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Updated: Sun Aug 29 16:43:38 UTC 2010
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APA NOTAMS ISSN 1836-7135
F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program: Collapse
is a “When” Question, not an “If” Question
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Air Power
Australia - Australia's Independent Defence Think Tank
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Air Power Australia NOTAM
17th August,
2009
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Dr Carlo Kopp,
SMAIAA, MIEEE, PEng,
Head of Capability Analysis, Air Power Australia
Peter Goon, BEng (Mech), FTE
(USNTPS),
Head of Test and Evaluation, Air Power
Australia
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| Contacts: |
Peter
Goon
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Carlo
Kopp |
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Mob:
0419-806-476 |
Mob:
0437-478-224 |
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F-35B SDD test vehicle BF-01 (US DoD
image).
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The
F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program
has been in serious difficulty for some time, showing all of the
textbook symptoms of a failed project. Like all failed projects
it
will eventually collapse, the question is now simply one of when it
will collapse, rather than if it will collapse.
The F-35 has been on political life support for the last four years,
with the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and Pentagon
acquisition bureaucrats investing much effort in convincing the White
House, Congress and participant Allied nations that the project is an
icon of virtue in the current pantheon of failed major acquisitions.
While former procurement Czar John Young went as far as to criticise
the program’s prior management history, he was not prepared to admit
the obvious, which is that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter now qualifies
in all key respects as what project management professionals term a
“non-executable project”[i].
The recommendation in the OSD 2010 budget proposal to accelerate
production of the F-35 flies in the face of mountains of publicly
available evidence of project failure, and is contrary in every respect
to all substantive risk management protocols and standards.
The viability of any project is determined by its ability to deliver
utility to its users, and its ability to meet cost and delivery
schedule targets[ii].
The Joint Strike Fighter Program continues to fall short on each and
every one of these cardinal measures and, thus, will fail to deliver
even on the most fundamental of requirements.
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Fighter Pilot’s Holy Grail:
“Having
the
capability to engage, disengage and re-engage, at will, throughout the
whole air combat continuum, and being able to overwhelm opponents,
whether airborne or surface based, while staying outside their kill
envelopes or evading whatever is thrown at you.” |
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The utility question is central to any project as it is the “value”
component of the “value for money” equation.
In a contemporary fighter aircraft “utility” is measured by its
survivability against current and future threats, and if the fighter
survives, then by how much damage it can do to a credible opponent.
When the Joint Strike Fighter was first defined, the design objectives
were simple – to develop and deploy a multi-service strike fighter with
the capability to interdict an opponent’s battlefield forces, and to
provide precision close air support for friendly troops on the
battlefield. The aircraft’s basic definition, and all of the Key
Performance Parameters (KPPs) were cast into concrete at this
stage. Importantly, a battlefield interdictor has fundamentally
different capability needs to high end fighters that must be able to
penetrate heavily defended airspace, and shoot down opposing high
performance fighters. The threat capabilities against which the JSF’s
KPPs were devised were 1990s era battlefield threats, with the stated
assumption that any higher-level threats would be dealt with by the
much more capable F-22 – now labelled by the Administration as
“obsolete”.
The world today is not what it was over a decade ago, when the key
decisions, which shaped today’s F-35, were made in the vacuum created
by the “peace dividend” driven deskilling of the 1990s. Advanced long
range Surface to Air Missile (SAM) systems and fighters, both much more
capable than those envisaged when the F-35 requirement was defined,
have been developed, built and proliferated globally.
There is little comfort to be had when the JSF community publicly
admits that its air combat simulations were based on Russian Sukhoi
Flanker fighter variants designed nearly two decades ago, and
assumptions
about opposing air combat doctrine which ceased to be true over a
decade ago. When the JSF community assert that they can defeat current
long range SAMs by using AESA radar jamming, it is an admission that
the aircraft’s stealth was not good enough in the first place, an
inevitability as contemporary SAM system radars are now much more
powerful – a situation that is worsening and favouring traditional
opponents as well as those who purchase such capabilities.
The inability of the F-35 to survive against the advanced threats of
today means that it will be unable to survive against the most common
threats of tomorrow. If it cannot survive in combat, it cannot do its
intended job of attacking enemy ground targets, and its “utility” is at
best poor, and at worst, less than zero as it continues to consume
resources that would be much better used elsewhere.
Recently, the idea has emerged that the F-35 is needed to replace worn
out Cold War era fighters – the suggestion implied is that “utility” be
measured in terms of replacing old, worn out equipment with new,
regardless of combat effect. If the latter were a valid argument, which
it is not, then why is the US sinking many tens of billions of dollars
into developing a new, risk-laden design when cheaper existing Cold War
era designs remain in production?
