David Axe on the F-35: Still Making S**T Up…

Because He Can!

This is not the first time I’ve 'Fisked' the poster boy for Punk Journalism. I’m sure it won’t be the last. His 'piece' here reeks royally, but not to worry-- I take it all apart below for your edification and enlightenment.  Axe's labors are in pink italics, mine are in black.

We begin.....

The U.S. military has grounded all its new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters following an incident on June 23, when one of the high-tech warplanes caught fire on the runway of a Florida air base. The no-fly order — which affects at least 50 F-35s at training and test bases in Florida, Arizona, California and Maryland — began on the evening of July 3 and continued through July 11.

I know “attention span” isn’t one of Axe’s strong points, but there have been at least a hundred F-35s delivered and most news stories have mentioned 97-98 aircraft have been affected. How uninformed is Axe anyway?

All those F-35s sitting idle could be a preview of a future in which potentially thousands of the Pentagon’s warplanes can’t reliably fly.

To be fair, the Pentagon routinely grounds warplanes on a temporary basis following accidents and malfunctions to buy investigators time to identify problems and to give engineers time to fix them. But there’s real reason to worry. The June incident might reflect serious design flaws that could render the F-35 unsuitable for combat.

Yet there has been no talk of such a worry throughout the life of the safety stand-down-then-grounding. In fact, the reports have been increasingly positive that there is in fact NOT a ‘serious design flaw’ related to this incident. So no, there’s NO “real reason to worry” as long as you deal in facts and not your, or your fellow traveler’s fetid imaginations.

For starters, the Lockheed Martin-built F-35 — which can avoid sensor detection thanks to its special shape and coating — simply doesn’t work very well. The Pentagon has had to temporarily ground F-35s no fewer than 13 times since 2007, mostly due to problems with the plane’s Pratt &Whitney-made F135 engine, in particular, with the engines’ turbine blades. The stand-downs lasted at most a few weeks.

DE-VEL-OP-MENT David!

Repeat that faster and faster until you recognize the word, and then look up what it means. The F-35 is still integrating changes that have already been identified and until development is complete, further changes may come as well. Axe also doesn’t know dip-squat about Low Observability, but we won’t let that distract us.

“The repeated problems with the same part of the engine may be indications of a serious design and structural problem with the F135 engine,” said Johan Boeder, a Dutch aerospace expert and editor of the online publication JSF News.

Except!
1) Problems haven’t been found ‘with the same part of the engine’ and

2) I can’t think of any of the ‘problems’ lately that have been found to be ‘design-related’.

The last I can think of is the shaft length/spacer design for the lift fan, and that was a relatively simple fix. As an aside,  quoting an un-cleared, uninvolved, and therefore uninformed ‘engineer’ with a website is also just about the epitome of a Fallacious Appeal to Authority.

Pratt & Whitney has already totally redesigned the F135 in an attempt to end its history of frequent failures. ….

Put delicately, That’s a complete and total lie. The design remains fundamentally the same since it was first built. It is the same two-shaft engine with a three-stage fan and six-stage high pressure compressor. The hot section still has an annular combustor with a single-stage high pressure turbine unit and a two-stage low pressure turbine. The afterburner still consists of a variable converging-diverging nozzle. The design has been tweaked (details and materials) for reliability and durability…just like every other turbine engine development since the history of turbine engine development began.
Axe oversteps to feed the low information crowd on this point. The lie either reeks of desperation or supreme confidence that his mouth-breathing base won’t bother to call him out on such flat-out Bullsh*t-- because is suits them just fine either way.

But there’s only so much engineers can do. In a controversial move during the early stages of the F-35′s development, the Pentagon decided to fit the plane with one engine instead of two. Sticking with one motor can help keep down the price of a new plane. But in the F-35′s case, the decision proved self-defeating.

Assertion of belief unsupported by fact. The single engine approach was an affordability (procuring and maintaining half as many engines as a two engine plane) decision at the start.

Now Axe follows up with some  ‘narrative’:

That’s because the F-35 is complex — the result of the Air Force, Marines and Navy all adding features to the basic design…..

