What Will the JSF Really Cost?Winslow Wheeler | April 01, 2010
In two hearings in the Senate and House Armed Services Committees in March, Under Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Ashton Carter and his Director for Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation Christine Fox presented new unit cost estimates for the F-35.
Those estimates are extremely optimistic (and very incomplete). The explanation explains why the Gates/Obama Pentagon is failing to reform anything in the Pentagon, their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.~snip~
It may be that Carter and Fox are unwilling to testify to a total program unit cost because they are unwilling to inflict further "sticker shock." Presumably, the official, more complete numbers will be made available later in April when the Defense Department releases its new Selected Acquisition Report, now about 18 months over due. What Carter and Fox thought they had to gain by delaying the more complete revelation does not merit speculation; their existing (incomplete) production unit cost estimates have little to do with reality.The 2011 budget request for the F-35 plans to buy 43 aircraft for $8.654 billion in procurement funding. That makes for a production unit cost for the 2011 buy of $201 million per F-35. In his March 24 testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, Carter stated that the unit cost "will decrease significantly" from this level as purchases increase and production processes "optimize." This is consistent with conventional wisdom that there exists a "learning curve" for aircraft production that progressively shrinks unit cost steadily as production proceeds. Thus, Carter and Fox argue, F-35 unit production costs will come down from the currently unsettlingly high number of $201 million each down to the $114 to $135 million band.
~snip~
Carter, Fox, and other advocates of the F-35 will contend the F-22 cost experience is irrelevant for two reasons. First, the F-35 will see a much longer production run than the F-22, affording time and opportunity for learning and optimization of production – the old learning curve argument. Second, they will lean on how well they are solving the currently horrendous F-35 production problems: that is, all the out of station work; missing, late, and non-fitting components; redesign, etc., etc., etc. pointed out by the Government Accountability Office, the Defense Contract Management Agency, and the Independent Manufacturing Review Team: A litany of problems just like those of the F-22 production line. Surely, they will say, once this legion of problems is addressed, we will see more efficient, cheaper production.
Not so fast. Addressing many of the current assembly line problems assumes a stable design for the F-35. We are a long way off from that; we may never get there. (Indeed, we never got there with the F-22 and are still modifying produced units.) Not only have recently uncovered design fixes not yet been incorporated into production (such as the new airframe strengthening needed for the carrier variant and so far unfunded nuclear wiring to be added to the Air Force variant) but also there are certain to be many modifications imposed on the aircraft design as the F-35 contorts through is initial flight testing, now only 3 percent done and currently scheduled to finish in April 2016. In other words, a stable enough design to produce "optimally" is years off. Rest of article about this $239 million dollar paperweight at:
http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,213006,00.html?wh=news
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