引用
can change your cookie settings through your browser. More info: Privacy Policy
ACCEPT & CLOSE
Sputnik International
all editions
SEARCH
Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
‘Americans Will Die’: F-35s Fatally Flawed from Production to Battlefield
OPINION
21:51 12.10.2018
(updated 21:55 12.10.2018)
Get short URL
30774
The first time an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter crashed was on September 28, 2018, and the US grounded its entire F-35 fleet to assess and remedy the problem. The failure highlights far greater problems in the procurement and production process responsible for both the high cost and low performance of the plane.
After a US Marine Corps F-35B Joint Strike Fighter jet crashed in South Carolina last month, the US military found the cause to be a faulty fuel tube. Israel and the UK grounded their own F-35 fleets after the US announced its planes would stop flying until the fuel tube issue was fixed.
F-35 Lightning II
CC BY-SA 2.0 / MASHLEYMORGAN / F-35 LIGHTNING II
Software Issues Derail F-35 Testing Schedule
With a production price tag judged variously to be between $115 and $198 million per plane, and a total projected program cost at nearly $1.5 trillion, each plane that crashes is an equivalent financial loss to five F-16 Fighting Falcon jets; or, in greater social terms, a 100-bed hospital, like the $150 million facility being built at Augusta University, according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle.
The F-35 program is no stranger to procurement difficulties or parts quality, either. Among the problems encountered by the F-35 so far — the B version of which only flew its first combat mission the day before the South Carolina crash — have been the LEDs in their helmet displays, tires that wear out too quickly, refueling probes breaking off in mid-flight, the plane's life support system not providing adequate oxygen to pilots during flights, and being unable to fly in certain kinds of weather. Many more such problems exist. Each has impaired the ability of the plane to operate effectively and further inflated the cost per plane, as problems have to be identified and fixes found and implemented before the jets are up to "factory spec" — or what factory spec is supposed to be from the Pentagon's point of view.
Pierre Sprey, a special assistant to the Secretary of Defense and a former defense analyst who is considered to be one of the fathers of the F-16 and A-10 fighter jets, and one of the country's foremost critics of the F-35, told Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear Thursday that the reason for both the high cost and the low quality of the plane's parts is the way the procurement system operates. Built into this system, he says, are incentives for cost overruns and corruption by military brass who go on to lucrative defense contracts after they retire.
"The fundamental reason" the US military continues to use the F-35, despite its numerous shortcomings compared to the warplanes it was due to replace, "is the flawed — I should say corrupted — acquisition process that unfortunately now is running acquisition in the Pentagon. The fundamental problem is very simple: we let Air Force and Navy and Army and Marine generals go to work for contractors who are building weapons that these generals have had influence over while they were on active duty. It's gotten so bad that close to 90 percent of generals involved with air, either with helicopters or Air Force fighters or Marine or Navy fighters, go to work for contractors when they retire. As long as we as a nation permit that to continue, we will never have decent, effective air power. It's impossible when those kind of incentives are operating with that kind of huge money."
A-10's Gatling Gun
US AIR FORCE
F-35 vs A-10 Flyoff Test Rigged to Favor Lockheed Jet - Watchdog
Noting how contractors working on Pentagon projects have placed their subcontracts in nearly every single congressional district in the country, Sprey told hosts John Kiriakou and Brian Becker that this was "a way of influencing the Congress to vote in ways that are not in the interests of national defense and not in the interests of the taxpayer."
Sprey noted that those kinds of decisions — for example, to build a certain component in Montana instead of Georgia — aren't simply changes in location; spreading around the F-35 pie so most of Congress gets a piece carries a "penalty [that] is very, very high." He noted that such operations have to outsource for parts more, which "makes control of the production very, very difficult." Further, the best contractors might not be available in those districts, meaning "second-rate contractors" pick up the tab and likely don't build the part to specifications. "You can't fire him, because you need that senator, right? So effectively you've lost control over your production process because you've let politics interfere in the selection of the sources for the parts you need."
Sprey noted that scheduling is plagued by the same problems for the same reasons.
"So you wind up with a bunch of major quality control problems that of course affect the safety and the maintenance of the airplane," the former defense analyst said.
Sprey described how this can create real problems when the part breaks later on and "the 19-year-old mechanic on the flight line" has to order a new part that isn't quite the same as the one shimmed onto the plane during production. "Now he has to apply the kind of expertise and years of experience it takes to shim the part into place — you can't expect him to be able to do that."
As to the question of battlefield efficacy, the former special assistant to the secretary of defense said that "the do-everything, ‘Swiss knife' of airplanes" is "like a screwdriver and a saw and a hammer all combined into one, and obviously it doesn't do any of those three very well. Multi-mission airplanes never do.
）
/https://k-static.appmobile.cn/uploads2/allimg/240419/13131560S-0.png)
/https://media-proc.singtaousa.com/photo.php?s=https://media.singtaousa.com/wp-content/uploads/master/2024/04/2024042217504266764.jpg&f=jpeg&w=815&q=75)
/https://cdn.hk01.com/di/media/images/dw/20240422/859114053790863360851604.jpeg/wXLx6F5Pq7CeUWj3nhZvpEXahQDNaJiCaAzB92gMwfc?v=w1920r16_9)
/https://chinese.aljazeera.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/shutterstock_1638160309.jpg?resize=770%252C513&quality=80)
/https://picx.zhimg.com/80/v2-d0ed914dfff240c5562c93b9a0d4d7ff_1440w.webp?source=2c26e567)
/https://img.youtube.com/vi/rYD6XijOWFg/0.jpg)