Sheesh. More Axe B.S.
The F-35 is as complex as it needs to be as far as the users are concerned, and he can’t name anything on any of the variants that adversely affect the other variants. The irony here is that if the F-35 was a two engine plane, it WOULD be necessarily more complex.

In airplane design, such complexity equals weight. The F-35 is extraordinarily heavy for a single-engine plane, weighing as much as 35 tons with a full load of fuel.

Complexity does not necessarily equal weight; complexity can in fact reduce weight. Proof please? And the F-35 is not 'extraordinarily heavy (see F-16 data that follows), But moving on...

In structures, a truss is more complex than a beam but can weigh much less for the same purpose. In components, a multifunction box (GPS-INS) can weigh less than having separate INS and GPS boxes (incidentally, the F-35 uses separate, less-complex GPS and INS components).

 Axe is therefore making another sweeping generalization on a topic for which he possesses no consequential knowledge, and is so typical of Punk Journalism. He uses this complexity-weight ‘Strawman’ to build his narrative further:

By comparison, the older F-15 fighter weighs 40 tons. But it has two engines. To remain reasonably fast and maneuverable, the F-35′s sole F135 engine must generate no less than 20 tons of thrust — making it history’s most powerful fighter motor.

An 'interesting' comparison, selected no doubt to feed the meme machine, and executed with complete ineptitude from an engineering perspective. (But probably counts as a profundity to the Ignorami.)

The only F-15 variant that weighs around ’40 tons’ is a max-loaded F-15 Strike Eagle, the air-to-mud optimized variant of the F-15 air-superiority fighter. The F-35 weighs ‘a lot’ for the same reason as a fully loaded F-15E would weigh ‘a lot’, and at the same point in time (takeoff or after aerial refuel): it is loaded down with fuel and weapons.

The air-superiority version of the F-15 would be much more lightly loaded, but….. so….. what?
Why not compare say, a ‘fully loaded’ F-16's weight and power to weight with an F-35? The F-16C Block 50 has a max takeoff weight of 37K lbs (18.5 tons) and an engine that ‘only’ produces 27K lbs of thrust.

Alternatively, we may want to compare same generations of technology. So why not compare the F-35 power/weight with the F-22’s? Especially since the F135 is a derivative of the F119 in the F-22?

Answer: It doesn’t support Axe’s little lamentations and story line

All that thrust results in extreme levels of stress on engine components. It’s no surprise, then, that the F-35 frequently suffers engine malfunctions...

No, not really…since the ‘frequency’ is more in Axe’s imagination than reality. Maybe he should add jet engine technology to that long list of things he knows nothing about?

…Even with that 20 tons of thrust, the new radar-dodging plane is still sluggish.
The F-35 “is a dog … overweight and underpowered,” according to Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Project on Government Oversight in Washington.

Winslow Wheeler is a paid hack for Strauss (first name Phil), trust-fund baby and itinerant ‘photographer’ who by the way is an anti-defense sponsor of Wheeler’s work for ages now. First at the Center for Defense (Dis-)Information and now under the POGO umbrella. Strauss is Board Chairman of that (sarc) bastion of Pro-American thought (/sarc) 'Mother Jones'.  [But don't question their 'patriotism'!]

I think all indications are that the F-35 is anything BUT a dog. But then, I’ve done the math.

In 2008, two analysts at the RAND Corporation, a California think-tank that works closely with the military, programmed a computer simulation to test out the F-35′s fighting ability in a hypothetical air war with China…

This is an obfuscating oversimplification to say the least. RAND did not sponsor what produced the now-infamous slide-show, and RAND disavowed any so-called ‘findings’. In short it was a ‘rogue operation’ at best.

…The results were startling.

NO. The results were deterministic Garbage-In Garbage-Out.

They are now known to have been based on ‘simulations’ run on 'Harpoon 3' (yes….. the video game) using performance, tactics and strategy ‘data’ of unknown pedigree by people who had no current working knowledge of the classified and/or technical data required to realistically model the ‘problem’ in the first place.

So should we dismiss Axe for being incompetently uninformed on the topic or for lying about it? IMHO, either one is unforgivable.

  “The F-35 is double-inferior,” John Stillion and Harold Scott Perdue concluded in their written summary of the war game, later leaked to the press. The new plane “can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run,” they warned.

