What is there left to say about the F-35? It's the most expensive program in the Pentagon's history
 | | Ten international partners and customers have committed to buying the jet, and eight of them have received their first F-35s.Anne Rearick for The New York Times |
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What is there left to say about the F-35 joint strike fighter? It's the most expensive program in the Pentagon's history and potentially its most ambitious, and it's arguably the most notorious weapon ever produced. This week for At War, I wrote about its troubled history and the challenges the Defense Department is still facing. |
As an air-warfare reporter, I've covered the minutiae of the F-35 program and the aircraft's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, for the past five years. When people ask whether it's as big a disaster as they've heard, it's hard to know what to say. I can't help respecting the ambition of an effort that has tried to solve so many problems and has overcome technical and bureaucratic hurdles that would have killed another program, resulting in a plane that pilots seem to love and say is desperately needed. At the same time, it's frustrating to watch the continued struggles knowing that American taxpayers will sink more than $1 trillion into an effort that has been poorly managed and resulted in so much waste. |
Some officials in the Pentagon feel the same. This year, the Pentagon's inspector general investigated Patrick Shanahan, then the acting defense secretary, over accusations of favoritism toward Boeing, Shanahan's previous employer. One accusation derived from a Politico report in which a former senior Defense Department official said Shanahan had called the F-35 "[expletive] up" and suggested that Boeing would have done a better job running the program. |
When the inspector general interviewed Shanahan about his comments, he said the capabilities of the F-35 were "awesome" but acknowledged that he criticized the program over having "insufficient spare parts in the inventory, the cost per flight-hour not decreasing fast enough and the logistics support system not having the functionality that the war fighters need to sustain the aircraft." Military leaders from the F-35 program office, the Navy and the Air Force have publicly made similar complaints. In the end, the inspector general concluded that Shanahan had not crossed any lines. |
There are no simple answers for fixing the F-35 program, as tempting as it is to look for a single root cause for its problems. It would be so much easier to blame Pentagon bureaucracy or corporate greed, but that ignores the human side of the program — the thousands of people whose work has advanced technology and who are disheartened that their accomplishments are overshadowed by the complications. |
A couple of months ago, I received an email from a man who works for Booz Allen Hamilton, one of Lockheed Martin's subcontractors on the F-35 program — a guy with no fancy corporate title or stars on his shoulder. He was angry with me because he felt that I had written something that unfairly blamed him and his colleagues for the problems they were struggling to fix. We emailed back and forth and, finally, he acknowledged his frustration: The system may not be perfect, he said, "but it's my baby you're calling ugly." |
Valerie Insinna is the air-warfare reporter at Defense News. |
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