Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Inside the Air Force
November 28, 2008
Pg. 1
USAF wants to kill second engine program, again
Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England has directed the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps to all but disregard a recent assessment by a highly esteemed team of military cost estimators that concludes the Joint Strike Fighter program requires two additional years of testing and development -- and a staggering $15 billion more than is currently programmed over the next six years.
Instead, the Pentagon’s No. 2 official -- after much high-level debate this fall over about how to proceed with funding the U.S. military’s largest weapon system procurement in history -- directed the three services in an Oct. 31 classified memo to add $480 million to bolster testing in fiscal year 2010, in a bid to support plans for accelerated F-35 production beginning in FY-15. Inside the Air Force reviewed an unclassified Pentagon summary of the previously unreported JSF investment decision.
“I think this is extremely prudent,” John Young, under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, said of the new way forward for JSF in an exclusive interview with Inside the Air Force.
Young said that Pentagon leaders were presented this fall with two widely divergent cost estimates for the JSF program -- one from the JSF Joint Program Office and another that was $15 billion higher from a team of “independent” military cost analysts called the Joint Estimate Team (JET).
“You had to place a bet on either the program office of the Joint Estimate Team and there was not enough data to decide where to place that bet,” Young said. “So what we did was the more prudent thing, which was fund about the JET [-recommended] amount in FY-10.”
At a high-level meeting earlier this month, Young said Pentagon leaders “debated heavily” a number of options for proceeding with JSF development, including funding the program to the higher JET estimate -- a step that would have required cutting or terminating other weapon systems development projects in order to find additional resources.
“There was some resistance in the Senior Leader Review Group,” a panel chaired by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “to go break a bunch of programs to go put money in the JSF program that we might not need on the chance the program would succeed,” he added.
Moreover, Young said, there was a view among Pentagon leaders that adopting the JET estimate at this juncture would be tantamount to setting low expectations for the program.
“If we put all this money in the budget, these things [the JET estimate] become self-fulfilling prophesies: We manage to spend the money,” Young said.
The decision to discount the recommendations of the JET across the six-year investment plan amounts to a high-stakes wager by Pentagon leaders that the incredibly complex development of the F-35 Lightning II program will avoid technical difficulties that typically increase the cost of major military aircraft development efforts.
The Pentagon plans to acquire 2,456 JSF aircraft for the Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force at a cost of $298.8 billion -- a sum that reflects cost growth of 44.4 percent over original estimates in 2002, according to the Defense Department’s most recent acquisition report to Congress.
If the optimistic assumptions underpinning JSF funding in the recently finalized fiscal year 2010 to 2015 program objective memorandum prove to be misplaced -- as congressional investigators also vigorously argued this spring -- the Obama administration will be left to figure out how to finance the increased cost of the Pentagon’s largest procurement project.
Such a decision is likely to involve politically difficult choices that Pentagon leaders entertained this fall, such as terminating other weapons programs to harvest cash for JSF, seeking additional funds from Congress, or converting future procurement funds to finance development, which would reduce the size of the planned JSF fleet.
Although a new administration from a new party is preparing to take power in January, Young said there was no political calculus in determining the way forward for JSF.
“Absolutely nobody is kicking the can to the next administration,” he said. “To the contrary, the budget right now robustly funds JSF procurement, and if the JSF program development slips, then I think the first decision the department would have is to convert that production funding to additional development.”
In January, the Defense Department -- at the request of Maj. Gen. Charles Davis, the JSF program executive officer -- assembled a team of cost examiners from the Navy, the Air Force and the Office of the Secretary of Defense to independently calculate the price tag for JSF system demonstration and development as well as production between FY-10 and FY-15, according to Air Force budget documents reviewed by Inside the Air Force.
The purpose of the assessment, the Pentagon said in a March 10 memo to the Government Accountability Office, was to “aid the department’s development of the fiscal year 2010 president’s budget request.”