The view in some circles is that the sole utility of the F-35 lies in
protecting the reputations of political and bureaucratic players
involved in promoting the program, and creating jobs for those involved
in the program. This is the “corporate welfare” or “rent seeking” model
of defence program utility, which has crippled the EU defence industry
over recent decades, with nonviable programs displacing the viable.
The F-35’s inability to meet intended cost and delivery schedule
targets shows a consistent and unbroken trend, since the beginning of
this program, of incrementally increasing costs and incrementally
increasing delays. Critical risk items have been repeatedly and
consistently shifted out of the SDD development phase, into the
subsequent production phases, thus magnifying those risks and
increasing the cost to correct them downstream, while blurring the line
between fact and fiction.
The long running series of GAO (Government Accountability Office)
reports, the SARs (Selected Acquisition Reports) and, most recently,
the JET (Joint Estimates Team) report, all paint a consistent and
coherent picture of a program deeply mired in basic engineering,
project management and governance problems, none of which have been
addressed in any fundamental, let alone substantive, fashion. All of
these reported problems have been consistently avoided in a fog of
effusive public relations offensives targeting Congress, Allied nations
and the public.
The use of public relations rhetoric rather than rigorous engineering
and project management measures to deal with technical and schedule
problems, especially by F-35 program management and procurement
bureaucrats, shows little appreciation of the severity of these
problems. It also shows a complete preoccupation with preserving the
flow of funding rather than fixing deeply embedded capability, project
management and governance problems.
There is much existing project management literature, which describes
the symptoms of failed or failing projects. Even more interesting is
the literature that describes the “continuation of non-viable
projects”, that is, failed projects that have been kept alive despite
their inability to deliver a viable product to a credible timeline, and
at reasonable cost.
Characteristics identified with previous nonviable projects on “life
support” include (cited verbatim)[iii]:
- Perceived lack of alternatives to the end product;
- Preoccupation with short term project management problems;
- Lack of awareness of changes or evolution in the end user
environment (needs);
- Lack of awareness of technological evolution and changes in
the end user environment (means);
- Self deception by managers, planners or end users, or any
or all of these groups;
- Overinvestment in organisational or public politics
required to sustain the project;
- Fear of mistakes being exposed to scrutiny, also fear of
public embarrassment;
- Emotional attachment to the product, the project, or
marketing propaganda for the product.
It takes very little effort to find multiple and repeated examples of
each of these eight characteristics in public statements made about the
F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program.
Public statements made by program officials since 2003 also provide
proof positive that within the program office, the imperative to keep
the program alive has displaced all other imperatives.
Inevitably, at some point in the near future, the OSD will no
longer be able to protect this dysfunctional program from detailed
Congressional scrutiny, or from legislative scrutiny by participant
nations. To date, the OSD has been able to shield the Joint Strike
Fighter program by every means at its disposal to maintain the flow of
funds required to keep it alive.
Even if the OSD chooses to persist in its established policy of
protecting the Joint Strike Fighter program through public relations
and political coercion of critics and doubters, it may not be able to
avoid a loss of confidence by participating nations and the US armed
services as the project continues to slide in delivery schedules,
continues to creep upward in Unit Procurement Costs, and continues to
see promised critical capabilities shifted into the distant future as
“block upgrades”. Sooner or later, the mismatches between promises and
expectations versus material reality will become obvious even to those
in the political stratosphere, whose expertise lies in very different
areas.
It is therefore only a matter
of time before the penny drops, and the reality that the Joint Strike
Fighter program is a failed project, sustained artificially by the OSD,
becomes obvious to all observers.
What happens then? The US will
have to do what it should have done years ago, which is to kill the
F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, perform a critical and unbiased forward
looking appraisal of its fighter recapitalisation strategy, and launch
more realistic fleet replacement programs for the participant services.
Until this happens, we will
continue to see vast quantities of scarce taxpayer’s funds squandered
on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, for no purpose other than seemingly
to keep this disastrous program alive. In the meantime, the
Services will have to continue to make do with reducing numbers of
rapidly tiring and steadily outclassed aircraft.
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Air
Force Association Threats
to Air Supremacy Presentation:
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Endnotes:
[i]
Note: this term has been used previously in relation to the JSF and,
most recently, in the Augustine Report on the manned space program.
[ii] David Cleland and Lewis Ireland, Project
Management: Strategic Design and Implementation, 3rd Ed,
McGraw-Hill, 2008.
[iii] FIT2002
Project Management, SIG Unit Curriculum Definition, Monash
University, November, 2005.
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Related
Reading:
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© 2009, Carlo Kopp and Peter Goon
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Air
Power Australia Website - http://www.ausairpower.net/
Air Power Australia Research and
Analysis - http://www.ausairpower.net/research.html
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