John Stillion left RAND for ‘greener pastures’ shortly after this cockup, and the reader can make their own assumptions as to perhaps “why”.
Stillion was supposed to be doing a study on what he is perhaps best known for: Airbase Vulnerability. I own some of his stuff on the topic and it is generally very good. IF he was suckered into an anti-JSF operation as part of that, then that’s tragic. But if that brief was his production he is still wrong in how he thinks about modern air combat.

His experience, his air combat worldview as came out in the briefing: that very much of a SEA back-seater. Given post-SEA air combat experiences, it very much looks like the rules for success have progressed way beyond Boyd’s first-generation-think on Energy-Maneuverability, so he should have showed a little humility in recognizing the possibility he was perhaps ignorant of important facts.

Yet the F-35 is on track to become by far the military’s most numerous warplane. It was designed to replace almost all current fighters in the Air Force and Marine Corps and complement the Navy’s existing F/A-18 jets. The Pentagon plans to acquire roughly 2,400 of the radar-evading F-35s in coming decades, at a cost of more than $400 billion.

Like it or not, the stealthy F-35 is the future of U.S. air power. There are few alternatives. Lockheed Martin’s engineers have done millions of man-hours of work on the design since development began in the 1990s. Starting work on a new plane now would force the Defense Department to wait a decade or more, during which other countries might pull ahead in jet design. Russia, China and Japan are all working on new stealth fighter models.

So then, what’s the point of all Axe’s B.S.?

The Pentagon sounds guardedly optimistic about the current F-35 grounding. “Additional inspections of F-35 engines have been ordered,” Rear Admiral John Kirby, a military spokeman [sic] said, “and return to flight will be determined based on inspection results and analysis of engineering data.”

If Axe had bothered to read Reuters the day before he would have found Defense Undersecretary Frank Kendall saying :

• …..the grounding had halted testing but he did not view the incident as a "fundamental setback" for the $400 billion program, the Pentagon's biggest, which still has about 40 percent of developmental testing to complete.
• ….. the engine had suffered two issues involving fan blades in the past few years, but they appeared unrelated and not systemic to the airplane.
• "None of those things that have happened, including this recent one as far as I know, suggests that we have a fundamentally flawed design," Kendall said.
• ….detailed inspections of engines on the fleet of 97 F-35s already built had not shown signs of the kind of excessive rubbing founded on the engine that broke apart, although there were signs of milder rubbing in several other engines
• . … the evidence being compiled did not point to a systemic issue, but the analysis was still going on. In this case, engineers found evidence of significant rubbing by the fan blades against a cowl.
• "We’re not noticing it throughout the fleet," he said.
•  "The design allows for a limited degree of rubbing, but it was enough in this case to cause a structural reaction that ultimately led to failure."

If Axe read more, the rest of us wouldn’t have to suffer through his Beta-boy handwringing:

Minor fixes might get America’s future warplane flying again soon — for a while. But fundamental design flaws could vex the F-35 for decades to come, forcing the Pentagon to suspend flying far too often for the majority of its fighter fleet, potentially jeopardizing U.S. national security.

….and monkeys might jump out of Axe’s nether regions.

If it is between Axe’s ‘potentials', ‘coulds’ and ‘mights’, and F-35 evidence to date, all indications are we should expect those monkeys first.

My interest now is seeing who picks up Axe's ramblings and repeats the same uninformed drivel Axe just spewed.

NOTE: Work and family demands (and an illness or two)  are the reason for my hiatus have prevented me from posting regularly these days. I still have a couple of major posts in the fire, but don't know when I can complete them. As Axe's commentary proves, it is much more easy to just make up stuff or repeat other people's made-up stuff.  The only reason I had time to do this post was that Axe's drivel spun me up and it was getting in the way of me being able to clear my head for working on real life problems.

F-35 "price sinks to US$80-85m" in FY2019 Dollars?

Some H8ters H8, Others are (Apparently?) 'Gobsmacked'

Hat Tip: 'Spazsinbad' over on F-16.net



F-35 Numbers Growing, Prices Falling? 

