Add another several billion dollars and years in delays to the military’s most important new jet. Nearly a year after Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired the head of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program for failing to keep costs and performance under control, a new internal Pentagon review finds the $382 billion stealth plane might get pushed back as much as three years, with an added $5 billion price tag.
The Joint Strike Fighter was supposed to be a family of stealth jets that could do it all: bomb targets, engage in air combat, provide air support for ground troops, knock out missile sites, take off vertically (as the Marines like), whatever. 90% of America’s combat aviation power is eventually supposed to come from the jets’ three variants. But the all-in-one features have made the JSFs hard to produce. The plane’s already four years behind schedule, and tens of billions over budget.
Tomorrow, Bloomberg reports, Gates will receive a report from the Joint Strike Fighter’s new program chief, Vice Admiral David Venlet, that’s filled with bad news. The Navy, the Air Force and the Marine Corps are all supposed to buy the Lockheed Martin-designed plane — ostensibly a cost-saving measure. Only Venlet’s review finds that the Air Force and Navy might not have the Joint Strike Fighter until late 2016 and Marines might not get their versions until 2018.
The delay is due to a host of problems central to the aircraft, including “software, engineering and flight difficulties,” according to Bloomberg. Fixing them will require jacking program costs up an estimated $5 billion. Worse, Venlet’s review is supposed to find that the Joint Strike Fighter will be “as much as 1 1/2 times more expensive to maintain” as the F-16, the F/A-18, the A-10 and the AV-8B — the planes the Joint Strike Fighter is supposed to replace.
That’s just the latest in a string of cost overruns stretching back to the program’s Clinton-era inception. In June, the Pentagon told Congress each individual plane will cost $112.4 million, an 81 percent jump from a $62 million price tag at the dawn of the plane’s 2002 development phase, with the total cost of the program up a full 65 percent from original estimates. And that was after Gates sacked Marine Major General David Heinz, the chief of the Pentagon’s Joint Strike Fighter development team, for letting the cost of the plane explode.
Last year, Gates used the Joint Strike Fighter program to convince Congress to get rid of the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor, another expensive stealth jet. (It was designed for air-to-air combat; the JSF, for ground attack.) He spent a lot of political capital on the Hill arguing that the Joint Strike Fighter made the F-22 a costly relic. And he’s spent even more trying to keep the Senate from funding a second engine for the plane. Expect lawmakers to call Gates — and probably Venlet — to the carpet to explain one more time why the Joint Strike Fighter is the future of U.S. air superiority. They’ve long been running out of patience with the star-crossed jet.
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