F-35B IOC To Come ‘Latter Half of 2015,’ Marine Commandant Gen. Amos Says

F-35B IOC To Come ‘Latter Half of 2015,’ Marine Commandant Gen. Amos Says
F-35B IOC To Come ‘Latter Half of 2015,’ Marine Commandant Gen. Amos Says

[updated with official dates] WASHINGTON: Just two days before the Pentagon is required by Congress to report when the different versions of F-35 will hit Initial Operating Capability, that mark when the services begin to deliver planes that are sort of ready for war missions and serious training, Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos told me…

F-35 Costs Dip A Tiny Bit; SAR Says Program Costs Down $4.5 Billion

UPDATED: SAR Report Added WASHINGTON: The official costs of the F-35 program have shrunk, not much, but they are down for the first time. The Pentagon’s authoritative Selected Acquisition Report says the program is projected to be $4.5 billion less expensive than its last estimate. That’s 1 percent of the program. F-35 December 2012 SAR…

Marine’s F-35B Executes Its First Vertical Takeoff; Straight Up Cool But…

Marine’s F-35B Executes Its First Vertical Takeoff; Straight Up Cool But…
Marine’s F-35B Executes Its First Vertical Takeoff; Straight Up Cool But…

Watch the F-35B, the Marines’ fighter of choice, execute a very cool maneuver in this video, taking off straight up into the sky. While very cool, this is not something the Joint Strike Fighter is actually expected to do very often. For one thing, it requires enormous amounts of fuel. Instead, the B model is…

Army Up, Navy Down, & Pakistan Makes Us Pay In 2013 Reprogramming Request

Army Up, Navy Down, & Pakistan Makes Us Pay In 2013 Reprogramming Request
Army Up, Navy Down, & Pakistan Makes Us Pay In 2013 Reprogramming Request

What’s a few billion between friends? You can download the details below – more than 100 pages of them – but here are the bottom lines of the 2013 reprogramming requests the Pentagon has submitted to Congress: For fiscal year 2013, the administration wants “reprogramming authority” to reshuffle an extraordinary $9.6 billion between accounts in…

The Ford-Class Carrier, The F-35C and ‘Spider Web’ War At Sea

The Ford-Class Carrier, The F-35C and ‘Spider Web’ War At Sea
The Ford-Class Carrier, The F-35C and ‘Spider Web’ War At Sea

An aircraft carrier is nothing without aircraft, and a Navy aircraft is worth little without a carrier. It’s ships and planes in synergy that revolutionized war at sea in the 1930s and with new systems now entering service – the F-35C Joint Strike Fighter and the Ford-class carrier – they can do it again. On…

X-47B: Navy Drone Launches Off Aircraft Carrier; A New Tailhook Era

X-47B: Navy Drone Launches Off Aircraft Carrier; A New Tailhook Era
X-47B: Navy Drone Launches Off Aircraft Carrier; A New Tailhook Era

It’s hard enough for a human pilot to take off from the cramped and pitching deck of a US Navy aircraft carrier. Today, for the first time in history, a Remotely Piloted Aircraft did it. You can bet that military leaders in Beijing and Tehran sat up and took note as the batwinged X-47B drone…

What Will F-35 Costs Be In New SAR Estimate; Do They Matter?

What Will F-35 Costs Be In New SAR Estimate; Do They Matter?
What Will F-35 Costs Be In New SAR Estimate; Do They Matter?

WASHINGTON: Acquisition experts agree that accurate cost estimates can be devilishly difficult to get right. The Pentagon’s top cost estimator, Christine Fox, says current cost estimates are often accurate within several percentage points. That’s impressive, but on programs measured in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, a few percentage points can mean a…

HASC AirLand Chair Turner Targets GCV, Lima and York Army Plants

CAPITOL HILL: There’s a new chairman in town on the HASC’s powerful tactical air and land forces subcommittee, the sometimes fiery Michael Turner of Ohio, and he’s got his sights set on right on the Army and the Defense Department’s industrial base practices. Turner, best known as a vigorous advocate for missile defense and his…

Navy Budget Share Grows, Boosted By Pacific Strategy Shift

PENTAGON: The Navy would get the largest budget share among the three military services in the 2014 budget submitted Wednesday, but would still see a drop in total funding from what Congress provided for this year in the final version of the continuing resolution. The $155.8 billion requested for the Navy Department in the president’s…

Gen. Amos, Adm. Greenert: F-35 Essential But Procurement ‘Constipated’

NATIONAL HARBOR: The top officers in the Navy and Marine Corps defended their most expensive program, Lockheed Martin‘s troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, while acknowledging the way the Pentagon buys such weapons is not merely broken but “constipated.” “There’s no alternative for the United States Marine Corps to the F-35B,” Commandant Gen. James Amos said…

Countering China: Hypersonic Missiles, Sensors, Stealth, & Speed

We have heard much about the anti-access/area denial threat China poses to American and allied forces in the Pacific. We have read much about new Chinese missiles such as the DF-21, which supposedly can destroy maneuvering ships at sea — especially US aircraft carriers. We have read that Pacific allies wish to deploy substantial fleets…

F-35B Jump Jet Makes Its First Vertical Landing At Night (VIDEO)

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has had more than its share of ups and downs, but this week the jump-jet variant of the JSF had an up and down of historic significance: On April 2nd, a Marine Corps F-35B conducted the first ever short take-off and vertical landing that aircraft has ever done at night.…

Singapore Poised To Announce Purchase Of 12 F-35Bs

WASHINGTON: Singapore is expected to announce sometime in the next 10 days that it plans to buy its first squadron –12 planes — of some 75 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35Bs, further bolstering what had been the flagging fortunes of the world’s most expensive conventional weapon system. The fact that American allies in the Pacific are…

F-35 Cleared For Flight; Turbine Crack Cause Identified

WASHINGTON: The entire F-35 fleet has been cleared to resume flying only one week after being grounded for the second time this year. In vintage Pentagonese, this is how the return to flight was announced today to Capitol Hill: “Upon completion and compliance with the immediate action Time Compliant Technical Directive (TCTD) issued this week…