Party of One (17 page)

This perverse procurement model had long since set off alarm bells with American government officials and even with the US military, who were learning that there was a terrible price to be paid for the practice of “concurrency”—of producing and testing the F-35 in parallel rather than in sequence. The evidence from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the US Senate armed services committee revealed that the F-35 program was in deep trouble at every level—from poor production quality on the aircraft’s electronic warfare capability to obscene cost overruns and hugely expensive delays. Even the pilots’ headrests were too big, limiting aft vision in combat with potentially fatal results.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), the agency charged with catching government waste in the United States, pointed out that the program was veering off course because the Pentagon had committed to final production before testing and development were complete. Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, offered a scathing assessment of how the US military acquired the F-35. On April 24, 2012, he told
ABC.com
, “Putting the F-35 in production years before the first test flight was acquisition malpractice. OK? It should not have been done. OK? But we did it.”

This was the heart of the matter. The same month that Canada’s auditor general revealed that the Harper government had grossly understated the cost of the F-35, the GAO was reporting in the United States that the Pentagon was buying its weapons systems backwards—squandering billions in taxpayers’ dollars on sophisticated equipment by “spending first and asking questions later.” It was a practice the Congressional Budget Office had been warning about since 1988 in a study called “The Effects of Concurrency,” which looked at fourteen major weapons system
programs acquired by the Pentagon. Each of them featured a parallel process of production and testing. All of the programs experienced cost increases ranging from 33 to 527 percent, and schedule delays of up to 139 percent.

In other words, the US F-35 program followed a procurement process that the Congressional Budget Office had deemed to be a bad idea twenty-five years ago. Although the aircraft went into production in 2003, the first “test flight” didn’t take place until three years later. As long as things went without a hitch—i.e., when flight simulators and computer models correctly predicted how the aircraft would perform—savings on testing costs were realized. But when difficulties arose, it meant the public was stuck not only with expensive upgrades to fix the immediate problem, but also with a huge bill for retrofitting all the planes built to that point. From that perspective, the F-35 was a manufacturer’s dream and a buyer’s nightmare.

“The F-35 saga shows an essential part of a broken military procurement process in the United States,” Winslow Wheeler told me. Wheeler spent thirty years as a national security advisor on Capitol Hill, and is the director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Centre for Defense Information in Washington. “The heart of the broken process is ‘setting the hook,’” Wheeler noted. “The manufacturer over-estimates the performance and underestimates the cost and offers ‘fantasies’ about the scheduling. The F-35 is classic. The key to ‘setting the hook’ is making sure that production starts before you begin testing. Contractors like Lockheed Martin say testing can’t take place first because it would waste a lot of money. Once a lot of public money is spent, the argument used is that you can’t waste all that money that has already been invested. At that point, you have entered the ‘buy-in’ stage.”

In the movies, they called it “the sting.” More than one high-ranking US military officer has felt it during the painful course of
procuring the F-35. Air Force Lieutenant General Christopher Bogden put it like this in
American Spectator
magazine in May 2013: “What I see Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney doing today is behaving like they are getting ready to sell me the very last F-35 and the very last engine and are trying to squeeze every nickel out of that last F-35 and that last engine.”

There was another big problem with the F-35. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, the Joint Strike Fighter is an aircraft designed by clueless politicians, Star Wars–struck Pentagon planners, and opportunistic contractors. From the late 1980s, when its design first emerged from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the F-35 was burdened with contradictory demands. It was supposed to be both a short takeoff and vertical-landing aircraft, and a supersonic fighter jet. “This required an airframe that—simultaneously—wanted to be short, even stumpy, and single-engine, and also sleek, long, and with lots of excess power, usually with twin engines,” Winslow Wheeler wrote.

Politicians added more humps to the “flying camel” during the Clinton administration, including the demand that the F-35 be multi-service. Consequently, it had to meet the differing needs of the Air Force, the Marine Corps, and the Navy. In reality, three planes in one were being developed simultaneously—with an astonishing twenty-four million lines of computer code in the electronics of each F-35.

