Air Force Blues

SASC Should Drill Carter On JSF <-- STS!!!!
By Winslow Wheeler
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 10:01 am

Winslow Wheeler, veteran Senate defense budget expert and now an analyst at the Center for Defense Information, penned the following commentary on what he thinks the Senate Armed Services Committee should really focus on when it holds a Thursday morning hearing on the Joint Strike Fighter. He wants to know why the Joint Estimating Team has not been invited to testify, among other things.

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 [url]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[/url].

Will Carter retract his foolish statement, hide behind a careful parsing of the word “fundamental” in his silly assertion, or offer glib promises that his management will miraculously make all the elementary problems go away. The world wonders.

Third, the broader context of the F-​​35 program is a U.S. air component that is in serious decay. The air combat arms of the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps have each grown smaller and older (and less ready to fight) and they have done so at now record highs in Pentagon spending. This trend has been worsening for decades. What is the DOD plan for this decay? Make it worse. That is inadvertently documented by a new “Aircraft Investment Plan, Fiscal Years (FY) 2011–2040″ released last month by the Pentagon. It is a harsh assessment, but it is spectacularly incompetent. The arguments for saying so are laid out in a new article I co-​​authored with aircraft designer (among other things) Pierre Sprey. The article addresses the gigantic oversights of the study and the elements promoting decay of American air power. It appears in the new, April, issue of The American Conservative magazine. Find it at [url]http://​amconmag​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​2​0​1​0​/​a​p​r​/​0​1​/​0​0​0​30/[/url] and below:

The SASC hearing starts at “approximately” 10:30; see the lower half of the committee’s announcement at [url]http://​armed​-services​.senate​.gov/​e​_​w​i​t​n​e​s​s​l​i​s​t​.​c​f​m​?​i​d​=​4​383[/url]

So here's another gem about this program. I've emphasized a couple points that stand out to me.

JSF Costs Rocket 50 Percent
By Colin Clark
Thursday, March 11th, 2010 1:14 pm

The Pentagon will tell Congress that the Joint Strike Fighter is roughly 50 percent more expensive than it was in 2002 and will breach the Nunn-McCurdy cost limits “in a few days,” Pentagon acquisition czar Ash Carter told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Carter told the committee the cost increases were “unacceptable.” The Pentagon has “to wrestle this back into some realistic box.”

Unit costs will climb from $50.2 million to as much as $95 million a copy, Christine Fox, director for Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, said in her testimony

The Government Accountability Office’s director of acquisition and sourcing management testified that the GAO unit cost estimate is about $112 million. A congressional aide who follows the program told DoD Buzz that the unit costs were likely to be even higher. “You are looking at least $112 million JSFs, with estimates as high as $137 million – average unit procurement costs.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, wanted names. “I need to know whose fault it is,” she said. “Is it the contractors fault? How much at fault was the military?”

Carter told her he thought “there is responsibility on both the government’s side and the contractor’s side.” And he mentioned the removal of Maj. Gen. Heinz as program head along with elevation of the job to three-star level.

Even though Carter and his team have known the program was in trouble back in November, they won’t notify Congress until what would seem to be the all-too-appropriate April Fool’s Day. And they won’t finish the Nunn-McCurdy review required by law until this summer. Fox, director for CAPE, said in her testimony that, “the Department plans to complete certification review of the restructured JSF program by June, 2010.”

“The cost is really a tremendous problem,” Fox said under pressure from Sen. John McCain, top SASC Republican, who expressed disbelief that Fox could point in her testimony to the C-17 and the F-22 as “successes” for the Pentagon.

Compared to $177.6 for the -22 (and that's with fewer orders, more orders would mean cheaper jets) . Anyone else think we should start looking into cheaper aircraft, say, $30 million max, and start training enlisted pilots?


The -35 is officially a joke,

Enlisted pilots?! How dare you think such a thought and go and piss off all those folks with shiny shit on their collars. That's their domain.

Curse you Public Law 658(?)!!

I've been a propenent of the first part of your comments from the beginning. As unpopular as this might make me, gotta say 'No' to the second part. That last one: SHACK!!!

Why no to the second one? Just curious as to your reasoning. We're at a point in the USAF where a group of airman are told if they don't have a Master's Degree the highest they can get will be MSgt, and that we should have a BS before we make Tech. A quarter of the airmen in my squadron came in with an associate's or better, and have a BS before they even test for staff. Two of my coworkers are finishing up their master's, and they're both SrA.

At the risk of appearing a traitor to my stripes, I must say: this issue about enlisted with advanced degrees has been brought up here before. And although everyone seems to claim the majority of their shop/flight/squadron/clubhouse has a bachelor's degree or better, the official AF numbers still say only about 5% of the enlisted force has a college degree.

Now, on a slight tangent, I do think the military should do more to recognize enlisted members who do have advanced degrees. More than with a wicked cool EPR bullet, anyway. The old caste system of enlisted and officers is getting seriously outdated.

I didn't say majority. I just said a quarter. Granted, I was probably excessive with that number, it's probable closer to an eighth, but it's a quarter of the ones I deal with.

Still though, even at that, what does having a college degree have to do with flying an aircraft? push stick forward, ground gets bigger. Pull stick back, ground gets smaller. Unless you pull back for too long, then ground gets bigger again. This you can shoot at, this you can't.

I know this probably won't gain me any cool points and may actually cost me some or all that I've accumulated to date(if I have any). Honestly, it's a combination of parochialism and tradition.
I'm not a pilot or WSO/Nav, yet I take pride in being part of the service that sends it's officers to do the fighting while the enlisted take care of the "home front" which is backwards from our sister services. Yes, yes, I know we send folks outside the wire often enough, but I'm talking about the USAF mission as a whole. And yes, I know about the Enlisted Pilots in WWI and WWII - those were different, "desparate" times and almost all of them ended up officers. I would also like to point out that none of our sister services have enlisted pilots either.

On a semi-tongue-in-cheek level: you think it's bad now with some of the officers, can you imagine egos and assholes we'd be dealing with if we had enlisted pilots?

What about bringing back Warrant Officer grades to the Air Force?

Yeah, but at least the army lets privates pla... errr, "pilot" their UAV's. And yes, they're UAV's goddammit. I refuse to call them RPV's to massage some desk jockey's ego.

Why not let enlisted (or W/O) fly UAV's or transport aircraft? And believe me, I know exactly the type of ego's I'd be dealing with. The enlisted controllers had that mentality. Hell, make them permanent right-seaters in two seat aircraft. The AC would still be an officer. I just think that, in the AF at least, w need a major shake-up of the way we view jobs. Granted, I know we won't get enlisted pilots. But it's one of those push hard for something so they'll give ground on a lower level.