Home » Air » Venlet Denies F136 Support

Venlet Denies F136 Support

By Colin Clark Monday, November 29th, 2010 5:15 pm
Posted in Air, International, Policy, Rumors

The head of the Joint Strike Fighter program, who was portrayed in a letter by senior House defense lawmakers as voicing support for the F136 second engine, has issued a denial. While he supports the generic idea of competition, Vice Adm. David Venlet supports Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ position opposing the F136.

Here’s what a Pentagon spokesman sent in an email: “The letter does not correctly convey Vice Admiral Venlet’s remarks to the committee. Admiral Venlet made it clear when he briefed HAC-D, that he supports the Secretary of Defense position on the extra engine. He made it clear no one can deny benefits from competition for government equipment, yet he agrees with the analysis that spending more money on an additional engine diverts limited modernization funds from other important Defense priorities.”

News that Venlet apparently supported the F136 sent ripples through the defense community given the Obama administration’s patent and repeatedly stated opposition to the program. Word of his position came from a letter signed by senior defense lawmakers. The key statement in the letter: “As you are well aware from testimony to the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Secretary Gates’ most senior military advisory and acquisition official on the F-35 program, [Vice] Admiral David Venlet, has stated that he believes in competition in the F-35 engine program.”

The wording was very, very careful and, apparently, disingenuous. It may show just how far lawmakers are willing to go in support of the F136. I hear that senior DoD officials have reassured Venlet that all is well since he, in fact, supports Gates’ and the administration’s position.

We’ve contacted the Hill asking for comment. Nothing yet.

