The F-35 Lightning has gotten plenty of bad press in the two decades since the Pentagon awarded Lockheed Martin the lucrative contract to build the fifth-generation fighter jet.
In 2001, the F-35 was billed as a low-cost, one-plane-fits-all alternative to building three separate planes to suit the Air Force’s, Navy’s, and Marines’ different needs.
The F-35 is undeniably an engineering marvel, the most advanced, capable combat jet in the world.
Depending on the model, it can take off vertically or land on an aircraft carrier. It’s stealthy, features a high-tech helmet that allows pilots literally to see through the plane, and can carry everything from small bombs to nuclear weapons.
But Google “F-35” and “boondoggle,” and in less than a second, you’ll get 154,000 results. It stems from the fact that the program’s cost has ballooned to more than $400 billion over the years. The notoriously buggy plane that runs on more than 8 million computer code lines has consistently failed to perform up to spec.
However, with the sticker price of a basic Air Force variant now a relatively affordable $80 million per copy and 650 F-35s currently flown by nine U.S. allies, it seemed that the troubled plane might have turned the corner.
Still, last month, the F-35 program, the Pentagon’s most expensive ever, came under friendly fire from the Air Force’s top general, who made an unfortunate, inadvertent, inconvenient admission.
“It’s like your Ferrari. You don’t drive your Ferrari to work every day. You only drive it on Sundays,” Gen. Charles Brown, Jr., Air Force chief of staff, told reporters at a session for defense writers.
What Brown was saying is that the F-35, advertised as a jack of all trades, has turned out to be too expensive for routine missions, and like a high-performance sports car, should be reserved for what it does best.
While the analogy makes perfect sense, the offhand observation reverberated like a thunderclap in aviation circles because it was a classic “Kinsley gaffe,” defined as someone “accidentally telling the truth.”
In discussing his desire for the Air Force to build a new, cheaper, more durable fighter jet to lighten the load on the expensive, high-maintenance F-35, Brown was tacitly admitting that after hundreds of billions of dollars and 20 years, the Joint Strike Fighter failed in its original raison d’etre. Namely, to be all things to all missions, from down-and-dirty close air support to ground troops to routine patrols in nonhostile regions.
“Boom! Just like that, the F-35, long peddled as the low-end fighter in the high-low mix, has suddenly become the high-end fighter,” said veteran defense reporter Mark Thompson, who writes The Bunker newsletter for the Project on Government Oversight. “That’s what happens when you spend $400 billion on a new warplane.”
The media had a field day.
“The U.S. Air Force Just Admitted The F-35 Stealth Fighter Has Failed,” Forbes wrote.
NBC News anchor Brian Williams predicted that the “Pentagon may scrap the F-35 program” in a commentary on his late-night MSNBC program.
Brown was forced to walk back his Ferrari quote at his next engagement with reporters a week later.
The F-35 is “nowhere near” a failure, Brown said at a media roundtable. In fact, he said, “The F-35 is the cornerstone of our TacAir [or tactical aircraft] capability.”
While not precisely a hothouse flower, Brown has had to admit the F-35 is not holding up well to the rigors of real-world deployment and, much like an over-engineered sports car, is spending way too much time in the shop.
The latest problem is with the engines on the basic A model, which takes off and lands like a conventional plane.
The engines are running hot, wearing out too fast, and replacement engines are on back order.
“What we are seeing based on the use of the engine, in some cases, they’re failing a little bit faster in certain areas, but it’s also because of the high use rate,” Brown said, hence his desire to add a new plane of a more straightforward design to the mix. “I want to moderate how much we’re using those aircraft.”
The constant cost overruns, the failure of complex new technology to perform as promised, the unexpected problems, followed by expensive fixes and more program delays, combined with no suitable alternative because too many billions have been sunk into the program to allow it to fail — it’s all depressingly familiar to Rep. Adam Smith, the somewhat jaded chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
“I want to stop throwing money down that particular rat hole,” Smith said at a Brookings Institution event this month. “Is there a way to cut our losses? Is there a way to not keep spending that much money for such a low capability?” he asked.
The Air Force is the biggest customer for the F-35, with plans to purchase 1,763 planes, and, at least for now, insists it has no plans to cut back on the buy, even as it explores a low-cost alternative to round out the fleet.
The biggest drag on the F-35 is the prohibitively high cost of maintaining the delicate jet’s combat readiness, something the military calls “sustainability.”
“The sustainment costs are brutal. And they keep saying they’re going to bring them down, but past a certain point, they can’t,” said Smith.
Advocates of the F-35’s high-tech capabilities fear that the program’s overall cost, projected at $1.7 trillion over 50 years, could doom the F-35 to the same fate as the F-22 Raptor, another high-end, stealthy fighter, which was aborted in 2009 after its costs soared.
Instead of getting 648 F-22s, the Air Force had to settle for 187 but was promised the F-35 would soon take up the slack.
The bigger problem, argued Smith, is that the Pentagon’s long-broken acquisition system has never been genuinely reformed and consequently has produced an embarrassingly long line of overpriced, underperforming, prematurely obsolete weapon systems.
“We reward people for process, not for results. The failure we wind up tolerating is failure on a massive frickin’ scale,” Smith said. “The Pentagon procurement process is resistant to better solutions.”
The F-35 is becoming the latest poster child for a DOD acquisition process gone awry, assuming the mantle from other high-profile disasters, such as the Navy’s Zumwalt-class destroyer (canceled after just three ships and $22.5 billion) and the Army’s Future Combat Systems ($32 billion spent over 14 years for not a single vehicle).
Brown is hopeful that advances in computer design and simulations can help the Air Force design a new, lighter, more nimble plane, much like the aging F-16, while avoiding the pitfalls of the F-35.
“Actually, I want to be able to build something new and different that’s not the F-16 that has some of those capabilities but gets there faster using a digital approach,” Brown said, noting that he doesn’t have the final say.
“I can make recommendations. I don’t actually have the final vote because, again, I have to work with [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] and the Congress.”
Smith said he’s on board so long as the new plane doesn’t end up being another “too big to fail” fiasco.
“What I’m going to try to do is figure out how we can get a mix of fighter attack aircraft that’s the most cost-effective,” he said. “A big part of that is finding something that doesn’t make us have to rely on the F-35 for the next 35 years.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
