The F-35 Doesn’t Stick the Landing
In president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Chance for Peace” speech, he made the statement that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone”. The deepening of the Cold War over Eisenhower’s term in office and the history of the last 80 years have served to ensure that these words went unheeded, as evidenced by the fate of the F-35.
On February 23rd the air force’s top officer, Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown Jr., announced the need for a new light weight, low-cost fighter to fill out the ranks of the fleet and give support to the relatively smaller core of high end, high weight fighters and stealth bombers. This role is the same one that the F-35 was meant to fill when it was first pitched. However, 20 years and more than 1.5 trillion dollars later, General Brown went on the record as saying that the F-35 is a Ferrari, and “You don’t drive your Ferrari to work every day, you only drive it on Sundays. This is our ‘high end’ [fighter], we want to make sure we don’t use it all for the low-end fight”. When the F-35 fighter was initially pitched, the idea behind it was centered around creating a swiss-army knife fighter, one that could replace or supplement the roles of many other models of planes and save money through making six or seven other models of fighters obsolete.
The F-35’s new classification as a “Ferrari” puts the lie to that original concept, pursued for the last 20 years in the face of severe technical difficulties, a ballooning budget, concerns over inefficiency, and the near monopolistic control that Lockheed Martin has kept over the project. Air Force Lieutenant, Christopher Bogdan, who became the program’s executive officer in December 2012 stated, “I had a sense, after my first 90 days, that the government was not in charge of the program”. Bogdan went on to state “that all of the major decisions, whether they be technical, whether they be schedule, whether they be contractual, were really all being made by Lockheed Martin, and the program office was just kind of watching”. This control by Lockheed Martin is largely due to the fact that the company is responsible for everything from the organization of the supply chain for parts to the uniforms and equipment pilots and technicians wear when working with the plane.
The failure of the F-35 to fill its intended role, or become the easy to use, cheap to produce workhorse that the military says it needs means that the Air Force, as well as the other armed forces, will have to continue to rely on Cold War era planes such as the A-10, F-14, and others. Only time will tell whether the next “affordable, lightweight fighter” will actually be worth the money spent developing it, or if the Military-industrial complex will simply produce another “Ferrari” with performance not worth the down payment.
Joe Doner - Staff Writer