F-35 Fighter Two Years Behind Schedule: Pentagon Panel
By Josh Rogin, CQ Staff
An internal Pentagon oversight board has found that the Joint Strike Fighter program is two years behind the schedule that has been publicly announced, according to multiple congressional aides who are familiar with the findings.
The Pentagon’s Joint Estimate Team (JET), which was established to independently oversee the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, is at odds with the fighter’s Joint Program Office, the aides said. The oversight panel’s calculations determined that the fighter won’t be able to move out of the development phase and into full production mode until 2016, rather than 2014 as the program office has said. That’s assuming there are no further problems with the program, which has already faced cost overruns and schedule delays. The Government Accountability Office said the delay could cost as much as $7.4 billion.
“In every parameter and in every respect, the Joint Program Office’s projections were always a hell of a lot rosier than what the Joint Estimate Team found,” said one Senate aide who was briefed on the findings.
As Congress has debated the future of the F-22 fighter program, lawmakers have used the promise of the F-35 plane’s completion as a key plank in their argument that the F-22 line could be ended without a significant risk to national security.
Now, senators and aides are lamenting that the Pentagon oversight panel’s more pessimistic view on the F-35 program was not publicly released during the F-22 debate and are calling for more open disclosure of the problems with the development of the F-35.
Sen. Christopher S. Bond, R-Mo., who has often criticized the program, calling it the “Joint Strike Failure,” said his attempts to get internal Pentagon data on the program have often been rebuffed.
“They are wrapped so tight on that F-35,” said Bond, who added the Pentagon is so invested in the program they are loathe to release negative information, especially during a debate over Air Force funding.
“They bet too much on the F-35. It’s too big to fail,” said Bond. “It’s like Citigroup.”
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said there is no delay in the completion of the first production aircraft, which is due next year, but did not comment on the findings of the Joint Estimate Team specifically. He added there is no “attempt to suppress information about the program.”
John R. Kent, a spokesman for the F-35’s main contractor Lockheed Martin, said that despite the Joint Estimate Team’s findings, there has been no change made to the F-35 official production schedule.
Cheryl Limrick, spokesperson for the F-35 program office, said that the “JET analysis is grounded in past performance of other legacy fighter programs and does not fully acknowledge proactive F-35 management steps.”
Delays Attributed to Design Changes
The Joint Estimate Team reports internally to the Pentagon and includes representatives from each of the military services.
After extensive evaluations that included site visits and meetings with the program’s contractors, the team determined that added delays were caused by ongoing complications with the engineering and design changes to the plane as well as the difficulty of organizing some 7 million lines of software code, Senate aides said.
The Joint Estimate Team is probably more reliable than the program office because they don’t have a stake in the program’s success, one Senate aides argued. “Their objective is to be objective.”
The team’s findings were based on data from September 2008 and the next report won’t be available until at least October, likely to be well past consideration of the fiscal 2010 Defense appropriations and authorization bills, the aide said.
The discrepancy between the Joint Estimate Team and the F-35 program office was noted in a March report by the Government Accountability Office, but received little attention at the time.
Delays to the F-35 program schedule, as noted by the Joint Estimate Team, could add as much as $7.4 billion to the cost of the program and the Defense Department’s desire to accelerate production could cost an additional $33.4 billion, the GAO found.
F-35 “development will cost more and take longer than reported to the Congress last year,” the report stated, adding, “Despite cost and schedule troubles, [the Pentagon] wants to accelerate [F-35] procurement.”
Appropriators are dubious of speeding up F-35 production and have already reduced the president’s request for F-35 procurement by $530 million in the House’s version of the Defense appropriations bill, shifting much of that money toward research.
“This is a cut because we think they just can’t spend the money [that they requested],” said John P. Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee. “They’ve got to do a better job of oversight.”
F-35 Used To Undercut F-22
Administration officials and senators repeatedly touted the F-35 program as the best bet to preserve U.S. air power superiority and as a primary reason that the F-22 program should be capped at 187 planes, as the Senate voted 58-40 to do on July 21.
“If properly supported, the F-35 will be the backbone of America’s tactical aviation fleet for decades to come,” said Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in a July 16 speech at the Economic Club of Chicago, “if — and it’s a big if — money is not drained away to spend on other aircraft.”
Experts said Gates’ tough rhetoric on the F-22 and his determined efforts to pressure senators to support the administration’s plan to end F-22 production would have been hurt had the Joint Estimate Team’s findings been widely known.
“If this information had been part of the debate over the last couple of months, several Democrats, many of whom switched their votes at the last minute, would have been much harder to persuade,” said Tom Donnelly, director of defense studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Any delay in full production of the F-35 would affect the entire fighter fleet, said Donnelly, because the F-35 is meant to take the place of so many planes, including the F-15, the F-16 and the F-18.
Although the Senate voted to strip the defense authorization bill (S 1390) of the F-22 funding, the debate over the plane is sure to resurface when the House and Senate move their fiscal 2010 draft Defense appropriations bills.
“The F-22 debate is not over, so the administration’s credibility on the F-35 could really be hurt by this information,” Donnelly said.
Even Senators who were fighting to save the F-22 referred to 2014 as the Pentagon’s official estimate of when full production would commence, although there were hints that might change.
“The F-35 was scheduled to begin construction in 2010. Since then, of course, it has been pushed back 4 years to 2014,” Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., an F-22 supporter, said during the floor debate, adding, “There are some rumors that this date may be pushed back even further.”
A delay in F-35 production could have international implications as well, because several allied countries are tied into the F-35 program and are depending on that plane to contribute to their own defense structures.
“Customers such as the United Kingdom, the Air National Guard, the Marine Corps, and others are on very tight schedules because their current equipment is rapidly aging out,” said Douglas Birkey, director of government relations for the Air Force Association, “They need the F-35 as a backfill.”