The Defense Department’s chief weapons tester questions the logic and legality of the Pentagon’s block buy approach to buying F-35s due to the program’s state of maturity and the law’s “fly before you buy” approach to defense acquisition.
Michael Gilmore, director of operational test and evaluation (OT&E), said in his annual report released Monday that DoD should carefully consider whether committing to a block buy, composed of three lots of aircraft comprising as many as 270 jets, is prudent. Gilmore said the program continues to discover significant problems during developmental testing that, if not addressed with corrections or, in some cases, labor-intensive workarounds, will adversely affect the operational effectiveness and suitability of all three variants.
These deficiencies, Gilmore said, need to be corrected before the system is used in combat. He said, to date, the rate of deficiency correction has not kept pace with the discovery rate. Gilmore said examples of “well-known significant problems” include the immaturity of the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS), Block 3F avionics instability and several reliability and maintainability problems with the aircraft and the F135 engine.
Gilmore said much of the most difficult and time consuming developmental testing, including roughly 50 complex weapons delivery accuracy (WDA), remains to be completed. New discoveries, some of which could further affect the design or delay the program, are likely to occur throughout the time the Pentagon could commit to the block buy. Gilmore said recent discoveries that require design changes, modifications and regression testing include the ejection seat for safe separation, wing fuel tank over-pressurization and the life-limitations of the bulkhead on the Marine Corps’ F-35B short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) variant.
“Further program delays are likely,” Gilmore said.
Gilmore questions the appropriateness of the block buy considering essentially all the aircraft procured so far require modifications to be used in combat. Though still officially characterized as low-rate, F-35 production rates are already high and have been allowed to steadily increase to large rates, well prior to the initial operational test and evaluation (IOT&E) and official full-rate production (FRP) decision, Gilmore says.
Due to this concurrency of development and production, Gilmore said, approximately 340 aircraft will be produced by fiscal year 2017 when developmental testing is currently planned to end, and over 500 aircraft by FY ’19 when IOT&E will likely end and the FRP decision should occur. Gilmore said these aircraft will require a still-to-be-determined list of modifications to provide full Block 3F combat capability.
However, he said, these modifications may be unaffordable for the services as they consider the cost of upgrading these early lots of aircraft while the program continues to increase production rates in a fiscally-constrained environment. Gilmore said this may potentially result in left-behind aircraft with significant limitations for years to come.
Gilmore wondered whether entering into a block buy would be consistent with the “fly before you buy” approach to defense acquisition he said many in President Barack Obama’s administration support. Similarly, Gilmore wondered whether a block buy would be consistent with Title 10 U.S. Code, which he said stipulates that IOT&E must be completed and a report on its results provided to Congress before committing to FRP, a commitment Gilmore said some would argue would be made by executing the block buy.
In his recommendations, Gilmore suggests DoD “carefully consider” whether committing to the block buy is prudent. Teal Group Vice President for Analysis Richard Aboulafia said Monday he believed the “fly before you buy” approach was normally focused on the early stages of a program, like prototyping, to avoid any kind of “concurrency-type experience” from the start.
F-35 Program Executive Officer (PEO) Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan said via a spokesman Monday that mission systems software and ALIS are the program’s top technical risks. He said disciplined systems engineering processes addressing the complexity of writing, testing and integrating mission systems and ALIS software have improved the delivery of capability, although challenges remain. Bogdan said there is more work to accomplish in both mission systems software and ALIS before the end of the development program. DoD spokesman Joe DellaVedova did not respond to a request for comment on Gilmore’s F-35 block buy assertions.
The F-35 is developed by Lockheed Martin [LMT] with subcontractors BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman [NOC]. The F135 engine is developed by Pratt & Whitney, a division of United Technologies Corp. [UTX]