[Peace] Mike Fredenburg | National Review: Mr. President, Cancel the F-35

[Robert Naiman]

The F-35’s severe, ongoing problems with weight have resulted in *indefensible
decisions* affecting plane *safety*, reliability, and durability — *the
most egregious example being the removal of hundreds of pounds of equipment
designed to keep pilots from dying in fiery explosions.* Some of the safety
equipment removed includes the fuel tank’s ballistic liner, critical
fueldraulic fuses, the flammable coolant shut-off valve, and the dry bay
fire-extinguishing unit. The *unprecedented* and *pervasive* presence of
flammable hydraulic fluid, flammable coolants, and fuel throughout the
plane makes the F-35 a *flying tinderbox*. But without these *risky*
weight-reduction measures, the F-35 will not be able to meet even its
bare-minimum contractually mandated range goals. *It should be unacceptable
to ask American pilots to fly these fighters.*

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443612/f-35-donald-tru
mp-should-cancel-failed-f-35-fighter-jet-program


Mr. President, Cancel the F-35



by Mike Fredenburg January 6, 2017 4:00 AM



*Mike Fredenburg holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering and a masters in
production operations management and is a regular contributor to National
Review. A past contributor to the California Political Review and the San
Diego Union Tribune, he was the founding president of the Adam Smith
Institute of San Diego.*



The failed F-35 fighter-jet program can’t be fixed — it’s time to turn the
page.

Our incoming president’s willingness to boldly challenge the status quo is
arguably the main reason he was elected. And no defense project is more
representative of a disastrous status quo than the 20-year-old Joint Strike
Fighter program — the F-35. The F-35 program showcases all that is wrong
about our military’s vendor-dominated, crony-capitalist procurement system.
Unless dealt with decisively, its massive cost and its lack of capability
will have a dramatically negative impact on our military’s effectiveness
for decades to come.

Therefore, President-elect Trump’s willingness to publicly call out this
$1.5 trillion program is good news. However, getting involved in
negotiating a better price on incomplete, crippled fighters will not save
taxpayers any money in the long run — because the prices being negotiated
between Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon are prices designed to fool the
public about the F-35’s true costs. Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon both
know that any “discount” or price reduction negotiated in public will
quickly be made up on the back-end, where a plethora of upgrades, airframe
life-extension programs, and uber-expensive spare-parts purchases over the
life of the program will easily generate over $200 million for each plane
delivered. Consequently, if Trump expends presidential prestige to save a
few percent off the top, it won’t solve the underlying problem. Instead, he
will only validate a failed program that is a big part of the swamp he is
eager to drain as part of his plan to restore our depleted military.

In place of counter-productive price negotiations, within hours of taking
office President Donald Trump could use the extraordinary influence of
@realDonaldTrump to tweet 127 power-packed characters: “20 years and the
F-35 is still not working. Program a mess. Plane a mess. Time to stop
buying F-35s! New, better planes needed!”

More than any other single action, this tweet would signal that a new
sheriff is in town — a sheriff committed to taking on the entrenched
special interests that have corrupted the Pentagon.

TWENTY YEARS OF FAILURE

Just as Donald Trump turned out to be 100 percent correct about the
bloated, $4 billion Air Force One program, he would be justified in calling
foul on Marine Corps and Air Force claims that their F-35s have achieved
Initial Operating Capability (IOC). Contrary to recent statements made by
the executive officer of the F-35 program, Lieutenant General Chris Bogdan,
the F-35 is not back on track. It’s time to face the facts: Because of
fatal mistakes made during the conceptual design process well over 20 years
ago, the F-35 will forever be crippled by intractable weight and heat
issues that ensure that the program will never deliver a reliable,
cost-effective fighter.

Further evidence of this was revealed on Wednesday, when Inside Defense
exposed the fact that the Navy’s F-35C model has design defects that can
cause pilots to suffer disorientation and severe pain when undergoing
carrier catapult launches. As it stands, Navy pilots have determined the
F-35C is not “operationally suitable” for carrier launches. New design
changes to the F-35C will be required that could take years — and even our
carriers may need to be modified to fix the problem. This issue has been
known about for years, but until now it has been concealed from the public.

So, instead of an on-track program, what we have is a pattern of deceptive
statements and actions designed to create the illusion that the F-35
program is on track. The goal of this deception is to provide the political
cover necessary to allow the F-35’s supporters in Congress to continue to
fund the purchase of hundreds of incomplete, combat-incapable planes — each
of which will require many years and many tens of millions of dollars of
structural repairs, structural rework, systems-stability and functionality
fixes, engine modifications and retrofits, and more. And that is just to
get the planes to where they should have been when we took initial
delivery. Never before have we seen a warplane granted so many waivers and
reductions in key performance standards. Never before have we taken
delivery of so many planes so far from being complete and so far from being
ready for combat.

