Big news week for the F-35. As my colleague Colin Clark reported over at DOD Buzz, Pentagon comptroller Robert Hale came out and said the obvious: “If there is cost growth, I think we will just have to reduce the buy.” Hale made those comments at this week’s annual Precision Strike Conference.
Will there be cost growth? Yes. Air Force Secretary Mike Donley confirmed the program is headed for a Nunn-McCurdy cost growth breach. And, as Pentagon acquisition history shows over and over as weapons costs grow, the number bought drops. So now it becomes a question of how big a price tag. Colin quotes a congressional aide: “You are looking at least $112 million JSFs, with estimates as high as $137 million – average unit procurement costs.”
The Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, Ashton Carter, issued an acquisition decision memorandum slipping full rate F-35 production by 13 months to late 2015 (although Bill Sweetman at Aires blog says 2016 is more likely). A congressional aide emailed Colin:
“A 13-month slip seems very optimistic when press reports today suggest they are already at least 11 months behind the 2008 schedule. How did they get from the JET 30-month slip to 13? Maybe I’m too cynical, but this seems overly optimistic. The phrase ‘lipstick on a pig’ comes to mind. The JSF is still an ugly, stinking pig,”
Carter held an unusual conference call with reporters to try and reassure the world everything will be okay. Colin reporting again:
“First, we now have a realistic plan going forward, not a blindly optimistic one but not a fatalistic one either,” Carter said during the conference call. The government, working with Lockheed, was able to “reduce the slip in development from 30 months to 13 months,” Carter said.
Worried about all these ominous reports on the program’s status, F-35 supporter Sen. John McCain asked Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to schedule a hearing next week to get some clarity on what’s going on here. Wouldn’t we all like to know what’s going on with the Pentagon’s costliest weapons program. Hopefully next week’s hearings will provide some answers.
Of course, not everybody thinks the program is in trouble. Defense industry insider, analyst and consummate F-35 optimist Loren Thompson says everything is just fine:
“The problems, such as they are, arise mainly from a disagreement between the Bush and Obama administrations about how much up-front testing is required, combined with some excessively pessimistic forecasts about how much the program will cost to execute over the next few years.
F-35 still looks like the future of tactical aviation, a fighter so stealthy, agile, versatile and effective that buying anything else would put countries at a severe operational disadvantage in the future. The program isn’t imploding and the defense department isn’t having doubts about whether it should still be funded.”
If proven wrong, he vowed to dip his laptop screen in melted brie and eat it. Now that’s confidence.
– Greg
{ 53 comments… read them below or add one }
Just buy more F-22's for the airforce, maybe a carrier variant as well for the navy, and let the marines develop/buy a plane of thats designed specifically to meet their needs like super hornets. (Do marines really need an stealth air dominance fighter?)
The F-22 cannot become a carrier aircraft.
The answer to cut costs is 1 version of the JSF only – the Navy version. Cancel the STOVL Marine version that has yet to hover, and have the Marines and Air Force fly the Navy version.
If you are flying a jet off a ship it should be off a carrier with a catapult and arresting gear. The Air Force guys might complain a little about the weight, but on short expeditionary runways (where they should be) they won't mind rugged landing gear and a real tailhook.
Why do the Marines even need a Super Hornet? Marine air is or should be close air support (CAS) for the grunts on the ground. You don't need stealth for that–the opposition can SEE you. You can do this with an upgraded Harrier if you need STOL capabilities or an A-1D Skyraider if you don't.
Let the Navy and/or the Air Force take care of interdiction and counter-air battles.
As far as going "all stealth" is concerned, it is a ridiculous idea. It seems the fly boys want all future missions to be totally loss-free. If you have F-22s to gain air superiority, then you can use F-15Es and F-16s to do ground attack and interdiction missions. All these missions since Vietnam times have had Wild Weasel and jamming aircraft as part of the package. No single aircraft is going to be the "be all and end all" solution. Perhaps LTG Dave Deptula has forgotten how to write an Air Tasking Order; I haven't.
Gosh, the answer is so simple. Why aren't you one of their chief advisors? BTW it's spelled Air Force.
