For as much as the 2018 report from the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) reveals about the F-35’s lack of progress in nearly every essential area, it is markedly less transparent than previous reports…
Despite an ongoing stream of optimistic press releases from the Pentagon, the information that is provided by DOT&E shows that the F-35 is still in trouble in these vital areas:
Little or no improvement in the key availability, reliability, and flying-hour metrics over the last several years means too few F-35s will likely be ready for combat when they are most needed, now or for the foreseeable future.
During durability testing, the Marine and Navy F-35s have suffered so many cracks and received so many repairs and modifications that the test planes can’t complete their 8,000-hour life-expectancy tests.
Despite years of patches and upgrades, the F-35’s most combat-crucial computer systems continue to malfunction, including the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) maintenance and parts ordering network; and the data links that display, combine, and exchange target and threat information among fighters and intelligence sources.
The program has not provided the resources necessary to build, test, and validate the onboard mission-data files that control mission accomplishment and survival.
As in previous years, cybersecurity testing shows that many previously confirmed F-35 vulnerabilities have not been fixed…
The all-important and much-delayed F-35 Initial Operational Test and Evaluation report—assessing whether the plane is combat-suitable and ready for full-scale production—may well not only be late (perhaps well into 2020), but may also be based on testing that is considerably less combat-realistic than planned.
That was POGO making hay out of the DOT&E report on the F-35. Let’s do a back of the envelope calculation for change in cost-effectiveness (of the roughest order of magnitude):
Unit Cost: increase from $38M to $158M.
Availability (F-35B and C model): decrease from 80% desired to <20%
Service life (F-35B model): decrease from 8,000 to 2,000
That’s a 4x increase in unit cost, and, at the very most, effectiveness is only 1/4 what was expected. At any given time, less than a quarter of the aircraft intended to be available actually are available. Moreover, for the B model, you have to retire aircraft four times faster than expected.
Without saying anything about combat performance, the return on investment is still a tiny fraction of what was planned. Indeed, if the service life is 1/4 and the availability is 1/4, and if we get into a shooting war and are pushing as many sorties as possible, then we would need to procure 16x more F-35B aircraft than we would have expected to generate the same extended sortie rate. (Of course, in a shooting war most aircraft won’t reach their service life, so this is a bit of an overstatement.)
POGO estimated that the fleet-wide F-35 sorties per day came in at 0.3 to 0.4, while during Operation Desert Storm the F-16 flew 1.0 sorties and the A-10 flew 1.4 sorties. So again, we have about F-35s that can support the fight about 1/4 of what was expected in a given day, and their service life could be as bad as 1/4.
The aircraft life-time returns on the procurement could be 1/16th what was planned, and the costs are 4x higher. That’s something like 1/64th the cost-effectiveness. Whatever we hoped the cost-effectiveness would be in 2001, it looks like we’re getting only 1/64th of that — again, not including combat performance and a host of other issues. You can decide for yourself the direction and magnitude of those variables.
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