The Jet That Ate the Pentagon

WINSLOW WHEELER

Cross-posted at Foreign Policy.

By WINSLOW WHEELER

The United States is making a gigantic investment in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, billed by its advocates as the next--by their count the fifth--generation of air-to-air and air-to-ground combat aircraft. Claimed to be near invisible to radar and able to dominate any future battlefield, the F-35 will replace most of the air-combat aircraft in the inventories of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and at least nine foreign allies, and it will be in those inventories for the next 55 years. It's no secret, however, that the program--the most expensive in American history--is a calamity.

This month, we learned that the Pentagon has increased the price tag for the F-35 by another $289 million—just the latest in a long string of cost increases—and that the program is expected to account for a whopping 38 percent of Pentagon procurement for defense programs, assuming its cost will grow no more. Its many problems are acknowledged by its listing in proposals for Pentagon spending reductions by leaders from across the political spectrum, including Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), President Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and budget gurus such as former Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Alice Rivlin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and Office of Management and Budget.

How bad is it? A review of the F-35's cost, schedule, and performance—three essential measures of any Pentagon program—shows the problems are fundamental and still growing.

First, with regard to cost—a particularly important factor in what politicians keep saying is an austere defense budget environment—the F-35 is simply unaffordable. Although the plane was originally billed as a low-cost solution, major cost increases have plagued the program throughout the last decade. Last year, Pentagon leadership told Congress the acquisition price had increased another 16 percent, from $328.3 billion to $379.4 billion for the 2,457 aircraft to be bought. Not to worry, however—they pledged to finally reverse the growth.

The result? This February, the price increased another 4 percent to $395.7 billion and then even further in April. Don't expect the cost overruns to end there: The test program is only 20 percent complete, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has reported, and the toughest tests are yet to come. Overall, the program's cost has grown 75 percent from its original 2001 estimate of $226.5 billion—and that was for a larger buy of 2,866 aircraft.

Hundreds of F-35s will be built before 2019, when initial testing is complete. The additional cost to engineer modifications to fix the inevitable deficiencies that will be uncovered is unknown, but it is sure to exceed the $534 million already known from tests so far. The total program unit cost for each individual F-35, now at $161 million, is only a temporary plateau. Expect yet another increase in early 2013, when a new round of budget restrictions is sure to hit the Pentagon, and the F-35 will take more hits in the form of reducing the numbers to be bought, thereby increasing the unit cost of each plane.

A final note on expense: The F-35 will actually cost multiples of the $395.7 billion cited above. That is the current estimate only to acquire it, not the full life-cycle cost to operate it. The current appraisal for operations and support is $1.1 trillion—making for a grand total of $1.5 trillion, or more than the annual GDP of Spain. And that estimate is wildly optimistic: It assumes the F-35 will only be 42 percent more expensive to operate than an F-16, but the F-35 is much more complex. The only other "fifth generation" aircraft, the F-22 from the same manufacturer, is in some respects less complex than the F-35, but in 2010, it cost 300 percent more to operate per hour than the F-16. To be very conservative, expect the F-35 to be twice the operating and support cost of the F-16.

Already unaffordable, the F-35's price is headed in one direction—due north.

The F-35 isn't only expensive—it's way behind schedule. The first plan was to have an initial batch of F-35s available for combat in 2010. Then first deployment was to be 2012. More recently, the military services have said the deployment date is "to be determined." A new target date of 2019 has been informally suggested in testimony—almost ten years late.

If the F-35's performance were spectacular, it might be worth the cost and wait. But it is not. Even if the aircraft lived up to its original specifications—and it will not—it would be a huge disappointment. The reason it is such a mediocrity also explains why it is unaffordable and, for years to come, unobtainable.

In discussing the F-35 with aviation and acquisition experts—some responsible for highly successful aircraft such as the F-16 and the A-10, and others with decades of experience inside the Pentagon and years of direct observation of the F-35's early history—I learned that the F-35's problems are built into its very DNA.

The design was born in the late 1980s in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon agency that has earned an undeserved reputation for astute innovation. It emerged as a proposal for a very short takeoff and vertical-landing aircraft (known as "STOVL") that would also be supersonic. This required an airframe design that—simultaneously—wanted to be short, even stumpy, and single-engine (STOVL), and also sleek, long, and with lots of excess power, usually with twin engines.

President Bill Clinton's Pentagon bogged down the already compromised design concept further by adding the requirement that it should be a multirole aircraft—both an air-to-air fighter and a bomber. This required more difficult tradeoffs between agility and low weight, and the characteristics of an airframe optimized to carry heavy loads. Clinton-era officials also layered on "stealth," imposing additional aerodynamic shape requirements and maintenance-intensive skin coatings to reduce radar reflections. They also added two separate weapons bays, which increase permanent weight and drag, to hide onboard missiles and bombs from radars. On top of all that, they made it multiservice, requiring still more tradeoffs to accommodate more differing, but exacting, needs of the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy.

