F-35 behind schedule and has cost over runs

NY Times:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on Monday that he was replacing the general in charge of the Pentagon’s largest weapons program — the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — and withholding $614 million in award fees from the contractor, Lockheed Martin.

The surprise announcement came after Mr. Gates had touted the plans for the new plane last year in persuading Congress to kill the more expensive F-22 fighter jet program. But a special Pentagon review team had since projected billions of dollars in cost overruns on the F-35, and Mr. Gates said on Monday that the company needed to absorb some of the extra costs.

Mr. Gates disclosed the reshuffling on the F-35 program as he released the Pentagon’s proposed $708.3 billion spending package for fiscal 2011. Coming after a year in which the Obama administration killed the F-22 and other expensive weapons programs, the Pentagon’s new spending plans represent a $14.8 billion increase over the current totals.

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But the increases also come at a time when President Obama has frozen spending on many domestic programs, so some Democrats in Congress could find the planned increases hard to take politically. And while Mr. Gates said that Lockheed Martin had agreed to absorb part of the cost overruns on the Joint Strike Fighter, industry consultants said other military companies were delighted that, once again, a widely expected downturn in military spending had not materialized.

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Mr. Gates said the program manager on the F-35, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. David Heinz, would be replaced by a higher-ranking general whose name would be announced soon.

The Pentagon plans to buy more than 2,400 F-35s over the next 25 years, and the Air Force, the Navy and the Marine Corps will each have their own versions of the single-engine fighter. Eight allied nations are also investing in the project and could buy hundreds of planes.

President Obama and Mr. Gates praised the F-35 as the new mainstay fighter when they persuaded Congress to halt production of the more sophisticated F-22 last summer. And Mr. Gates recently said he thought “most of the high-risk elements associated with this development program are largely behind us.”

But Pentagon and Congressional auditors have criticized the program in recent years for problems with suppliers, delays in producing the first planes and a flight test program that remains only 2 percent complete.

The latest concerns came from a special Pentagon assessment team, which includes experts on airplane production who work for an office that estimates the cost of all major Pentagon programs.

The team projected that delays on the jet program could end up adding $16 billion to the costs if nothing was changed. Mr. Gates on Monday that he was making the changes to try to keep that from happening.

Daniel J. Crowley, one of Lockheed Martin’s co-managers for the project, has said in interviews that the company had improved its performance in recent months and was building some of the initial planes more quickly.

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I suspect that some of the problems are related to trying to build so many different versions of the same plane. That was what happened with the F-111, whose Navy version was eventually scrapped. This is going to be an important aircraft for decades to come and they better get it right and keep it affordable.