Ares:
Norway Delays JSF Purchase
Ignoring a stern warning from Joint Strike Fighter program leaders this summer, Norwegian defense minister Grete Faremo announced earlier today that Norway would delay its acquisition of the F-35A to take account of delays in the systems development and demonstration (SDD) program announced in March.
Norway now plans to acquire no more than four aircraft for delivery in 2016 (contract year 2014), for training purposes, but main-force deliveries will not start until 2018. Previous plans called for 20 deliveries in 2016-17.
Faremo says that the most important issue is to make sure that the F-35 is fully operational before it replaces the F-16 and implies that Norway wants to buy more aircraft at multi-year-production prices. Norway is changing its schedule, she says, to "ensure operational maturity and optimum cost of production on the Norwegian aircraft." (Under previous plans, Norway would be byuing most of its aircraft from low-rate initial production batches.)
The minister also notes that the re-scheduled SDD program "should [put] more emphasis on risk management, cost control, staffing of critical positions, test plans and monitoring by the vendor", and adds that all additional costs due to the delay will be absorbed by the US.
This is probably not what JSF program leaders have been looking for, given Lockheed Martin executive vice-president Tom Burbage's warnings at Farnborough that backsliding partners would incur higher prices: Norway appears to have concluded that the opposite is the case.
Of other early JSF customers, Denmark has deferred its decision and the Netherlands has officially confirmed that cost increases are likely to have a "considerable" effect on its program. In the FY2011-2015 order years - LRIP batches 4 through 8 - well over one-third of JSFs are destined for non-US customers, and program managers have repeatedly said that disruptions to the ramp-up will cause unit cost targets to move out of reach.