Category: Defense Procurement

How Badly Does Someone Have to F%$# Up for the DOD to Decide That They Won’t Hire Contractors to Do It?

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It appears that the Pentagon is looking at terminating its massive cloud computing project known as Jedi. 

Given that this massive contract has the potential for creating comfortable retirements for dozens of senior officers, I call it back-loaded bribery, something has to be seriously wrong.

It’s got to be worse than the F-35 clusterf%$#, and it doesn’t get much worse than that:

Pentagon officials are considering pulling the plug on the star-crossed JEDI cloud-computing project, which has been mired in litigation from Amazon.com Inc. and faces continuing criticism from lawmakers.

The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract was awarded to Microsoft Corp. in 2019 over Amazon, which has contested the award in court ever since.

A federal judge last month refused the Pentagon’s motion to dismiss much of Amazon’s case. A few days later, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said the department would review the project.

………

“The prospect of such a lengthy litigation process might bring the future of the JEDI Cloud procurement into question,” the Jan. 28 report said.

………

Some lawmakers and government-contracting experts say JEDI should be scuttled because its single-vendor, winner-take-all approach is inappropriate and outmoded for mammoth enterprises like the Department of Defense.

These people say the Pentagon should move to an increasingly popular approach to enterprise cloud-computing that includes multiple companies as participants. Spreading out the work also reduces the risk of legal challenges from excluded companies, they say.

Oh, I see now:  They want to spread the dollars around to get some of the usual suspects into the room, as opposed to Microsoft and Amazon, who have been playing the game far longer than either of them, and they have LOTS if executive vice president positions. 

If you split this up between Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, etc., think about all the retired officers that you can hire.

………

A Pentagon inspector general report last year determined that the Pentagon adviser didn’t violate any ethical obligations or give preferential treatment to Amazon.

Steven Schooner, a George Washington University law professor who specializes in government contracting, said early questions about the Pentagon’s underlying procurement strategy for JEDI have grown over time.

“And all of that is before this case became one of the most jaw-dropping, head-scratching collections of conflicts of interest imaginable,” he said.

The US defense procurement system is beyond dysfunctional..

From the Department of About F%$#ing Time

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It looks like members of Congress are getting sick and tired of skyrocketing operational costs and fiscal obfuscation by the Department of Defense, and will be pushing back against any increase in acquisition.

Unfortunately, the excessive costs of the program has been baked into the program, with the DoD signing off a model that is clearly intended to maximize rent seeking by Lockheed-Martin: (Paid subscription required)

In response to new delays to the F-35 fighter program, senior House Democrats are threatening to limit aircraft production and end the practice of adding funding for aircraft the Pentagon never requested.

The laundry list of program problems includes cost overruns, a large engine backlog at the depots, funding cuts to an already temperamental predictive maintenance system and delays to essential upgrades.

“If this program continues to fail to significantly control and reduce actual projected sustainment costs, we may need to invest in other affordable programs and backfill an operational shortfall of potentially over 800 tactical fighters,” Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.), House Armed Services Committee (HASC) tactical air and land forces subcommittee chairman, said during a hearing on the F-35 program.

………

Now that Democrats control the Senate, Garamendi and Norcross may turn the tide and prevent lawmakers from increasing the F-35 quantity in future budget requests. During the fiscal 2021 budget cycle, the HASC failed to convince the other defense committees not to add extra F-35s.

………

F-35 Program Executive Officer Lt. Gen. Eric Fick, agrees with Abba’s assessment. Delays in delivering required support equipment and technical data, along with the increased work scope for F135 power module repairs, are driving the depot shortfalls, he said.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) acknowledges that the Pentagon is taking steps to increase depot repair capacity for the F135 power module, but the GAO says the number of capable aircraft will remain an issue in the near term.

………

Along with those delays, the cost of the engine is growing. The increase, likely 3% for the 15th production lot, is the result of Turkey being removed from the program after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan opted to purchase the Russian-manufactured S-400 anti-aircraft weapon system.

………

Meanwhile, the F-35’s logistics system is experiencing yet another round of upheaval. The Pentagon was in the process of transitioning its Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) to a new cloud-based network, the Operational Data Integrated Network (ODIN), by 2022. But the Pentagon has directed a “strategic pause” for the move to ODIN because of a 42% funding cut in fiscal 2021.

………

Other delays plaguing the program include the slowdown of Technology Refresh 3 (TR-3) and Block 4 development. Lockheed Martin waived $60 million in fees because of the delays to TR-3, the hardware providing the F-35 additive processing power, memory and open-systems architecture. The company says the delays were caused by supplier challenges related to the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Lockheed knows that they have the DoD, and particularly the USAF by the short hairs, and the “Mistake-Jet” continues to eat the operational capabilities of the USAF. 

The tail, now controlled by the contractors, is devouring the teeth.

