The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35
March 21st, 2015And next up from the same imbeciles that brought you the F-35: Long Range Strike Bomber.
Via: John Q Public:
As Air Force senior officials prepare for posture hearings this week with the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, the subject of modernization promises to be front and center. Core to that discussion will almost certainly be the limping, $1.4 trillion F-35 program.
Belying the conventional wisdom, which touts the Joint Strike Fighter as something of a futuristic aerial Swiss army knife, the F-35 is proving to be little more than a dull, bent, and unwieldy butter knife — a jack of no trades, master of only one: burning through taxpayer dollars at a rate that would embarrass Croesus.
The bloat of the program is now placing increasingly excruciating pressure on the entire Air Force budget, this despite the F-35 being years from genuine operational capability. The pressure it is exerting is leading to a parade of rhetorical and actual absurdity of the variety that should, under normal circumstances, alarm Congress and anyone else concerned about the future of American defense.
Take, for example, a recent account filed by the nonprofit Project On Government Oversight (POGO), which exposes damning conclusions in the latest F-35 report from the Defense Department’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E).
Among the crippling problems highlighted in the DOT&E report:
Software glitches disrupting enemy identification and weapon employment.
A redesigned fuel tank that continues to demonstrate unacceptable vulnerability to explosion from lightning or enemy fire.
Departures from controlled flight during high-speed maneuvering, a six-year-old problem that apparently will not be solved without sacrificing stealth or combat capability.
Helmet issues fundamentally degrading pilot situational awareness.
Engine problems so severe they’re limiting sortie rates, impeding the test schedule, and generating risky operational decisions.
Nightmarish maintainability issues leading to over-reliance on contractor support.
As these and other issues mount, the F-35 Joint Program Office, led by Air Force Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan, is apparently employing categorization and accounting schemes that overstate reliability and maintenance rates, masking the true nature of the crisis gripping the program.
Interestingly, the Russians in their development of the new PAK-FA have a different approach to funding. Whereas in the USA it’s a case of huge dollops of cash being thrown at projects, the Russians work on the basis of escalating funding that is contingent on key objectives in the development being met, so that if development of a sub-system appears to be going into a dead-end, then it’s nipped in the bud early on. Some refer to this as a “risk-oriented development strategy”. See this piece of commentary from a few years back contrasting F-35 development with the PAK-FA program:
“…the Russian approach to development follows an “evolutionary” design philosophy, in which risks are retired early in the development phase of a new aircraft type or variant. Where possible, the retirement of risks is achieved in earlier programs, as demonstrated repeatedly in the development of the T-10 Flanker series of aircraft.
The PAK-FA prototypes displayed in January, 2010, are clearly intended to validate the compatibility of the overall observables shaping with the aerodynamic and structural design needs and clearly so, as the expensive detail RCS flare spot treatments we are accustomed to seeing on US prototypes are absent. The rationale for this is simple – why expend valuable but scarce development resources if aerodynamic / structural load testing shows that major changes are required to shaping of important design elements? For Western contractors, where the imperative is to extract the maximum of development funding from the customer, and make early cancellation of a program difficult, the highest risk approach will nearly always be sought by senior management. An excellent case study of the latter is the extremely high level of “concurrency risk”, reported by the General Accounting Office, in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.”
Source: http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-2010-01.html
Just a quick adjunct to Freeman’s excellent background :
Over their contracted lifespan, defense development programs accrue on average 80% of their total cost in *maintenance*. That is, maintaining the system — be it a jet, satellite or truck — for the required contract period.
So, when you see number in the billions for development, keep in mind that those numbers are typically no more than about 20’% of the overall project cost from start to end of contract.
Oh yes, the contract maintenance period for most defense aviation and aeronautics programs is ten years from product launch.
Naturally, products that never make it to rollout also consume additional billions.
See : Comanche, F-35, etc…