I disagree with Rep. Adam Smith on nuclear deterrence policy. But when it comes to the F-35 joint strike fighter jet program, the House Armed Services Committee chairman is dead on the money.
Speaking on Friday, Smith described the F-35 program as a “failure on a massive freaking scale.”
He’s right. The F-35 program is a masterpiece of government mismanagement, corporate arrogance, and strategic failure. U.S. security requires heavy defense investment, but it must be wise investment. Politely put, the F-35 program is not that.
The Pentagon’s most recent F-35 program oversight report, released in January, proves that the once-vaunted jet remains a far-from-credible asset. The Defense Department notes that “software changes, intended to introduce new capabilities or fix deficiencies, often introduced stability problems and/or adversely affected other functionality … the overall number of open deficiencies has not changed significantly since the completion of [the System Development and Demonstration stage] due to ongoing discoveries of new problems.”
Cybersecurity testing, which is rather important considering China’s potent and growing capability in this domain, “continued to demonstrate that some vulnerabilities identified during earlier testing periods have not yet been remedied.” Front-line combat units “met or exceeded the 80% Mission Capable and 70% Fully Mission Capable rate goals intermittently, but were not able to meet these goals on a sustained basis.”
Put simply, after years of cost overruns, delays, and failures, the F-35 doesn’t work properly, isn’t ready for action, is vulnerable to being hacked out of the sky, and retains still-undiscovered problems. Were this scandal not so serious, it would be a glorious joke.
Unsurprisingly, F-35 contractor Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon disagree. They say that the F-35 issues are being addressed. They insist that the platform’s three variants, F-35A (Air Force), F-35B (Marine Corps), and F-35C (Navy/Marine Corps), will be the linchpin of American-allied air power in the first half of the 21st century. They say costs are falling and that taxpayers are finally getting value for money. Even where supporters of the F-35 recognize that its problems are real, they tend to offer the rather unoriginal fix of throwing more money at the problem.
This can’t continue. As the Project on Government Oversight showed last October, F-35 per-aircraft costs are cleverly hidden from public view. Costs actually remain stubbornly high, contributing to an anticipated F-35 program lifetime cost of $1.72 trillion. Yes, with a “t.” How did we get here?
The project documents how lawmakers and Pentagon leaders have failed to impose accountability. Lockheed Martin’s F-35 team, for example, once charged taxpayers nearly $17,000 for a single golf cart. It also purchased large televisions, printers, and other equipment unjustified under the government contract. Contractors also left hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of taxpayer-purchased equipment uncovered in the rain.
Lockheed Martin refuses to accept its failures here, continuing to offer rosy press statements that proclaim the intrinsic importance of the F-35 to the nation. Even worse, most members of Congress seem happy to allow the company to continue its taxpayer swindle. Looking at local jobs and likely corporate donations, the House Armed Services and Senate Armed Services committees recently bought 14 more F-35s than the Pentagon even requested. As with its approach to Marine Corps needs, Congress seems more interested in corporate largess than in boosting warfighting capability. Congress should be trying to fix the F-35 issues and diversify away from the program. Instead, it is doubling down on failure at the expense of American security and its moral obligation to our service personnel.
This is unacceptable, as are the Air Force’s ridiculous excuses for how we’ve ended up here.
Speaking on Friday, Gen. Mark Kelly, the head of Air Combat Command, said, “Geopolitics change faster than our programs of record. [With] the geopolitics we have now … frankly, we need a significant capacity. In a perfect world … a budget-unconstrained environment would have a huge number — capacity — of huge capability fifth-gen [aircraft] for every squadron in the Combat Air Forces. The challenge with [that] is the reality of fiscal requirements of a nation that is coming out of a pandemic and the impacts of it and the demand signal of being really busy around the world.”
Thanks for that insight, General.
It was obvious 10 years ago that China and Russia would pose the rising critical challenges to the survival of the United States-led international order, the linchpin of American prosperity and security. Saying, as Kelly effectively does, that “we didn’t see China coming, and we will just paper over the F-35’s flaws by buying as many of them as Congress allows” is absurd. Kelly is at least pushing to supplement the F-35s with more F-15X fighter jets, but he and Pentagon leaders should dramatically scale up that rebalancing toward the fast, cheap, heavily armed F-15X.
Regardless, the generals, admirals, and civilian program managers responsible for overseeing the F-35 program should be fired. Lockheed Martin should face tens of billions of dollars in new penalties and its leadership should resign. That might seem over the top, but considering the very real threat of a major conflict between the U.S. and China, we should demand that the Pentagon applies the same rigorous standards to senior officers and corporate executives as it happily does to field commanders. Instead, generals fail and then get rewarded with lucrative jobs on defense boards.
But let’s take a closer look at the F-35 and China’s security challenge in the South China Sea. Because we are now banking on the ability to win a major war on the back of a jet that doesn’t deliver. This failure has many faces.
It’s not just about the capability gaps in the limited armament of the F-35 and its continuing hardware and software flaws, nor is it only the Pentagon’s absurd assumption that China and Russia would sit idle as they raved about how the F-35 was indestructible (Beijing and Moscow’s artificial intelligence, saturated air defenses, and standoff strike capabilities attest to the opposite truth). Add to all this that each of the F-35 variants has a lower operating range than the Navy and Marine Corps F-18 fighter variants and the Air Force’s F-15 and F-22 fighters. An analysis of the F-35’s utility to the Australian air force illustrated why that matters, showing that the F-35 will have a loiter-strike range of around 500-800 kilometers rather than the 1,500+ kilometer range that the Pentagon proclaims.
The loiter range is critical in that this is what would be necessary for the F-35s to defend surface vessels, anticipate-target mobile adversaries, and return to base. Considering the distance from the South China Sea to U.S. air bases on Guam and Okinawa and the Philippines’s new deference to China, in war, the U.S. would likely have to rely on aircraft carriers and amphibious strike groups to get the F-35s in persistent range of Chinese warships and aircraft. Refueling aircraft could add a bit of range here, but they lack stealth characteristics and would be vulnerable to targeting from the People’s Liberation Army. In turn, this would necessitate their protection under fighter escorts. Oh, and the closer that the aircraft carriers get to the Chinese mainland, the more likely that they’ll become graveyards for 6,000 American lives, something the Navy cares not to admit.
President Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin need to light a very hot fire under the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin. America’s victory in the next war may well depend upon it.
