This morning, President-Elect Donald Trump suggested he will attempt to significantly curb military spending by slashing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.
It’s no secret that the F-35 program has run into cost overrun after cost overrun, tied to multiple technical and design flaws including engine fires, software failures, and airframe cracks since the plane’s first flight a decade ago. But even though the F-35 has become a grossly bloated project, hacking away at the fifth-generation fighter would open up some significant holes that a well-defined alternative plan would need to fill.
Full-scale production of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 was originally scheduled to begin eight years ago, but this proved to be an overly-optimistic estimate by 11 years—and that’s assuming full-scale production does, in fact, begin in 2019 as projected now. The F-35 will be the most expensive weapons system in history by a significant margin, exceeding $1 trillion in projected lifetime costs. Trump has targeted the program as an area to save money, along with the new Boeing 747s intended to serve as the new Air Force One jets.
At last count, the Pentagon plans to purchase 2,457 F-35 Lightning IIs to fill the needs of the Air Force, Marine Corps, and the Navy. The cost per plane is roughly $100 million, depending on the variant, though full-scale production should drive down that cost some in the future. Even so, the concerns about the aircraft have led Canada to cancel their order of F-35s in favor of Boeing’s F/A-18 Super Hornet, and Boeing has submitted a formal proposal to Denmark to consider doing the same.
Given the 140-character limit of a tweet, it’s impossible to know exactly what President-elect Trump has in mind. While he is right about the fighter’s troubled and expensive past, the Joint Strike Fighter is almost certainly too big to kill. The production of parts and software for the F-35 accounts for over 100,000 jobs at over 100 contractors spread across 45 states, lending it a broad base of congressional support. The Pentagon, meanwhile, has put all its eggs in the F-35 basket, expecting the jet to be the premier fighter for all branches of the military for the next 50 years.
One hypothetical cost-cutting solution would be to reduce the order for F-35s and fill the gap in the fleet by purchasing a different jet. The two obvious choices would be the F-22 Raptor and the F/A-18 Super Hornet. F-22s could help equip the Air Force, and carrier-capable F/A-18s could serve the Navy. But this would require restarting the F-22 production line that has lain dormant since 2011, and neither of these jets have the vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capabilities required by the Marine Corps. The Raptor and Super Hornet also lack the brain of sophisticated software that is supposed to set the F-35 apart. In short, the alternatives are merely stop-gaps, and not even particularly palatable ones at that.
Though the program continues to struggle, the Marine Corps and the Air Force have declared Initial Operational Capability (IOC) for the F-35A and F-35B, meaning if the need arose, Lightning IIs could be deployed to current conflicts. The software for the jet is far from completed, however, and the F-35 is really designed as a high-tech information hub to locate targets, remain undetected, and then coordinate air strikes with older fighter jets flying support. The Pentagon sees the jet as a technological advantage in a hypothetical war with rival countries that have the ability to challenge the United States, and really, the F-35 program is intended to deter such a war from ever starting.
In current conflicts in the Middle East, aircraft such as the A-10 reign supreme as low-cost, highly effective weapons systems to protect friendly ground troops and take out enemy ground targets. The Warthog has proven its worth time and again, and the continued need for the heavily armored attack plane—which the F-35 was intended to replace—has led the Air Force to restart the depot line to maintain the A-10 fleet indefinitely.
So Congress—which carries the bulk of the decision-making weight, not President-elect Trump—finds itself in a precarious situation. The F-35 program has become a costly mess, the effectiveness of the Lightning II has been called into question, and we don’t need the Joint Strike Fighter now—but we might sorely need it in the future. This combined with the far-reaching economic impact of canceling or significantly cutting the program has led to disagreement among legislatures about the best course of action.
Trump wants to save money by slashing military spending, and the F-35 stands as an obvious target. But with so much riding on the Joint Strike Fighter and no obvious alternative, the situation is—as always—more complex than the raw numbers might imply. Could there be a magic bullet no one has thought of? We’ll have to wait until January 20 to find out.
Popular Mechanics
