The average program unit cost for each F-35 has more than doubled, from $62.2 million at the program’s inception in 2001 to an average $158.4 million in 2018. It is also 12 years behind schedule. Establishing new budget and schedule goals for the program at this point would likely be too big an admission of failure for the Pentagon to endure, as it would create tremendous pressure for lawmakers on Capitol Hill to pull the plug on the entire endeavor.

The fact that it will take a quarter-century to complete the F-35’s design is evidence of the disastrous price we have paid for the Pentagon’s decision to initiate concurrent development and production of yet another weapons system that deliberately incorporates multiple undeveloped, untested technologies. Recent history provides several examples of programs with huge schedule slippages, cost overruns, and technological failures, with the F-111, C-5, B-70, B-1, B-2, and F-22 programs.

Frank Kendall, the former Pentagon acquisition chief, famously described the push to buy F-35s before the development process concludes as “acquisition malpractice.” Compounding the mistake of concurrency, the overlap of design and production, the Pentagon sold Congress on the F-35 in part with the idea of creating a common aircraft for three services, alleging it would save money—despite the well-documented and glaring failure of the tri-service F-111 program 25 years before Congress signed off on the very same plan with the F-35 in 2001. As the doubling of the F-35’s acquisition cost clearly demonstrates, the American people are paying heavily for the misleading claim that the three F-35 versions would achieve 70-90 percent part-commonality when in fact they achieved 20-25 percent. Even Lieutenant General Christopher Bogdan, the former F-35 program chief, cautioned against using joint programs in the future due to the difficulties and compromises associated with balancing the conflicting requirements of three different services, each with differing missions. As both the F-111 and F-35 have proven in practice, joint aircraft development programs lead to higher cost and underperforming designs.

888 Cost-cutting Initiatives

Efforts are now underway to rein in the program’s out-of-control costs.

In late 2016, then-President-elect Trump famously, and correctly, questioned the efficacy of the F-35 program before Pentagon officials got to him and he suddenly proclaimed it to be great. He now praises the aircraft, and even posed in front of one that had been trucked onto the White House lawn. Secretary of Defense James Mattis and his deputy, Patrick Shanahan, have been highly critical of Lockheed Martin’s efforts at controlling costs.

This public pressure from within the Pentagon prompted the F-35 Joint Program Office to put together a report in early 2017 exploring ways to tamp down the runaway costs threatening to make the program unaffordable; POGO obtained a copy of the report through the Freedom of Information Act.

While the F-35 Affordability Study provides a clear picture of the program’s complexity, it offers a route to only modest and largely hypothetical savings.

For example, one proposal calls for executing a block buy (also known as an Economic Order Quantity) for the Low Rate Initial Production lots 12, 13, and 14 approved in last year’s defense authorization act subject to cost conditions. The program estimated that the commitment to a three-year buy would save approximately $2 billion. Along with the fact that entering into a three-year commitment to an aircraft unapproved for full production violates the spirit, if not the actual letter, of federal laws governing multiyear procurement plans, program officials likely overstated the savings by well over half. By October 2017, the estimate had been revised down to $1.2 billion for the U.S. and the F-35 partner nations. The Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office threw cold water on even that estimate: in a letter first reported on by Inside Defense in June, CAPE officials said the U.S. savings would likely be no more than $300 million, a mere 0.08 percent of the $400 billion total buy.

The document includes an annex detailing the initiatives the F-35 program office intends to use to get costs under control. It will probably not surprise anyone with even a passing familiarity with the F-35 program to learn that these lists are quite extensive. They include a total of 888 initiatives spanning three broad categories: development, production, and sustainment.

A number of the ideas are gambits to reduce accountability for program performance. The development initiatives include a proposal to slash the testing program by 3,800 test points, in a move the program office estimates would shave off about 10 months’ worth of flight tests. The production initiatives mainly deal with the block-buy proposal, but also include 244 manufacturing and material improvements for an estimated $234.6 million in savings. The biggest effort by far is on the program’s long-term sustainment. Officials claim the program has already identified $60.7 billion in potential savings, through 514 initiatives, with future savings yet to be determined. Only time will tell if these efforts will actually bear any fruit—or whether these fruits will be buried under the major overruns associated with fixing 966 deficiencies.

The affordability plan fails to address the fact that the F-35s we have now and are continuing to buy have known design flaws that must be fixed in the future, one of the inevitable penalties of concurrency. Nearly 300 F-35s have thus far been delivered to the services. All of these aircraft—plus the additional 300 aircraft scheduled to be acquired before the Initial Operational Test and Evaluation final report declares whether or not the plane is combat-suitable—will require myriad fixes for current deficiencies, not to mention for the many future defects will likely be discovered during the more stringent operational tests. The GAO estimates—based on unaudited numbers—that the program will end up spending at least another $1.4 billion to retrofit design corrections into aircraft purchased early in the production cycle. Indeed, the program has already spent more than that retrofitting F-35s to fix design flaws: the Pentagon has spent more than $1.5 billion upgrading F-35s since 2012. The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act alone includes $305 million to retrofit design corrections into F-35s recently purchased and delivered.