Courtesy of 'Spazsinbad', I first read this at the Sydney Morning Herald website and wondered why I didn't see anything about it at any of the so-called 'leading' defense websites:

JSF price sinks to US$80-85m

Australia looks like paying a less than expected $US80-$US85 million for each F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft and that could drop if production ramps up. That's much cheaper than recent indications of over $US100 million ($A111.73 million) per aircraft. Lieutenant General Chris Bogdan, who heads the JSF acquisition program for the US military, said the price included profit for JSF manufacturer Lockheed Martin and was in 2019 dollars, accounting for inflation. That's less than the $130 million budgeted price for each of Australia's first two, which are in production set for delivery in the US later this year and next (Read it all here ).

The initial reaction around the web appears to be muted to say the least, especially compared to what it has been whenever hypothetical and amorphous outside cost 'estimates' have gone up. Could the Anti-JSF bias be any more blatant?

From the thread at the F-16.net link above, I saw that the Euroshill was allegedly casting aspersions Gen. Bogdan's way, so I dropped in to find another Moronic Convergence at Defense-Aerospace. First de Briganti heads his 'piece' with:

Recent Statements by F-35 Program Chief Strains Credibility

Then, after opening with an 'incredulous' review of past cost numbers, he reports the JSFPO e-mail reply he received when he asked them to explain:

JPO spokesman Joe DellaVedova confirmed Bogdan’s figures in an e-mailed statement, adding that “The number [he] quoted is an affordability initiative we're working on with our industry partners.”  

He added that “Don't know if ‘contradiction’ is the right word to use or how you did the math or what is included in a FUC ... but the reality is we've been buying aircraft at a lower cost than what are in budget estimates” such as the FUC figures quoted above.  

“For example, in LRIP 7 (buy year 2013, delivery 2015), we negotiated with LM the price of $98 million for an air vehicle and we fully expect to negotiate a lower price in LRIP 8 and a lower price in LRIP 9,” he said.  

The $98 million cost quoted by DellaVedova is $28.8 million lower than the $126.8 million budgeted by the US Air Force for LRIP 7 aircraft, implying that the JPO was able to negotiate a reduction of 22% in the price of F-35A fighters

Where's the problem Giovanni?

Is it in your inability to do math: you can't or refuse to put two and two together without insisting it must be something other than 4? Or is it that you don't understand 'learning curves' and Economic Order Quantities? Somebody-- anybody!-- please, help that man.

 

Like Europe Needed Another Maroon: Diversity in the Strangest Places 

Evidently this Don Bacon character has found a European home, so that we now have a strange alliance formed between a European Defense PR Flack and an US Anti-Defense Isolationist.

 

Go Figure.

 

The Euroshill  gives Bacon a platform (again) to sputter from incoherently. His ability to determine what is a direct quote (hint: they are called quotation marks) and someone reporting what was said in a press release is apparently non-existent. But 'Non-existent' is still more than what I can say for his critical reading skills. (Is it possible for someone to NOT understand anything?) 

 

Example? How about the DoD press release (Emphasis mine) Bacon references:

Interim capability currently allows the F-35s to survey the battle space, absorb information and give the department a clear picture from an individual perspective, the general said. Meanwhile, he added, the software development aims to ensure not only that two jets can assess and fuse the information, but also that multiple systems can share and process the data -- systems such as F-22 Raptor fighters, Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft, B-2 bombers, satellites and ground stations.  

Bogdan explained that finishing interim capability as quickly as possible with the resources at hand will help the program move to the next development phase. So far, he said, airframe and engine production schedules are stable and predictable, measuring milestones in days and weeks, not months and years.

“It’s more important to know when those lines will come out so we can get them to those bases and start that stand-up,” the general said.

The developmental test program is 50 percent complete for 28 F-35s, Bogdan said. At this time last year, he added, the program office delivered about 36 airplanes, with plans this year to deliver 36 to 38.

Don Bacon's comment?

--"The developmental test program is 50 percent complete for 28 F-35s" makes absolutely no sense.

Makes....no...sense...?

Pssst. Don. Look at the passage again. Keep looking at it until you realize the paragraphs are about the same topic: Interim Capability.

 

Bacon's comments on the DAS indicate a lack of technical knowledge impervious to reason, so I won't waste my time on them.  