No the Marines do NOT need a stealth air dominance fighter – and the quicker Marine Air realizes that and drops its fetish for VTOL/STOVL, the better off the USMC will be. The Marine JSFs will never even be in stealth configuration – the gun will require an external mount, as will all the ordnance required to make it worthwhile for showing up to the fight – so stealth is a moot issue as far as Marine usage is concerned. On top of that, every stealth aircraft has costly (manpower and dollars) maintenance issues that simply will not get done in an austure environment that Marine Air operates from – so again, useless to be paying for it from the outset.
Re-opening the F-22 production line is very cost prohibitive. I saw that on alert5.com the other day.
The F-35B seems like the most viable of the A/B/C F-35 variants. I'm in support of dropping the purchase numbers of the A and C variants. I don't mind having the 5th generation fighter (F-22 or F-35) as one facet of our air platform just as the F-117 was in the early '90's. But to have the ENTIRE air platform based on stealth is also very cost prohibitive. So, in response to the Nunn-McCurdy cost overruns, why couldn't we reduce the purchase numbers of the F-35 across the board (except the F-35B, which I always thought was the crux of the JSF competition…jump jet capability with stealth), and upgrade our 4th generation fighters to 4.5 gen fighters, like buying the F-15SE to replace our current F-15C/D's (since the F-22's will be quarterbacking future air wars), and buying F-16 block 60's to replace our current stock of F-16's. That's my response to the whole Nunn-McCurdy cost over-run problem. Honestly, what would be wrong with that?
It certainly does seem excessive that every single fighter in the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy inventory needs to have stealth. The idea is that you are supposed to gain air superiority and blow up enemy radar after a while. Some stealth good. Does every warplane in the U.S. arsenal really need to be an F-22 lite with more bomb capacity?
Summary: politicians fail to anticipate the obvious, and inevitably leave us with massive holes in our force structure. Why haven't we reformed defense acquisitions, again?
Because to reform defense acquisitions would require the reform of pork in Congress.
*sarcasm* Sec Def Gates was very very wise to cancel the F-22 *sarcasm*
Earlier on here there was an article stating that F-22 restart costs + production costs for 75 new aircraft would result in a $227 million unit cost. By the time the F-35 fiasco is through, that price tag could look rather cheap.
And that's assuming we restart it two years from now. If we restart production NOW no part of the line would have been shut down yet, thus resulting in cheaper costs.
People need to stop quoting these moronic 'congressional aides' with no clue WFT they are talking about.
The average unit procurement costs are nowhere near $112 million. In fact because produrement costs are BELOW projections, LM has announced that the LOWER produrement costs could buy an additional 90 aircraft over the life of the program.
Because LM has absolutely no incentive to lowball their projected prices. After all, LM has met all of its test schedules flawlessly, oh wait…
You do realize you are talking about what LM said? And what is their stated goal – profits.
Procurement costs are nowhere near $112 million?
Huh? The JSF's we are buying today are around $300 million
Ah! The 'Friday Red Meat Post'.
A more accurate title would have been " Rough Week for F-35 in the Military.Com-Flight Global-Ares Blog Echo Chamber".
Just a guess, but I get the vibe that Monster wanted more traffic on DT and moved DT closer to the Military.com site to get some synergy and cross-site traffic going. I am reminded of a quote attributed to Moshe Dayan concerning the annexation of the West Bank: "It's like getting Cancer so you can have the extra cells". ~Sigh~ This used to be such a nice neighborhood, too.
lol
Do not forget Australia_APA and Eric Palmer
F-22 dev costs are sunk, every unit we produce drives down unit cost. If we buy the 400 the air force wanted originally, we can come cost competitve or ahead of the f35, with a deadlier plane, plus we know what it will cost and what we are going to get.
An F-22 is great as long as we don't want to drop big heavy bombs on anything. How much of what needs to be done is strike and air to air, and how much is medium weight bombing? At the very least I'd like to hear what 183 F-22s are incapable of doing, instead of what they are capable of doing. I'd like to hear what we need more for before we buy then and I'd like to hear the same for the 2400 F-35s we're footing the bill for.
With the performance the U.S. is getting, maybe it should sue for beach of contract and buy the company out of bankruptcy. We have lots of very experienced lawyers writing contracts working for people in the Pentagon used to handling massive enterprises, you'd think that they could act a litlte entitled.
Cut the middle man cost. Dont forget this is your country too.
Huh?
So the F-35 is going to cost at least as much as an F-22. How did we know that was going to happen?
I don't think the Brits or Euro partners would be too happy is the program was cancelled..