The F-35’s severe, ongoing problems with weight have resulted in
indefensible decisions affecting plane safety, reliability, and durability
— the most egregious example being the removal of hundreds of pounds of
equipment designed to keep pilots from dying in fiery explosions. Some of
the safety equipment removed includes the fuel tank’s ballistic liner,
critical fueldraulic fuses, the flammable coolant shut-off valve, and the
dry bay fire-extinguishing unit. The unprecedented and pervasive presence
of flammable hydraulic fluid, flammable coolants, and fuel throughout the
plane makes the F-35 a flying tinderbox. But without these risky
weight-reduction measures, the F-35 will not be able to meet even its
bare-minimum contractually mandated range goals. It should be unacceptable
to ask American pilots to fly these fighters.

Other bad design decisions executed in the name of saving weight have
focused on reducing the airframe’s weight. For example, load-bearing
structural bulkheads originally supposed to be made from fatigue-resistant
titanium were swapped out with fatigue-prone aluminum bulkheads. Now, we
have aluminum bulkheads suffering stress-induced fatigue cracks that will
require heavier bulkheads in future F-35s and weighty retrofit kits for
those that have already been built.

Unfortunately, cracked bulkheads are not the only casualty of the weight
pogrom. The Department of Operational Testing and Evaluation (DOT&E), which
answers to the secretary of defense, has issued reports that are full of
descriptions of cracks in engine parts, failed turbine blisks, cracks in
the floor, root-rib cracks, and the like. In 2004, the F-35’s F135 engine
was also subjected to an extreme weight-reduction program. Not
coincidentally, according to an April 2015 Government Accountability Office
report, it has very poor reliability — “less than half of where it should
be.”



THE PENTAGON’S SUGAR-COATED ASSESSMENTS

Complementing the extreme, unsustainable weight-reduction efforts have been
a raft of deceptive statements designed to fool the public as to the true
state of the program. The most blatantly deceptive statements are the
declarations by the Marine Corps and Air Force that their variants — the
F-34B and the F-35A, respectively — have achieved Initial Operating
Capability (IOC). In fact, they have not.

Moreover, it is shocking that best-practices protocols of the rigorous
operational testing followed by every major fighter program — including the
F-15, the F-14, the F-18, the A-10, the F-16, the A-6, the F-4, and even
the F-22 — were ignored. That Congress continues to let the service chiefs
and Lockheed Martin get away with their fictional IOC declarations is
another sign that congressional obeisance to Lockheed Martin has destroyed
its ability to provide effective oversight of our country’s defense.

Despite the thoroughly discredited set of exercises the Marines tried to
pass off as “operational testing” in May 2015, no service has been so
foolish as to complete the standard Initial Operational Testing &
Evaluation (IOT&E). In fact, the services accidentally forgot to order the
equipment that would allow them to even attempt the IOT&E. They understand
that going through the IOT&E could kill the program. Instead, the plan
appears to be to continue to avoid IOT&E like the plague for as long as
possible, while continuing to buy as many F-35s as possible.

Further evidence of a what a sham the Air Force and Marine Corps IOC
declarations are is revealed in a DOT&E memo. In it, we find that on the
battlefield F-35s are not an asset. In fact, America’s new fighters will
actually have to be protected in combat. Because of numerous performance
deficiencies and limited weapons capacity, the so-called operationally
capable F-35 will need support to locate and avoid threats, acquire
targets, and engage enemy aircraft. Unresolved deficiencies in sensor
fusion, electronic warfare, and weapons employment continue to result in
ambiguous threat displays, limited ability to effectively respond to
threats, and, in some cases, a requirement for off-board sources to provide
accurate coordinates for precision attack. In short, the F-35 — a flying
tinderbox — will need to be nursemaided by other aircraft that are actually
combat capable.

An August 9, 2016, DOT&E memo put the nail in the coffin with this damning
statement: “In fact, the [F-35] program is actually not on a path toward
success, but instead is on a path toward failing to deliver the full Block
3F capabilities [i.e., full combat capabilities].”

This statement distills to just a few words what independent airpower
analysts and all the DOT&E reports have been trying to tell us in gory
detail — the F-35 is a failing program and the IOC being touted by the Air
Force and Marines is nothing more than PR puffery designed to please
Congress and the big defense contractors, the future employers of a whole
lot of generals and admirals.

A PLANE SO ADVANCED, IT’S OBSOLETE

After two decades, the F-35 absolutely, positively has not achieved Initial
Operating Capability. By contrast, both the F-15 and the F-16 achieved IOC
in eight years or less — with full production following quickly. But
falsely declaring IOC is only the tip of the iceberg of what Lockheed
Martin and its supporters in the military have done to prop up a program
that by any reasonable measure is already a failure. Indeed, it has become
standard operating procedure for the F-35’s flaws and problems to be kicked
down the road to be fixed in the future.

