Angry Planet - Why the F-35 may not stink

Episode Date: April 7, 2016

This week on War College we're diving into the weeds on how weapons systems come into existence. Andrea Shalal, Reuters’ longtime aerospace correspondent, takes us through the steps. She also gives a counterpoint to the show’s very first episode, which focused on the flaws of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter plane and program. In a discussion that may surprise to some listeners, she describes a program that’s back on track, despite its possible trillion-dollar price tag.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. There's a lot of critics of the F-35, and there are problems, to be sure. But by and large, the program seems to be doing much better, since the program was pretty massively restrously. structured in the 2010 timeframe.

This week on War College, we're diving right into the weeds to figure out how weapons get made. Andrea Shalal, who is Reuters' long-time aerospace correspondent, takes us through all of the steps. She also gives a counterpoint to the show's very first episode, which focused on the flaws of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. In what may be a surprise to some listeners, she describes a program that's actually getting back on track. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters opinion editor, Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt with War is Boring. Today we're talking with Andrea Shalal about weapons programs, how they come to be,

and both when they go wrong and when they go right, which is maybe a little bit more often than we're led to believe. So, Andrea, welcome. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Matthew. It's great to be with you. So can we start off with just the very, very basics, which is who decides what weapons are going to be built and how the process began? It's a magical mystery to most people, but it's actually kind of boring, you know. A need arises, say in the case of the war in Afghanistan, they realized that the MRAPs were just too clunky and unwieldy to move around on the rough terrain in Afghanistan. And so the commanders, the military commanders in the field, sent in an urgent needs statement and said, we urgently need a vehicle. that will allow us to maneuver, but still give us that sort of V-shaped hull and the protection that will protect people against roadside bombs, so troops against roadside bombs.

So that joint, urgent operational need statement, because nothing happens in the Pentagon without an acronym, as you know. So a Jewan is then sent basically to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military leaders, and there's a separate committee that looks at those. that all weapons programs have to be sort of blessed by something called the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, another acronym, the J-Rock. So the J-Rock looks at all of the requests that come in from all the different parts of the military, the different services, the different commands, and it weighs those against each other, and looks for duplication and ways to save money and ways to make programs joint to perhaps avoid duplication. and then it makes a decision about whether something is or isn't going to be blessed.

And then this vast apparatus that is the Pentagon's acquisition system kicks into gear, and then frequently we'll do something like an analysis of alternatives to determine what solutions are out there that could potentially answer this need. So the requirement is set by the military, by the war fighters, as they call themselves. And then the other parts of the Pentagon bureaucracy sort of get into this mix and help decide how that thing that they want is going to be acquired and what makes sense to go after. I'll use a non-military item that just is a way to get into it. Someone out there decides they desperately need a handled implement with four prongs on it. So you're saying that at some point someone will say, oh, yeah, those are called forks,

and instead of developing the fork, we'll then try to see if there are forks made by silverware makers? Exactly. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely something comes into the mix, and the Pentagon for many years now has been trying to use more commercial items, although frequently that gets them into trouble. So, for instance, in the case of the littoral combat ship, which some folks also called little creppy ships is the way they often described. It's been a very troubled program since it began. What happened there was that they wanted very quickly to build the size of the fleet,

which was depleted and shrinking as older warships go out of service. They weren't buying enough ships. And so they saw this opportunity to buy commercially built ships and then make them like trucks so that you could put a different mission on depending on what you needed to do. It was an idea that was supposed to get those ships fielded very quickly and to buy them in numbers. Initially, the number was 55. That was eventually changed to 52. And now Defense Secretary Ash Carter has decreed that there will be no more than 40 of these things built. But the idea initially was to use commercially designed ships.

that were out there and to forego some of the more complicated things that would be required by the military. But almost immediately after that decision was taken, the smart folks in the Navy were like, well, we can't exactly put sailors onto the ship if it's not secure and it's not safe. And so almost immediately that program nearly doubled in cost, or more than doubled, actually from 220 to 460 million because they needed to reinforce the hulls of the ships to make them more secure against attack.

