The F-35 program will triple its aircraft production and fielding rate by 2019, which is giving Program Executive Officer (PEO) Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan pause, he said Wednesday.
Bogdan said the program will deliver about 43 airplanes next year as part of Lot 8. Over the next three years, in Lots 9, 10 and 11, the F-35 program will produce over 120 planes per year, he said. An acquisition rule of thumb, Bogdan said, is not to do more than about 50 percent of what you did the year before.
Needless to say, the F-35 program is tossing that rule out the window.
“[We’re] on a much bigger slope than that,” Bogdan told an audience at the 2015 ComDef conference in downtown Washington. “What I’m most worried about, and what we most have to concentrate on, is our supply base.”
In addition to ramping up the production and fielding rate, the F-35 program will ask its supply base to produce more spares to keep fielded airplanes operating. Bogdan said the program will also ask its supply base to stand up “robust” repair capability and produce parts for modifications, all at the same time. This also worries Bogdan.
To ensure the supply base can keep up with the program’s demands, Bogdan said the program has to make sure the money it is investing is “going to the right places at the right time” so it can accomplish such an ambitious ramp-up.
The F-35 program’s solution to this endeavor is fielding a global sustainment enterprise that can sustain across multiple continents a fleet that will eventually reach the thousands. Bogdan said the program is going to stand up 17 new operating locations, with more than half of them overseas in the Pacific and European theaters. The program will also continue building up sustainment capability in North America, he said.
“We have to create a global sustainment enterprise that can sustain the airplane no matter where it is, no matter which partner has it…in a way that is effective for warfighters,” Bogdan said.
The F-35 program will have to constantly negotiate with its F-35 supply base by asking it to increase volume while charging less to help cut costs, Teal Group Vice President of Analysis Richard Aboulafia said Wednesday. This constant negotiation, he said, took place in the last two F-35 production lots and lead to carefully-guided cost reductions while simultaneously giving the supplier base what it needed to ramp up.
Aboulafia said working with the supply base will go deeper than just F-35 manufacturer Lockheed Martin [LMT] and subcontractors BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman [NOC]. It will go all the way down the supply chain to companies that provide specialty metals and composites.
“[You’ll] have to do stress tests up and down to make sure they can do their part of the job at the promised price,” Aboulafia said.