HAC-D chair throws cold water on new F-35 engine, won’t talk DoD supplemental until budget set

PALMDALE, Calif. — House appropriators don’t intend for the Pentagon to re-engine the F-35 with a new adaptive powerplant, the chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee (HAC-D) said this week.

“It states pretty specifically in the appropriation bill that we’re not looking or seeking to change out the Pratt & Whitney engine,” Rep. Ken Calvert, a California Republican, said in a Wednesday interview with Breaking Defense at the inaugural North LA Defense Forum hosted by Rep. Mike Garcia at Northrop Grumman’s facilities here in Palmdale. “Unless there’s a catastrophic failure on the part of [current engine maker] Pratt & Whitney, which I don’t foresee, I don’t see at this point that there’s going to be any change… Pratt & Whitney will continue to have that engine.”

Calvert’s comments come amid a public spat between F-35 maker Lockheed Martin and Pratt, after the head of Lockheed’s aeronautics division publicly backed a new engine that would be fielded through the Air Force’s Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP), as opposed to the tri-variant fleet getting an upgraded Pratt engine. (The new AETP engine would be compatible with the F-35A and F-35C variants but would not be compatible with the F-35B, which would need the upgraded Pratt engine.) Should the Pentagon pursue the adaptive powerplant, Pratt and GE Aerospace would compete to field it.

The Lockheed exec’s comments were quickly admonished by Pratt officials, who accused the aerospace giant of seeking to delay or deny the Air Force’s forthcoming NGAD fighter by trying to turn the F-35 into a sixth-gen platform itself, obviating the need for a new jet as a result.

The Air Force previously announced it would shutter AETP in its fiscal 2024 budget request, but some lawmakers appeared to leave the door open to a new engine by giving the program money in drafts of next fiscal year’s policy and funding bills, including HAC-D’s. Calvert threw cold water on the idea, however, emphasizing that the $150 million House appropriators would provide in FY24 to keep AETP going is not intended to upend Pratt’s incumbent F135 engine. (Senate authorizers separately indicated they would not fund the new engine, breaking with their House counterparts who would seek $588 million for the program next fiscal year. The Senate appropriations committee has yet to unveil the details of its spending legislation.)

Garcia said that continued funding for AETP is merely a backup in case the Pentagon’s preferred Pratt-made Engine Core Upgrade for the F135 goes awry. Additional funding to keep AETP alive, he said, is also a tool to further mature adaptive engine technology. 

“I would submit that now is not the time to be swapping out the engines on a program that’s had enough churn as far as tech baseline for 20 years,” said Garcia, a fellow California Republican who also sits on HAC-D.

“It’s nice to have a backup plan. It’s nice to have a development program running in parallel as a hedge and as a plan B and especially if it could be [incorporated] into other platforms at some point and future technologies, but not at the expense of current production contracts. We already have enough turmoil in the development of the F-35,” he added. “So I’m not opposed to funding it and looking at alternative engine programs, but it can’t be predetermined that we snap it in at some date that ends up trainwrecking the entire production program.”

Supplemental Funding? We’ll Talk About It Later

Following comments from lawmakers in Paris, who suggested that the Pentagon would almost assuredly get extra funding through a special supplemental spending bill above the caps agreed to as part of negotiations on the debt ceiling, Calvert insisted that the normal budget process would have to be wrapped up first before additional spending can be considered. 

“There’s not going to be a supplemental until we get our work done on the appropriations side,” he said. “So that means all 12 appropriation bills must be completed, technically, by the end of the calendar year. I’d like to do it sooner rather than later.”

Pointing to the possibility of yet another continuing resolution (CR) as lawmakers hammer out an agreement on spending, Calvert said that “every month we go by operating under a CR is a costly month, costly in time and costly in money. So our intent is to get all 12 appropriation bills done as rapidly as possible. So that’s our focus.” 

Negotiations over a final spending bill could drag out in part since Republicans have a majority in the House and Democrats hold the Senate, setting up disagreements that will have to be reconciled in conference between the lower and upper chamber.

“We know we’re gonna have to do this with Republican-only votes on the floor [of the House],” he continued. “I know that [Senate Appropriations Vice Chair Senator] Susan Collins and [Senate Appropriations Chair] Patti [Murray] are working together to get these appropriation bills done. It’s in their interest to do so. It’s in everyone’s interest to do so… I think they may actually get these bills done.”

Garcia cautioned as well that Republicans should be prepared to accept some concessions.

“Every member, and especially the Republicans, need to realize that this is all part of a negotiated position, and nothing is going to be 100 percent what they want it to be. 

“And these aren’t the dollar values we want it to be,” he added. “These aren’t all the policies we want it to be either, but there are, you know, there’s a burning hell and a freezing hell, and we’re trying to get to the lesser of two evils here.”