F-35 Lightning II: News thread

Militarov wrote:

Another source of video: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=565_1455124843

"Normally, James Martin is the very model of a modern major general. But the Air Force officer, who is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Budget, recently collapsed at the podium while answering questions about the F-35. Air Force Deputy for Budget Carolyn Gleason held Maj. Gen. Martin up, while aides came to help Martin, who regained his senses seconds later."

Militarov wrote:

Another source of video: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=565_1455124843

George1 wrote:US allies Canada and Norway have already withdrawn from participating in the troubled F-35 program. The aircraft is now the most expensive plane in military history.

Read more: http://sputniknews.com/military/20160212/1034618973/more-f35-expensive-upgrades.html#ixzz3zvvfuM00

The U.S. May Build 500 Jets Before Finding Out If the F-35 Works
Tests of how Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 will perform in combat won’t begin until at least August 2018, a year later than planned, and more than 500 of the fighter jets may be built before the assessment is complete, according to the Pentagon’s test office.

“These aircraft will require a still-to-be-determined list of modifications” to be fully capable, Michael Gilmore, the U.S. Defense Department’s top weapons tester, said in his annual report on major programs. “However, these modifications may be unaffordable for the services as they consider the cost of upgrading these early lots of aircraft while the program continues to increase production rates in a fiscally constrained environment.”

The Defense Department plans a fleet of 2,443 F-35s for the U.S., plus hundreds more to be purchased by allies, including the U.K., Italy, Australia and Japan. The costliest U.S. weapons program, at a projected $391 billion, the F-35 is being produced even as it’s still being developed, a strategy a top Pentagon official once called “acquisition malpractice.”

Despite the plane’s many problems, “F-35 production rates have been allowed to steadily increase to large rates,” Gilmore said in his annual report to congressional defense committees.
Buying More

The Pentagon wants to increase the number of F-35s purchased for the U.S. to 92 annually by 2020 from 38 last year. The number jumps to 120 a year when foreign sales are included. For this year, Congress added 11 aircraft to the 57 requested.

Marillyn Hewson, Lockheed’s chairman and chief executive officer, told analysts on a Jan. 26 earnings call that the company expects to increase F-35 deliveries to about 100 in 2018 from 45 last year.

Gilmore, whose full weapons report will be posted on his office’s website on Monday, said the delay in testing stems from flaws in the “3F” software that gives the F-35 its full combat capability. Testing of the software isn’t likely to be completed until at least January 2018, or 15 months behind the October 2016 date set when the program was reorganized in 2012, he said. The F-35 is a flying computer, with more than 8 million lines of software code.

Joe DellaVedova, spokesman for the Defense Department’s F-35 office, said in an e-mail that the program “continues to aggressively execute development and testing of Block 3F capabilities with the objective of delivering” them about mid-September 2017. He said the program office doesn’t intend to take any shortcuts.

The F-35’s $55 billion development phase is evaluating how well aircraft and systems meet contract specifications and military requirements. Combat testing, which takes at least a year, puts all the pieces together to stress the aircraft in realistic war-fighting scenarios -- such as how well a four-jet formation detects and shares data about sophisticated Russian or Chinese air defenses during realistic mock missions.
Full-Rate Production

The Pentagon will need the results of the testing before proceeding with full-rate production, the most lucrative phase for Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed, the largest U.S. contractor. Full-rate production is currently scheduled for April 2019.

The next milestone for the F-35 is supposed to be an Air Force declaration by August that its version of the F-35 has initial combat capability. The Marines declared their version’s initial capability in July.

The Air Force last month told a Joint Chiefs of Staff weapons review group it rated that date as jeopardized, or “red,” because of “inherited deficiencies” with its “Block 3i” software and “new avionics stability problems,” Gilmore wrote.

DellaVedova said that the 3i “software has been continually improved.” Deficiencies in air-to-air and air-to-ground mission sets “were addressed and resolved,” he said.

Other F-35 flaws cited by Gilmore in his report:

A fuel system deficiency on all three models of the plane that limits their maneuverability when carrying a full load of gas.
A diagnostic system, called “ALIS,” that continues “to demonstrate poor accuracy and a high false alarm rate.”
Cracks in wing spars discovered in October on the Navy version of the F-35 and “damage to a significant number of fasteners and grommets” found during testing of the Marine Corps model.
A lack of high-fidelity simulators to rehearse combat missions and specialized data for each major geographic area that pilots will use to test sensors and track enemy radar.
A pilot escape system that could kill ejecting pilots who weigh 136 pounds or less by breaking their necks. DellaVedova said the program office plans improvements by November to fix the neck-stress issue.

