Driving down production costs and attacking long-term lifecycle costs are a top priority for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, service and program office officials yesterday told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee Airland panel.
“Affordability remains the department’s and my top priority,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, program executive officer F-35 Lightning Joint Program Office (JPO), said.
The program is making slow but steady progress with production costs continuing to come down, Bogdan said. Lockheed Martin [LMT] is the airframe producer. Pratt & Whitney [UTX] is developing the engine for the advanced fighter.
Senators several times raised their concerns over lifecycle costs described by Government Accountability Office testimony April 17 before the House Armed Services Tactical Air and Land Forces panel.
The GAO testimony said, “the current sustainment cost projection by (Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation) CAPE for all U.S. aircraft, based on an estimated 30 year service life, exceeds $1 trillion.”
The program office today is taking steps to find ways to reduce lifecycle costs, Bogdan said. For example, “we’ve taken a look at the overall sustainment costs, broken down into different elements and identifying areas where the JPO and contractors can work together to reduce costs.”
When that scrub is complete, he plans to let Congress know what he found.
Additionally, he intends to have competition in various parts of the sustainment effort to see if domestic and foreign companies have the “capacity, capability and desire” to compete in various areas–such as running training centers.
“Industry has a great capability to do that for us, there’s no reason not to open it up and find the best company to give the best value,” Bogdan said. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be Lockheed Martin or Pratt & Whitney.”
Vice Adm. W. Mark Skinner, principal military deputy to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition, said the GAO’s $1 trillion figure “is hard to swallow.”
The Navy has seen signs of the cost of production lots coming down,and the service also is looking into what it can do to trim costs, looking at how it flies the aircraft and train pilots. All the information will be fed into the JPO models for more accurate sustainment costs. “We’ve already noticed some discrepancies,” he added.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Davis, military deputy to the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, said the F-35 is not an F-16 or F-18–“it’s a different animal.” Figures discussed for flying hours will not likely hold because training in the “open air” for the F-35 may not be as helpful as using very high-fidelity simulations, because the planes “know everything and see everything.” Simulations are a lot cheaper than flying aircraft.
Also, Davis said, once the plane is fielded and operational, a lot of things done for current aircraft won’t work for the F-35, but that won’t be entirely known until the pilots and maintainers are actually flying and maintaining the planes.
About that $1 trillion GAO figure, Bogdan said, “Everyone’s worried and I’m working on it.”