An audit released to the general public in May by the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—the federal government’s top watchdog agency—dropped some truth bombs on the heads of the Pentagon and F-35 Lightning stealth jet-builder Lockheed Martin.
The report revealed that, because of inadequate inventory reporting to the federal government, over a million spare parts used to maintain F-35s operational have gone missing. These parts have a complete value of not less than $85 million, and the true total might be “significantly higher” because of that aforementioned lack of book-keeping.
‘Spare parts’ here’s a term that might seek advice from items starting from multi-million dollar F135 turbofan engines to tiny screws used to connect landing gears and flaps. The GAO report cites, specifically, dozens of missing actuator doors costing over $91,000 each, in addition to 14 batteries averaging $150,000 each in cost.
Reportedly, the Pentagon has only bothered to research roughly 2% (60,000) of the missing parts.
Apparently, this problem is coming to the forefront since the Pentagon and Lockheed simply don’t have any type of comprehensive system to trace spare parts. There’s also some implied disagreement on how big a deal missing thousands and thousands of dollars of spare parts truly is.
Passing the spare buck
The U.S. government considers itself the owner of F-35 parts right up until the moment they’re installed abroad’s aircraft. Nonetheless, the federal government’s Joint Program Office (JPO) for the F-35 doesn’t have any type of master inventory of F-35 parts in its Government Furnished Property (GFP) Module tracking system. In consequence, the Defense Department lacks exact data on what number of parts are on the market, where they’re situated, and what they’re value.
Lockheed-Martin argues that the extent of reporting its providing the JPO already fulfills its contractual requirements, but says it’s working on an answer to integrate its own inventory records with GFP Module anyway.
Historically, Lockheed has often sought to beat back the Pentagon’s attempts to amass more data and control over F-35 logistics, because of what the corporate views as being its mental property.
A spokesperson for the JPO argued of their defense that while the variety of missing parts and their price tag could appear high, they amount to a loss rate of 1 percent, and that this rate is definitely decent provided that the federal government’s minimum required standard was 95% inventory accuracy (ie. as much as 5% losses).
In other words, while absolutely the value could appear large since the F-35 program is so big—with as many as 3,000 eventually expected to be assembled—it’s not a high percentage of the full part inventory.
That looks like an affordable defense if F-35 part losses are on par with or higher than those for other aircraft. It also ought to be said that the $85 million value of the missing parts matches the value to obtain one F-35A fighter—obviously a crucial sum, but not an earthshaking loss.
Nonetheless, the GAO isn’t confident that there aren’t so much more parts missing that they simply don’t find out about (‘unknown unknowns’), potentially leading to a rate higher than 1%.
One other complicating factor is that there are 19,000 non-useable F-35 parts taking over shelf space which have either been used up or change into obsolete while awaiting paperwork authorizing their disposal or repurposing. The F-35 had many early production configurations rendered obsolete by phased improvements, and the GAO report states that Lockheed has given JPO only ‘adhoc’ reports on these retired parts.
The report recommends that Lockheed and the JPO have to finally institute a comprehensive spare parts inventory regime that might be transparently tracked by the federal government in real time on its GFP Module database, reasonably than counting on Lockheed’s in-house accounting.
Jetfighters for subscription fee
For years, the lack of spare parts has caused frequent long delays and heavily impaired operations of F-35s across the globe.
The F-35 Lightning II was designed to be a comparatively inexpensive multi-role fighter that the U.S. could procure in large numbers and export to allies—bringing with it the greatly coveted advantage of stealth and particularly advanced networked sensors. Lightning IIs are available three models—F-35Cs for landing on large carrier decks (F-35C), F-35B jump jets compatible with smaller amphibious carriers, and the land-based F-35A model.
Despite an especially tormented and controversial development process and protracted problems with high operating costs, F-35s have been selling like hot cakes to countries allied closely with the U.S.—aided by the actual fact their unit price is lower than that of advanced non-stealth fighters just like the Rafale and Typhoon. And stealth is a big deal in any conflict facing enemies with substantial air defenses like Russia or China.
Recently, Germany and Canada decided to obtain F-35s after spending years searching for alternatives. Now, Greece and Romania seem inclined to hitch the Lightning club as well.
As a part of the F-35 program’s development and export strategy, production of F-35 parts was distributed across multiple partner states/operators. Designing a logistics system that may absorb globally distributed manufacturing while also efficiently servicing globally distributed demands has proven uniquely difficult— at one point, spare parts shortages were culpable for crippling readiness rates in F-35 units.
A previous GAO report already noted the dearth of unified parts accounting, in addition to the proven fact that by late 2018, just one JPO official was dedicated to the issue—and a parts database remained unpopulated.
Lockheed’s business strategy focused on maintenance services because the corporation’s chief F-35 revenue stream, may make the kind’s relatively low “fly away” procurement costs possible.
Lockheed has, at times, raised mental property objections when the military has sought to implement fixes or work-arounds to broken F-35 systems. This was especially notable for the infamously buggy ALIS ground-based logistics software, which was partially implicated in difficulties tracking spare parts.
Recent comments by the Air Force chief reveal that the service does not like how this business model is working—Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall recently derided it as “acquisition malpractice”—and can insist on holding greater IP rights for its forthcoming Next-Generation Air Dominance stealth fighter over its next-generation fighter procurement.