By Marina Malenic
The Pentagon’s premier tactical aircraft development effort is in trouble because of unrealistic cost estimates and poor performance on the part of the contractor, the Defense Department’s top weapons buyer said last week.
“We know that one of the things we need to guard against in defense programs is…kidding ourselves about what something’s going to cost,” Ashton Carter, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, told reporters during a March 12 briefing. “We have to have the discipline to not fall into that trap.”
Just a day earlier, Carter and other Pentagon officials told lawmakers that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s initial operational capability (IOC) for the Air Force and Navy will be delayed by years and that Congress will be notified “within days” that the program has suffered a unit cost breach of more than 50 percent, triggering a formal recertification process (Defense Daily, March 11).
“That’s poor performance,” Carter told reporters at the Pentagon. “We are trying to be realistic now. Obviously, a realistic story has not been in people’s minds for the last couple of years.”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced last month a restructuring of the F-35 program that extends its development phase, reduces the number of early production aircraft and withholds $614 million from prime contractor Lockheed Martin [LMT].
Asked whether international buyers would pull out due to the slower production increase Carter authorized last month, he said that was unlikely.
“I think most of the international customers are going to realize that a slower ramp-up to full-rate production doesn’t mean that their aircraft are not going to be there when they need them,” he said. “So I think most of the customers are going to stay with the Joint Strike Fighter program.”
Australia, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey and the United Kingdom have signed on to the effort. Israel, Japan and Singapore have been touted as possible signatories in the coming months.
Christine Fox, director of the Pentagon’s newly configured cost assessment and program evaluation (CAPE) office, last week said the average-procurement-unit cost for the program is now $80 million to $95 million in 2002 dollars–a growth of at least 50 percent of the cost of $50.2 million in 2002, set in 2001 when the Joint Strike Fighter received Milestone B approval.
The Government Accountability Office estimates the new F-35 unit cost in current-year dollars to be approximately $112 million.