A high-level Pentagon review of the Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter programme that would have established a new cost baseline for the tri-service F-35 Lightning II has been postponed until the fall, the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) programme's top official said last week. The F-35 programme came under fire for rising costs at a Senate hearing in May.
The F35The Pentagon's top weapon's buyer, Dr Ashton Carter, informed a Senate committee in May this year that buying the planned 2,443 F-35 planes for the US Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps was estimated to cost twice as much in real terms as originally expected.
The price, he said, was "unacceptable and unaffordable."
The review had been scheduled for late May and then was rescheduled for mid-June. Now, the programme's Pentagon overseers have decided to wait until more actual performance data is available before forming estimates.
The Defense Acquisitions Board (DAB) review would have required defence undersecretary, Ashton Carter and other senior defence officials to establish a new procurement, or cost, baseline at the meeting.
The 2,443 US tri-service stealth F-35, or Joint Strike Fighter, is currently estimated to cost $382 billion. The new price baseline would allow future cost growth to be measured.
A settlement of the new price baseline would also reflect a major restructuring of the programme, the programme's second in two years.
Lockheed chief executive, Robert Stevens, continues to assert he is confident the company could resolve development challenges facing the programme.
Lockheed expects the F-35 programme to account for more than 20 per cent of its global sales once it enters full production.
Explaining the review cancellation, the JSF programme executive officer, Vice Adm David Venlet, said, "It was decided: why don't we let a little bit more of the performance of the programme both in test and production play out through the summer; why don't we let that integrated master schedule get finished, do a schedule risk assessment of it, present that to service leadership, let them ponder IOC [initial operating capability], let the operational test planning complete."
"Then, rather than set a baseline now with a whole bunch of go-finish-your-homework assignments, we will go finish the homework and then present the new baseline for Dr Carter's approval in the fall of this year."
Carter, as mentioned earlier, is the Pentagon's procurement chief.
The delay is a matter of being thorough, not an indication of new problems, Adm Venlet clarifed.
"That is not a sign of alarm. It is, I think, a determination to continue in a deliberate fashion with good solid fundamentals applied to get things done," he said.
The jet is doing well in testing and it is meeting its key performance parameters (KPP), Adm Venlet said.
The Air Force's F-35A model had previously fallen just short of some of the parameters.
"There is not a lot of margin, but we expect all of them to be met," Venlet said. "We have data and some issues in development that caused us to assess a current status of the range for the [Conventional Take-off and landing variant] to be below its KPP number … but we also have a body of test data. We're sort of getting an aggregation of measured test points of specific fuel consumption that's better than the models."
Carter has expressed confidence that the Pentagon would be able to trim excess costs over the coming months and years.
The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, estimates that total development cost of the F-35 will go up 26 per cent to $56.4 billion and the programme itself will finally mature in 2018, five years behind schedule.
Another staggering statistic is the estimated total cost of operating and maintaining the new planes, which, over the coming decades, is expected to cost the Pentagon upwards of $1 trillion. Defence officials and industry executives, however, are at pains to emphasise that they are working hard to reduce those costs.
