By Marina Malenic
Any further cost growth in the Defense Department’s marquee tactical aircraft development program will result in cuts to the number of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) aircraft the department is able to purchase, the Pentagon’s top financial official said yesterday.
“I think we are to the point in our budgetary situation where, if there is unanticipated cost growth, we will have to accommodate it by reducing the buy,” said Undersecretary of Defense Robert Hale, the Pentagon comptroller.
The Pentagon’s program of record has until recently called for 2,456 of the fighters in three variants for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. Last week, top Pentagon weapons buyer Ashton Carter authorized a restructure of the program that reduces that number by 122 aircraft. A 13-month extension of the development phase of the program was also authorized.
Hale, however, said that additional cost growth is not out of the question and that any such growth will come out of the buy quantity.
“I wouldn’t raise my right hand and swear that there won’t be any future cost growth,” he said. “I don’t see us getting a lot of added funding, and therefore I don’t see large JSF funding increases.”
He noted that officials at Lockheed Martin [LMT], the program’s prime contractor, have said that “they can build more planes with the money that we have budgeted than we think” they can. “That would be great,” he added.
Hale was speaking at a Precision Strike Association conference in Arlington, Va.
The Air Force in recent weeks acknowledged that problems in the program mean that the F-35 conventional take-off and landing (CTOL) A-model likely will not be ready for deployment until “late in calendar year 2015,” significantly pushing back the service’s anticipated Fiscal Year 2013 initial operating capability (IOC) date.
Rear Adm. David Philman, the Navy’s director of air warfare, said yesterday that the Marine Corps is “holding to 2012” for IOC of the short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) B-model of the aircraft. Philman said the Navy’s IOC date for the carrier variant C-model will be “event driven” and will depend on sufficient quantities of the aircraft with Block 3 software being delivered and tested.
“We have on the record 2014 as our IOC, and there’s no change to that, but it’s very clear that that is going to be pressurized,” he said. “It’s 2014, but that is going to have to be addressed based on the pressures in the program.”
Late last year, the Pentagon acknowledged that its special assessment team once again found that the F-35 program is at risk of significant cost increases. The Joint Estimating Team’s latest cost projection for the program contains similar numbers to last year’s JET estimate. Both warn that the $300 billion program may end up costing the government some $16.6 billion more than budgeted.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates last month announced an F-35 program shake-up, with a new three-star program manager still pending appointment. Lockheed Martin was also punished, with the department withholding $614 million in fees. The program is also in danger of breaching a congressionally mandated cost-growth cap in coming weeks.