The U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) questioned the Joint Strike Fighter Program during the preparations and debate about the National Defense authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013.
Key items were serious concerns about “potentially serious issues with its electronic warfare capability”, about the production quality and the ever increasing pricelevel. Also the high modicifaction costs caused by overlap between development and production (US$ 18 to US$ 25 millionmodification costs per aircraft) is a growing concern.
The SASC promised continuation of “strong oversight of the F–35 program, including concurrency, software development, production, and testing”
Pentagon: F-35 Acquisition malpractice
Department of Defense (DOD) officials have testified that the F–35 ‘‘Lightning II’’ Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program is the most concurrent program in DOD recent experience. Concurrency refers to the overlap between system development and testing, and production.
Excessive concurrency arises when a program’s development and production overlap to the extent that major, expensive changes identified in testing have to be made in production items after they are on the production line or after they are delivered.
According to JSF’s Program Executive Officer, ‘‘Fundamentally, that was a miscalculation . . . You’d like to take the keys to your shiny new jet and give it to the fleet with all the capability and all the service life they want. What we’re doing is, we’re taking the keys to the shiny new jet, giving it to the fleet and saying, ‘Give me that jet back in the first year. I’ve got to go take it up to this depot for a couple of months and tear into it and put in some structural mods, because if I don’t, we’re not going to be able to fly it more than a couple, three, four, five years.’ That’s what concurrency is doing to us.’’
The Acting Under Secretary of Defense of Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics was considerably more pointed in his assessment, referring to the decision made years ago to put JSF into production before flight testing had started as ‘‘acquisition malpractice.’’
He noted that the program was started with ‘‘the optimistic prediction that we were good enough at modeling and simulation that we would not find problems in flight test . . . That was wrong, and now we are paying for that.’’
The committee agrees with these appraisals and views them as a valuable starting point that may help ensure that the additional 33 months and $7.9 billion that DOD has added to the previous JSF development plan will result in a sustainable program capable of delivering the required capability to the warfighter. The committee remains concerned that, even with these changes, the level of concurrency risk that still resides in the program may be excessive.
Growth of cost overruns in first production series
Because of concern about the lack of a coherent concurrency change management strategy in the JSF program, the committee declined to approve DOD’s request to reprogram funds from other programs to cover part of a roughly $771.0 million cost overrun in low-rate initial production lots (LRIP) lots 1 through 3.
Unfortunately, the cost growth problem persists. As of March 2012, DOD estimates total concurrency costs (caused by overlap of development and production) for:
- LRIP–1 at $50.1 million (2 aircraft);
- LRIP–2, $300.3 million (12 aircraft);
- LRIP–3, $319.1 million (14 aircraft);
- LRIP–4, $523.3 million (28 aircraft).
Average modification costs (pay before you fly):
- LRIP-1: US$ 25 million
- LRIP-2: US$ 25 million
- LRIP-3: US$ 23 million
- LRIP-4: US$ 18 million
The committee does not find this trend encouraging and believes that the program must ensure that these costs are managed more effectively and that the prime contractor share equitably in them.
Software problems major concern
As stated before at this website the most important and threatening problem for the F-35 to get an IOC in 2019 is software and software and software. The SASC agrees:
In addition to concurrency change management, the committee is concerned about the JSF program’s lack of progress in software development.
The most recent Selected Acquisition Report for this program identified this issue as ‘‘a significant area of focus,’’ Challenges facing efforts to develop and integrate software Block 1B and Block 2A appear to be affecting the successful delivery of Block 2B capability. While the program has built capacity in the integrated master schedule for discovering and dealing with problems in the development of Blocks 2 and 3, the potential cascading effect of failures to deliver software capability on the balance of a major developmental program like JSF can be particularly pernicious.
The committee, therefore, believes that the contracting strategy for this program should target improved performance in the development of software to ensure that the Block 2A schedule will be met. To ensure the dependable delivery of needed software capability, the Joint Program Office (JPO) and the prime contractor must work collaboratively to properly assess software maturity for readiness to proceed to flight-testing and for production-release; provide for sufficient schedule capacity to support the production and delivery of unscheduled software builds; move towards automatically generated, data-driven capability maturity metrics across the entire air-system; and structure the program’s management of software development to enable premeditated trades among capability, cost, and schedule.