And that is one of the downsides for doing commercial items in the Pentagon is that the military really does have sort of unique requirements. I mean, they buy lots and lots of commercial items, everything from chairs and tents and paper and office supplies. But when it comes to weapons, it's a lot more difficult and more challenging for them to buy commercial items that are sometimes called off the shelf. They're not buying Thunder, Mifflin, special military-grade paper. They actually just use regular paper.

They just buy regular paper, yeah. Andrea, how does the military decide who builds the new weapons? There are different circumstances. If they do this analysis and they decide, there's really only one company that makes this thing that we want. they can do something called a sole source acquisition. They have to fill out a questionnaire to meet certain requirements that lets them do that because, you know, the general rule is the government wants competition for everything. In the case of a sole source acquisition, the company still has to submit a bid.

There's a very complex process that involves posting a draft, request for proposals, and then there will be some response to that draft. then the government issues a formal request for proposals. There is usually then a certain period of time between 30 days, sometimes a little bit longer, to respond. The companies, if this is a competition, the companies kick into high gear and they submit these proposals. These proposals are sometimes hundreds, if not thousands of pages long. In the famous case of the tanker war between Boeing and what is now Airbus and Northrop Grumman, those proposals to build a new refueling plane for the Air Force were so vast that it required basically a van to transport them.

There were so many pages. It didn't make any difference because that particular acquisition process was riddled with mistakes and was thrown out essentially, and they had to start all over again. Please don't tell me you're talking about a literal van, are you? I am talking about a literal van. It was that big. What could go wrong? Yeah, all kinds of things might wrong.

At one point, the wrong CDs were delivered to each of the companies, and Airbus and Boeing each opened the information that was meant for the other company. So basically, mistake happens. as they say. What kind of systems are in place to stop things from going wrong? If something looks like it's going off the rails, what happens? I don't know that it ever looks like it's going off the rails after the tanker scandal, which involved, you know, an Air Force weapons buyer who just had amassed too much power and was sort of running too much of the show.

There was a, you know, a general effort within the department to ensure that there were more checks and balances. In the case of the big long-range strike bomber that was just awarded to Northrop Grumman, as in all of these things, there is sort of a secret group that is assigned that will make the decision, and they will go finally through all of the bids. They will be the ones who are asking the questions of the companies. There's a lot of back and forth because as the proposals come in and the acquisition officials on the Pentagon are working through them, they have questions.

then they go back to the companies and ask for those questions to be answered. And that source selection authority, as it's known, is kept secret. The person who makes that decision is the source selection authority, the source selection team, all of those elements in every acquisition are kept secret. And in the case of the classified bomber program, especially so that there's no opportunity for the companies to influence those people because they don't know who they would be influencing. Shortly after the bomber decision was announced days before the government accountability office was due to render its decision about a protest filed against that decision, it emerged that

the person who was the acting acquisition chief for the Air Force had failed to disclose that his wife had a retirement account and was drawing a retirement account from Northrop Grumman. That would have been a material fact in the protest, except that this man, Richard Lombardi, was actually not part of the source selection committee and team that chose the bomber. And so it was ultimately dismissed as being relevant or germane. But it could very well have been if he had been involved. And it did factor in Boeing, raised it in its protests, which was ultimately denied. So if a company sees that something's going

wrong or they're unhappy with how a competition is going, they have options to file a protest with the government accountability office, which is the investigative arm of Congress and acts as the sort of arbiter for federal protest disputes, this body rules about the mechanics, how the acquisition was run, whether they followed all the rules, chucked off all the boxes, and really, most importantly, treated each of the competitors fairly. What happens sometimes is that the acquisition officials will talk to one party or the other party and bend the rules a little bit, or seem to be bending the rules, and then the competitor will file a protest because they say that the rules were not administered equally or fairly. It turns out, actually, though, that

most of the contract disputes are not upheld. In other words, most are dismissed because very few of the actual protests are ever proven to be correct or sustained. Let me ask you about a weapons system that's going on that's active right now that a lot of people have problems with that gets a lot of negative press. How do you feel about the F-35? Well, I don't know that I have any particular emotion about it except it's been going to on for a very long time. I feel some sense of ownership because I had just started covering this beat a few months before the contract was awarded to Lockheed Martin. And so I've kind of been following it from the get-go. And it's had a lot of ups and downs for sure. I think at this point,