I think its safe to say most folks don't give a rat's ass how happy the Euros will or won't be – the Brits are a different matter, but honestly, I'm not sure they will ever buy a JSF of any make the way their budget and defense structure is going….
So one chubby F–35 costs almost than 3 slenders Su-30MKI.
Heh. Target unit costs are always cheaper than real weapon systems.
More like 6 times more expensive — Su-30 can be had for about $40 million (probably much less). JSF is running about $300 million a plane today, and might get down in the mid $200's in the next couple years.
Buy 1,500 and the price might even get below $200 milliion a copy!
What a deal!
Yeah fuck the F-35 lockheed needs to get its act together.
This program should be scrapped. Build some more F22's right now and buy some updated F15/F16/F18 planes, some unmanned attack planes, some COIN planes, and keep those A10's flying. Screw jump jets, tell 'em the Osprey was enough of a boondoggle from an acquisitions point of view.
Some one criticizing the F-35 is a fighter pilot?
Mark,
NO, a "congressional aide" made up the $112 & $137 million. LM AND THE USAF/DOD say the average unit procurement costs will be BELOW $100 million.
*
Gabriel,
Are you able to read a budget? No F-35 has EVER cost $300 million (expect perhaps AA-1) & the 22 FY2011 F-35A are less than HALF that with the (FY2011 budget) projection show inga drop BELOW $100 million in FY2014 (& that is noit even at full rate production).
The initial bid was in the $30 millions a plane. We have not experienced hyperinflation in the interim. Figure out average price inflation per year, figure out how many years it will take to get this done far behind schedule, figure in some cancellations of orders, and $112-$137 million a unit isn't implausible.
Actually the first few JSF are not fully capable tools of war.
They would likely be used for transition training because of their limitations – or need expensive upgrades to reach the standard of operationally capable JSF.
As for VTOL capability. To my knowledge the USMC has never fielded the AV-8B in the dirt. The aircraft has killed more pilots for fleet size than any other. So what are we keeping by not having a VTOL stealth fighter? Forward deployed aircraft in the A-1/A-10 niche with short and rough field capability and carrier deployed stealthy fast movers would seem to be a mo betta mix. But then again if the government would just come clean about the black helicopters and the UFOs…
Marine Air deployed Harriers to austure "FARPs" during Gulf War I and again in II – they split the maintainers and would support a forward rearming/refueling site – the Harriers were based on the amphibs, would fly to the FARP site, then conduct several missions from the FARP before returning to the amphib for full maintenance work. Some were just fields, others were football/soccer stadiums, whatever was available and close to the action. It worked and it reduced response time – it also took a lot of support assets to keep the Harrier "FARPs" logged up – assets that could have been supporting the ground units during their long haul to Bagdad. If we had a better aircraft (non VSTOL) with longer legs/endurance and payload, the need for a forward FARP would disappear…kind of a self licking ice cream cone.
It is worth recalling that the Harriers were hardly the stars of the Iraq War. The stars of the Iraq war were the A-10s, which proved themselves to be the most reliable way of dispatching Iraqi tanks. The shone in this job relative to more modern fighters and relative to helicopter gunships.
The F-22 may be the queen of air-to-air, but the F-35 is too much F-22 light and too little a fit for some other niche.
Even a regime change war against a medium sized, moderate advanced military like Iraq's, where support on the ground from the locals is modest benefits from aircraft far more basic than the F-35 or even the F-16 or Harrier.
Will the F35 ever be built ? Will any "next" generation weapons ever be built. Ships, submarines, aircraft, missles, armor ? Don't you all think something is broken. Might this not be a societal problem ? Remember the skunk works days when innovation came out of the hangers in months rather than decades- certainly systems are more complex now, but they also built everything with slide rules then….There is something more going on here, don't you think….I see it in my own company. Increasing inertia due to aversion to risk, focus on process and absence of passion about product….Seems to me that most progress is achieved by folks willingness to work around internal obstacles. But that success is never rewarded. It only results in new layers of process in an attempt to factor out variables that are hard to program such as talent. The generation of doers is just about purged from the system now. Should we be surprised that only paper and jargon comes out the back end anymore. After all that is the prime deliverable of project management
Blah blah blah. We've had a lot of innovation over the last few years. Look at all the UAVs that have been developed, relatively inexpensively. Look at the improvements in camoflage, in mine-resistant vehicles, in communications. There are a lot of new technologies that we use today that would blow the minds of guys fighting in Desert Storm.
