Luke Sharrett for The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
Published: November 28, 2012
LEXINGTON PARK, Md. — The Marine version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, already more than a decade in the making, was facing a crucial question: Could the jet, which can soar well past the speed of sound, land at sea like a helicopter?
On an October day last year, with Lt. Col. Fred Schenk at the controls,
the plane glided toward a ship off the Atlantic coast and then, its
engine rotating straight down, descended gently to the deck at seven feet a second.
There were cheers from the ship’s crew members, who “were all shaking my hands and smiling,” Colonel Schenk recalled.
The smooth landing helped save that model and breathed new life into the huge F-35 program,
the most expensive weapons system in military history. But while
Pentagon officials now say that the program is making progress, it
begins its 12th year in development years behind schedule, troubled with
technological flaws and facing concerns about its relatively short
flight range as possible threats grow from Asia.
With a record price tag — potentially in the hundreds of billions of
dollars — the jet is likely to become a target for budget cutters.
Reining in military spending is on the table as President Obama and
Republican leaders in Congress look for ways to avert a fiscal crisis.
But no matter what kind of deal is reached in the next few weeks,
military analysts expect the Pentagon budget to decline in the next
decade as the war in Afghanistan ends and the military is required to do
its part to reduce the federal debt.
Behind the scenes, the Pentagon and the F-35’s main contractor, Lockheed Martin,
are engaged in a conflict of their own over the costs. The relationship
“is the worst I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in some bad ones,” Maj.
Gen. Christopher Bogdan of the Air Force, a top program official, said
in September. “I guarantee you: we will not succeed on this if we do not
get past that.”
In a battle that is being fought on other military programs as well, the
Pentagon has been pushing Lockheed to cut costs much faster while the
company is fighting to hold onto a profit. “Lockheed has seemed to be
focused on short-term business goals,” Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s top
weapons buyer, said this month. “And we’d like to see them focus more
on execution of the program and successful delivery of the product.”
The F-35 was conceived as the Pentagon’s silver bullet in the sky — a
state-of-the art aircraft that could be adapted to three branches of the
military, with advances that would easily overcome the defenses of most
foes. The radar-evading jets would not only dodge sophisticated
antiaircraft missiles, but they would also give pilots a better picture
of enemy threats while enabling allies, who want the planes, too, to
fight more closely with American forces.
But the ambitious aircraft instead illustrates how the Pentagon can let
huge and complex programs veer out of control and then have a hard time
reining them in. The program nearly doubled in cost as Lockheed and the
military’s own bureaucracy failed to deliver on the most basic promise
of a three-in-one jet that would save taxpayers money and be served up
speedily.
Lockheed has delivered 41 planes so far for testing and initial
training, and Pentagon leaders are slowing purchases of the F-35 to fix
the latest technical problems and reduce the immediate costs. A helmet
for pilots that projects targeting data onto its visor is too jittery to
count on. The tail-hook on the Navy jet has had trouble catching the
arresting cable, meaning that version cannot yet land on carriers. And
writing and testing the millions of lines of software needed by the jets
is so daunting that General Bogdan said, “It scares the heck out of
me.”
With all the delays — full production is not expected until 2019 — the
military has spent billions to extend the lives of older fighters and
buy more of them to fill the gap. At the same time, the cost to build
each F-35 has risen to an average of $137 million from $69 million in
2001.
The jets would cost taxpayers $396 billion, including research and development, if the Pentagon sticks to its plan to build 2,443 by the late 2030s. That would be nearly four times as much as any other weapons system and two-thirds of the $589 billion the United States has spent on the war in Afghanistan.
The military is also desperately trying to figure out how to reduce the
long-term costs of operating the planes, now projected at $1.1
trillion.
“The plane is unaffordable,” said Winslow T. Wheeler, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group in Washington.
Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments,
a research group in Washington, said Pentagon officials had little
choice but to push ahead, especially after already spending $65 billion
on the fighter. “It is simultaneously too big to fail and too big to
succeed,” he said. “The bottom line here is that they’ve crammed too
much into the program. They were asking one fighter to do three
different jobs, and they basically ended up with three different
fighters.”
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