it is doing much better than most people think. There are over 120 airplanes have been built and are flying. The Marines have started using these. They've declared an initial operational capability, which means they can use them in war. They could send them to war if they need to. The Air Force is slated to create an initial operating squadron later this summer. It was initially intended to be August, but it looks like they'll probably miss the August 1 date by a little bit due to just some continued work on the software. But the Air Force General, who heads the program for the Pentagon Hilled reporters, that he thought there was a risk that that August one date could slip by 45 to 60 days.

So there's a possibility it could come in later. They're still shooting for August 1 if they can make it. And the issue is that this airplane is incredibly complex. So it's one program, but it encompasses three different versions of the plane, one for the Air Force that has a conventional takeoff and landing. One for the Marine Corps that is the short takeoff and vertical landing, which means it can take off from shorter runways and land like a helicopter. and the carrier variant, which has folding wings, it can land on an aircraft carrier and take off, and then it has the folding wings,

so it can be squished onto the flight deck with other airplanes. So each of those planes, that program, the intention was to make those airplanes very, very common to save money. And to build this airplane, not just for the United States, but also for the many, many allies that the United States works with. So it was designed from the beginning, to replace something like 13 different warplanes. And it wasn't initially intended to be the be-all and end-all.

It was intended to be kind of a war course, sort of like the F-16 is. Over 4,000 F-16s have been produced. Many of them are still in use. And, you know, it's sort of like the workhorse warplane. And they thought at the time, they thought they could save money and speed up the process if they basically from the beginning designed a plane that could be explored. that could be used that, you know, the allies would come in from the ground floor as partners and decide what was needed on that airplane and that by making it very common across the services,

they'd save money on servicing and maintenance and all of that. So at the end of the day, though, it's only about 20% common across those variants, which means, in essence, you have one program that encompasses three, you know, all of them very equally complex warplanes with many, many millions of lines of code that run not only the airplane, but also something that's never been done on this scale before, which is a computerized and automated logistics system that is meant to look at the health of the airplane and basically kind of automatically go ahead and order parts that are going to be needed. It actually is tied in with the mission control software.

So the pilots come on board with their, they call it a brick, basically a big hard disk. You know, they come on board with it and they stick it in the airplane. And then the airplane knows has all the mission files, where it's going to go, where they're going to fly, what they need to know about what they're going to see. And there's been some software glitches and failing, both with the actual airplane, but also with this very complicated logistics system that goes. around it. It encompasses everything from the pilot's flight schedules to the tiniest little part. And just as a reminder, this airplane will be used by, you know, many, many countries around the

world. So currently, of the eight initial partners, all but two have signed on and purchased airplanes. The two that are remaining from that initial partnership in addition to the United States are Canada and Denmark. Denmark was actually due to make a decision and may well yet make a decision in the second quarter of this year. Canada's process is sort of up for grabs again after the election there. The new prime minister Trudeau and his party have sort of said they're going to revisit Canada's participation in the program. But up to now, they haven't, they've paid their dues and they are still a member of that partnership. In addition to those nine countries in the initial partnership,

Israel, Japan, and South Korea have also ordered planes. So have you actually seen the F-35 fly or one of the variants? Oh, yes, I've seen it fly in many occasions. I've been on board both an aircraft carrier and an amphibious worship for sea trials where the airplanes come and land. And I have to say, you know, it's pretty impressive. It's very loud. I don't know. I haven't been around that many, but they're all pretty loud, and this one is pretty loud. And in fact, there's going to be noise testing done in the Netherlands in June. So the Netherlands will fly its airplanes back home. They're here in the U.S. now training, but they're going to fly those airplanes to the Netherlands and then do some noise testing there in June. It would be interesting to see what comes to that. Thus far, the noise testing that's been done in the U.S. shows that, yeah, it's a loud warplane, but it's not so significantly louder than anything else.