Headline of the Day

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The Operating Costs of the F-35 Are High Because They Are Designed to Be

—Hush-Kit

Money quote from the interview:

The operating costs are high because they are designed to be so. From the very beginning of the program, the F-35 was set up to operate as a “total system performance responsibility” enterprise which meant that the services were intentionally surrendering a great deal of control over the maintenance and operations of the weapon they were buying to the contractors. This incentivised the contractors to design the aircraft in such a way that only their personnel could perform many of the maintenance actions on the aircraft. It is nearly always more expensive to use contractor personnel to perform work for the government, which certainly drives up the cost-per-flight-hour. It also means that the government has only one source bidding for these contracts, so there is little incentive to lower costs.

This, “Total system performance responsibility,” was not an accident.

The Pentagon procurement is deeply corrupt, with senior military officers choosing the most expensive, and hence most profitable ways to address their stated needs, because at the end of their career, after they retire, they secure comfortable sinecures at defense contractors and the like.

Our defense procurement system is corrupt, dysfunctional, and unaffordable.

Speaking of Defense Procurement Misconduct………

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The US Air Force has declared the F-35 A combat ready.

The Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation (DOT&E) has declared that it is not even close:

The Pentagon’s top weapons tester is again sounding the alarm over the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, warning that significant deficiencies with the gun, challenges integrating the short-range AIM-9X missile and unresolved software bugs could delay fielding of the jet’s full capability.

 On the heels of the U.S. Air Force’s milestone decision to declare the F-35A ready for battle, the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation (DOT&E) is raising new concerns about Lockheed Martin’s fifth-generation fighter. In an internal memo to Defense Department leadership Aug. 9, the DOT&E warned the jet still has a long way to go before full combat capability and may run out of funds to fix significant performance problems on time if late discoveries delay the end of the program’s development phase.

 ………

 In response to Aviation Week queries, the DOT&E reiterated concerns that the program’s official start date for IOT&E is “not realistic,” repeating the agency’s public assessment that the F-35 will not be ready to begin the test period until mid-2018 at the soonest—assuming the JPO can provide production-representative test aircraft by then.

Late, over budget, and not combat ready.

The internal fun does not shoot straight, there are cracks in the carrier variant’s wings, external carriage of ordinance is at least 2 years away.

The Pentagon procurement process at its finest.

This is a Fascinating Concept, But Only if it is Applied Rigorously

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The suggestion that defense contractors post performance bonds is intriguing, but, much like the rest of the military industrial complex, the question is that the people who would enforce the terms of this bond would not allow themselves to be swayed by the political and economic powers of the defense contractors:

In Washington, D.C., “military reform” usually means “acquisition reform.” There is a lot of talk about it on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon. Enough think-tank papers have been written on the subject to clear whole forests. But of the myriad options out there, one has escaped notice.

Performance bonds — money put up by a contractor as insurance to the buyer to make sure the job is done on time and to specifications — are already required for federal building projects under the Miller Act. Prime construction contractors have to furnish a surety to the government to ensure their work is completed properly and to guarantee all subcontractors get paid should the firm go out of business.

These bonds have been used with some success in overseas defense procurement contracts. Using performance bonds is one way the government protects its interests without having to resort to judicial proceedings. In fact, the Congressional Research Service recently noted that performance bond money can be used to “offset the costs of contract completion, which can include delays and finding a new contractor.”

The same idea could potentially be applied to a weapons acquisition project to protect the government’s — and the taxpayer’s — interests. But it has so far been overlooked during the sometimes desperate search for solutions to the Pentagon’s dysfunctional buying process.

One key selling point for this idea is that provisions for using performance bonds for Defense Department acquisition already exist. As is usually the case, improving discipline in weapons spending doesn’t require new rules but using the rules that already exist to better effect.

That last paragraph reveals the weakness of the concept.

The tools are already there, but the Pentagon is unwilling to use them.

If you were to decertify the 4 services, and move procurement to an agency independent of the Pentagon, a structure similar to Sweden’s FMV, you might have a chance of making it work, but this would require a catastrophe to generate sufficient impetus to do this.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!? Trillions of Dollars?

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An auditor has found that the US Army has engaged in trillions of dollars in dodgy spending:

The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.

The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.

As a result, the Army’s financial statements for 2015 were “materially misstated,” the report concluded. The “forced” adjustments rendered the statements useless because “DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.”

………

The new report focused on the Army’s General Fund, the bigger of its two main accounts, with assets of $282.6 billion in 2015. The Army lost or didn’t keep required data, and much of the data it had was inaccurate, the IG said.

“Where is the money going? Nobody knows,” said Franklin Spinney, a retired military analyst for the Pentagon and critic of Defense Department planning.

The significance of the accounting problem goes beyond mere concern for balancing books, Spinney said. Both presidential candidates have called for increasing defense spending amid current global tension.

I’m beginning to think that we will need to experience something akin to the sinking of the Vasa in 1628 (which led to the creation of the progenitor of the Swedish defense procurement agency, the FMV) before we end up with a defense procurement system that actually works.

Ka Ching!

