The dropping dollar would make all manufacturing sectors viable in this country. However it would also make our debt blow-up out of control too. The world would be feasting on free products, because we would owe so much money, that would be the only way to pay it off — with slavery.

Lockheed has to start saying “NO”. “NO” to changes in the requirements which caused the redesign that led to many of the schedule overruns. “NO” to trying to speed up critical software development especially when there is a lawsuit, by former employees, stating the software does not comply with DoD standards. Lockheed Martin needs to estimate better and do a better job in risk management. Maybe if Lockheed had accurate and valid historical data they could make better estimations. They won’t since they try to hide some of the defects from the DoD as stated in the lawsuit. The Military needs to ask for more reasonable requirements and stop changing them. DoD projects are tough to estimate due to their length, technology, and dynamically changing threats.

The answer is better requirement traceability, avoiding requirement creep, controlling customer’s expectations, reasonable technology goals, fixed contracts, better risk management, oversight and auditing by a 3rd party embedded within development teams, and have shorter development to production cycle while implementing more enhancements/upgrades later after production.

As far as CAS goes, the A-10C is still king, we should keep as many of these as possible in service.

Did any Harrier ever deploy to the woods in combat??

The F-35’s bloat — in cost, leaden weight, and mindless complexity — guarantees failure. It will shrink our air forces at increased cost, rot their ability to prevail in the air and support our ground forces, and will needlessly spill the blood of far too many of our pilots.

We have to take the first steps to better understand the extent of the F-35 disaster and to reverse the continuing decay in our air forces.

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Are these all the “teething problems” you have found, Mr. Scott, or are there more?

As a “close air support” ground-attack aircraft to help US troops engaged in combat, the F-35 is too fast to identify the targets it is shooting at; too delicate and flammable to withstand ground fire, and too short-legged to loiter usefully over embattled US ground units for sustained periods. It is a giant step backward from the current A-10.

…

This is the same vision that President Obama expressed to the VFW in Phoenix last August when he said he wanted to stop “the special interests and their exotic projects that are years behind schedule and billions over budget”. Clearly, no one has told the President that the F-35 is a leading poster child for those evils.

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For the part of the inventory that most urgently needs immediate expansion, the A-10 and the close support mission, hundreds of airframes now sitting in the “boneyard” can and should be refurbished – something that can be done at extraordinarily modest cost.

(Continued)

If the latest iteration of “beyond visual range” turns out to be yet another chimera, the F-35 will have to operate as a close-in dogfighter, but in that regime it is a dog. If one accepts every aerodynamic promise DOD currently makes for it, the F-35 will be overweight and underpowered.

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The F-35 is, in fact, considerably less maneuverable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105 “Lead Sled”, a fighter that proved helpless in dogfights against MiGs over North Vietnam. (A chilling note: Most of the Air Force’s fleet of F-105s was lost in four years of bombing; one hundred pilots were lost in just six months.)
Nor is the F-35 a first class bomber for all that cost: in its stealthy mode it carries only a 4,000 pound payload, one third the 12,000 pounds carried by the “Lead Sled”.

(Continued)

As a fighter, the F-35 depends on a technological fantasy. Having failed to develop in the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s an effective (and reliable) radar-based technology to shoot down enemy (not friendly) aircraft “beyond visual range”, the Air Force is trying yet again with the F-35, like the F-22 before it. Both have the added development of “stealth” (less detectability against some radars at some angles), but that new “high tech” feature and the long range radar have imposed design penalties that compromised the aircraft with not just high cost but also weight, drag, complexity, and vulnerabilities. The few times this technology has been tried in real air combat in the past decade, it has been successful less than half the time, and that has been against incompetent and/or primitively equipped pilots from Iraq and Serbia.

(Continued)

In an age when the Air Force budget looks to increase only marginally, if at all, while simultaneously planning to buy several other major aircraft (new aerial tankers, new transports, new heavy bombers, and new helicopters), the plan to distend the fighter-bomber budget is a pipe dream.

