UAL T38 Phlyer

F-35 Total Costs Soar to $1.5 Trillion; Lockheed Defends Program

From the article:

".........those targets for both production and for sustainment. These numbers are for unit recurring flyaway cost. (This is the cost to buy a plane, not to operate it. It also usually doesn't include all development costs.)

We lay them out for each of the three models.

Production
F-35A = $83.4 million
F-35B = $108.1 million
F-35C = $93.3 million

Cost Per Flying Hour
F-35A = $35,200
F-35B = $38,400
F-35C = $36,300"

Stated another way: $600 a minute to operate. A minute.

Ridiculous. Stop this thing. F-22 is supposedly pushing $50k/hr.

Billy Pilgrim

So... I can purchase a four ship of vipers, and fly them AS A FOURSHIP for 20% longer than a SINGLE F-35.

Fifth generation stuff is fantastic, but not if you can afford it.

EA / new radars / new motors / new missiles to fourth generation jets and the US will be able to TRAIN and equip our air force for the next decade or so. My $.02

Kill the F-35 - maybe we can salvage some of the R&D... It's called a sunk cost.

thrust

Too big to fail.

America... we had a nice run.

AZFlyer

Asking from a civilians perspective....why do we do this to ourselves??

50-60 years ago, new fighters and bombers were developed and put in service at a blindingly fast rate compared to today, and it was okay to have an airframe specialize in a particular mission. And didn't that work?

Why the obsession today with shoe-horning every mission capability into a single airframe when we aren't going to be able to afford the damn thing in the end?

Seriously frustrating.

crewdawg

In those days the planes, their systems and tactics we're extremely basic. I mean dropping dumb bombs out of a 45 HARB or 30 DB (which i'm sure UAL T38, could school us all on) is basically the same no matter what aircraft you fly. We also killed TONS of dudes back then as well. Planes crashed at a staggering rate, but they were cheap and easy to replace.

I guess the thought process, at the very basic level, is the same as Southwest only flying 737s. There is a cost benefit to having like airframes (ground equp., training, mx, etc...). Plus now you have, "in theory," one airframe that can do the work of two, and do it better... When in reality all you get is an airplane that is mediocre at both and cost way more!

Example: Back in the day, to get checked out in a new aircraft may just be a matter of hopping in the cockpit and having another pilot show you where everything is and what the speed were. Then off on a flight, to figure out the basic handling characteristics and you were "checked out." Nowadays it's a 4-5 months transition course...


2!

Scrap the 35 and buy Block 60 F-16s or Super Hornets (with upgraded motors)!

USMCFLYR

You think this is expensive AZ - try having, maintaining, training, operating, etc.... multiple specialized aircraft - ALL costing an incredible amount of money to develop with all of the bells and whistles and then think about the cost! You want to talk mind staggering!

Similar airframes are a good thing. Current example - a Growler.
XX exchangeable parts, maintenance cycles, parts, training, equipment, etc.... with a majority of the rest of naval aviation. HUGE costs savings in the long run no doubt.

Why do we try to to fit more and more and more into every airframe so that it can do everything and more to the Nth degree? There is a movie out there that demonstrates this exceedingly well. It is about the development of the Bradley Armored Fighting Vehicle. Maybe someone else here will remember the name or do a Google search - but it point out the bureaucracy that gets involved and how a good idea and go down the crapper (and we won't even touch on special interests!!). It was tongue-in-cheek if I remember right - but look beyond and you see the truth in-between the scenes!

As far as testing them in a short amount of time and getting them out the door....yep - and there have been some excellent examples where that worked - my favorite being the A-4 SkyHawk; and there have been MANY more examples where that has failed miserably (think of the many different 50-60s era planes that hardly made it past the testing phase). Crewdawg mentioned a lot of accidents. We are not prepared to go back to those days where military aviation was losing over 500+ airframes a year! Think about that loss rate!

USMCFLYR

UAL T38 Phlyer

How does it happen?

Too many vested parties get their hands into the process. The manufacturers want to sell as many airframes as possible with the greatest profit-margin. The politicians justify large expenditures as long as it is in their district. The Generals believe the sales-hype that says "This airplane can do CAS, Attack, VertRep, Strategic Bombing, basic and advanced training, anti-sub, mine-sweeping, strategic AND tactical airlift, COD, and maintains our pre-eminence as the world's superpower!"

Think-tanks too often provide not combat-specific guidance to the generals, but "Lowest life-cycle cost estimations." Problem with estimations is they are usually incorrect.

There is a strange dichotomy here. For 60 years, the US has strived to have a technological edge over any adversary. The problem in the last 20 years is, to achieve that technological advantage, we have forsaken the numerical advantage. A token force of super-jets is a hollow force.

On the other hand, the Air Force has become more and more WWII-ish in that many newly-fielded aircraft are prop-driven 200 knot airplanes. Why? Because it does the required job more effectively, and cheaply.