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Guess what, despite the fact that the US spends more on defense than the next 7 nations, we still need to flush even more money down the toilet to combat coming Russian and Chinese technological superiority:

The fight against the Islamic State may get the headlines. But it’s the military threats from Russia and China that most worry top Pentagon officials — and are driving a new arms race to deter these great-power rivals.

This question of how to deal with Russian and Chinese military advances has gotten almost no attention in the 2016 presidential campaign. But it deserves a careful look. The programs begun in the waning days of the Obama administration could potentially change the face of warfare, in the United States’ favor, but they would require political support and new spending by the next president.

A drive to build exotic versions of conventional weapons may sound crazy in a world that already has too much military conflict. But advocates argue that strengthening U.S. conventional forces might be the only way to avoid escalation to nuclear weapons if war with Moscow or Beijing began.

Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work argued for the new deterrence strategy in a presentation this month to the bipartisan Aspen Strategy Group, amplifying comments he made to me in an interview in February. The approach, awkwardly named the “third offset strategy,” would leverage the United States’ technological superiority by creating weapons that could complicate attack planning by an adversary.

The premise is that as Russia and China modernize their militaries, the United States must exploit its lead in high-tech warfare. In the world envisioned by Pentagon planners, the United States could field an array of drones in the sky, unmanned submarines beneath the seas and advanced systems on the ground that could overwhelm an adversary’s battle-management networks. Like the two previous “offsets,” battlefield nuclear weapons in the 1950s and precise conventional weapons in the 1970s, this one would seek to restore lost U.S. military dominance.

Those lucrative retirement gigs for Generals don’t pay for themselves.

The US military is looking at reducing the number of troops, to pay for the bling, which is exactly the wrong thing to do.

The markedly inferior Grumman F4F Wildcat achieved a 6.9:1 kill ratio over the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, an aircraft that could literally fly rings around it.

They did so because of superior tactics, superior situational awareness (better radar and radios), and a training regime that produced better trained pilots more quickly.

Technological superiority does not necessarily win wars.  Ask a Tiger tank commander in WWII about that.

F%$# Me. I Agree with Rand Paul.

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I guess that we file this under that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, because Senator Aqua Buddha is opposing the massive arms sale to Saudi Arabia because of their indiscriminate brutality in Yemen:

Citing concerns over Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, Republican Senator Rand Paul says he’s looking for ways to stop a $1.15 billion weapons deal with Riyadh that would include the sale of 130 Abrams battle tanks, 20 armored vehicles, and other military equipment.

Paul’s pledge comes as Saudi Arabia resumed its bombardment of the Yemeni capital of Sanaa following the collapse of peace talks in Kuwait between representatives of the government and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

“I will work with a bipartisan coalition to explore forcing a vote on blocking this sale,” Paul told Foreign Policy in a statement. “Saudi Arabia is an unreliable ally with a poor human rights record. We should not rush to sell them advanced arms and promote an arms race in the Middle East.”

Humanitarian organizations are criticizing the proposed weapons sale as a setback for efforts to bring pressure on Riyadh to throttle back its military campaign. The U.N. estimates that at least 6,400 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the conflict while more than 2.8 million have been displaced from their homes.

He’s right.

Saudi Arabia provided support for the 911 bombers, and they created ISIS.

They are not our allies, and we should not be helping them in Yemen, which, among other things, has resulted in a massive increase in the power of al Qaeda in that nation.

Combat Ready My Ass

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The US Air Force has declared that its first squadron of F-35s is combat ready:

The U.S. Air Force on Tuesday declared an initial squadron of Lockheed Martin Corp F-35A fighter jets ready for combat, marking a major milestone for a program that has faced cost overruns and delays.

………

“The U.S. Air Force decision to make the 15 F-35As … combat ready sends a simple and powerful message to America’s friends and foes alike – the F-35 can do its mission,” the program’s chief, Air Force Lieutenant General Chris Bogdan, said in a statement.

Not so much:

Dan Grazier, a fellow of the Project On Government Oversight, said, however, “This is nothing but a public relations stunt.” He added that it would not be possible to know if the F-35 jets were ready for combat until after initial operational testing.

That’s putting it mildly.

As the folks at The Register note. “It’s got dodgy radar, relies on an insecure database, boasts a buggy operating system, and a laser targeting system that can’t be used for training in the UK, but the United States Air Force is satisfied that the F-35A fighter is ready for combat.”

Also: its ejection seat can injure smaller (less than 165 lb) pilots, and its cannon cannot be fired.

This is a statement that is intended for the consumption of the Pentagon and Congress, and not reflective of the maturity of the program.

We’ve Known This for Thirty Years

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Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense shield continues to reveal itself to be an expensive mirage:

The system designed to defend American cities and towns against a nuclear attack by North Korea is “simply unable to protect the U.S. public” and will remain ineffective unless Congress exerts rigorous oversight, according to a new report.

The report, to be released Thursday by the Union of Concerned Scientists, recommends that the Obama administration halt the expansion of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, known as GMD, until its technical problems have been solved.