 

Note: A friend e-mails me that he thinks Mr. Bacon is a retired Army officer. If so, I suspect he was the 'classification' of officer that Baron Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord warned us about.

 

The rest of the JSF Defamation League seems silent for now, but why do I suspect they are all just comparing notes to get their story meme straight?

F-35 and the "Crack"-pots of Doom...Again.

They never learn.

At least it seems that way.

If the F-35 is 'plagued' by anything, it is plagued by critics who haven't a clue as to how Airframe Durability testing is conducted, what its objectives are, and how it fits into the modern aircraft development process. It seems this ignorance 'dooms' the F-35 program to an annual round of misplaced and sneering derision by people who have no idea they are broadcasting their own ignorance after every DOT&E report release.

Durability Testing Promotes the Useful Life.

Amusing as it is, such unwarranted criticism is counter-productive. I could produce a lengthy dissertation (you know I can) on the history and benefits of this kind of testing, and show how the developments to-date for the F-35 are no different than the programs before it --except for the F-35 doing it perhaps better and in a bigger fish bowl --but that would bore the cr*p out of most people.On top of that, the unrepentant anti-JSFers would only claim I was making excuses or some other equally stupid assertion. So I will default to providing an illustrative example of what I mean. Consider the following passage concerning the EARLY F-16 development (Queen's English BTW).

Fatigue tests 

In parallel with the flight-test programme a series of ground fatigue trials were carried out on the fifth development airframe. A test rig set up in a hangar at Fort Worth used more than 100 hydraulic rams to apply stress to an instrumented airframe, simulating the loads imposed by takeoff, landing and combat manoeuvering at up to 10g. By the summer of 1978, this airframe had clocked up more than 16,000 hours of simulated flight in the rig. These tests were carried out at a careful and deliberate pace which sometimes lagged behind schedule. 

As the tests progressed, cracks developed in several structural bulkheads. News of this problem resulted in hostile comments in the media, but GD pointed out in its own defence that the cracks had occurred not in flying aircraft but on ground test specimens. If the risk of such cracks during development testing was not a real one, a company spokesman remarked to the author at the time, no-one would be willing to pay for ground structural test rigs. GD redesigned the affected components, thickening the metal, and installed metal plates to reinforce existing units.  

--Source: F-16: Modern Fighter Aircraft Vol 2., Pg 18. ARCO Publishing, 1983.

Sounds kinda' familiar doesn't it?

I was tempted to employ some trickery to deceive the reader into thinking the above was written about the F-35, but I think this point is better made straight up.  Even after this testing, because the F-16 was initially the ultimate knife-fighting hot rod of a dayfighter, there were useful-life 'issues' on the early airframes. Pilots were flying higher G-loading at several times the rate as previous fighters and higher percentages of the time than that for which the airframe had been designed.    

Guest Post at Op-For

Many thanks to 'DaveO' and 'LtColP' at Op-For for the opportunity to give a guest commentary today, to explain and expand upon a comment I made in an earlier thread on Op-For  .

This is particularly 'timely' considering there's a 60 minutes segment on the F-35 tonight. I myself am prepping a quick viewer's guide as it concerns the topic of 'Concurrency'.  Should be up before it airs in most time zones.

Moronic Convergence at Defense Aerospace

Mmmmm. BACON! I usually like to fry mine so it is somewhat less crispy, but tonight? ‘Carbonized’ is just fine. 

AKA 'Blogiversary Over'

Don Bacon & DeBriganti. What could go wrong?
Defense Aerospace has a ‘guest commenter’ who appears to have more ambition than to just keep saying stupid things in the comment threads at other people’s websites. He now wants to be ‘featured’ saying stupid things.

You don’t have to go there to read it.

I fisk it here, so you don’t have to take a shower afterwards.

The F-35 O&S Cost Coverup

(Source: Defense-Aerospace.com; published Feb. 04, 2014)

By guest contributor Don Bacon

The F-35 selected acquisition report (SAR) reported last Spring that there had been no progress in reducing its staggering $1 trillion, 50-year life-cycle cost. Then in June 2013 it was reported that "the company and the U.S. military are taking aim at a more vexing problem: the cost of flying and maintaining the new warplane." Not only was the total cost stratospheric but the cost per flying hour was much higher than the legacy fleet at $31,922.