Let's cut to the basic problem. Wonder weapons are expensive.
That's it. That is the problem. If you're going to build a jet, or a ship, or a tank, or whatever, and have it be generations more advanced than anything else out there, then be prepared to spend a lot of money. Just because something can be built doesn't mean that it can be built cheap. You want an F-35 you're gonna pay for it.
Add to this the fact that the public is no longer fascinated by aviation. The best and brightest no longer want to design airplanes. The golden age of aviation was pre-space program. The innovators are now working in private industry, making new cell phones and touch pad computers.
I agree with you danf, and I think its a huge issue that hopefully more folks will become aware of. I can't comment on it and keep it under several thousand words, so I'll just say I agree, and I think its a large, possibly nation-destroying issue. It also won't be solved from the inside – sometimes you have to destroy to renovate when the rot is too pervasive.
Drones as capable as a modern fighter do not exist. Drones as capable as a WW2 atack plane can't compete with fighters as old as MiG-21. And that's where the drones are now. They are only now starting to equip them with AA missiles, but they are still slow, lumbering, mostly prop driven, utterly unstelthy RC planes that cost $10 million or more per unit. They are excellent in when all you have to worry about is RPG's and an odd Igla now and again. That's about it.
All of that is not to say that JSF is the best investment of the R&D dollars today.
If we go to all drones could we name them Rademachers.
How many drones could be purchased for 100 million dollars. I think the time for manned fighters should be over. You could probably purchase 500 drones for the price of 10 F35's and do a better job of defending the country.
I was unaware that effective air-to-air combat drones existed. Also, how did they solve the jamming issue?
You should get out more. Air-to-air is in many ways easier than air-t-ground (less clutter, less collateral damage). The jamming issue is no different than for manned aircraft.
You gotta love the way they closed down the F-22 production line because of the cost per plane and it was competing with the production of the F35. Now the F35 is going to approach the cost per unit of the F22….maybe we should have just bought more of the F22's….duh!
Yes, because more units of a single service air superiority fighter makes more sense than more units of a tri- and combined forces multirole aircraft….yes I totally see the logic there. :(
But the F-22 is Air Force only, not for export, and would almost certainly have higher operating costs.
F-35 does not cost the same as the F-22 in fly-away cost, period.
Nothing says the F-22 line is actually going to be closed; things can change quickly. All tooling will be left in place for a continuation or restart.
Drones are Wright flyers when compared to fourth gen jets. The drones fly in uncontested airspace.
F-35B is needed to make LHA's have airplanes, just like AV-8B's work today.
Upgraded 4th Gen jets are SAM missile fodder in the battlespace in just a few years. Why waste the $'s in making more targets, let alone the loss of pilots?
The F-35, once the battlespace has our air superiority established, will have pylons on the wings to carry all types of ordinance, like a souped up A-10 or F-16, and also carry internal bombs and missiles.
The opposing jets like Sukhoi and MIG in 4th Gen version have one thing in common – targets for F-22's to practice shooting fish in a barrel. It doesn't matter if the costs are 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 in comparison. I'm sure the Kill Ratio of the F-22 will more than make up any difference.
The recent Russian supposed 5th Gen prototype is not impressive. The slab tail verticals impose drag with any movement. The engines are nearly fully exposed thus making good IR targets from the side and front. Other areas of the jet are not stealthy, period. The metallurgy is not correct. The steps and gaps are ridiculous.
Lancier,
Australia has not reduced it buy. It is buying 1 squadron (14 aircraft actually) for delivery in FY2014 (still need to replace those now retired F-111s) with additional squadrons (at least 72 additional aircraft) expecting to become fully operational in 2018 & 2021 respectively. It has yet to decide if it will then order another 14 aircraft for it intended total of 100 based on what it does with its F/A-18Fs.
Why don't we give congress and the senate a raise then they can scrap or trade away every one of Americas' vital military programs.[SARCASM]
Guys due to current world financial issues and the constant increse in costs buyers are already reducing there requirements the RAAF will now only but one sqn, the UK are still discussing the issue as its dependent on the two new carriers and the costs there, others are also reviewing there budgets, F18 are looking as replacements to some countries, as is the eurofighter while the uk reduced its last batch spend they could again increase, the french are looking at selling Rafale to the UK at 25% of the cost of a F35 and with all the source codes and operational requirements something the US are not offering.