“The story of this system is a cautionary tale about how the lack of appropriate oversight of a politically charged missile defense program has led to a system in tatters,” said the report, written by three physicists with expertise in missile defense.

“Despite more than a decade of development and a bill of $40 billion, the GMD system is simply unable to protect the U.S. public,’’ the authors wrote.

………

The report notes that in “heavily scripted” flight tests that are “set up for success,” GMD interceptors have often failed to hit mock enemy warheads. In the seven most recent tests, interceptors destroyed their targets just three times, the report says — a finding consistent with conclusions of the Pentagon’s operational test and evaluation office.

………

The report said members of Congress and Pentagon officials insisted on deploying and expanding the system at a rapid pace—at the expense of sound procurement and engineering.

“Repeatedly,” the report said, “the Pentagon has sacrificed quality, shortened engineering cycles and sidestepped acquisitions best practices to meet a deadline imposed by political rationales rather than technical realities.”

………

The physicists write that “the continued development of the GMD system without adequate oversight and accountability, and the continued fielding of interceptors without adequate testing, means the system is not even on a path to achieving a useful ability to intercept ballistic missiles.”

As if the F-35 weren’t proof enough, it’s clear that our defense industry  is completely dysfunctional.

And the JSF Clustf%$# Continues

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If there was one thing that you would think that the people managing could get right, it would be the rather prosaic ejection seat, which has been in fighter jets since the Korean war.

You would be wrong:

The US Air Force is looking into the possibility of replacing the Martin-Baker ejection seat on the F-35 joint strike fighter with the United Technologies ACES 5 model, Defense News has learned.

While still in the earliest stages, such a move could have have massive repercussions for the F-35 supply chain, impacting the workshare strategy that forms the backbone for the international fleet of the Lockheed Martin-designed fighter.

………

At the core of the Air Force’s move is concern over pilot safety following the discovery that F-35 pilots under 136 pounds were at increased, potentially fatal, risk of neck damage when ejecting from the plane aboard the Martin-Baker US16E design. The service has also acknowledged an “elevated level of risk” for pilots between 136 and 165 pounds.

Defense News first broke the news of that issue in October. As a result of the issue, pilots under 136 pounds are prohibited from operating the fifth-generation fighter, which went operational for the Marines in 2015 and is expected to be operational for the Air Force by the end of this year.

That pilot risk, Bunch said, is unacceptable.

………

Based on Bunch’s comments, it appears Air Force officials are concerned that another problem could occur with the Martin-Baker seat in the future, which raised the question of why the Air Force is only now starting to look at a backup option, eight months after the pilot safety concerns became public knowledge.

This is a big deal, particularly since changing the seats will mess up the work share with the UK. (Martin Baker is a UK firm)

The fact that this is still up in the air while the various branches are attempting to declare, or have declared, Initial Operating Capability (IOC) .

This is a definition of IOC that I was previously unaware of.

This Wouldn’t Have Happened If the Original Story Hadn’t Gotten a Lot of Ink

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The USAF inspector general lost over a decade of corruption and mismanagement files back, and now, following surprisingly extensive coverage of this mishap, they appeared to have rectified the error. I thought that the loss was suspicious, and I don’t think that the recovery efforts were as herculean as the article implies.

My guess is that no one wanted to try to recover the data, but it got too hot not to try:

The U.S. Air Force says it has recovered files from 100,000 inspector general investigations dating back to 2004.

In a short, four-sentence statement released midday on Wednesday, service officials said the Air Force continues to investigate the embarrassing incident in which the files and their backups were corrupted.

“Through extensive data recovery efforts over the weekend and this week, the Air Force has been able to regain access to the data in the Air Force Inspector General Automated Case Tracking System (ACTS),” the statement reads.

………

The inspector general’s office investigates claims of waste, fraud, and abuse within the Air Force.

It may be innocent, but it smells like a 3 dead dead gopher in august.

About F%$#ing Time

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After months of Terror Bombing by the House of Saud in Yemen, the White House has finally blocked the transfer of cluster bombs to their military:

Frustrated by a growing death toll, the White House has quietly placed a hold on the transfer of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia as the Sunni ally continues its bloody war on Shiite rebels in Yemen, U.S. officials tell Foreign Policy. It’s the first concrete step the United States has taken to demonstrate its unease with the Saudi bombing campaign that human rights activists say has killed and injured hundreds of Yemeni civilians, many of them children.

The move follows rising criticism by U.S. lawmakers of America’s support for the oil-rich monarchy in the year-long conflict. Washington has sold weapons and provided training, targeting information, and aerial refueling support to the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen. It has also sold Riyadh millions of dollars’ worth of cluster bombs in recent years.

Asked about the hold on the shipments, a senior U.S. official cited reports that the Saudi-led coalition used cluster bombs “in areas in which civilians are alleged to have been present or in the vicinity.”

“We take such concerns seriously and are seeking additional information,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The US foreign policy establishment has viewed the House of Saud as a crucial ally in the region for longer than I have been alive, and I cannot imaging that this decision appears not to have come from there.