The JET -- made up of experts from the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s cost analysis improvement group, the Air Force Cost Analysis Agency, and NAVAIR 4.2, the Navy’s team of analysts who assess the cradle-to-grave cost of weapon systems -- briefed its findings to the Pentagon’s high-level team of procurement officials, the Defense Acquisition Board, on Sept. 16.
“JET estimate is approximately $15B higher than JPO [F-35 Joint Program Office] estimate,” states the Pentagon budget document reviewed by ITAF.
Young said the JET estimate “was very professionally done” and added that the higher price tag is attributable to an analysis “grounded heavily in the experience in past programs.” In essence, the JET believes the F-35 will encounter engineering and development difficulties on the order of other major U.S. military aircraft development projects like the F-22A, the F/A-18 and the B-2, he said.
The F-35 Joint Program Office, however, believes an array of risk-mitigation measures -- including a fleet of prototype aircraft dedicated to perfecting fuel system design, hydraulics design, and software integration -- collectively amount to a new and more efficient model for complex aircraft development, Young said.
“To be honest with you, you end up not having a way to decide this issue,” Young said of the challenge DOD officials faced in determining which approach is correct.
Decisive in fixing a way forward, he said, was the JSF test program, designed to achieve a dozen flight tests a month for the next several years. The objective is to ensure the Pentagon did everything it could to ensure these flights, Young said.
“If you don’t fly those sorties, you’re going to end up where the Joint Estimate Team is, or run that risk,” he said. “It is a more robust budget for the flight test program, so that if we can fly more than 12 sorties a month -- 14 or 16 -- they can go fly those and try to get ahead on the test program. We made sure the budget was not a limit to successfully executing that program. I think this is extremely prudent.”
“The truth is: You need the next six to 12 months of seeing how the program performs to make that next decision” on whether to fund the program to the JET estimate, Young added.
The FY-10 POM restores a plan to ramp up F-35 production to 110 aircraft per year beginning in FY-15. Over the past several months, senior Pentagon officials -- most notably England -- have said they would like to ramp up JSF production over the next five years.
The Air Force -- for a third consecutive year -- will attempt to kill the General Electric/Rolls Royce-run F136 alternate engine program, according to an internal Pentagon budget document. The canceling of the second-engine effort would save the service $3.5 billion across the board. ITAF reported the F-136 engine costs across the POM earlier this year.
Previous efforts by the Pentagon to cut funding for the F-136 have been reversed by lawmakers who believe the program needs a concurrent program to develop a back-up engine in the event the primary powerpack program has a major defect.
Continued funding of the F136 engine carries “cost penalties to both engines for reduced production line learning cure due to two sources instead of one,” the information states, noting that the benefits of competition have been difficult to quantify.
This has prompted the Pentagon comptroller to place $31 million -- intended for F136 advance procurement -- on hold, according to the information.
George McLaren, a spokesman for the General Electric-Rolls Royce team, said in a statement that the venture was unaware of the Pentagon’s FY-10 budget plans, adding that the company plans to begin testing a first system development and demonstration prototype engine in early 2009, “ahead of schedule.”
“The F136 program has a proven track record of staying on schedule and within budget, and has consistently received ‘exceptional’ performance reviews from the [F-35] Joint Program Office. We are committed to sustaining this level of quality and performance,” McLaren said.
Meantime, the Pratt & Whitney-run F135 program will need an additional $600 million -- split evenly between the Air Force and Navy across the POM -- to complete engine development, according to Pentagon budget summary.
That money will cover costs associated with the redesign of a turbine in the short-takeoff, vertical-landing engine, in addition to cost growth or originally planned work due to technical difficulties; replenishment of contractor management reserve; low-observable improvements; and an extension of the development schedule, according to the internal budget summary.
Tests to prove the reliability of the redesigned turbine blade are under way to support STOVL operations in the coming months.