Production quality needs attention
While Lockheed Martin faces the seventh week of a strike of about 3.200 workers over health care benefits and pension, and L-M has hired about 200 temporary workers to keep production of the F-35 on schedule, the SASC shows its concerns about the quality of the production:
The committee is similarly concerned about production quality and whether it is sufficient to ensure the delivery of JSF aircraft to the U.S. and its allies at an affordable price. The average rate of scrap, rework, and repair at the prime contractor’s main manufacturing facility from 2009 through the first 2 months of 2012 gives rise to concern. Inattention to production quality also appears to have contributed to discovery of a potentially serious issue with an aperture on the aircraft critical to its electronic warfare capability.
While the full extent of this problem is presently unknown, it underscores the fact that DOD and the contractor team must rigorously manage production quality.
With the foregoing in mind, the committee is hopeful about an approach that DOD has taken to try to address some of the issues described above. Under this approach, called a ‘development dial’’ or ‘‘dial-up’’ approach, DOD would modulate its purchase of future aircraft for which funding has been authorized and appropriated based on how the prime contractor performs in the areas of concurrency risk reduction, software development, flight-testing, and durability.
While the committee believe this approach holds merit, it also believes that the approach’s success in incentivizing desired contractor performance will require that DOD identify a very clear, specific, and realistically achievable set of performance criteria upfront.
The specificity of these criteria should be sufficient to convey to the prime contractor what constitutes desired performance and how its performance, once rendered, would be assessed. The committee directs DOD to provide these criteria to the congressional defense committees before they are actually implemented so that the committees may assess their efficacy.
Corrosion problems F-22 and F-35
The committee has recommended a provision that would amend the DOD reporting requirements to Congress by requiring additional information on corrosion projects, including validated returns on investment for completed corrosion projects, activities, and information on how corrosion funding is used for military projects, the Technical Corrosion Collaboration pilot program, and other corrosion-related activities. Additionally, the Government Accountability Office has stated that the Corrosion Policy and Oversight Office within the DOD Corrosion Program delivers at least a 14 to 1 ratio return on investment to the taxpayer through corrosion project opportunities and activity requirements. Ensuring proper corrosion prevention and control plays a major role in the sustainment costs and life cycle range of many current and future weapon systems including the F–22, F–35, and various ground vehicles, ships, and aircraft.
US Navy fighter gap and FY2014
The committee recommends a provision that would express the sense of the Senate that, if the budget request of the Department of the Navy for fiscal year 2014 for F–18 aircraft includes a request for funds for more than 13 new Boeing F–18 Super Hornet aircraft, the budget request of the Department of the Navy for fiscal year 2014 for F–35 aircraft should include a request for funds for not fewer than 6 F–35B aircraft and 4 F–35C aircraft, presuming that development, testing, and production of the F–35 aircraft are proceeding according to current plans.
The budget request included $3,063.6 million to purchase 26 F/A–18E/F aircraft and 12 EA–18G aircraft. The budget also included US$ 30.3 million for advance procurement of 13 F/A–18E/F aircraft in fiscal year 2014. Fiscal year 2014 would represent the final year of production for the Department of the Navy. Throughout the past several years, the committee has expressed concern that the Navy is facing a sizeable gap in aircraft inventory as older F/A–18A–D Hornets retire before the aircraft carrier variant (F–35C) of the Joint Strike Fighter is available.
This year, the Navy says that the maximum shortfall is now projected to be around 56 aircraft. The Navy claims that the estimated shortfall has not increased much since last year even though the Department removed a total of 64 F–35B and F–35C aircraft from the future-years defense program (FYDP). The Navy’s estimate of the shortfall is based on conducting intensive management of the current inventory, making some reduction in force structure within Marine Corps aviation, and pursuing a service life extension program (SLEP) of 150 F/A–18 aircraft.
The Navy intends that a SLEP would extend the life of select legacy F/A–18s from 8,600 to 10,000 flight hours. As yet, the Navy does not have sufficient data to predict the failure rate for aircraft being inducted into the SLEP program. Too high a failure rate could leave the Navy with too few aircraft that could benefit from the SLEP program, which would exacerbate the shortfall projections.
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