Source: Undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics

There’s not much to say about the latest F-35 report. Concurrency costs are down and predicted to continue dropping.

Among the reasons it’s reasonable to expect costs to keep dropping: Lockheed has to eat 50 percent of the costs of concurrency fixes for lots six and seven of Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP). So Lockheed has hundreds of millions of reasons to keep costs down.

However, the report paints the overall case on concurrency costs in a slight off-white: “Overall, the F-35 concurrency costs remain stable. with the estimate for March 2014 reducing slightly from from the previous report. The May 2013 estimate was $1,750 million and the February 2014 estimate is $1,650 million.”

Concurrency, of course, has long been a bane too F-35 program workers and to senior Pentagon acquisition officials. Readers will remember our ground-breaking interview with then-Vice Adm. David Venlet, the first time a program official slammed concurrency.