What could be done to cut high operations and sustainment (O&S) costs? International customers were being scared away by high production costs, and particularly by high operating cost.

The F-35 program office had the answer. Simply announce that the costs are lower! Why not? The result:

Pentagon Cuts F-35 Operating Estimate Below $1 Trillion

WASHINGTON (Reuters), Aug 21, 2013 - "The U.S. government has slashed its estimate for the long-term operating costs of Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter jets by more than 20 percent to under $1 trillion, according to a senior defense official, a move that could boost international support for the program." 

That arbitrary announcement out of the F-35 program office that operating cost had dropped from $1.1 trillion to $857 million didn't fly very high. (See related story—Ed). On September 6 the Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall announced that there would be a review of F-35 operating costs. Kendall indicated that the program office's estimate might have been overly optimistic. 

In fact the GAO has reported that F-35 operating and support costs (O&S) are currently projected to be 60 percent higher than those of the existing aircraft it will replace. 

“We’re … looking at that number,” Kendall said. “The official number is still the one we put up in the SAR [selected acquisition report]. We’re going to do a review of F-35 this fall. We’ll get another estimate out of CAPE [Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation] for that and we’ll probably make some adjustments.

On October 6, 2013 Kyra Hawn, spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s F-35 program office, said a high-level Defense Acquisition Board meeting was expected to proceed on Monday despite the partial government shutdown. The meeting has already been postponed several times. 

Well that CAPE meeting came and went, with no news on F-35 operating cost. The cost data must have been bad and so it had to be covered up, just like other cost data (production cost, etc.) on the F-35. We did get some PR fluff out of the meeting, though. “While risks remain, progress on the F-35 program at this point has been adequate to support a decision to budget for increased rates,” Frank Kendall, under-secretary for acquisition, said in a decision memo.

If it was good cost news supporting an increase in production rates, then why didn't Kendall release the data? Apparently the opposite was true, the data was bad. And now we have the data, in the FY2013 F-35 test report, and it isn't pretty.

Got all that?

Bacon cherry picks old news reports and not only ponders why there’s been no operating cost updates, but asserts it must be bad for the JSF because Kendall would have released it if it were ‘good’. I could just say “proof please”, but I got a theory too—only I’ll tell you it is just a theory and not assert it as ‘fact’. As we have noted all along (one, two, three) the actual costs have consistently come close enough to LM’s ‘should cost’ curves to call LMs estimates 'accurate'. The CAPE stuff? Not so much. My theory assumes the CAPE-ers will try to cover their collective estimating a**es by bringing down their estimates slow enough that (they hope) people won’t notice how bad they were to start with. Note I do not blame the analysts themselves, just their political management that tells them what and how to compute.

As to the ‘massive’ O&S costs (Cue Austin Powers clip) ONE TRILLION DOLLARS!? Who the H*LL cares about a GUESS covering FIFTY years of future operations? Answer: No one. At least no one in their right mind that is.

Pssst, Don: Calculate the B-52s operating costs over the first 50 years, go back in time to the start of the program and tell them what it will cost in 2010 dollars. Think that would stop them? Answer: No. They, unlike you and the legions of mouth-breathers, actually understood the 'time value' of money.      

Next, Don Bacon takes us into a world where he proves he hasn’t a freaking clue: R&M.

FY13 DOT&E Report

-- Mean Flight Hours Between Critical Failure (MFHBCF)
variant--threshold/observed
F-35A--20/4.5
F-35B--12/3.0
F-35C--14/2.7

-- Mean Corrective Maintenance Time for Critical Failure (MCMTCF)
variant--threshold/observed/FY12 Report
F-35A--4.0/12.1/9.3
F-35B--4.5/15.5/8.0
F-35C--4.0/9.6/6.6

So you fly the F-35A for 4.5 hours, get a critical failure, and then it takes 12.1 hours to fix it, or nearly three hours longer than it took last year. (That's hours, not manhours; Eglin AFB has seventeen mechanics per F-35.)

Similarly with the F-35B -- fly it for 3 hours, critical failure, then corrective maintenance takes 15.5 hours (7.5 hours more than last year).

