F-35 update: SASC Should Drill Carter On JSF

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SASC Should Drill Carter On JSF
By Winslow Wheeler Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 10:01 am
Posted in Air, Naval, Policy

This Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Whether this event turns out to be an exercise in actual oversight (competent investigation) or just another opportunity for senators to give speeches and read off staff prepared questions in a huffy tone of voice (and for the Pentagon witnesses to utter bromides, unchallenged by oblivious posers), hinges — I believe –on three matters:

First, why is the Joint Estimating Team (known as JET II) not invited to testify? It is they who have for two years running uncovered many of the continuing failures of the F-35 program, most recently finding $16.6 billion in additional costs and up to 30 months of delay just in the next five years. It is not just a question of hearing from the actual investigators; there is also the question of Under Secretary Ashton Carter’s truncating the JET II’s findings in less than half ($2.3 billion in extra costs and 13 months’ delay) and his inference in his February 24 Acquisition Decision Memorandum (available to any requestor) that the JET II team even authored these changes in what he calls a “Revised JET II estimate.” The JET II’s presence, and their original briefing materials, at this hearing would not only give the committee the basis for much better informed questions, but were the JET II to testify Thursday, Under Secretary Carter and his co-witness, the newly installed Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, Christine Fox, would most assuredly be — shall we say — encouraged to give more complete and informative answers to questions.

GAO is just now finishing up on the final stages of a new report on the F-35. Their 2009 report was important and revealing. GAO testimony Thursday on their new findings is a second obvious component of competent oversight at this hearing — and an element that would also help examine the accuracy of the testimony of the Pentagon’s top management at the hearing.

To delay either GAO or JET II testimony to a point in time disjointed from Under Secretary Carter’s and Director Fox’s testimony is to give Carter and Fox an implicit assurance that the Thursday hearing will be clear sailing for them.

Second, in his Acquisition Decision Memorandum, Under Secretary Carter made the statement “no fundamental technology or manufacturing problems were discovered” by his review of the F-35 program. It is a quite astonishing assertion. The problems are legion: test airplanes that can’t complete a small fraction of their schedule, software years from completion, a completely inadequate flight test plan that will only probe 17 percent of F-35 performance characteristics, a manufacturing line that churns out incomplete, unflyable aircraft, raiding the assembly line for spare parts, serious questions about the F-35’s ability to protect itself in air-to-air combat, failure to show even rudimentary characteristics for an effective close air support aircraft. These are just a few of the issues that come to mind. The manufacturing problems have been documented in Defense Contract Management Agency reports for years; find a summary of the more recent ones at http://​www​.cdi​.org/​f​r​i​e​n​d​l​y​v​e​r​s​i​o​n​/​p​r​i​n​t​v​e​r​s ​i​o​n​.​c​f​m​?​d​o​c​u​m​e​n​t​I​D​=​4​588.


Rest of article about this $239 million dollar wonder at: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2010/03/09/sasc-should-drill-carter-on-jsf/