Now, of course, loud matters, though, if you're talking about a stealth warplane, right? Is that part of the concern? No, I think it's mostly the takeoff and landing. When it's flying, it's much quieter. It's just the take-offs than landings. And especially for the short take-off and, you know, the sort of B variant that can land on it, like a helicopter. It has an additional part of the engine that is a giant lift fan, and that thing makes a lot of noise. So, yeah, it's pretty impressive, you know, watching the landing of that vertical landing is pretty

amazing that the airplane flies around. You see it coming toward the aircraft. It makes the approach just like it would if it were going to catch a tail hook. And instead it stops dead and hubbers in the air and then descends. And, you know, it hits the same spot within a few inches. It's actually incredible. So normally on an aircraft carry, what happens is if they do a touch and go, the aircraft, the aircraft will actually hit the tail hook, descend, stop, taxi for a minute, and then take off again.

So it's meant to simulate what you might be doing if you miss the tail hook, you would have to sort of touch and then go again to get off the aircraft carrier and not fly off the end, right? So they practice doing that. And to see that, though, happen when the airplane stops and midair, hovers, descends, then taxis forward and takes off again. It's pretty impressive. And you have to say that the last sea trials that occurred, the reporters who were there on previous times, we sort of counted. We had a tally going of how many flights we'd seen, but we lost track. There were just so many. It was pretty incredible. And, you know, the airplane, there have been issues with the helmet. Those have been

largely addressed. Let me interject for a second. Just to explain to people who haven't been following this as closely as I think a lot as you have and sadly as Matt and I have. The helmet, just to describe it is, and tell me, Andrea, if I get this wrong, but the helmet essentially lets the pilot see through the airplane, meaning that it's actually like a virtual reality helmet if you look down. it's like the Wonder Woman's invisible aircraft and what you're actually looking through though is a camera and of course it has all sorts of heads-up displays as well and there had been some issues with it.

Yeah, the helmet is an incredible piece of engineering work and each one is molded and designed specifically for a pilot. The pilot no longer has a display in front of him. all of the instruments, all of what you see, the data that is coming from the sensors on the airplane, the radars, the targeting information, any of that now is streaming into the helmet. So the pilot sees all of that information basically in front of his visor or her visor. So when they move their heads, one direction or another, it's as if they're seeing the outside world. So they actually don't see the space of the airplane between them and the outside world.

It's pretty impressive. There have been problems with it. It's a complicated thing. There are issues with a bit of green glow for the night version where it just was a little bit more green than it ought to be if you're using the helmet at night. There were issues with some latency where if you turned, it would take a minute to catch up with where you were, which obviously isn't good if you're in the middle of a dog. or targeting something on the ground, but they're slowly addressing all of these issues. So now we're told that the helmet is actually doing pretty well,

and they're implementing the next version of that. All of this costs money. This weapons program is the most expensive weapons program in history, ever in the world. The current price tag is $391 billion, and that is just for development and procurement, and that's only for the United States. The U.S. military is slated to buy a total of 2,457 of these airplanes. 14 of those are flight-tasked planes, you know, and it's a big open question whether they ever buy that many, but for right now, all of the services are sticking to their totals.

The largest buyer is the Air Force with 17163 planes that they intend to buy, over the next years. The number that frequently gets circulated is the trillion dollar figure, which is the estimated operating cost for the airplane over the next 55 years. That trillion dollar figure is increasing now because the government is extending the period

that they think they're gonna be able to use these planes. And so that will add fuel cost, it'll add maintenance cost, and that trillion dollar figure instead of going down, actually now looks like it's going up, it's because they're going to use them longer, but it isn't good news for the program to see a cost increase. Do they think that these same planes are going to be in the air 50 years from now, or are they going to, they're planning on continuing to build them? Or what does it

mean to have something that has that kind of lifespan attached to it? The lifetime that they intend to use these planes is not significantly longer than any other airplane. It's just that they're going to buy so many of them that the use of these planes will stretch into the 2050s. So the way that they get to that 60, 65 year duration is from the first year of the program all the way through to the very last year. And you're buying them at small numbers initially and then you keep buying more and more and more and more and then eventually tapers off. It encompasses the whole duration of the program from one end to the other. But in first, It should be said, there are no other weapons programs that are held up to that same kind of scrutiny or that are measured by the same kind of yardstick.