I am pretty sure that this came from the Oval Office, and cynic that I am, I am thinking that this decision was driven by electoral considerations, specifically that Trump would use our cozy relationship with Riyadh against Hillary Clinton in the upcoming election.

PICTURES: Saab rolls out first Gripen E fighter

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Saab has rolled out its first Gripen NG, which structurally is pretty much a new plane.

As compared to the travails of the F-22, where upgrades and modernization have been expensive and difficult, and the F-35, which is late, expensive, under performing, and unreliable.

By comparison, all the major systems for the new Gripen have flown, the first aircraft is a production unit, and it is expected to start flight testing this year:

Saab is targeting the on-schedule delivery of its new Gripen E fighter to the Swedish and Brazilian air forces late this decade, as it steps up export campaigns involving both the advanced model and its earlier C/D-model jet.

 The first of three Swedish test aircraft to be involved in the project was unveiled at the manufacturer’s Linköping facility on 18 May, in front of an international audience of current and prospective Gripen users.

 Lead aircraft 39-8 will be handed over to Saab’s flight test department “this summer”, and should make its flight debut at the end of the year, the company says. It will be used initially to verify the general systems, airframe and aerodynamics of the evolved design, which – while visually resembling earlier iterations – is entirely new.

 Powered by a GE Aviation F414 turbofan engine capable of generating 22,000lb (98kN) of thrust, the Gripen E has an empty weight of 8,000kg (17,600lb) and a maximum take-off weight of 16.5t. The latter represents a 2.5t increase over the C/D. At 15.2m (49.8ft), it is also 30cm longer than its predecessor, while its wingspan has increased by 20cm, to 8.6m. With 40% more internal fuel, the new model has increased range, payload and endurance, and features an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, other updated avionics and new electronic warfare equipment.

 Saab chief executive Håkan Buskhe reveals the cost of developing the Gripen E and producing its three Swedish test aircraft will be less than $2 billion.

This is chump change by the standards of modern fighter development.

………

 Stressing that aircraft 39-8 is not a prototype, Ydreskog says: “Assembly of the first test aircraft – with 60,000, mostly new parts – was shorter than number 204 for the C/D.” The programme’s other test units are in different stages of structural assembly and only minor adjustments are expected as the shift to series production occurs. “There is some optimisation to do – we can reduce some weight,” he notes.

 But Saab believes one of the biggest advances with the Gripen E comes through its use of an all-new integrated modular avionics system, which splits flight-critical and tactical management software. It says the latter’s software, hardware and algorithms can be rapidly changed – like apps on a smartphone – to keep pace with evolved operational requirements or technological advances in computing over the life of the type’s use.

(emphasis mine)

The updated software has been in development for far less time than the (still not up to snuff) avionics package for the F-35 JSF, and it will be trivial for countries using the aircraft.

The reason is that critical functions are segregated from one another, which, as any programmer can tell you, simply works better than tightly integrated all in one software as used in the JSF, even after billions of dollars have been spent.

Of course, for Lockheed Martin, their hairball of a software platform is not a bug, it’s a feature, because it allows charge tolls on users who want to make upgrades.

As Aviation Week notes:

………

Gripen E is scaled up from the early Gripen C/D with 40% additional fuel capacity, more thrust from its General Electric F414 engine and more weapon stations. Internally the aircraft has been given a new sensor suite, with active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar and infrared search and track (IRST).

Key to the aircraft is a federated software system that separates critical flight control systems from the tactical systems. Saab claims this will make the Gripen E’s avionics and mission systems more easily and quickly upgradable. Just 10% of the aircraft’s system code will be devoted to flight-critical systems; the remaining 90% will be mission-system related. Saab officials say tactical upgrades could be tested and introduced in weeks rather than months.

(emphasis mine)

The direct operating cost, as well as the fly away cost, of the Gripen looks to be less than that of its competitors.

Compared to its competitors, the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Dassault Rafale, and the Lockheed-Martin Lightning II, this aircraft should better suit the needs of most countries out there, but Sweden lacks the connections behind the other platforms, so it looks likely that while it will be a market success, it will be a only a modest success.

Gee, You Think?

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The director of the F-35 (aka the Joint Strike Fighter) program, General Christopher Bogden, has admitted that the “Jointness” part of the program was a mistake:

Perhaps the only thing U.S. military leaders know about their next fighter jet is this: they want the program to go better than the F-35’s did.

The sixth-generation fighter effort is still in its infancy; the aircraft it produces may not fly for decades. The Pentagon hasn’t even decided whether to build separate planes for the Navy and Air Force. But the services’ leaders are already cooperating to figure out how the futuristic fighter will fit into the battlefield of the future — and how they can avoid another tactical aircraft program that winds up so late, over budget, and short of its goals.

Ask the F-35 program’s current director for advice, and you’ll get this gentle warning: joint programs are hard.

