GAO’s Latest Report On The F-35 Fighter Acquisition Program Finds No Major Problems. Really.

The F-35 fighter program is a smashing success. How else can you explain the fact that over the last year, Switzerland, Finland, Canada and Germany have all decided to buy it?

In the words of the Swiss government, when compared with other tactical aircraft, F-35 offers “the highest overall benefit at the lowest overall cost.”

The aircraft typically achieves 20 kills for every loss in military exercises, accomplishes strike and reconnaissance missions much more effectively than other fighters, and is the easiest combat aircraft to maintain in the joint inventory.

However, you wouldn’t learn any of that from reading the Government Accountability Office’s latest annual report on the F-35 acquisition program—the effort to produce and upgrade the fighter—because GAO didn’t interview users or maintainers.

Instead, pursuant to congressional direction, it only talked to program officials in government and industry, and then issued a report entitled, “F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: Cost Growth and Schedule Delays Continue.”

Not surprisingly, some legislators interpreted this as critical of the program—even though the report notes that the cost of buying 2,470 fighters for three domestic military services has remained “relatively stable” for ten years, and the price of each aircraft has fallen steadily (an F-35 today typically costs less to build than an empty Boeing 737).

GAO actually found little to complain about in the F-35 acquisition program, although you have to read the report carefully to realize that.

Before detailing what GAO found, I should note that my think tank receives funding from several companies involved in the program, most notably airframe prime contractor Lockheed Martin
LMT
.

The report identifies a grand total of three problems worthy of extended discussion: (1) delay of approval to enter full-rate production; (2) rising costs and longer time to implement so-called Block 4 upgrades; and (3) uncertainties surrounding the plane’s system for tracking logistical needs.

If you ponder what the report says about each of these issues, though, it is hard to get excited about consequences.

For instance, concerning the recently disclosed decision to delay full-rate production, the program is already turning out well over a hundred planes per year for U.S. and allied forces (nearly 800 have been delivered), and the delay has nothing to do with the aircraft.

The problem has to do with the Navy Sea Systems Command not completing development of a simulator needed “for conducting complex test scenarios that the program office cannot replicate in a real-world environment.”

The F-35 joint program office figures it shouldn’t give the final go-ahead on full-rate production until the simulator tests are conducted, but F-35 is performing extremely well for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps in real-world conditions, so what difference does it make?

Maybe there is a hypothetical contingency for which F-35 isn’t fully ready in its baseline configuration, but after watching the execrable performance of Russian military forces in Ukraine for two months, this concern does not seem urgent.

F-35 as it exists today could wipe out the Russians in a few days.

The second issue GAO surfaces is that Block 4 modernization plans to upgrade the fighter for advanced threats in 2030 and beyond are running late, and costing more than expected.

Here again, though, you have to read the report carefully. Even with the most recent increase in cost estimates, the total price-tag to upgrade F-35s over a decade is still less than 1% of the fighter’s life-cycle costs.

If you read further, you discover that most of the cost “increases” in Block 4 result from a decision to capture expenses not included in initial estimates rather than actual increases.

And the delay in completing the upgrades results mainly from a “reprioritization” that added 25 more capabilities not part of the original plan.

The program office has decided to double the time available to complete each additional software increment, but in general the Update 4 issues appear to be driven less by technical challenges than bureaucratic considerations.

The same is true with the third concern GAO identifies, the F-35’s Autonomic Logistics Information System, affectionately known as ALIS.

ALIS is supposed to analyze and diagnose aircraft performance in order to predict when support like maintenance will be needed.

GAO complains it cost taxpayers $28 million (about three minutes worth of federal spending at current rates) to fix deficiencies in ALIS, after which the program office elected to start over; but that plan changed due to a $34 million shortfall in funding (another three minutes in spending) so now the plan is to incrementally improve ALIS.

The report acknowledges that the even without developing a replacement for ALIS, some key goals have been achieved such as shrinking the size of hardware and gaining better government access to technical data.

Aircraft sustainment is an important challenge so one way or another the program office will get ALIS up to snuff, but if this is the worst challenge the F-35 acquisition program faces, then it’s a truly exemplary program.

The simple truth here is that the F-35 no longer faces major development or production challenges; government and industry have produced a game-changing fighter that can easily defeat any other tactical aircraft in the world.

So, delivering a report to Capitol Hill with the subtitle, “Cost Growth and Schedule Delays Continue” is really looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

F-35 is a winner, and every one of America’s allies want it.