Gilmore’s report also contained signs of progress:

A new helmet made by Rockwell Collins Inc. has shown improvements in reducing jittery or misaligned images displayed on the pilot’s visor.
Failures caused by Lockheed-supplied parts have decreased, showing the most improvement of all reliability measures.
F-35s were available 51 percent of the time required for training and flight tests in 2015, an increase from 37 percent in 2013 and 2014 but still short of a 60 percent goal for the year.

(An earlier version of this story was corrected because of a misspelled name in the second paragraph.)

F-35 Officials Prove Need for Cyber Testing by Cancelling One
By: Dan Grazier | December 7, 2015

Realistic weapon testing has come under assault yet again.

The troubled F-35 recently hit another snag when, as first reported by Politico, the Joint Program Office (JPO) refused to proceed with the required cyber security tests of the F-35’s massive maintenance computer, tests needed to determine the computer system’s vulnerability to hackers. The JPO argued that such realistic hacker tests could damage the critical maintenance and logistics software, thereby disrupting flights of the approximately 100 F-35s already in service. But that simply raises obvious and disturbing questions about what could happen in combat. But on the broader question of how DoD buys weapons today, this is a clear demonstration of the folly of approving production on expensive systems long before they have been fully designed and thoroughly tested, a now common practice on almost all major Defense procurements.

The scheduled cyber tests target the vulnerability of the F-35 Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS). According to Lockheed Martin’s website, ALIS “integrates a broad range of capabilities including operations, maintenance, prognostics and health management, supply chain, customer support, training and technical data.” ALIS is designed to be a “single, secure information environment” that connects the plane’s on-board failure diagnostics with its maintenance management and the logistics supply system. In theory, ALIS would identify a broken part, order a replacement through the logistics system, and tell the maintenance crews what to fix. Cyber tests are particularly important for the F-35, which is commonly referred to as a “flying computer.” The plane has approximately 30 million lines of software code controlling all of the plane’s functions, from moving flight surfaces to creating images in its infamous $600,000 helmet. All this is tightly integrated with the ALIS program, which many consider to be the plane’s largest vulnerability. Should an enemy hack the ALIS system successfully, they could disable F-35 systems in combat, cause disastrous crashes, or ground the entire fleet.

The ALIS software and computer has seen its fair share of problems already. Last year, Joint Strike Fighter Program Executive Officer, Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, had to admit that the software was “way behind.” Maintenance crews supporting the Marine Corps’ F-35 demonstration aboard the USS Wasp this summer found themselves going off base to transfer ALIS computer files to their laptops over a commercial Wi-Fi network when the ALIS system proved incapable of handling the massive data files. Elsewhere, maintenance personnel report that 80 percent of the issues identified by ALIS are “false positives,” reporting parts as broken when they weren’t. Determining which ALIS reports are real and which are not is a time-consuming process for maintenance crews, adding significantly to their workloads when they are already overburdened by the F-35’s significant reliability shortfalls.

Realistic cyber testing is required of all military systems “capable of sending or receiving digital information,” according to a 2014 memorandum from the Department of Defense’s top weapons tester. “The cyber threat has become as real a threat to U.S. military forces as the missile, artillery, aviation, and electronic warfare threats which have been represented in operational testing for decades,” wrote Dr. Michael Gilmore, Director of Operational Test & Evaluation. “Any data exchange, however brief, provides an opportunity for a determined and skilled cyber threat to monitor, interrupt, or damage information and combat systems," he added.

Dr. Gilmore proscribed testing of such systems to be completed in two phases. The first is an internal assessment by the program’s designers to attempt to identify potential problems and security gaps through an “overt and cooperative examination to identify all significant vulnerabilities and the risk of exploitation of those vulnerabilities.”

The second phase brings in outside “Red Teams” to simulate hacker attacks on the system to identify vulnerabilities. DOT&E uses adversarial teams certified by the National Security Agency to “act as a cyber aggressor presenting multiple intrusion vectors consistent with the validated threat.” Tests of this kind are often referred to as penetration or “pentesting” in civilian circles. By using highly skilled teams of computer hackers to break into the system, the combat user, weapons buyer, and designer learn if and how the system can be disrupted or exploited—and whether its vulnerabilities can be fixed.