-- Marcus Weisgerber and Jason Sherman
November 28, 2008
Pg. 1
USAF wants to kill second engine program, again
Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England has directed the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps to all but disregard a recent assessment by a highly esteemed team of military cost estimators that concludes the Joint Strike Fighter program requires two additional years of testing and development -- and a staggering $15 billion more than is currently programmed over the next six years.
Instead, the Pentagon’s No. 2 official -- after much high-level debate this fall over about how to proceed with funding the U.S. military’s largest weapon system procurement in history -- directed the three services in an Oct. 31 classified memo to add $480 million to bolster testing in fiscal year 2010, in a bid to support plans for accelerated F-35 production beginning in FY-15. Inside the Air Force reviewed an unclassified Pentagon summary of the previously unreported JSF investment decision.
“I think this is extremely prudent,” John Young, under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, said of the new way forward for JSF in an exclusive interview with Inside the Air Force.
Young said that Pentagon leaders were presented this fall with two widely divergent cost estimates for the JSF program -- one from the JSF Joint Program Office and another that was $15 billion higher from a team of “independent” military cost analysts called the Joint Estimate Team (JET).
“You had to place a bet on either the program office of the Joint Estimate Team and there was not enough data to decide where to place that bet,” Young said. “So what we did was the more prudent thing, which was fund about the JET [-recommended] amount in FY-10.”
At a high-level meeting earlier this month, Young said Pentagon leaders “debated heavily” a number of options for proceeding with JSF development, including funding the program to the higher JET estimate -- a step that would have required cutting or terminating other weapon systems development projects in order to find additional resources.
“There was some resistance in the Senior Leader Review Group,” a panel chaired by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “to go break a bunch of programs to go put money in the JSF program that we might not need on the chance the program would succeed,” he added.
Moreover, Young said, there was a view among Pentagon leaders that adopting the JET estimate at this juncture would be tantamount to setting low expectations for the program.
“If we put all this money in the budget, these things [the JET estimate] become self-fulfilling prophesies: We manage to spend the money,” Young said.
The decision to discount the recommendations of the JET across the six-year investment plan amounts to a high-stakes wager by Pentagon leaders that the incredibly complex development of the F-35 Lightning II program will avoid technical difficulties that typically increase the cost of major military aircraft development efforts.
The Pentagon plans to acquire 2,456 JSF aircraft for the Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force at a cost of $298.8 billion -- a sum that reflects cost growth of 44.4 percent over original estimates in 2002, according to the Defense Department’s most recent acquisition report to Congress.
If the optimistic assumptions underpinning JSF funding in the recently finalized fiscal year 2010 to 2015 program objective memorandum prove to be misplaced -- as congressional investigators also vigorously argued this spring -- the Obama administration will be left to figure out how to finance the increased cost of the Pentagon’s largest procurement project.
Such a decision is likely to involve politically difficult choices that Pentagon leaders entertained this fall, such as terminating other weapons programs to harvest cash for JSF, seeking additional funds from Congress, or converting future procurement funds to finance development, which would reduce the size of the planned JSF fleet.
Although a new administration from a new party is preparing to take power in January, Young said there was no political calculus in determining the way forward for JSF.
“Absolutely nobody is kicking the can to the next administration,” he said. “To the contrary, the budget right now robustly funds JSF procurement, and if the JSF program development slips, then I think the first decision the department would have is to convert that production funding to additional development.”
In January, the Defense Department -- at the request of Maj. Gen. Charles Davis, the JSF program executive officer -- assembled a team of cost examiners from the Navy, the Air Force and the Office of the Secretary of Defense to independently calculate the price tag for JSF system demonstration and development as well as production between FY-10 and FY-15, according to Air Force budget documents reviewed by Inside the Air Force.
The purpose of the assessment, the Pentagon said in a March 10 memo to the Government Accountability Office, was to “aid the department’s development of the fiscal year 2010 president’s budget request.”