I'd rather see more Block 52 and 60 F-16s, and Silent-Eagles, and more Hornets/Growlers, than the absolute fraud of this program.

John Boyd championed the move away from the "Gold-plated fighter." He succeeded with General Dynamics and the F-16. That was 40 years ago....the corporate knowledge has been lost.

His ashes must be in upheaval now.

HuggyU2

I'm not a big fan of high dollar, high tech spending... but this article is a good read.
The second paragraph of #4 is interesting. Don't know where the stats are to prove it, but they should be easy to find.

"F-35 Fighter Costs: Six Ways To Make A Bargain Seem Unaffordable"

The tortured path of the Pentagon’s biggest weapon program is beginning to look like a case study in poor management. The problem isn’t the F-35 fighter, which is making steady progress towards becoming the best tactical aircraft ever built. The problem is a federal acquisition culture that has grown so risk-averse it no longer cares about long-term consequences.

That bureaucratic myopia will be in abundant display next month, when the Department of Defense releases updated cost estimates for the fighter program. The estimates will reveal a modest increase in the cost of each plane, and Pentagon policymakers will repeat for the umpteenth time all of the heroic steps they have taken to rein in a wayward contractor. But don’t expect them to take any responsibility for the cost increases because, after all, they’re the good guys.
If you follow the F-35 program closely, which almost nobody outside the Pentagon does, a different narrative emerges. It is the story of what happens to major technology programs in a balkanized, distracted political system when there is no urgent danger to push them forward. Bureaucratic and personal agendas fill the vacuum once occupied by the threat, and so programs seldom stay on track — leaving the nation unprepared when the next big threat appears.
Maybe you’re incredulous that the real reason the F-35 program has become so controversial is government behavior. After all, I advise many of the companies involved in the program so I’m not objective, right? Fair enough. I’ll abandon generalities and provide concrete examples of what the Pentagon has done wrong (the examples aren’t hard to find). Here are six ways that the military acquisition system makes a bargain seem unaffordable.

1. Develop a plan for holding down costs, then ignore it. The F-35 fighter was conceived as the cheapest way of modernizing the tactical air fleets of three U.S. military services and eight foreign allies. The key to keeping it cheap was to fund a compressed development program in which production quickly ramped up to the kind of rates providing economies of scale. The Clinton Administration had a plan for doing that, and the Bush Administration tried to stick with it despite encountering the usual challenges any next-generation weapon system faces. But the Obama Administration decided not to take any chances, repeatedly restructuring the program and slowing it down.
The official story on why the program was delayed was problems in developing and testing the plane. But the production rate will remain depressed long after testing has concluded, and tests to date have not revealed major design issues anyway. The real reason it was slowed, with $30 billion being taken out of the program over the last three budget cycles, was so the money could be used for other things. Under the Obama plan, the number of F-35s produced through the end of the President’s second term (assuming there is one) will be 365 rather than the 1,600 originally planned. The idea of a quick production ramp-up is dead, along with the economies of scale it would have produced.

2. Issue cost estimates nobody understands. A year ago, the Pentagon provoked a political firestorm by revealing that it would cost over a trillion dollars to operate and support F-35s once they had been produced. Nobody in Congress had ever seen a weapon system that cost so much, and some legislators concluded the system must be unaffordable. What got lost in all the noise was that the F-35 was the first big aircraft program ever that the Pentagon tried to project costs for over a 50-year period.
And I don’t mean in today’s dollars. The trillion-dollar cost projection was in what the Pentagon calls then-year dollars, meaning with inflation included. That’s right, the Department of Defense really thinks it knows what the inflation rate is going to be in 2035, so it’s included in a cost estimate that stretches from 2015 to 2065. Try applying that same methodology to the four-dollar latte you buy each day, and you’ll discover that over the next five decades it will cost you more in nominal terms than a typical house currently sells for in Cleveland. So of course Congress was upset. The Pentagon didn’t have an estimate of what the program would cost in today’s dollars, but it helpfully threw in an estimate in “base-year” 2002 dollars. How confusing is that?

3. Blame the contractor for cost increases the government caused. Congressional ire over F-35 support costs was exacerbated when the media reported that projections had increased by over a hundred percent since the program began without any corresponding increase in the number of planes. Many legislators assumed this signaled massive cost overruns. What it really signaled, though, was changes in the way the government calculated support costs. For instance, it decided to estimate costs over 50 years rather than 30 years, it increased the number of operating bases from 33 to 49, and it doubled some categories of equipment needed to sustain the plane.
It also changed its ground rules for projecting future labor rates, fuel usage, material costs and other inputs, without making any adjustment for program features aimed at holding down those costs. And it included the cost of lifetime modifications to the aircraft aimed at improving its performance — expenses that are not included in the projections for other aircraft. It turns out that about three-quarters of all the “increases” in F-35 support costs were caused by changes in the scope and methods of government estimators rather than actual escalation in costs. But almost nobody outside the Pentagon realized that.