It’s not as if this is a theoretical threat. The Department of Defense admitted in 2013 that a foreign power had hacked into unclassified F-35 subcontractor systems and stolen large amounts of sensitive information about the aircraft. The DoD would not say which foreign power stole the data at the time, but earlier this year, documents released by Edward Snowden confirmed the Chinese stole the information from Lockheed Martin in 2007.

The Air Force’s investigation into the breach was initially resisted by the F-35’s prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, Shane Harris described in his book @War. They were only able to determine that the company’s networks had been breached repeatedly after the Air Force generals in charge of the program at the time insisted that Lockheed and its subcontractors cooperate. The stolen information included vulnerabilities of the aircraft and its software.

Left unsaid is whether the program office would rather have operations disrupted now by friendly testers or later by hackers when the planes are engaged in combat.

The F-35 program office may have inadvertently confirmed the gravity of the concerns about software vulnerability with their statements regarding the testing delay. A program spokesman says the office “did not initially approve a cyber-vulnerability test due to the lack of a risk assessment related to operational F-35 assets.” In other words, the office fears the tests could end up disrupting real-world flight operations of the F-35s already in service. Left unsaid is whether the program office would rather have operations disrupted now by friendly testers or later by hackers when the planes are engaged in combat.
Concurrency Increasing Software Risks and Vulnerabilities

This speaks to one of the major, fundamental failures with the F-35 program: its unprecedented level of concurrency. Concurrency is the overlapping of development, testing, and production in an acquisition program. Advocates of the strategy claim it is a way to shorten the time necessary to field a weapon system. In reality, concurrency has historically slowed down the acquisition process and greatly increased costs.

Highly concurrent programs increase the risk that systems built early in the process will require expensive fixes or retrofits after problems are identified during subsequent testing. The Defense Department’s Undersecretary of Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics reported to Congress that the costs of concurrency for the F-35 program last year were $1.65 billion. These costs include “recurring engineering efforts, production cut-in, and retrofit of existing aircraft.” The report hardly painted a flattering picture of the practice.

Concurrent software development issues are hardly new. Frank Conahan, an assistant comptroller with the then-named General Accounting Office, warned against the practice in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1990. Even then, nearly a decade before the Joint Strike Fighter program began, Mr. Conahan correctly identified software development as the one of the biggest risks to success in highly concurrent programs. “If the software doesn’t work, then the weapon system as a whole is not going to work the way it should,” he said.

The practice is becoming increasingly entrenched for several reasons. Defense contractors and the Pentagon tend to understate costs and overstate performance. Hence they have a strong motivation to spread subcontracts across as many congressional districts as they can (known as “political engineering”) and sell the Pentagon as many units as possible before an under-performing program becomes obvious to everyone. Those with a vested interest in the program then have a great deal to lose if a system does not perform well during testing. A recent example is the now famous dogfight test between an F-35 and the older F-16 the F-35 is designed to replace. The F-16 performed much better and prompted many to question the value of the entire Joint Strike Fighter program.

But because the F-35 is already in multibillion-dollar production employing thousands of people in hundreds of congressional districts, the plane has a great deal of political support. At least, that is the image Lockheed Martin wishes to cultivate. Parts of the aircraft are built in factories all across the country before eventually arriving in Fort Worth for final assembly. Lockheed Martin says the F-35 relies on suppliers from 46 states and provides an interactive map touting this fact. The reality is the majority of the work is done in only two states, California and Texas. Several states counted in the 46 have twelve or fewer jobs tied to the F-35. Still, there are precious few politicians willing to cast a vote that will be portrayed as “killing jobs” when campaigning for reelection.

The military services and defense contractors have a long history of working and lobbying to avoid realistic operational testing of new weapons systems.

A much better way of doing business is known as “fly before you buy,” the almost universal buying practice in commercial, non-defense procurement. Former Director of Operational Test & Evaluation Tom Christie says when done properly it “will demand the demonstration, through actual field testing of new technologies, subsystems, concepts, etc. to certain success criteria before proceeding at each milestone, not just the production decision.” In other words, acquisition decisions can be made based on performance achieved rather than capabilities hoped for.

