The HASC has moved to pressure the F-35 program. (file)

WASHINGTON: The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) wants the Defense Department to explain how it will implement the numerous recommendations by Congress’s watchdog agency for driving down the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s astronomical sustainment costs — or, if the Pentagon won’t follow through, to explain why not.

The demand is embodied in the fiscal 2022 defense policy bill, passed by the committee late yesterday, heaping yet another reporting requirement on DoD’s somewhat embattled F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO). The provision, drafted in an amendment by Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., chides DoD on failure to implement the majority of the more-than-30 recommendations for managing the F-35’s ever-growing sustainment costs proffered by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) since 2013.

In a July report, GAO found that “DOD plans to acquire nearly 2,500 F-35 aircraft for about $400 billion. It projects spending another $1.27 trillion to operate and sustain them—an estimate that has steadily increased since 2012. The military services collectively face tens of billions of dollars in sustainment costs that they project will be unaffordable.”

The new HASC language states:

“Although the Department has taken positive steps to implement and eventually close out several of these recommendations, the majority of GAO’s recommendations remain open. Some of these recommendations, which focus on critical aspects of sustainment such as developing an intellectual property strategy for the program and establishing a performance-measurement process for the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS), have been open for 7 years. Others, such as the June 2021 recommendations to help the Department ensure it can afford to sustain the number of F-35s it plans to purchase, are more recent and particularly time-sensitive.”

The provision directs Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to provide the House and Senate defense committees a report by March 1, 2022 that covers progress toward putting GAO’s recommendations in place; plans for implementing those recommendations that are outstanding; and details of any obstacles that prevent the JPO from doing so.

The HASC markup of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) also places spending constraints on the F-35 program, based on the “affordability targets” assessed by the Air Force, Navy and Marines of the three fighter variants.

This means that service budget planners would have to take into account the long-tail costs of sustaining the jets — a longstanding issue for the F-35 — in order to decide how many of the fighters they can afford to maintain. The move, if passed by both sides of Capitol Hill, could ultimately force the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corp to downsize their overall planned fleet size.

DoD asked for some $12 billion in its fiscal 2022 budget request to buy 85 F-35 JSF aircraft, with the Air Force accounting for the bulk of the procurement plan with 48 jets at $4.5 billion. However, the Air Force broke with tradition by failing to include extra jets in its annual “unfunded priorities” wish list of equipment that didn’t make the budget chop inside DoD, precisely due to concerns about affordability. Overall, the HASC language would cut the budget for F-35As by $194.1 million and the F-35C by $63.3 million, while keeping the F-35B stable.

The HASC draft bill also requires Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to submit a report, no later than March 1, 2022, on sustainability costs, before the F-35 Joint Program Office can move to a performance based logistics (PBL) contract with prime contractor Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed Martin for some time has been pushing to move from today’s annual contracts to a five-year PBL deal to start in 2023, asserting that this would significantly cut sustainment costs by allowing the prime and its subcontractors to better invest in efficiency measures.

As part of that report, DoD also needs to address what HASC sees as a need for greater industrial competition in the F-35 program, on the basis that doing so would drive down costs. Critics say Lockheed Martin, because it owns the vast majority of the sustainment work, has little incentive to reduce prices. Company officials retort that as the maker of the jet, it is best positioned to manage the technically complex program.