WASHINGTON — A number one House lawmaker desires to see some hard details — and shortly — from the F-35 Joint Program Office about the way it plans to repair the jet fighter’s long-lagging availability rates.
And Rep. Rob Wittman’s patience with the JPO on the fighter’s low readiness is beginning to wear thin, he said in an interview.
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Chatting with Defense News in his Capitol Hill office on Sept. 29, Wittman, the Virginia Republican who chairs the House Armed Services subcommittee on tactical air and land forces, said he thinks the JPO’s “war on readiness” plan is “the appropriate idea.”
Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt, the F-35 program executive officer, told Wittman’s subcommittee in a March hearing that the plan would “mature sustainment processes and maximize F-35 availability for a long time to come back.”
But Schmidt didn’t offer more details at that hearing on what the plan would entail.
Since then, Wittman said, his committee hasn’t heard way more to flesh out the thought.
“In a general sense, [Schmidt] has the appropriate idea in mind” on the war on readiness, Wittman said. “He hasn’t shared with us any of the small print, or the granularity of what you’ll need to find out about how he’s going to be certain that gets achieved.”
Defense News has repeatedly asked the JPO for an interview on its plans for the war on readiness, to this point without success.
If the JPO has used the last six months to work with F-35 manufacturer Lockheed Martin and nail down its plans for easy methods to fix the fighter’s disappointing availability rates, Wittman said, that might be comprehensible and time well spent.
“But I’d say that the expectation about what could be an inexpensive time period to try this might be coming quickly to an in depth,” Wittman said.
“I believe we’ve tried to be patient, given them some room,” Wittman continued. When asked if his patience is running out, he said, “it’s on the very end of what could be reasonable, within the patience shown, yes.”
In a press release provided to Defense News Tuesday, Schmidt said the war on readiness is solving problems with the highest issues that degrade F-35 performance, and consolidating the fighter’s inspection requirements to scale back future maintenance needs.
The JPO is conducting “readiness health assessments” to work out unique challenges partners, services and sites are having, and tell leadership about those problems in order that they can give you plans to repair them, he said.
The JPO also stood up an F-35 Readiness Control Board to tackle persistent and emerging problems that drag down the fighter’s availability. Such boards are a typical best practice within the Navy and business aviation, Schmidt said.
“The whole enterprise, including the services, our international partners, [foreign military sales] customers, and our industry partners are utilizing a data-driven approach to drive improvements across the sustainment enterprise to enhance readiness,” he said. “These recent actions proceed moving us towards establishing the enduring mission capability our fleet requires.”
A Government Accountability Office report from September, which outlined quite a few problems hindering the F-35′s availability and difficulties with the jet’s maintenance, said that the mission-capable rate for all F-35s was 55% earlier this yr. That’s well below the Air Force’s goal of getting 70% of its F-35As available to perform their missions, and the Navy and Marine Corps’ goal of 75% for its F-35B and C variants.
In Tuesday’s statement, Schmidt said the F-35 fleet is now at 58% mission capable, and has a goal to succeed in 64% by March 2024.
Wittman plans to have a hearing by the top of the yr to listen to more from the JPO on the way it expects to resolve problems with the jet’s sustainment and availability rates, and other issues with the F-35.
Wittman said he expects Schmidt to come back to that hearing ready to clarify how his readiness plan would work.
“I’d want some specificity,” he said. “At this particular point, they’ve had enough time to look at the issue, to grasp it.”
Wittman called the GAO’s recent findings “deeply concerning.”
“There’s numerous what we expect out of the aircraft, and there’s some shortcomings there about what has been promised after which what’s being delivered,” Wittman said. “Where has the due diligence been performed on this program with the Air Force and the JPO, on ensuring that it meets these performance parameters? There’s several places where it has fallen short.”
He plans to have a GAO representative appear on the hearing, and is talking with the subcommittee’s rating Democrat, Rep. Donald Norcross of Latest Jersey, about adding GAO to the witness list.
‘Mind boggling’
Wittman wants GAO to share its perspective on the F-35′s readiness issues with the subcommittee, “after which to ask the JPO and the Air Force why they’re on this position, or if there’s a disagreement on the assertions and the findings of GAO, then what’s their viewpoint?”
The breadth of problems highlighted in GAO’s report — resembling a scarcity of spare parts and depot capability for the military to repair broken parts, and the military’s difficulty in obtaining vital technical data that makes it hard for its maintainers to repair the fighter — are worrying, he said.
The 55% mission-capable rate for the F-35 fleet is unacceptable, Wittman said, and the undeniable fact that these problems are happening within the face of the fighter’s $1.7 trillion life cycle cost, $1.3 trillion of which comes from its operation and sustainment, is “mind boggling.”