The military services and defense contractors have a long history of working and lobbying to avoid realistic operational testing of new weapons systems. A common claim is that testing of this kind is too expensive and adds unnecessary delays to an already lengthy weapons acquisition process. In fact, the most recent industry effort to avoid realistic testing resulted in a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act requiring DOT&E to “ensure that policies, procedures, and activities implemented by their offices and agencies in connection with defense acquisition program oversight do not result in unnecessary increases in program costs or cost estimates or delays in schedule or schedule estimates.” However, these claims are false. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released an audit showing that operational testing does not cause significant cost increases or schedule delays in major weapons programs.

The Pentagon and defense contractors will continue to avoid independent, realistic testing out of their own self-interest. The GAO said it well in its recent report: “postponing difficult tests or limiting open communication about test results can help a program avoid unwanted scrutiny because tests against criteria can reveal shortfalls, which may call into question whether a program should proceed as planned.” This is why Congress created the independent DOT&E in 1983 with broad, bipartisan support (the amendment creating the office passed 95-3 in the Senate)—one of the most important and lasting achievements of the military reform movement of the 80s. To this day, the office provides a vital service to strengthening national security and protecting the men and women in combat who must actually use the equipment the Pentagon buys.

January 17, 2016
5 Reasons Why Our F-35s Are Too Dangerous to Fly
By David Archibald

The F-35 has been around as long as global warming. The aircraft had its origin in the Joint Advanced Strike Technology (JAST) program started by the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy in 1993. The word "Strike" in the designation of this program indicates that it was oriented toward developing a light bomber. The following year, the JAST program absorbed the Common Affordable Lightweight Fighter program and a separate short take-off/vertical landing program. This became the Joint Strike Fighter program, with the aim of producing a common airframe and engine across the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Marine Corps. This aircraft was claimed to be 20 percent cheaper to acquire and operate than legacy aircraft such as the F-16. That was the intent. Lockheed Martin won the flyoff against Boeing in 2001.

Many years then passed. The production prototype F-35 first flew in 2006.

The flying characteristics of an aircraft can be determined from its statistics – that is, things like the weight divided by the wing area, weight relative to thrust, etc. The F-35 was still a light bomber. Its engine is optimized for operating at about 20,000 feet. By 2008, simulations had shown that the F-35 was not fit to be a fighter aircraft. This was in a RAND study by Dr. John Stillion, which concluded that the F-35 "can't turn, can't climb, can't run."

Now, ten years after the F-35 first flew, it remains in development, though 180 have been built. None of those aircraft can operate in combat; all will have to be modified if and when the final design has been settled on. There is not much point in doing that, because the F-35 has a number of show-stoppers that would kill it instantly in a rational world. These include:

The F-35's engine is failing at too high a rate, and its reliability is not improving fast enough to be approved for operational use. The F-35 has a poorly designed, unreliable engine – the largest, hottest, and heaviest engine ever put in a fighter plane. It is a highly stressed derivative of the F119 engine, which powers the F-22. Because of the need to drive the F-35B lift fan, it is about 2,000 lbs heavier than other combat jet engines of comparable thrust. The project recognized the engine's limitations in 2012 by announcing an intention to change performance specifications for the F-35A, reducing sustained turn performance from 9.0g to 4.6g and extending the time for acceleration from 0.8 Mach to 1.2 Mach by 8 seconds. As in September 2014, the Government Accountability Office reported that "[d]ata provided by Pratt & Whitney indicate that the mean flight hours between failure for the F-35A engine is about 21 percent of where the engine was expected to be at this point in the program." But engine reliability is not improving; it has flatlined.

The F-35 requires a runway at least 8,000 feet long to operate from. By comparison, the F-16's minimum runway length requirement is 3,000 feet.

The F-35's operating cost of $50,000 per hour means that we won't be able to afford to give its pilots enough flying time to be fully proficient. The same problem afflicts the F-22 with its $70,000-per-hour operating cost. Raptor pilots get 10 to 12 hours per month in the cockpit when 20 hours are needed to be able to make split-second decisions in combat.