4. Never explain costs in a meaningful context. If a development program was begun to meet valid operational requirements but is experiencing cost growth, the logical question is whether there are other ways of meeting the same needs. Congress has a mechanism for reporting cost overruns called the Nunn-McCurdy process that is designed to address that question. But Pentagon policymakers never put F-35 cost trends in perspective by detailing the price of potential alternatives. If they did, it would be obvious the current program remains a bargain.
For instance, some analysts have proposed that the military scale back its purchase of F-35s and instead keep relying on Cold War planes such as the Air Force’s F-16 and the Navy’s F/A-18. However, the cost of maintaining the existing fleet of legacy fighters each year is already greater than the projected cost for the F-35s that will replace them, and the burden of supporting old fighters will double over the next decade as metal fatigue, corrosion and parts obsolescence take their inevitable toll. Over the long haul, it would cost the military 3-4 times more to keep existing fighters flying than it would to replace them with the F-35. Unfortunately, nobody ever explains that to Congress so legislators lack the budgetary context to assess options.

5. Don’t discuss the long-term consequences of current choices. Last week, senior Pentagon officials proposed a further slowing of the F-35 program designed to calibrate production rates to contractor performance. None of the various officials discussing the new approach in congressional hearings said anything about the long-term consequences of waiting so long to get the program into serial production. Reflecting the tenor of the Obama Administration’s recently announced Asia-Pacific posture, the implicit assumption is that near-term delays in programs will have “manageable” consequences for future administrations.
However, recent history suggests the opposite could be the case — that delaying tactical-aircraft modernization could leave the military unprepared for the next big threat, and might even encourage aggression. From Sputnik to the Tet Offensive to 9-11, military planners have a stunningly poor record of anticipating new challenges. They all agree enemies are likely to strike where America is weak, and yet no one seems to draw the obvious inference that if air fleets have grown decrepit with age that is a signal to rising powers about what strategy might work best. In other words, the biggest bill taxpayers are likely to get as a result of how the F-35 program is being managed isn’t for the planes, but for the consequences of not having them in adequate numbers when the next big aggressor comes along.

6. Send the wrong signals to domestic and foreign audiences. With the single exception of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, senior Pentagon officials often seem to be competing with each other to utter the most negative comments about the F-35 program. When Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter discussed the program’s support costs before the Senate Armed Services Committee last May, he called them “unacceptable” and “unaffordable” rather than explaining they were inflated. More recently, Air Force Secretary Michael Donley told the same committee the military has “no more money to put against contract overruns or problems” in the F-35 program — which is an odd statement coming from a service that keeps reducing money for the program.

Such gratuitous expressions of outrage undermine support for the program in Congress and among allies, even though the F-35 remains by far the most cost-effective solution to future air-power needs for the U.S. and its overseas allies. Several of the countries that have been in the program from the beginning such as Canada and Norway have recently reiterated their support, but it is clear that criticism coming out of Washington has not helped the cause of selling F-35s to foreign partners. Instead of scoring political points by adopting an adversarial, punitive approach to the industrial team developing the F-35, the government needs to offer a more balanced picture of what has been accomplished — one reflecting an awareness of how severely U.S. security would be impaired if the program does not go forward.----

AZFlyer

Thanks for the info, guys. That all makes sense.

Were the Europeans onto something with the Eurofighter Typhoon? It is electronically modern, fast, agile, and far less expensive than an F-22/35, but does lack stealth. Given China and Russia's realistic capabilities, perhaps our efforts would have been better served by creating our own clean sheet design 4.5 gen fighter. I have a hard time believing that either of those countries has the technological and financial capabilities to produce in large numbers a legitimate threat to an aircraft like the F-22/35.

What happens if we really are only able to buy a couple hundred F-35s and F-22s? Doesn't seem like enough jets to me. Something will have to fill that gap. Our own clean-sheet 4.5gen design. It will be known from the outset to not be quite as good as a Raptor or JSF, but still superior to the legacy fighters of today. And hopefully cheaper...but knowing our system that is in place, it would just get screwed up as well.

Grumble

There was a really good article written about a year ago by a few TOPGUN IP's about the advantages of EPE motors in the Superhornet. The increase in capability was pretty staggering. It's available on SIPR if you have access, PM me. If I remember, one of the direct quotes was "all the thrust of a Viper, with all the alpha of the Hornet." Yeah, wrap your mind around that beast!

Last I checked, a Superhornet was somewhere in the ballpark of $4500/hour direct operating cost too. And that's without the billions that will have to be spent to SCIF up every inch of dirt the facilities to support it will require.