F-35 Program Manager says DoD must avoid past mistakes, own the technical baseline

This is perhaps the most interesting part from the April 2022 HASC hearing on F-35 sustainment. Representative Waltz asked Lt. Gen. Eric Fick, PEO for the F-35 Joint Program Office, what should be learned from the F-35 as the Air Force takes on its next generation of fighters. Here’s how Lt. Gen. Fick responds:

Sir, I think we’ve actually already learned a fair number of lessons from the F-35. When I think about the origins of the F-35 and the timeline on which it was initially conceived and developed, we were in a far different place from an acquisition workforce perspective. We just come down off of the Desert Storm. We were eliminating thousands of acquisition professionals and no longer had the intellectual capacity to do the kinds of things internally that we had done for so many years before through the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

 

We conceived this notion that we called TSPR, total system performance responsibility, and we decided that we were going to give that to the contractor and say, ‘Look, it’s over to you. You make this work forever.” That was the the environment in place when the F-35 was born. Several years later, early 2000s time frame, on a couple of other programs probably including F-35 we realized that’s really not where we wanted to be. We were kind of driven there by necessity, but we really didn’t want to be there as we were seeing programs not succeed in delivering the outcomes that we wanted. So we’ve begun to dig back out to take more things back into our own hands organically.

 

Dr. LaPlante, when he was the air force acquisition executive, talked about owning the technical baseline. We had no people to own the technical baseline in that time, but we’re building them today. My daughter is a computer programmer at Kessel Run. She is going to be able to own the technical baseline as she grows up within the Air Force. Our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, can do that. So we had an organizational construct, an acquisition strategy that I think we decided was fundamentally flawed, and we backed away from it on almost every program, even the F-35. We’re still digging out of that. That’s one one thing I don’t think we’ll ever do again.

Of course, Bill LaPlante became DoD’s acquisition executive just recently in 2022. I’d like to hear him speak about this concept of owning the technical baseline and where it should be used. Some have preferred the term “mastering” the technical baseline because the government doesn’t literally need to own the data rights to everything or integrate it organically. For this reason, I used “Master the Baseline” in the Acquisition Next report.

Similar principles I think apply, including the idea that government contract directly with firms providing critical subsystem and components. F-35 did this with the engine, but previous systems like the F-16 separately contracted for most of the mission systems as well. Fick mentioned that the F-35 program wants to buy data rights from the Lockheed Martin so it can take on more responsibility in sustainment activities.

I think the other aspect of the F-35 TSPR idea is long-range planning of costs and capabilities. I’d like to hear a rebuke of the idea that total program planning should occur early. I think B-21 is an example of taking mostly mature technologies for quick integration. It’s also good to push at the cutting edge of some capabilities, so long as a 30 year sustainment plan doesn’t depend on its sparkling success.

I highly doubt DoD will see major improvement by partitioning contract tasks by component without also breaking it down into incremental periods of performance. Simply sticking government in the middle of some contractual relationships might make things worse if government doesn’t also retain the optionality to pivot throughout the acquisition phases.