Why do you think this one is? Why does this one get so much negative press? That's just such a big target. It is so big and it's so important. And for the Marines, it is absolutely essential because their airplanes are very old. We've just heard testimony that they are having serious accidents at the rate of nearly four for every 100,000 flying hours. That's more than twice what the previous number was. So the age of the war planes is making a difference. And the Marines skipped buying an interim plane and just kind of went from their older model Hornets, which were built by Boeing, the FAA 18. and they have the ABC and D models. They skipped buying the E and F models.

The Navy went ahead and bought those. Many more than were initially planned because of delays in the F-35 program. And also because of the wear and tear, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now the fight against Islamic State are causing them to use those planes at a much higher rate than they had initially intended.

There's a lot of critics of the U.S. 35 and there are problems to be sure. But by and large, the program seems to be doing much better. It has not had any cost overruns, hasn't had any cost increases. In fact, the cost of the airplanes is continuing to come down. There haven't been any significant schedule delay since the program was pretty massively restructured in the 2010 time frame. So looking ahead before we let you go, what do you think the process is going to be like for the new B-21 bomber? Do you think they've learned any lessons from the F-35? Do you think that this is going to just be the standard process?

Yeah, I mean, the B-21 bomber was a process that was also very carefully scrutinized because, you know, everybody knew that there could be and there was a protest filed. You know, whoever lost because it was such a big franchise, such a big franchise, such a, big deal to win this, you know, was going to basically protest. And there was fear that Boeing, which was, you know, Boeing had teamed up with Lockheed Martin. There was fear that the two companies could actually take it to court, even if they lost a protest. But Boeing has decided not to not to proceed with that. The bigger danger for that program is that it's run into opposition on the Hill, on Capitol Hill. Senator John McCain is quite frustrated and upset.

that that program was structured with a, the development part of that program was structured with a cost plus incentive fee, a structure which allows some cost sharing between the government and the contractor if the program runs into trouble. What McCain wants, he wants that program to be developed using a firm fixed price development contract, which would cap the government's exposure. if there are cost overruns. He cites the example of the Air Force Tanker program, the KC-46 program, which is being built by Boeing,

and the program has indeed run into cost overruns, and Boeing has, until now, taken pre-tax charges of over a billion dollars on that program, but the government is not liable for those overruns because of the structure of the contract. So Senator McCain's argument is that this program, because it's so large and so important also should have that kind of a structure. The Air Force argues that it is too risky to do that because it is so much new technology

that's being included. It is a complex engineering feat to try to bring everything together. They've used a lot of existing technologies, but they're bringing them together. That integration piece is still quite complicated. We talked about the software integration piece on the F-35, so it's very similar on the B-21. Functionally, what industry executives tell me is if you sign a firm fixed-price contract, you pay for that. Companies will price in the possibility that they may have to take a charge, that they may be left holding the bag. So the cost would be much higher, and the government seems to have gotten a very good deal on this B-21 bomber. There's been reports and discussion that the airplanes are going to cost way less than the government had expected to spend and that the development program is going to cost roughly half of what the government had anticipated.

There's a lot of skeptics out there. I think it kind of remains to be seen how the program proceeds, how it does. But surely, Senator McCain and his committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee and their counterparts in the House will keep a very close eye on progress on that plane. Andrea, we've taken up an awful lot of your time, and we know that you've got a couple other irons in the fire. So I want to say thank you very much for filling us in on this. It's a fascinating process. If you enjoyed this show, you can subscribe on iTunes or the Google Podcast Store. We also appreciate your comments on our posts on Reuters' Facebook page, and we tweet at War underscore College.

And if you're looking for insight into the world of business and finance, check out our Viewsroom podcast, also available on iTunes. Next time on War College. There was a massive psychological change that I observed in Dernets. It wasn't that they were scared that the same thing would happen to them. It was more like a kind of a moral outrage. They were looking for evidence that they really were. were fascists.