted on 09/06/2011 11:12:06 PM PDT by flowerplough (Pelosi on Republicans: "They want to destroy food safety, clean air, clean water, ...")
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To: unkus

187 units, if im not mistaken -the tooling wont be destroyed.


10 posted on 09/06/2011 11:33:09 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
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To: starvosan
The DoD is the biggest welfare program going. We don’t need to spend half of all military spending. Maybe we should give up our dreams of never ending military superiority and try to live in peace with the world.

Is that you, Dr. Paul?

Did it ever occur to you there's relative peace with the world because we spend around half of all military spending?

You see our allies long ago gutted their defence capabilities to pay for their unsustainable social welfare states. We've picked up the slack.

Under Carter we dropped to 3% of GDP in military spending. Reagan got it up near 5% and finally ended the Cold War. Clinton brought it back down to 3% and we ended up with 9/11. Bush got it back up and now Obama's got us almost back to 3% even with the wars.

We're not going broke because of "the wars" which have cost only $1 trillion over 10 years. Compare that to $1 trillion in stimulus.

We're going broke because of failed social programs that are far afield from constitutional mandates.

How bad are our allies? Let's look at Libya and NATO.

The UK had no carrier available because 2 of its 3 carriers have already gone to scrap and the 3rd it set for retirement short term with a gap of several years where it will have no carriers.

When it finally completes one, it won't have aircraft because the F-35 JSF is running behind schedule and they've already scrapped their Harrier fleets.

France has one carrier that had to return to port for maintenance shifting flights to land bases far off, increasing fuel use along with wear-and-tear.

11 posted on 09/07/2011 12:51:15 AM PDT by newzjunkey (Will racist demagogue Andre Carson be censured by the House?)
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To: sukhoi-30mki

Mr, Thomas, you pay for it.


12 posted on 09/07/2011 2:23:24 AM PDT by org.whodat (What does the Republican party stand for////??? absolutely nothing.)
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To: newzjunkey

If you think less military spending caused 9/11 you are a hanging on a tree limb waiting for a squirrel. That is up there really close to one of the most silly thing I have ever read.


13 posted on 09/07/2011 2:28:46 AM PDT by org.whodat (What does the Republican party stand for////??? absolutely nothing.)
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To: org.whodat
That is up there really close to one of the most silly thing I have ever read.

Obviously you don't read any of the nonsense you post.

14 posted on 09/07/2011 6:15:08 AM PDT by A.A. Cunningham (Barry Soetoro is a Kenyan communist)
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To: magslinger; Vroomfondel; SC Swamp Fox; Fred Hayek; NY Attitude; P3_Acoustic; investigateworld; ...
SONOBUOY PING!

Click on pic for past Navair pings.

Post or FReepmail me if you wish to be enlisted in or discharged from the Navair Pinglist.
The only requirement for inclusion in the Navair Pinglist is an interest in Naval Aviation.
This is a medium to low volume pinglist.

15 posted on 09/07/2011 12:13:56 PM PDT by magslinger (To properly protect your family you need a bible, a twelve gauge and a pig.)
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To: magslinger; Vroomfondel; SC Swamp Fox; Fred Hayek; NY Attitude; P3_Acoustic; investigateworld; ...
SONOBUOY PING!

Click on pic for past Navair pings.

Post or FReepmail me if you wish to be enlisted in or discharged from the Navair Pinglist.
The only requirement for inclusion in the Navair Pinglist is an interest in Naval Aviation.
This is a medium to low volume pinglist.

16 posted on 09/07/2011 12:14:25 PM PDT by magslinger (To properly protect your family you need a bible, a twelve gauge and a pig.)
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To: sukhoi-30mki

Need to replace it with a UCAV, anyway.


17 posted on 09/07/2011 12:16:17 PM PDT by Little Ray (FOR the best Conservative in the Primary; AGAINST Obama in the General.)
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To: Army Air Corps

Ping


18 posted on 09/07/2011 12:19:01 PM PDT by Jet Jaguar
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To: Little Ray

22 & 35’ll both end up with a software instead of soft flesh in the cockpit, hayna? Pro’ly fly w/ pilot (or observer) when they want and w/out when unneeded


19 posted on 09/07/2011 3:11:35 PM PDT by flowerplough (Pelosi on Republicans: "They want to destroy food safety, clean air, clean water, ...")
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To: Little Ray

Ultimately manned aircraft will be completely supplanted by UAV’s of various kinds. Not quite yet though.


20 posted on 09/07/2011 3:13:12 PM PDT by Vanders9
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