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	Cocidius November 29th, 2010 at 8:14 pm Would anyone in their right mind admit in pubic that they have a difference of opinion with Mr. Gates considering the long list of uniforms sacrificed at the alter by our Secretary of Defense since taking office? Vice Admiral Venlet has been given the unenviable task of cleaning up the most expensive and dysfunctional fighter program in history. Yet he still has to report to his military superiors and the OSD who continue to shelter and support the F-35 in spite of the abysmal performance of the JSF Program. The one-liner from an actor in a long dead TV show seems to best describe Admiral Venlet’s present situation, “I pity the fool”.
	RunningBear November 29th, 2010 at 8:25 pm Cocidius, Admiral Venlet is far from anyone’s fool. Suffer him, not. I agree with your assessment of his tasks, but differ in my opinion of the system design development of the program. The F-35 A & C are progressing well and I anticipate that the B model will “catch up soon”. Irregardless of differences, the program will progress to a successful conclusion.
	Cocidius November 29th, 2010 at 10:34 pm RunningBear: Admiral Venlet is not a fool I agree, yet he certainly is in quite a bad position, basically hired to fix an unrepairable fighter program. In response to you assertion that this the JSF is progressing well, I would refer you to the recent flight of an F-35B at Block I. Looking way back to the original SDD, the first test flight at Block I should have happened in 2002–2003! There is NOTHING in this program going according to schedule, and that’s been the case literally from day one. The F-35B continues to be hampered by premature parts wear, and now the latest shoe to drop is the rear bulkhead cracks discovered in stress testing. With the aforementioned continuing technical problems, and the UK dropping the STOVL variant altogether the F-35B is doomed. With the recent LRIP-IV pricing the JSF is now more then double the original cost projections putting it now out of the market price point for many of the national partners (the nations of the unwilling). The JSF program is a house of cards, and when it falls US military aerospace will be damaged for years.
	Henry J Cobb November 30th, 2010 at 1:12 am When they do throw the B under the bus, I pray that it’s in exchange for speeding up supercarrier builds to at least one every four years. (Also in exchange for downgrading Americas to San Antonios.)
	Oblat November 30th, 2010 at 4:46 am Yep waste the money on a different obsolete weapons system.
	Oblat November 30th, 2010 at 4:48 am RunningBear is mistaking the pigs flying past his window with the F25 test program. The only progression to a successful conclusion to the F35 would be cancellation.
	Willie November 30th, 2010 at 9:15 am Yep. The USS GEORGE WASHINGTON sure is displaying her obsolescence in the Yellow Sea right now.
	@Earlydawn November 30th, 2010 at 10:23 am What should we spend it on?
	willeger November 30th, 2010 at 12:29 pm The old SR71 had al the part that work way pass Mach 3 or mach 4. Why don’t they use some of those parts for the F35 which will never out fly the older SR71. I know the SR71 was not a jet fighter but it could out fly and out run any missile fired at it. I think they should look some of the part use in the SR71 and use they for the F35 and may be cut some cost.
	JKing November 30th, 2010 at 12:35 pm “Irregardless” is not a word. It undermines the content of your post.
	mike j November 30th, 2010 at 1:04 pm His time frame may be off, so instead let’s go with LockMart’s own: - STOVL first flight early 2006, and IOC should have been this year. Whoops. Apparently the people taking our money to build this thing don’t have a clue about what goes into these concepts, either.
	Navyair November 30th, 2010 at 1:05 pm Willeger, Probably for the same reason they don’t put ICBM rocket motors in shoulder fired missles. Different capabilities, different missions, and sticking 1950’s parts/maintenance capabilities into a 2000 era jet isn’t smart. (Not to mention that huge differences in aircraft size, fuel capacity, etc. would not allow it without a complete redesign)
	Oblat November 30th, 2010 at 1:40 pm What mike wants to say is that for 135+ million each you get actuator technology that is almost as good as what you can get off the shelf commercially. Lets thank god they didn’t try to push the envelope.
	Guest November 30th, 2010 at 2:15 pm Oblat– Sounds like you are volunteering? i’m sure we can get you a row boat and a free ride to the Yellow Sea if you would like to prove it?
	Cocidius November 30th, 2010 at 10:33 pm Really? Take a look below at the APA website and look closely at the 2001 SDD and the 2003 SDD documents posted there. Yes, these are the real thing, and yes the F-35 is that far behind schedule. I’ll leave it to you to determine who is clueless in this conversation… http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-2008–03.html
	William C. November 30th, 2010 at 11:32 pm What you see there is the norm for aircraft development programs these days, IIRC the F-22 was supposed to enter service in the late 1990s. Raging at the F-35 doesn’t do a thing to fix the problem I’m afraid. Part of it seems to be due to overly optimistic testing schedules but there are factors beyond that. It seems the software side of things is causing more headaches than the hardware (aircraft) itself.
	elgatoso December 1st, 2010 at 12:46 am Oh Good!!! If APA said that should be real!!! A couple of obscure Australians are more Qualified that the company that made the U-2 and the SR-71 .(sarcasm intended)
	Cocidius December 1st, 2010 at 1:13 am Yes, a couple of Aussies that predicted years ago the JSF Program would make us the laughing stock of the military aerospace world, and it has. Just for the record, the people that made the U-2 and the SR-71 under the direction of the famous Clarance “Kelly” Johnson are long ago gone cowboy. And Kelly is certainly rolling in his grave at the Ponzi scheme that his company created with the F-35.
