ISD has slipped from 2012/3 (and I attended the first programme briefs) to around 16/17.
DOD Buzz:
More cost overruns, delays and uncertainty for F-35 ......F-35 program boss Vice Adm. David Venlet told lawmakers he still does not have an estimate for when the F-35 will reach its initial operational capability, although the committee members could not be bothered to ask why. GAO’s report gives an explanation: The program is not performing reliably enough for them to try to guess: “Until greater clarity is provided on the program’s path forward, the military services are likely to wait to commit to new initial operational capability dates,” GAO said........
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In the meantime.....
US Navy Looks For New Jet, On Top Of Its Trillion-Dollar Model
On Friday, the US Navy quietly released a “market survey” asking the big defence contractors for their “candidate[s]” for “strike fighter aircraft” in the decades to come. Which is a little weird, considering the Pentagon is currently spending a trillion dollars on just such an aircraft: the troubled Joint Strike Fighter.
The stealthy F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) is supposed to one day make up 90 per cent or more of America’s combat aviation power. But the program has been hit with all kinds of expensive technical glitches and delays. So the Navy has long hedged against the giant JSF bet by buying more of its beloved F/A-18 Super Hornet; that way, the Navy can keep flying modern fighters, even if the JSFs slip. With this “market survey”, the Navy appears to be making a second hedge: a Son of the Super Hornet — one that would come online after the F/A-18s are retired in the 2030s — just in case the JSF flames out entirely.
“That’s absolutely not the right interpretation,” says Capt Frank Morley, the Navy’s program manager for the Super Hornet and its cousin, the EA-18 jamming Growler. But if the Son of the Super Hornet isn’t a hedge against the JSF becoming too expensive for the cash-strapped military, then the aircraft carrier decks of the future may be stocked with redundant planes.
After the Super Hornets retire, the Navy wants “a multi-role strike capability” that can fly from a carrier, according to the “market survey” that the Navy released Friday. Some of its primary missions: “air warfare (AW), strike warfare (STW), surface warfare (SUW) and close air support (CAS)”.
And that sounds suspiciously like the role that the Navy’s version of the JSF is supposed to play. That plane, already the most expensive weapons program in the history of mankind, is in serious budget trouble. In addition to newly discovered design flaws, the Government Accountability Office last month found additional problems with its software and safety systems. The military wants the F-35 to ultimately replace nearly every tactical fixed-wing aircraft the Navy, Marines and Air Force fly, but the admiral in charge of the program has backed off the 2018 estimate for when the plane is expected to enter the air fleet.
So the Navy has bought more Super Hornets as delays plague the JSF. At the Navy’s annual Sea Air Space convention, Morley self-congratulated by noting that the Super Hornet is “on time, on cost, and on schedule.”
But the Son of the Super Hornet, the Navy’s survey swears, isn’t supposed to be a backup in case the JSF fails. Instead, it will be a “complementary … asset to the F-35C and an unmanned persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) vehicle with precision strike capability.” In other words, it’ll fly in a carrier air wing alongside the JSF and the Navy’s future carrier-based drone, currently known as the X-47B.
But if so, that raises a question of redundancy. Both the JSF and the post-Super Hornet plane would be performing very similar manned strike missions. (Although the survey doesn’t suggest the post-Super Hornet will need to be stealthy, a central asset of the JSF.)
Morley strongly denies that the Son of the Super Hornet poses a threat to the JSF or will replicate its missions. “We are an all-F-18 fleet today,” Morley tells Danger Room. “In that 2020-2030 time frame, those decades, we intend to be a Super Hornet-JSF fleet. And then those Super Hornets are going to be ageing out, those earlier ones, and we need to be a JSF-and-something-else fleet.”..........