“I’m not saying they’re bad. I’m not saying they’re good. I’m just saying they’re hard,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan said Thursday. “You ought to think really hard about what you really need out of the sixth-generation fighter and how much overlap is there between what the Navy and the Air Force really need.”

When the F-35 was conceived in the 1990s, the goal was to buy a common plane for the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and even America’s allies. The Air Force version would fly from traditional runways, the Navy version would operate from aircraft carriers, and the Marine version would be built to take off from short runways and land vertically. The goal was to have all three have 70 percent of their parts in common, which was meant to save billions of dollars in development and logistics costs.

But engineering changes have produced three variants that have only 20 percent of their parts in common, Bogdan said at a conference sponsored by McAleese and Associates and Credit Suisse.

………

“We will have some different requirements for what we need based on the different things we are expected to provide for the joint force,” Lt. Gen. James “Mike” Holmes, Air Force deputy chief of staff for plans and requirements, told reporters last month. “We will use common technologies and maybe some common things, but at this point we think it will be a different enough mission that it won’t be the same airplane.”

The only joint US Navy/US Air Force fighter that ever achieved a modicum of defense was the F-4 Phantom, and that was developed exclusively for naval use.

Bogden also ignores the elephant in the room, which is that the jointness that most seriously compromised the program has been the jointness with the US Marine Corps.

The STOVL version has added about 2000 lbs to the weight of just the engine, led to poor rear visibility from the cockpit, made the wings smaller than they should have been for either the Air Force of Naval variants to save weight, and the volume occupied by the lift fan restricted the placement and the utility of the inner weapons bays.

This is not the only reason that the JSF is shaping up as a clusterf%$#, but it is a lot of the problem.

Reality: 1 – USAF: 0

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Because they have nothing else that can do the job, the the United States Air Force has declared a hiatus on trying to scrap the A-10 Warthog:


The U.S. Air Force has reportedly decided to temporarily call off its campaign to retire the long-serving Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II close air support aircraft. The service finally relented because the Warthog is in high demand fighting the Islamic State terrorist entity in Iraq and Syria.

With its distinctive, even ungainly design, the Warthog is nonetheless beloved by U.S. ground forces who have come to rely on the low flying jet to provide air cover during battles with militants in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the Air Force was — until recently — trying to retire the jet in favor of the stealthy, supersonic Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

“It appears the administration is finally coming to its senses and recognizing the importance of A-10s to our troops’ lives and national security. Since before I took office and after, I’ve consistently highlighted the A-10’s irreplaceable capabilities and worked to expose the administration’s flawed argument for wanting to retire it prematurely,” Rep. Martha McSally — a former A-10 squadron commander and current member of the House Armed Services Committee — said in a statement.

She added:

“With A-10s deployed in the Middle East to fight ISIS, in Europe to deter Russian aggression, and along the Korean Peninsula, administration officials can no longer deny how invaluable these planes are to our arsenal and military capabilities. But our fight does not end here. The administration has been persistent in its efforts to send our best close air support asset to the boneyard without a replacement. That’s unacceptable, and I’ll continue to lead the fight to ensure we keep these planes flying until we know without a doubt we can replace their capabilities.”

The facts on the ground are no surprise, but the fact that the USAF has acknowledged reality is.

They have been soft pedaling their close air support duties since at least the Korean war, when they refused to deploy the P-47 Thunderbolt, and instead deployed the P-51 Mustang, which carried less ordinance and was far more vulnerable to ground fire because of its aft mounted radiator. (And the fact that the Thunderbolt was built like a f%$#ing tank)

So, We are Selling Billions of Weapons to the Founder/Funder of ISIS

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I am referring, of course, to the House of Saud, who just inked a major arms deal with them, so that they can better bomb women, children, and hospitals in Yemen:

The US has cleared a sale of more than 10,000 advanced air-to-ground munitions for Saudi Arabia, a week after key allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) raised concerns over dwindling supplies of weapons.

If cleared by Congress, the sale, which could be worth up to $1.29 billion, would provide a wave of advanced munitions to a Saudi military that has been conducting airstrikes in Syria and Yemen for 13 months.

The contractor for the weapons will be decided by competition, according to a notice posted on the website of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.
Included in the potential sale are the following:

  • 1,000 GBU-10 Paveway II laser guided bombs (LGBs).
  • 2,300 BLU-117/MK-84 2,000 pound general-purpose bombs.
  • 4,020 GBU-12 Paveway II LGBs.
  • 8,020 BLU-111/MK-82 500 pound general-purpose bombs.
  • 1,100 GBU-24 Paveway III LGBs.
  • 1,500 BLU-109 2,000 pound penetrator warheads.
  • 400 GBU-31(V1) KMU-556 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) tail kits.
  • 1,000 GBU-31(V3) KMU-557 JDAM tail kits.
  • 3,000 GBU-38 KMU-572 JDAM tail kits.
  • 2,000 GBU-48 Enhanced Paveway II, dual-mode global positioning system (GPS)/LGB with the MXU-667 Airfoil and the MAU-169L/B computer control group (CCG) dual mode.
  • 2,000 BLU-110/MK-83 1,000 pound general-purpose bombs.
  • 500 GBU-54 KMU-572 laser JDAM tail kits, dual-mode GPS/LGB with the MXU-667 Airfoil and the MAU-169L/B CCG dual mode.
  • 300 GBU-56 KMU 556 laser JDAM tail kits, dual-mode GPS/LGB with the MXU-667 Airfoil and the MAU-169L/B CCG dual mode.
  • 10,200 FMU-152 fuzes.