	mike j December 1st, 2010 at 1:20 am Weak. The SDD slides are not from APA, that’s all LockMart. The JSF time line has been slipping to the right badly from day 1.
	mike j December 1st, 2010 at 2:29 am Did you happen to catch that Air & Space video a couple months back of the Oxcart/ A-12 discussion panel? Long, but great stuff therein. Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT4uwr_eJnY One real highlight at about 21:30. Speaker is Robert Murphy, Industrial Manager on the A-12. “To give you an example, in a normal operating environment, the North American B-1 had five thousand engineers! I don’t know how the hell you coordinate five thousand engineers…” ( The Oxcart/ A-12 project only ever had 100 to 125 engineers. ) The Skunk Works invented EVERYTHING on the A-12, including the equipment and techniques to build the airplane. They got the contract on 26 Jan, 1960 and first flight was 26 Apr, 1962 with the J75 powerplant. The J58 was integrated and the aircraft exceeded Mach 3 in early 1963.
	William C. December 1st, 2010 at 11:06 am The same world still working on incorporating an AESA radar and ground attack capabilites into the Typhoon? Or the same French who can’t sell a Rafale to anybody? Or the Indians and their Tejas fighter that doesn’t meet any requirements? Give me a break. Those Aussies predicted nothing. Their attacks on the F-35 were based on falsehoods regarding the aircraft’s performance. Once the program ran into development trouble they jumped on the bandwagon like everybody else. Their alternatives like modernized F-111s, a navalized F-22 that wouldn’t even be able to operate off a carrier safely, aren’t realistic.
	Algae December 1st, 2010 at 1:58 pm William C: Having extensively read the ausairpower site, I haven’t seen any reference to a “navalized F-22″. Most of the articles I saw referred to making the F-22 available for export as the F-35 is not capable of carrying out most of the missions required to replace thier F-18/F-111 fleet; which also applies to Canada’s F-18s as well. If you have the reference I would greatly appreciate reading it.
	William C. December 1st, 2010 at 2:27 pm I may be able to dig it up for you, but perhaps somebody took it down when they realised it would not be able to safely operate from a carrier. They called it the F/A-22N or something like that. Navaling the F-22 would require a significantly different aircraft, look at Lockheed’s NATF proposal. While the NATF did have different range and payload requirements than the ATF, both Lockheed’s and Northrop’s proposals were significantly different from the YF-22 and YF-23.
	DensityDuck December 1st, 2010 at 4:19 pm I love how everyone keeps using the SR-71 as this example of a program done right. The SR-71 met almost none of its primary requirements. It didn’t fit the mission profile at ALL, and that’s why they’re all slowly disintegrating in museums while the U-2 platform is still flying all over the world. Sure, it went fast; so did the X-15.
	mike j December 2nd, 2010 at 1:11 pm Care to back that up with a source, there, or is this just s***-stirring? Those aircraft were expensive to operate and logistically complicated. They had no real-time datalink til the very end. They were hamstrung by politics, and they arrived when satellites were becoming reliable (though not flexible). There is NO question about their performance. They were shot at, but never shot down, and they got some important intel for us when nothing else could. And that program took all of about 8 years from initial concept to fully operational Mach 3+ cruising recon jet, in the era of the slide rule.
	Charlotte December 2nd, 2010 at 6:09 pm William C and elgatoso, Good Grief, gentlemen!. Cocidius and others are right. If you bothered to actually read the material on the APA web site you would see that every lame brain cost, schedule and technical screw-up that has so far come to pass on the JSF Program was predicted by those Aussies you claim “predicted nothing”, and well before the gloss started coming off this Ponzi scheme. Next thing you will be telling us all is that the JSF is going to cost <drum roll> 60 million dollars per aircraft! If you are going to make comments on public forums like this, try to at least make them factual, honest and truthful, for your own sake. Otherwise, you only end up looking rather foolish in the eyes of those that do. BTW — you should study what APA has to say about what is known as “a total indifference to what is real”. It’s a hoot and goes a long way to explain why this JSF Program is such a mess, and likely can’t be saved.
	Jay Citizen December 2nd, 2010 at 6:34 pm Don’t make Oblat “refudiate” you! ]:)
	Jay Citizen December 2nd, 2010 at 6:55 pm That titanium dinosaur ?! The avionics on the SR-71 were from the ‘50s! You can’t turn a Saturn V into a Shuttle! What would be great is a more modular design — a more repairable design, so that you don’t end up replacing half the airframe because of cracks in the composite structure that need repairing. Doing that and still maintaining stealth & carrier capability would be a trick!
	Jay Citizen December 2nd, 2010 at 6:57 pm Not to mention, that one was pulled out of a museum not all that long ago for one last mission!
	Jay Citizen December 2nd, 2010 at 7:04 pm Somebody explain to me what the difference is between the regular fighter engine and the one used in the “swiveling butt-hole”. Aren’t we talking about three engines here? Of course no one is probably going to actually build the STOVOL now.
	Hitch Hiker December 2nd, 2010 at 8:15 pm I support the generic idea of hiring competent PMs while preserving the right to fire them periodically so that when the program eventually fails there won’t be anyone to blame.
	maddawg77 December 3rd, 2010 at 11:56 am Lets follow the bouncing ball, OK the F136 engine lost in the builders runoff and now congress wants to force the DOD to foot the bill for a second engine no wat no how. You lose and let it go.
	brian December 4th, 2010 at 10:16 am the pentagon said there was no competition. Do your research instead of spewing pratt lies.

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