Finally, again during the Clinton administration, the advocates composed a highly "concurrent" acquisition strategy. That meant hundreds of copies of the F-35 would be produced, and the financial and political commitments would be made, before the test results showed just what was being bought.

This grotesquely unpromising plan has already resulted in multitudes of problems—and 80 percent of the flight testing remains. A virtual flying piano, the F-35 lacks the F-16's agility in the air-to-air mode and the F-15E's range and payload in the bombing mode, and it can't even begin to compare to the A-10 at low-altitude close air support for troops engaged in combat. Worse yet, it won't be able to get into the air as often to perform any mission—or just as importantly, to train pilots—because its complexity prolongs maintenance and limits availability. The aircraft most like the F-35, the F-22, was able to get into the air on average for only 15 hours per month in 2010 when it was fully operational. (In 2011, the F-22 was grounded for almost five months and flew even less.) 

This mediocrity is not overcome by the F-35's "fifth-generation" characteristics, the most prominent of which is its "stealth." Despite what many believe, "stealth" is not invisibility to radar; it is limited-detection ranges against some radar types at some angles. Put another way, certain radars, some of them quite antiquated, can see "stealthy" aircraft at quite long ranges, and even the susceptible radars can see the F-35 at certain angles. The ultimate demonstration of this shortcoming occurred in the 1999 Kosovo war, when 1960s vintage Soviet radar and missile equipment shot down a "stealthy" F-117 bomber and severely damaged a second. 

The bottom line: The F-35 is not the wonder its advocates claim. It is a gigantic performance disappointment, and in some respects a step backward. The problems, integral to the design, cannot be fixed without starting from a clean sheet of paper.

It's time for Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the U.S. military services, and Congress to face the facts: The F-35 is an unaffordable mediocrity, and the program will not be fixed by any combination of hardware tweaks or cost-control projects. There is only one thing to do with the F-35: Junk it. America's air forces deserve a much better aircraft, and the taxpayers deserve a much cheaper one. The dustbin awaits.

Winslow T. Wheeler is the Director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight.

Comments

[Dfens]

Yes, and this is why I do not feel sorry for the US taxpayer. They beg to have their money taken from them. They are too damn stupid to keep it. The defense contractors, on the other hand, tell you what to think and when to think it. They are so much smarter than you people, they really do deserve to take your money away. After all, a fool and his money should be parted, and the sooner the better.

[Helen S. Pollin]

STOP THE F-35! IT IS TO EXPENSIVE AND NOT AS GOOD AS THE HYPE.

DO NOT BUILD ANY F-35 PLANES

[Garry Spencer]

It is obvious that the complexity (and expense) increases by the square of what it is designed to do. Congress evidently never heard of the KISS principle, "Keep It Simple Stupid". No one has ever come up with a good cheap Flying automobile. No one ever will. I have heard it said an elephant is a race horse designed by a committee. Nothing added to the existing program will make it any more affordable. We will NEVER be able to carve a universal peg to fit multiple holes. We want a fighter, a bomber, and a ground support airplane. Fine, build three then and be done with it. We do not have enough oil to sell to China to pay for the program this has developed into. Time to start over.

[hokie_1997]

There's no real new information or analysis in here. And the author doesn't propose a realistic solution. So we should junk JSF and just build a cheaper/better aircraft? Great, thanks for that....

What should this aircraft look like? When will it be ready?
And would starting over from a 'clean sheet' design really be more cost-effective? What about the billions of dollars already sunk into JSF R&D?

I'm no defender of the JSF, but it's very easy to sit in the aisles and pithily point out the faults. Lord knows there's no lack of them of them in the JSF. It's much harder, but immeninently more useful, to point out realistic alternative courses of action.

[Dfens]

So yet again POGO is joining Lockheed Martin in calling for an end to the F-35 program. After all, the defense contracting giant has already scooped up all of the free money. If they are forced to build actual jets, there are many risks, too many to be covered by their slim 10% profit margin. So both Winslow Wheeler and LM would like you to cancel this jet now so they can go on to the next development program which they promise (cross their hearts) will be better despite the fact that the last 30 years of weapons development has shown that each new program is worse than its predicessor, not better.

But hey, what does POGO or Winslow Wheeler care about another $40 to $60 billion of your tax dollars being flushed down a toilet without any weapons to show for the money spent? It's not their money. Heck, to them the fact that you'd have spent nearly $100 billion on development with nothing to show for it doesn't even rate mentioning in article after article.

Good to see POGO has hired another defense industry schill. Too bad there isn't anyone around too look out for the US taxpayer's interests.