The JET -- made up of experts from the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s cost analysis improvement group, the Air Force Cost Analysis Agency, and NAVAIR 4.2, the Navy’s team of analysts who assess the cradle-to-grave cost of weapon systems -- briefed its findings to the Pentagon’s high-level team of procurement officials, the Defense Acquisition Board, on Sept. 16.
“JET estimate is approximately $15B higher than JPO [F-35 Joint Program Office] estimate,” states the Pentagon budget document reviewed by ITAF.
Young said the JET estimate “was very professionally done” and added that the higher price tag is attributable to an analysis “grounded heavily in the experience in past programs.” In essence, the JET believes the F-35 will encounter engineering and development difficulties on the order of other major U.S. military aircraft development projects like the F-22A, the F/A-18 and the B-2, he said.
The F-35 Joint Program Office, however, believes an array of risk-mitigation measures -- including a fleet of prototype aircraft dedicated to perfecting fuel system design, hydraulics design, and software integration -- collectively amount to a new and more efficient model for complex aircraft development, Young said.
“To be honest with you, you end up not having a way to decide this issue,” Young said of the challenge DOD officials faced in determining which approach is correct.
Decisive in fixing a way forward, he said, was the JSF test program, designed to achieve a dozen flight tests a month for the next several years. The objective is to ensure the Pentagon did everything it could to ensure these flights, Young said.
“If you don’t fly those sorties, you’re going to end up where the Joint Estimate Team is, or run that risk,” he said. “It is a more robust budget for the flight test program, so that if we can fly more than 12 sorties a month -- 14 or 16 -- they can go fly those and try to get ahead on the test program. We made sure the budget was not a limit to successfully executing that program. I think this is extremely prudent.”
“The truth is: You need the next six to 12 months of seeing how the program performs to make that next decision” on whether to fund the program to the JET estimate, Young added.
The FY-10 POM restores a plan to ramp up F-35 production to 110 aircraft per year beginning in FY-15. Over the past several months, senior Pentagon officials -- most notably England -- have said they would like to ramp up JSF production over the next five years.
The Air Force -- for a third consecutive year -- will attempt to kill the General Electric/Rolls Royce-run F136 alternate engine program, according to an internal Pentagon budget document. The canceling of the second-engine effort would save the service $3.5 billion across the board. ITAF reported the F-136 engine costs across the POM earlier this year.
Previous efforts by the Pentagon to cut funding for the F-136 have been reversed by lawmakers who believe the program needs a concurrent program to develop a back-up engine in the event the primary powerpack program has a major defect.
Continued funding of the F136 engine carries “cost penalties to both engines for reduced production line learning cure due to two sources instead of one,” the information states, noting that the benefits of competition have been difficult to quantify.
This has prompted the Pentagon comptroller to place $31 million -- intended for F136 advance procurement -- on hold, according to the information.
George McLaren, a spokesman for the General Electric-Rolls Royce team, said in a statement that the venture was unaware of the Pentagon’s FY-10 budget plans, adding that the company plans to begin testing a first system development and demonstration prototype engine in early 2009, “ahead of schedule.”
“The F136 program has a proven track record of staying on schedule and within budget, and has consistently received ‘exceptional’ performance reviews from the [F-35] Joint Program Office. We are committed to sustaining this level of quality and performance,” McLaren said.
Meantime, the Pratt & Whitney-run F135 program will need an additional $600 million -- split evenly between the Air Force and Navy across the POM -- to complete engine development, according to Pentagon budget summary.
That money will cover costs associated with the redesign of a turbine in the short-takeoff, vertical-landing engine, in addition to cost growth or originally planned work due to technical difficulties; replenishment of contractor management reserve; low-observable improvements; and an extension of the development schedule, according to the internal budget summary.
Tests to prove the reliability of the redesigned turbine blade are under way to support STOVL operations in the coming months.
-- Marcus Weisgerber and Jason Sherman