DoD memo formalizes F-35 program overhaul - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

DoD memo formalizes F-35 program overhaul

The Pentagon’s top weapons buyer late last week formalized the restructuring to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, extending the plane’s test phase to 2015 and delaying the start of its full production by 13 months to November of that year.

In a separate event, Air Force Secretary Michael Donley today told reporters today that the service is delaying its initial operational capability date for the JSF to 2015, two years after the service originally planned to field its first operational F-35 squadron.

In a three-page acquisition decision memorandum (ADM) published Feb. 24, Ashton Carter outlined the Defense Department’s rationale behind the retooling of the F-35 program that saw the government program manager for the program fired, cut production buys of the aircraft and extended its development phase to 2015.

The restructuring was done after numerous analyses by the Pentagon’s Joint Estimating Team (JET) and other groups led Defense Secretary Robert Gates to believe that the program was going to breach the Nunn-McCurdy statute capping per-unit cost growth on major weapons.

Gates’ restructuring of the program — as well as an ongoing DoD-wide F-35 program review that began in November — were done with the Pentagon thinking “as though” the program had breached the statute, according to the ADM.

“While the JET II was only an estimate, the Review was undertaken as though the JSF program was in Nunn-McCurdy breach,” said the memo, first reported by the Web site DoDBuzz. A copy was obtained by Defense News.

Carter expects the Pentagon to receive 122 fewer F-35s over the next five years than it had planned last year, the memo said.

“No fundamental technology or manufacturing problems were discovered in the Review,” the memo said.

The ADM formally orders the JSF program to extend system development and design to 2015, delay the start of full-rate production to later that year, add four test jets to SDD, add $2.8 billion to the test phase of the program and withhold $614 million in performance award fees from Lockheed Martin.

Gates announced the retooling during a Feb. 1 news conference at the Pentagon where he unveiled the department’s budget.

All of this is being done in an effort to get the program back on track after Pentagon estimates predicted that the program was up to 30 months behind schedule. Defense Department officials have said that, even with the restructuring, the F-35 will still be 13 months late.

The ADM also allows for the purchase of additional F-35s using any excess money in the program’s budget should Lockheed and the government program office be able to “execute program development and or deliver aircraft at lower costs.”

The document describes 2010 as a critical year for the F-35 with the “completion of hundreds of test flights, commencement of flight testing at Eglin [Air Force Base, Fla.,] and other key milestones planned.”

The Navy is also considering slipping its initial operational capability date for the plane, and along with the Air Force, is eyeing extending the service lives of its existing fighters.

This comes after a number of monthly progress reports written by the Defense Contract Management Agency from late 2009 show the program to have experienced a number of hiccups at Lockheed’s Fort Worth, Texas, F-35 production facility.

These reports, released by the Center for Defense Information (CDI), show that between July and November of last year, the F-35 production line was being “cannibalized” to support the test program and that low-rate initial production delivery schedule for the plane was an average of 80 days late and that F-35 parts were arriving late from the suppliers 25 percent of the time. Later in the fall, the program experienced a quality verification stand-down, which focused on software issues with the aircraft, according to CDI.