GAO Issues 3rd Report on F-35 Program, Sees Serious Risks Along With Progress
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The US Government Accountability Office releases its latest report covering the F-35 Lightning II, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter program. They offered their assessment and made their recommendations, but the USAF agreed to disagree and will continue as planned. GAO writes:
“The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program — a multinational acquisition program for the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and eight cooperative international partners — is the Department of Defense’s (DOD) most expensive aircraft acquisition program. DOD currently estimates it will spend $623 billion to develop, procure, and operate and support the JSF fleet. The JSF aircraft, which includes a variant design for each of the services, represents 90 percent of the remaining planned investment for DOD’s major tactical aircraft programs. In fiscal year 2004, the JSF program was rebaselined to address technical challenges, cost increases, and schedule overruns… Total JSF program acquisition costs (through 2027) have increased by $31.6 billion and now DOD will pay 12 percent more per aircraft than expected in 2004. The program has also experienced delays in several key events, including the start of the flight test program, delivery of the first production representative development aircraft, and testing of critical missions systems… Despite these delays, the program still plans to complete development in 2013, compressing the amount of time available for flight testing and development activities
Accurately predicting JSF costs and schedule and ensuring sufficient funding will likely be key challenges facing the program in the future. JSF continues to pursue a risky acquisition strategy that concurrently develops and produces aircraft. While some concurrency may be beneficial to efficiently transition from development to production, the degree of overlap is significant on this program. Any changes in design and manufacturing that require modifications to delivered aircraft or to tooling and manufacturing processes would result in increased costs and delays in getting capabilities to the warfighter. Low-rate initial production will begin this year with almost the entire 7-year flight test program remaining to confirm the aircraft design. Confidence that investment decisions will deliver expected capability within cost and schedule goals increases as testing proves the JSF will work as expected. The JSF program also faces funding uncertainties as it will demand unprecedented funding over the next 2 decades–more than $12.6 billion a year on average through 2027…
Read the entire March 15, 2007 report (#GAO-07-360): “Joint Strike Fighter: Progress Made and Challenges Remain” PDF format | Abstract.
