F-35 in sky

A pair of F-35 Lightning IIs pass under the sun while doing maneuvers to the Eglin Air Force Base runway. (DVDS/Samuel King Jr.)

WASHINGTON: The F-35 program office wants $500 million so that it can harness technical data that will make it easier for the military services to manage F-35 spare parts instead of having to rely on prime contractor Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon’s F-35 program executive said today.

In order for the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy to set up an organic supply chain, the services need “provisioning and cataloging data” associated with various parts, Lt. Gen. Eric Fick told lawmakers at a House Armed Services readiness subcommittee hearing.

“We have the rights to that data. It’s not a matter of data rights, it’s matter of data delivery — and being able to have that data delivered is going to cost money,” he said. “And that money is going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of about half a billion dollars, divided amongst the services.”

Fick said the Pentagon has “struggled” to find funding that would allow that data delivery to happen en masse, and is instead working with the individual manufacturers of various components to try to secure that data “at low or no cost.”

In a statement to Breaking Defense, Lockheed Martin spokeswoman Heidi Fields said the company provides all required data rights to the government as contractually required.

“[In] mid-2020, we received a Request for Proposal from the Joint Program Office for Provisioning and Cataloging data,” she said. “We and our suppliers provided initial proposal responses in December 2020. An additional set of supplier proposals was provided in March 2021 and a final set in July 2021. We are currently awaiting a response and direction from the Joint Program Office as well as their intended contracting approach.”

The debate on F-35 technical data rights have been a sticking point in negotiations between the Pentagon and Lockheed in recent years, as the department has shifted its focus to lowering the sustainment cost of the aircraft. When the F-35 program was conceptualized more than two decades ago, it was structured under a “Total System Performance Responsibility” approach that gave Lockheed an unprecedented amount of power to manage the sustainment of the aircraft.

“As a result, the government did not procure technical data that the government could eventually use, as needed and depending upon the circumstances, to promote vendor competition and increase government control over specific elements of sustainment,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in a report on F-35 sustainment released today.

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When it became clear that the TSPR model was inflating costs, the Pentagon began shifting to a hybrid approach where the Defense Department took additional responsibility for sustainment functions like storing or transporting parts.

However, the GAO claims that “the government still has very limited control over the F-35 supply chain, including ordering, part procurement, and inventory,” with defense officials telling the GAO that Lockheed still maintains “substantial control” over areas like parts storage and transport, and maintainers describing constraints that keep them from repairing parts that are proprietary.

During the hearing, Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., asked Diana Maurer — who authored the GAO report — whether obligating the $500 million for data delivery would “be an investment that would show a good rate of return for the taxpayer?”

“I think there’s the potential for doing that,” she said, adding that during interviews with the GAO, F-35 maintainers often expressed frustrations over the limited information provided when trying to understand whether to replace a part and how best to accomplish the task.

“What tool do we use? How do I replace it? What tool do we use to put it back on? Those are the kinds of specific levels of information that’s part of technical data,” said Maurer.