The news comes just days after the end of the Dubai Airshow, where concerns over the depletion of weapon caches among the GCC states was a major talking point — one acknowledged by US Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James in public comments.

 Yeah, this is such a f%$#ing good idea.

Why Northrop Won the LRS-B Contract

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Over at Aviation Week, Bill Sweetman has a very good analysis as to why Northrop-Grumman beat the joint Lockheed-Martin Boeing bid for the LRS-B bomber program. (Paid subscription required)

When one considers the relative sizes of the competitors, Boeing and LM both dwarf Northrop, it was a surprise when won:

Northrop Grumman won the Long-Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) contest on cost; the question is whether it also beat its rivals on technology and risk. The immediate response from Lockheed Martin and Boeing was to query the cost and risk assessment behind the decision; Loren Thompson, a consultant to both companies, confirmed that they knew from the numbers announced on Oct. 21 that they had been underbid, quite unexpectedly and by a decisive margin, pointing to fatal flaws in their strategy.

Thompson’s later column in Forbes, focusing on Northrop Grumman’s ability to execute the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) contract, suggests that the winner undercut its rival on EMD. “I’d say Wes [Northrop CEO Wes Bush] bet the company,” Thompson said. One Wall Street analyst who had predicted a Boeing team win said: “I have an impossible time believing that this will be a financially attractive proposition if he underbid the only defense contractor who understands lean manufacturing.”

But Northrop Grumman did precisely that—relying on its operational experience with wideband, all-aspect stealth technology on the B-2 bomber and the still-secret RQ-180 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) unmanned air vehicle. Also, the winning formula was not just a question of delivering more stealth or greater range, but of meeting a complex set of requirements that stressed risk reduction, an open systems architecture, agile management and new manufacturing technology.

………


Northrop Grumman won the Long-Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) contest on cost; the question is whether it also beat its rivals on technology and risk. The immediate response from Lockheed Martin and Boeing was to query the cost and risk assessment behind the decision; Loren Thompson, a consultant to both companies, confirmed that they knew from the numbers announced on Oct. 21 that they had been underbid, quite unexpectedly and by a decisive margin, pointing to fatal flaws in their strategy.

Thompson’s later column in Forbes, focusing on Northrop Grumman’s ability to execute the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) contract, suggests that the winner undercut its rival on EMD. “I’d say Wes [Northrop CEO Wes Bush] bet the company,” Thompson said. One Wall Street analyst who had predicted a Boeing team win said: “I have an impossible time believing that this will be a financially attractive proposition if he underbid the only defense contractor who understands lean manufacturing.”

But Northrop Grumman did precisely that—relying on its operational experience with wideband, all-aspect stealth technology on the B-2 bomber and the still-secret RQ-180 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) unmanned air vehicle. Also, the winning formula was not just a question of delivering more stealth or greater range, but of meeting a complex set of requirements that stressed risk reduction, an open systems architecture, agile management and new manufacturing technology.

The conventional wisdom is that Northrop significantly underbid LM and Boeing, and that they will unable to execute their extremely aggressive bid.

Sweetman notes looks toward Northrop’s experience with the RQ-180, which seems to imply that they may have made a breakthrough in incorporating aerodynamic efficiency and broadband stealth.

I think that it is something else, and I think that Sweetman buried the lede here, because the following requirements should have whoever made the decision fleeing from LM like Laurie Strode did from Michael Meyers:

LRS-B, too, is planned to be upgraded easily and competitively, “with space and weight provision for things we can’t imagine today,” LaPlante said. Open architecture, he noted, could allow the Pentagon to procure a new or upgraded subsystem competitively, “provide it to the prime and say, ‘integrate this.’” Along with the cost of maintaining the bomber’s low-observable systems, upgrades will account for a large proportion of the bomber’s life-cycle cost—which will be much greater than its procurement bill.

………

Lockheed Martin brought its experience with stealth systems integration to the party. But the history of the F-22—where upgrades have been constrained by a tightly integrated architecture, so that every change requires painstaking regression testing to ensure that other functions are not affected—was exactly what the LRS-B program’s open architecture is designed to avoid.

(emphasis mine)

Lockheed-Martin has been doing tightly integrated monolithic systems for years, which runs counter to just about every rule of both software and weapons development, where critical functions should be segregated from everything else.

L-M’s model, as shown in the F-22 and the F-35 is put everything in one box that no one can look into except for Lockheed Martin.

They make their money by placing a toll on access.