In order to protect the F-35 from cancellation, the Pentagon has lowered
key performance requirements and helped Lockheed cheat so that it could
continue the charade that the F-35 will actually meet its bare-minimum
threshold ranges. And embarrassing, inexcusable design mistakes continue,
such as the F-35B not being able to carry the number of bombs it was
supposed to.

Because the Joint Strike Fighter’s development has been going on for over
20 years, much of its shiny new tech that looked so neat two decades ago is
now old tech. One victim of old age is the Distributed Aperture System —
the hard-wired design of which means that the F-35 is stuck with older
infrared sensors with vastly inferior resolution to what is available
today. Likewise, the F-35’s Electro-Optical Targeting Sensor is already
obsolete and is ten years behind those being used by our F-16s and A-10s.
Upgrading it will be difficult and costly.

After some 15 years of development, the F-35’s aging, increasingly
unsupportable Integrated Core Processor computer system needed upgrading.
Because of schedule pressures and the imperative to maintain the illusion
of progress, the decision was made to port 20 million lines of buggy,
immature code to the new architecture and then use that code as the base
for coding new significant functionality. This resulted in severe, ongoing
problems with the F-35’s avionics, its sensor fusion, and other unresolved
deficiencies. Many of these deficiencies are not scheduled to be corrected
until 2021.

Given all the above, how are we to interpret the announcement that a few
combat-incapable, unreliable, extremely expensive to maintain F-35s are
scheduled to be deployed to Europe later this year to help deter Russian
aggression? Rest assured, Vladimir Putin is not impressed — and neither
should we be. But even after many more years and many more billions of
dollars, we still won’t have cause to be impressed. That’s because of the
rapid proliferation of new anti-stealth radars by peer competitors such as
Russia and China, meaning the F-35 won’t be able to penetrate deep into
peer competitors’ air space to strike at critical targets as its supporters
claimed it would be able to do.

To make matters worse, the published $32,000-per-flying-hour cost is a
made-up number; its real cost per flying hour will likely be closer to the
$62,000 of the much less complex F-22. Its truly dismal
sustained-sortie-generation rate of one sortie (mission) every three or
four days means that, as is the case with our F-22 pilots, F-35 pilots will
only get a fraction of the 30 to 40 hours of stick-time (actual flying
time) per month necessary to gain and maintain fighter-combat mastery. The
chunky F-35 will find itself facing faster, more agile, longer-range
fighters carrying four times as many missiles. In going up against these
planes — fighters such as the Russian SU-35S — our F-35 will find itself at
a deadly disadvantage, despite its stealth.

IT TAKES A PRESIDENT

But enough about missiles and sorties, back to the cost question. Since
most of the real costs will occur after U.S. taxpayers take delivery, the
drama being played out in the media between Lockheed and the Pentagon is no
more than political theater. What we really have is a briar-patch exercise:
“Oh, you mean Mr. Pentagon! Please don’t force me to sell you these shiny
new planes for a few percent less than we wanted!” cries Lockheed, knowing
full well that each F-35 delivered will allow them to mainline taxpayer
dollars for decades to come.

The real goal is to obscure the true cost of the program for as long as
possible from taxpayers while pumping out as many revenue-producing
airframes as fast as possible — knowing that even Congress may at some
point become too embarrassed to continue to support the program.

So why, after 20 years, are we still dumping money into this plane? When
asked this question, Ron Kollmansberger, an aerospace-engineering manager
with decades of experience working on the F-15, the F-4, the A-10, and
the CH-53E, had this simple answer: “This is a jobs program, not an
airplane program.”

Ron’s answer cuts right to the heart of the matter. If not for its
super-sized pork-barrel politics and a military-procurement culture that
has gotten far too cozy with the defense industry to maintain any
objectivity, the F-35 would be canceled in a heartbeat. Sure, there are a
few F-35 critics in Congress, but no individual representative or senator
has the clout to lead a successful charge against the F-35. Taking down the
F-35 takes a president.

Starting on January 20, 2017, President Trump will be under the gun to get
as much done as quickly as possible. While he won’t be able to restore our
depleted military on Day One, he can send a strong message that restoring
our military is more than just about repealing defense sequestration and
spending more money — it’s about being smart in how we spend our money.

The F-35 is irredeemable. Contrary to the conventional wisdom on the Hill
and at the Pentagon, there are practical solutions that can replace the
failed Joint Strike Fighter project quickly while creating tens of
thousands of jobs and filling America’s national-security needs (more about
that in my next article). That said, no stronger message about reforming
our broken defense-procurement process can be sent than by canceling the
dumbest fighter program ever conceived.



Mr. President, please cancel the F-35.


===

Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
(202) 448-2898 x1 <(202)%20448-2898>
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