While most, but not all, in the Pentagon and Congress remain oblivious to the unaffordability of the F-35, some of its foreign buyers are becoming horrified. Despite their governments’ investment of hundreds of millions, parliamentarians and analysts in Australia, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands are expressing real concerns. The F-35’s single largest international partner is the United Kingdom. There, the Royal Navy and Air Force have just decided to reduce their F-35 buy from 138 aircraft to 50. The reason: “We are waking up to the fact that all those planes are unaffordable.”

(Continued)

With F-35 flight testing barely three percent complete, new problems – and big new costs – are sure to emerge. Worse, only 17 percent of the aircraft’s characteristics will be validated by flight testing by the time the Pentagon has signed contracts for more than 500 aircraft. Operational squadron pilots will have the thrill of discovering the remaining glitches, in training or in combat. No one should be surprised if the final F-35 total program unit cost reaches $200 million per aircraft after all the fixes are paid for.

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The latest version of the F-16, heavily laden with complex electronics and other expensive modifications, costs about $60 million, twice its original price – in today’s dollars. The A-10, which the F-35 will also replace, cost about $15 million in today’s dollars. Thus, to replace the almost 4.000 F-16s and A-10s built with just over 1,700 F-35s, the Air Force will have to pay far more to buy less than half as many airplanes.

(Continued)

A financial disaster? Impossible.

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… last August, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates assured us that the F-35 will be “less than half the price … of the F-22.”

Technically, Gates is right – for now.

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However, F-35 unit cost has barely begun to will climb. In 2001, the Pentagon had planned to buy 2,866 aircraft for $226.5 billion – $79 million per airplane. In 2007, that unit cost increased to $122 million, thanks to more cost and fewer airplanes being planned.

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…the F-35 program will cost up to $15 billion more, and it will be delivered about two years late, and there are rumors the “Joint Estimating Team” ‘s (JET’s) findings may even be worse.

(Continued)

How pathetic.

Even sadder than Lockheed’s desperate grasp for reasons to do nothing to fix the self-dismembering F-35 program is the fact that the future of Western combat aviation relies on it. The 2.456 models of it on order for the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps will ultimately replace almost all tactical aircraft now in our inventory, except for the F-22, for which production beyond 187 aircraft was cancelled this past summer. Major allies, including Britain and much of the rest of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Israel have all made commitments to buy the aircraft.

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Unfortunately, the F-35 is unaffordable, and it is a technological kluge that will be less effective than airplanes it replaces. It will undo our air forces and our allies’, not help them.

Few agree now, but in time the finger pointing will start. That’s when someone will have to pick up the pieces to give our pilots a war winning aircraft. The road between here and there will be neither smooth, pretty, nor short, but it is time to take the first step.

(Continued)

THE J.S.F. STARTS TO LOSE THE U.S. MEDIA

The wall of lies and delusions that surrounds the J.S.F. project is starting to crumble apace in Washington D.C. .

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Meanwhile, in the real world, the F-35 program continues to fall apart. The latest – but hardly last – shoe to drop is a new internal analysis (breathlessly refuted by Lockheed) that the cost growth stage for this airplane is just beginning.

Lockheed’s refutation of the Joint Estimating Team (JET) analysis of cost growth and delays in the F-35 program borders on the hilarious: New computer aided design, simulation, and desk studies (un-validated by empirical testing) make cost growth in truly modern defense technology a thing of the past, they assert. Indeed, just like in DDG-1000, LCS, FCS, VH-71, etc., etc., etc…..

(Continued)

To the poster Mr. Anthony Scott:

You wrote: “Teething troubles, always a pain to get right sometimes!”

I’m not sure that both the F-22 and the F-35 just need to iron out some final “teething problems” : It rather looks to me as if no molecule in their whole D.N.A. strand made sense!

There is a FORMIDABLE , synthesizing November 11, 2009 article about the F-35 on the Internet, the second one I found with this quality. It happens to be Australian, too. Since there is a size limit for our posts on “DoD Buzz”, and – I suspect – for uninterrupted sequences of posts too, I don’t dare to copy/paste it even in several small parts onto here. Instead, I’m going to copy/paste just some excerpts of it. I recommend you very much to read the whole article yourself:

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2009/11/1...

So, if my sequence of 9 ( N-I-N-E ) further posts below suddenly gets cut off, you know why…

(Continued)