It’s great for Lockheed Martin, but it’s technically stupid, and bad for the end user and the taxpayer, and it appears that someone in the Pentagon has finally recognized this.

Canadian Defense Industry May See Immediate Benefit from F-35 Cancellation

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Specifically, Canada has two needs, to replace its tired F/A-18s. but it also needs to replace much of its navy, which is well past its “sell by date”.

It turns out that the money saved by cancelling the F-35 may well free up money to allow for new ships, which will have the effect of creating a net plus for the Canadian defense industry:

While Canadian firms stand to lose business with the country’s withdrawal from the F-35 program, its maritime industry is expecting a potential windfall from the change of direction in defense.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised to put more money into Canada’s ailing naval shipbuilding program, including any savings from selecting a cheaper alternative to the F-35 fighter jet. Maritime industry officials said that could mean more ships and more work.

Trudeau promised the shift in defense priorities during the recent federal election campaign. His government was elected Oct. 19 and took power Nov. 4.

The previous Conservative Party government had launched the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy (NSPS) in 2011. That outlined an ambitious CAN $30 billion plan (US $23 billion) to construct new vessels for the Royal Canadian Navy and Canadian Coast Guard. NSPS would see construction of 28 major warships and 116 smaller vessels.

Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was defeated by Trudeau, had earlier dismissed the Liberal promise to spend more money on shipbuilding as unnecessary, noting that his government originally put enough funding into NSPS.

But the shipbuilding strategy has been dogged by concerns from industry. Defense analysts, the Royal Canadian Navy and the country’s Auditor General Michael Ferguson have all warned there is likely not enough money to build all the needed vessels.

Before the Conservative Party government was defeated, Defence Minister Jason Kenney acknowledged that the NSPS plan, supposed to build up to 15 replacement ships for the Navy’s frigates and destroyers, might actually only finance 11 vessels.

Trudeau may very well have backed himself into a win-win scenario for canada.

Northrop Grumman Wins Contract for New Bomber

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NG beat out a coalition of Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (paid subscription required)

My guess is that this was largely driven by the desire to make sure that all the primes had business. Boeing has the new tankers, LM has the F-35, and now NG has this:

Northrop Grumman is the winner of the Long-Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) contest, beating a rival team with six times its annual sales.

 The U.S. Air Force announced Oct. 27 that Northrop Grumman beat a Boeing/Lockheed Martin team in a competition to develop and build 100 of the bombers, which are expected to reach initial operational capability in the mid-2020s. The Pentagon says the next phase of the work, engineering and manufacturing development (EMD), should cost $21.4 billion in 2010 dollars, including the delivery of an unspecified number of test aircraft.

 Another $1.9 billion has already been spent on risk reduction, bringing both competing teams through the initial design phase. In 2016 dollars, the estimated EMD cost is $23.5 billion, the Pentagon says. The B-2 cost $37.2 billion to develop in 2016 dollars.

 The Air Force also says that the average procurement unit cost for the Northrop Grumman bomber (which does not have a formal designation yet) will be $511 million in 2010 dollars, assuming a 100-aircraft buy ($564 million in 2016 dollars). This figure, the result of two independent Pentagon estimates, is lower than the $550 million (2010 dollars) goal that was set in 2011, when then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates approved the start of the program.

 ………

 For the time being, however, the make-up of Northrop Grumman’s team is a secret, as are most attributes of the program. Not even the engine subcontractor is disclosed, although the Air Force said today that all major subsystems have been selected. Although most analysts agree it is overwhelmingly likely that the bomber will resemble a smaller cousin of the B-2, a blended wing-body aircraft with two engines and an unrefueled radius of action of around 2,500 nm, no such details have been confirmed.

Note that the range is less than half that of the B-52 and the B-2, and 15 less than that of the B-1, which has been criticized for excessive use of tankers in combat operations.

The payload is not public, but given that it will have two engines, I would expect to be far less than that of the B-2’s 40,000 lbs (to say much less of the B-52’s 70,000 lb payload, and the B-1’s 75,000 lb payload).

My guess is that this would place around a 25,000 lb payload, which means that we are spending an awful lot of money for a similar payload and range performance of the B-47, a medium bomber that first flew in 1947. (FWIW, Aviation Week has pegged the payload and range even lower)

And you wonder why I lament US weapons development and procurement.

Details of the selection process also remain highly classified, but it is likely that the winning bid rested on Northrop Grumman’s operational experience with wide-band, all-aspect stealth technology on the B-2 bomber and the still-secret RQ-180 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) unmanned air vehicle.

 But the winning formula was most likely not just a question of delivering more stealth or more range. In LRS-B, the winner had to meet a complex set of requirements that stress risk reduction, an open systems architecture, agile management and manufacturing technology.

The USAF wants its strategic bomber, and because its first pass at this, the Next Generation Bomber, was expensive enough to make the B-2 look cheap, they trimmed away enough requirements to end up with something equivalent to the FB-111, which really isn’t a strategic bomber at all.

This is absurd.