Sjekk dette som kom sammen med masse annet for tre uker siden: :JSF - SAR Discloses Another Three-Year SlipPosted byBill Sweetman1:17 PM on Apr 03, 2012
I spent some time this weekend on the latest Selected Acquisition Report (SAR) for the Joint Strike Fighter. It was an old-school job with a highlighter, yellow Post-Its, pencil and ultrafine rollerball. It hurt my head, but I am in good company: the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments’ budget expert, Todd Harrison, calls it “incredibly dense and frustrating to read.”
Lockheed Martin and its consultants are upset by the $1.5 trillion dollar figure for the program’s life-cycle cost. That's ironic, because the first person to talk about JSF being a trillion-dollar program was Micky Blackwell, in 1996, and he was president of a major company aeronautics sector located not a million miles from Fort Worth.
Other details in the document are more interesting.
There have been rumblings over the past year about another “SDD replan”, and here it is: Another three-year slip to initial operational test and evaluation, the culmination of system development and demonstration, which now is due to be complete in 2019 – the target date is February but the threshold date is October.
The program has not made progress, it’s gone backwards: completion of IOT&E is farther off than it was two years ago. In the early 2010 restructuring, IOT&E was expected to be complete in April 2016. The services are not going to announce initial operational capability dates until next year, according to the SAR.
From a Reuters report last Friday, it appears that the main culprit is software and hardware, mainly in terms of the integration functions – sensor fusion and emission control – that take place in the fighter’s main processor banks.
Completion of IOT&E should be followed by a Milestone C full-rate production decision in April or October 2019 – but this is a misnomer, because the plans call for the program to be most of the way to full rate in the 2018 buy year. The FY18 budget is planned to fund the F-35B and C at their full 50/year rate, and the USAF will buy 60 F-35As, against an FRP level of 80. And that means committing to those 110 jets in early 2016, three years before MS-C, to get advance procurement funds into the 2017 budget.
Lockheed Martin and its consultants are upset by the $1.5 trillion dollar figure for the program’s life-cycle cost. That's ironic, because the first person to talk about JSF being a trillion-dollar program was Micky Blackwell, in 1996, and he was president of a major company aeronautics sector located not a million miles from Fort Worth.
Other details in the document are more interesting.
There have been rumblings over the past year about another “SDD replan”, and here it is: Another three-year slip to initial operational test and evaluation, the culmination of system development and demonstration, which now is due to be complete in 2019 – the target date is February but the threshold date is October.
The program has not made progress, it’s gone backwards: completion of IOT&E is farther off than it was two years ago. In the early 2010 restructuring, IOT&E was expected to be complete in April 2016. The services are not going to announce initial operational capability dates until next year, according to the SAR.
From a Reuters report last Friday, it appears that the main culprit is software and hardware, mainly in terms of the integration functions – sensor fusion and emission control – that take place in the fighter’s main processor banks.
Completion of IOT&E should be followed by a Milestone C full-rate production decision in April or October 2019 – but this is a misnomer, because the plans call for the program to be most of the way to full rate in the 2018 buy year. The FY18 budget is planned to fund the F-35B and C at their full 50/year rate, and the USAF will buy 60 F-35As, against an FRP level of 80. And that means committing to those 110 jets in early 2016, three years before MS-C, to get advance procurement funds into the 2017 budget.
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