The president’s officials also imposed the new requirement that the high-tech aircraft be multi-purpose—both an air-to-air fighter and a bomber. That meant that the F-35’s already compromised design would be further burdened by adding weight to the airframe to manage heavy bomb loads. Something had to give, and that something was the agility embodied in the F-16, a singlepurpose pure fighter jet. The F-35 ended up with the worst of all
worlds—not as agile a fighter as the F-16, not as capable a bomber as the F-15E, and nowhere near as effective at low altitudes (in close air support for ground forces) as the A-10.

And then there was the part of the sales pitch the generals couldn’t resist. Clinton administration officials imposed the “stealth” requirement, which meant additional tweaks of the aerodynamics of the already guppy-like F-35, and what experts have called “maintenance-intensive skin coatings” required to reduce radar reflections. But as many experts have pointed out, “stealth” doesn’t mean invisibility, but merely limited detection ranges against some radar types at certain angles.

Even then, there are no guarantees. This is what retired general Lewis MacKenzie, the commander of NATO forces in the Bosnian War, told me about the sexiest selling point in the F-35 brochure: “In the Bosnian War, the Serbs shot down a ‘stealth’ F-117 bomber. Posters went up around Belgrade, ‘Sorry Bill, we didn’t know it was invisible.’ They were using old Soviet radar and missiles. The F-35 is really not relevant as an initial-strike fighter because initial strikes these days are not done by fighters, but by Cruise missiles.”

More than a decade into the project, what was supposed to have been a low-cost solution to the US forces’ need for a newgeneration fighter jet has became a procurement nightmare, gobbling up 38 percent of the Pentagon’s budget. In 2001, the Pentagon planned to buy 2,866 F-35s at $79 million per plane for a grand total of $226.5 billion. By 2010, the plan was altered. The buy was reduced to 2,456 jets at $298.8 billion—a 14 percent reduction in the number of F-35s against a 32 percent price increase.

By 2012, the cost of the fleet ballooned to $395.7 billion and climbing. Since development began in 2001, unit costs per aircraft have doubled—from $81 million to $161 million. The full life-cycle cost of operating and supporting a reduced US fleet of 2,457 F-35s is now estimated to be $1.5 trillion—a sum, as reported in
Foreign Policy
magazine, greater than the annual gross domestic product of Spain.

Even more daunting for potential buyers, the new jet is years behind schedule. The first batch of F-35s was slated for combat use in 2010, but since less than 20 percent of the flight testing on the aircraft has been completed, and just 4 percent of the mission systems verified, the US military now says the deployment date is “to be determined.” It could be as far off as 2019 or 2020. Added to an escalating price, the production delay is almost certain to lead to reduced or cancelled orders. And that means just one thing: a much higher sticker price for buyers who proceed with the acquisition.

Production has slowed to such a crawl that the US Department of Defense (DOD) has for three straight years reduced near-term orders, deferring aircraft and costs to future years. Since 2002, total orders through 2017 by the DOD have been reduced by threequarters, from 1,591 aircraft to just 365.

After a dozen years of development at a cost of $64 billion to US taxpayers, the F-35 project hasn’t produced an aircraft that can be mass-manufactured. So how can any country’s military even operate training squadrons with F-35s? Since the aircraft is still an “experiment,” the answer is that they can’t. In fact, the operational limitations are laughable. The F-35 is prohibited from flying at night or in instrument weather conditions, including clouds. Test pilots have complained that the plane’s radar often doesn’t work. And on days when the temperature dips below 15 degrees Celsius, the fifth-generation aircraft is a little like an old British sports car—hard to start. That is bad news for the F-35s Peter MacKay has said will be stationed in Cold Lake, Alberta. Final flight testing for the F-35 is now slated to be completed in 2017, which means that everyone who flies the aircraft before that date is effectively a test pilot.