Being designed as a light bomber, the F-35 is less maneuverable than fighter designs up to 50 years old and will be shot out of the sky by modern fighter aircraft. Thus, it wasn't a surprise when an F-16 outflew an F-35 in mock combat in early 2015, a result entirely predictable from simulation. What is telling is that the F-35 is not being flown against other aircraft types on an at least monthly basis. The latest derivative of the Su-27 Flanker, the Su-35, is expected to be able to shoot down 2.4 F-35s for every Su-35 lost. China is in the process of acquiring 24 Su-35s. In combat, those 24 Chinese Su-35s will shoot down 58 F-35s before all being shot down themselves. The Russians have followed the Su-35 with the T-50, which will be close to the F-22 in combat effectiveness but without the cost of maintaining the radar-absorbant material (RAM) coating.

The F-35 uses its fuel for cooling its electronics. The aircraft won't start if its fuel is too warm, making deployment in warmer regions problematic. At the Yuma and Luke U.S. Air Force bases in Arizona, fuel trucks for the F-35 are painted white, parked in covered bays, and chilled with water mist systems because the jet won't even start if the fuel is already too warm to cool the electronics.

The F-35 has a logistics system (ALIS) that requires an internet connection to a centralized maintenance system in the United States. ALIS is kept permanently informed of each aircraft's technical status and maintenance requirements. ALIS can, and has, prevented aircraft taking off because of an incomplete data file. If the internet link is down, the aircraft can't fly even if there is nothing wrong with it. This is one of the more bizarre problems. It could lead to a situation in which enemy aircraft are inbound and the F-35s are refueled and ready to go but can't take off to meet the threat.

Those are the known show-stoppers; the F-35 has many other mere deficiencies. Embarrased by having 180 aircraft that can't actually fight, the head of the F-35 program, General Bogden, has decided to make December 2016 the make-or-break date for the program.The Department of Defense has started backing away from it and is contemplating buying more F-15s and F-16s to fill the USAF's capability gap.This may be the year that the F-35 nightmare ends.

David Archibald is the author of Twilight of Abundance (Regnery 2014).

The Pentagon's long-awaited fighter plane just had a massive setback
Jackie Leo, The Fiscal Times

If you were the CEO of an airline business and got a negative report about your new, very expensive aircraft that has been in development for a number of years, what would you say to your engineering and production managers?

The report highlights look like this:

Key Tests Have Been Delayed Repeatedly
Flight Controls Impact Maneuverability
Serious Safety Concerns Remain
Significant Logistics Software Problems
Deferring Cyber Security Testing Leaves Aircraft Vulnerable
Maintenance Problems Keep Aircraft Grounded
Simulation Facility Failure Threatens Testing Program

At the very least, people would be fired for incompetence and the contractors would be held accountable.

The details above are not about a commercial aircraft. They are from the latest forensic analysis of the $1 trillion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which has been in flight tests for more than 10 years. Each unit costs about $100 million, and so much is money is riding on this aircraft that it’s been deemed “too big to kill.”

The F-35 was redesigned in 2004 because it weighed too much. So Lockheed Martin put the plane on a diet and shed 2,700 pounds —at a cost of $6.2 billion. In 2010, the Pentagon admitted that the F-35 program had exceeded its original cost estimates by more than 50 percent.

The delays are especially costly since pre-orders from multiple countries can’t be filled until the aircraft is combat ready.

And now an independent watchdog group is saying that the long list of unresolved problems means that the F-35 won’t be ready for combat until 2022. The watchdog group, the well-respected Project on Government Oversight, is basing its analysis on a recent Department of Defense report that found numerous serious problems with the fifth-generation fighter.

The watchdog analysis comes after one of the three F-35 variants has already been declared combat ready. The F-35B, designed for the Marines, was declared ready to go in July 2015. However, the jet has not been used by the Marines in combat, despite plentiful opportunities in Syria and Iraq. And the Project on Government Oversight maintains that the declaration was premature, and that official testing proves that the jet is not ready for active duty. Some analysts have speculated that the Pentagon is trying to buy hundreds of planes before testing has been completed.

The Joint Strike Fighter Program Office has pushed back against the most recent analysis by the watchdog group, citing a long list of achievements for the program. The office reminded its critics that “the F-35 program is still in its developmental phase” and that there are “known deficiencies that must be corrected.” But that’s exactly the point: The plane that was supposed to be flying combat missions in 2012 is still costing taxpayers billions to develop, with no end in sight.

This story was originally published by The Fiscal Times.