“It’s a brand new aircraft — why is it at 55%?” Wittman said. “You’ll think on a brand new production line, … you’ll learn pretty quickly what your maintenance and repair models could be. All of those things appear to be lacking on this.
“It appears to be, just get the aircraft off the assembly line and let the Air Force essentially operate by itself afterwards,” he continued. “That’s a disconnect about how it’s essential to be sure that you just’re managing the lifecycle cost of that aircraft.”
In his statement, Schmidt said the war on readiness focuses on 4 key areas: solving the highest issues that degrade the fighter’s availability, getting aircraft which were down for long periods back to mission-capable status, getting maintenance at unit levels operating more efficiently, and streamlining the provision chain.
A vital step towards making the F-35 reasonably priced and available in the long run shall be standing up repair operations at depots, Schmidt said. Depot repair facilities within the U.S., Europe, and Pacific regions have already been stood as much as repair the F-35′s air vehicle, propulsion and components, he said, and more are under way.
One option the Pentagon is considering to enhance F-35 sustainment is moving into a limited performance-based logistics contract with Lockheed Martin. However it stays an open query as as to whether such a deal would lower costs or improve aircraft availability, as Lockheed believes it will.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense is analyzing the proposed PBL deal — using data from the Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation — aiming to confirm to lawmakers whether it will deliver the promised cost and readiness advantages.
Wittman said lawmakers are dissatisfied with how much information CAPE typically shares with them, and are having conversations to make sure CAPE provides details on their findings on the suitability of a PBL contract.
“CAPE must do a greater job of being transparent with Congress about how they provide us that information,” Wittman said. “We had a really heart-to-heart talk with the CAPE director about ensuring that they do this. Our concern is, they hold numerous that information to themselves after which they find yourself making decisions that either aren’t informed by what Congress wants, or sometimes even potentially in contradiction to what Congress has said is the direction that should be pursued.”
Wittman said he has not gotten any preliminary findings from CAPE about what they’ve found, and he was unsure when their study shall be finished and provided to lawmakers.
When asked whether he’s open to a PBL contract for the F-35, Wittman said he must see more information.
“I’m still in the invention mode of how things must occur” with a possible PBL, Wittman said. “The things that got here out of the GAO report introduce more questions than they answer. I believe numerous those questions must be answered before we get into the scope of determining the course for PBL.”
TR-3 upgrade delays
The F-35 hearing Wittman is planning may also cover the repeatedly-delayed rollout of latest F-35 upgrades generally known as Technology Refresh 3, which has halted the delivery of the newest fighters.
The TR-3 improvements will include higher displays, computer memory and processing power, and can allow a even wider range of upgrades generally known as Block 4 in the longer term. TR-3 was originally meant to roll out in April 2023. But in recent months that deadline has slipped a minimum of twice, and now may come sometime between April and June 2024. The federal government attributes the TR-3 hangup to software integration issues.
Within the meantime, the federal government cannot conduct the needed acceptance flights on TR-3 fighters before taking possession of them, so dozens of constructed F-35s are sitting at Lockheed Martin’s Fort Price, Texas facility.
When asked how confident he’s that the F-35 program can follow the present goal for ending TR-3 and resuming delivery of the newest series of jets by next June, Wittman said he’s hopeful — but that “should you base it upon their historical performance, you could be somewhat suspect.” He plans to ask the JPO on the hearing later this yr how much progress they’ve made on resolving the TR-3 problem and the way likely it’s they’ll meet the deadline of next June.
Several issues have hampered this system’s ability to make TR-3 work, Wittman said. This system needs more testbeds, he said, which prompted lawmakers so as to add more funding to this yr’s National Defense Authorization Act to permit this system to do more testing on its TR-3 software.
However the TR-3 problem and lingering difficulty in getting its software to work shows that the Pentagon must rethink the way it creates these systems and prioritize software creation first, Wittman said.
“Now we have to take a look at software and data and the power to do certain things in that realm first, after which design our hardware around that,” Wittman said. “Versus, construct an ideal piece of hardware after which say, ‘We’ll work out how the software makes it work later.’ We’re doing it backwards now.”
Wittman said he plans to carry Lockheed Martin and the military accountable to make sure the F-35 is in a position to field the TR-3 capabilities it is supposed to have. The fighter’s full capabilities should be realized so it could counter a possible threat from China in coming years, he said.
“As they undergo the testing, what happens is, the software gets to a certain point after which shuts down,” Wittman said. “I believe that’s due to inadequacies in how the data is gathered in that process. … They’ve some holes they need to fill to be able to get to the place where the software is operational.”
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.