A March 27 settlement between the Department of the Navy and Lockheed Martin [LMT] on a more than four-year-old case on data rights for the F-35 fighter will spur improved organic software development by the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and U.S. Marine Corps, the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) said last month.
In October 2019, Lockheed Martin filed an appeal before the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals (ASBCA) of a Defense Contract Audit Agency decision that the U.S. Navy was entitled to “government purpose rights” to nine Verification Simulation (VSim) algorithms for the high-fidelity Fighter-In-A-Box (FIAB) F-35 simulators that are part of the F-35 Joint Simulation Environment (JSE) to test the fighter’s performance against high-tech adversaries (Defense Daily, June 30, 2023).
No requirement existed in the Joint Strike Fighter contract, awarded in October 2001, for Lockheed Martin to deliver VSim software to the government, and the Navy then sought to amend the contract to require the company to deliver certain software that the company was developing. Lockheed Martin then contended that such rights should be restricted, as Lockheed Martin said it had developed the software at its own expense.
In lieu of such “government purpose rights,” the F-35 JPO and Lockheed Martin negotiated “specialized license rights,” which deviated from DFARS 252.227-7014, and restricted the government’s ability to use, modify, reproduce, release, perform, display, or disclose VSim software that Lockheed Martin asserted it developed exclusively at private expense (Defense Daily, June 10, 2022).
The F-35 JPO and Lockheed Martin “have reached a mutually beneficial agreement on the intellectual property dispute concerning FIAB software elements,” the F-35 program said on Apr. 15.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt, the F-35 program executive officer, said in the JPO statement that “the agreement has significant implications for organic software development.”
“The agreement paves the way for users to begin integrating current F-35 operational software into the JSE, and to prepare for follow-on test and evaluation of Block 4 capabilities,” he said.
Block 4, which the Technology Refresh-3 software upgrade is to allow, will feature dozens of new weapons and the Northrop Grumman [NOC] AN/APG-85 Active Electronically Scanned Array radar, which is to replace the F-35’s AN/APG-81 radar, also by Northrop Grumman.
Lockheed Martin said last month that F-35s with the full TR-3 will field next year and that the company still plans to deliver 75 to 110 F-35s this year (Defense Daily, Apr. 23).
Defense Daily reached out to the Air Force, the Navy, Lockheed Martin, and the F-35 program on whether the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps plan to buy F-35 data rights from Lockheed Martin and whether the services are negotiating with Lockheed Martin to do so in order to provide significantly cheaper Government Furnished Equipment parts, vice Contractor Furnished Equipment parts, to F-35 mechanics.
The F-35 program said on Apr. 15 that, as a result of the March 27 data rights settlement, the JSE, which is to lab-simulate a U.S.-China air battle better than limited live testing, “will now expand to service-operated facilities.”