While the Harper government stuck with the sales pitch, the Americans weren’t the only ones getting nervous about the cost or performance of the warplane that is supposed to give them tactical superiority in the air for the next half century. JSF partners Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey were all so “dismayed” about the performance and cost of the F-35, they delayed or downsized their own orders for the troubled aircraft. Israel, which has actually signed a Letter of Order and Acceptance for the purchase of nineteen F-35s, with fifty-five others to come later, was worried enough to send a high-level defence delegation to Washington for a first-hand look at the JSF project. The Israelis were not impressed with the Americans’ refusal to share computer codes, or with the state of the project. One of the members of the Israeli team subsequently told the
World Tribune
, “We knew there were problems with the airplane, but things are much worse than we had been told.”

There was also the issue of obsolescence. The US military is already talking about a sixth-generation fighter jet. Others
³
who watch the defence industry are beginning to question the wisdom of investing vast amounts of money in fighter jets piloted by humans, when the future of air warfare may well belong to cheap drones that can outfly any manned aircraft because their design doesn’t have to take into account the level of G-force a human pilot can withstand. As one pro-drone F-35 skeptic put it in response to an online defence of the F-35, “Building F-35s today is as stupid as fielding horse cavalry was at the beginning of World War I.”

G
IVEN
ALL
THE
evidence to the contrary, most of it coming from the very country that was actually building the aircraft, Stephen Harper’s insistence that the costs of the F-35 were fixed was peculiar to say the least. But his government’s uncritical assumption
that it was the right aircraft—in fact, the “only” one—for the RCAF was, if anything, even stranger. Associate Minister of Defence Julian Fantino rhapsodized that the acquisition of the F-35 was a “holy” undertaking, and Peter MacKay warned that if the purchase was cancelled, Canadian pilots would “die” and national sovereignty would be at risk.

The government preferred to talk about anything but what the country actually needed from a new fighter. For Canada, where the main roles for fighter aircraft are airspace defence and sovereignty, the F-35 is a poor fit. As the aircraft now stands, it can’t communicate by satellite while on reconnaissance missions in the High Arctic—a flaw Lockheed Martin promises to fix by 2019. There is trouble with the weapons systems, trouble with the cockpit, and trouble with the special helmet test pilots say gives them blurred or double vision. As a single-engine jet, the F-35 is less than ideal for long-range reconnaissance flights over remote areas. In the jargon of the industry to describe an aircraft’s range, Canada requires a “long-legged” jet fighter—one that can patrol over great distances. The F-35 is “remarkably short-legged,” according to expert Winslow Wheeler. “Its short range is an oddity because the F-35 has an enormous ‘fuel fraction’ rating, able to carry 18,000 pounds of fuel. But to make room for the external tanks, all of the aircraft’s weapons systems have to be stored inside. Viewed from the nose, the plane looks rather pregnant. Worse, the huge external tanks are a permanent weight and performance drag,” said Wheeler. Retired Colonel Paul Maillet, former manager of Canada’s fleet of twinengine CF-18s, also puzzled over the choice of the F-35: “How do you get a single-engine, low-range, low payload, low maneuverability aircraft that is being optimized for close air support to operate efficiently in the North?”

Although they didn’t much like conversations about the cost of the F-35, there was one number the Harper government loved
to talk about—the much-ballyhooed windfall of contracts to the Canadian aerospace industry for JSF-related work. As reported by Murray Brewster of the Canadian Press, the government marketing machine had initially pegged the industrial benefits of the F-35 to Canada at US$12 billion. It was a Pollyanna figure that high-balled the potential benefits, just as the government had low-balled the F-35’s true costs.

There was one fact that the government’s rose-coloured glasses couldn’t change. No one knows how much business Canada’s $25-billion-a-year aerospace industry will receive. It is true that as a member of the JSF consortium, Canadian industry can bid on work. But as the auditor general reported, there is no guarantee of contracts for the F-35 because Lockheed Martin puts all work out to competitive bid. Even if a Canadian company wins a contract— as seventy of them have at a value of just under $500 million—it would have to have that contract constantly renewed over the fifty years the F-35 is slated to operate in order to realize the maximum economic benefit.