The F-35C will fly for only 2.7 hours before 9.6 hours for corrective maintenance time. (Only one engine, too, out over the deep blue water.)

~Sigh~
As I noted over at F-16.net, “Statistical Crimes Against Humanity” were about the only thing of note in the latest DOT&E report.

Bacon evidently even missed the part of the DOT&E Report that stated: “the program has fielded too few F-35C aircraft to assess reliability trends”. 
That’s OK though, because the entire program has flown too few hours, especially considering training activity and the changing and expanding operational footprint, to assess anything meaningful. The fact that reality didn’t stop some calculator in DOT&E from applying their inconsequential knowledge simply invites more abuse of math and logic. I’m surprised Bacon didn’t also glom on to that B.S. software reset ‘analysis’ inside. Maybe that much idiocy was obvious even to Bacon. 

 My 2012 post on the subject criticizing the GAO’s similar violations holds up rather well when applied to DOT&E. The DOT&E report IS helpful in one way in that it provides the bounds for measuring the R&M of the airplane. Each variant has a cumulative flight hour measuring point and the fleet cumulative flight hour measuring point. People seem to have a better time of it visualizing just how little the program is into the data collecting if you graph it for them, so the following is offered for your enjoyment:

I started the growth slope at zero, but that isn’t really important, as the initial starting point is usually an educated guess or completely capricious. Raise the start point to 5-10 Hrs MTBCF if you like: it is still a long way from where the ‘grade’ counts, and not much of a slope to climb from where the program is now.
What is most important is to show how far away the current flight hour total is away from the cumulative experience required to be even considered as showing any kind of ‘trend’, much less a ‘grade’.  The chart above shows how far the total fleet hours have to go. Here's how far the variant measure has to go:

These charts are simplified and use a linear scale, so remember Log-log scales as are the norm, as I've thoroughly described before (same link as previous). Also note the apparent bobbling in the ‘objective’ lines comes from rounding and my selecting precise flight hour data points for the current flight hours in the DOT&E report among the other, evenly spaced, ones.

Give us a ring when the planes get to about the 25K-30K Flight Hour per variant and 100K Fleet Flight Hour mark. Then we can talk trends and problems areas.

Same thing goes for the mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) figures. And bring average crew size and MMH/FH with you so it can be discussed intelligently next time.

 

So Bacon then decides he wants to beat on fictional operating costs some more. Let’s keep tagging along shall we?

If anybody thinks the acquisition cost is high, and it is, it will be totally eclipsed by the operating cost. An independent audit by KPMG has estimated the cost of buying and operating the F-35 warplanes at $600-million per jet, two-thirds of that operating cost. 

Captain Overstreet of the F-35 program office warned in November that while development costs are high for the F-35, they will be “dwarfed” by the sustainability costs. Back in May 2011 Defense Undersecretary for Acquisition Ashton Carter described current projected costs for the F-35 as “unacceptable.”

Ahem, Minor point. It is a rule of thumb that 2/3 of total life cycle costs are in the operating and support of the systems. Nothing shocking there.

 It is an accepted premise and I think it was taught in just about every DAU course I ever completed. Any bets Bacon wants to use it for nefarious purposes?

Awww, you guessed right. He does:

All of this reality runs against what the early F-35 promises were.
-- From the 1997 doc -- "The Affordable Solution - JSF": Tactical Aircraft Affordability Objective 1997: R&D 6%, Production 54%, total dev & prod 60%, O&S 40%.

-- The actual 2014 test data is way different:
dev & prod -- $397B = 26%, O&S -- $1,100B = 74%, total -- $1,497 

So the F-35 has gone from an initial-operating cost ratio of 60-40 to 26-74, and that's with much higher production costs. Nobody can afford that, especially foreign customers -- which is why it's been covered up. 

Hate to harsh your mellow there Don (OK, I really don’t mind it a bit) but you are shoveling some mighty fine hoo-haw there. The only real question is:

 

Are you doing it 'intentionally' or 'stupidly'?

 

Answer?...It's 'Stupidly'

That first set of numbers comes from a ‘document’ that is a POWERPOINT presentation. It looks very much like those numbers are talking about either the planned cost reduction percentage over legacy aircraft OR where the percentage of cost reduction opportunities resided at the time. I use the past tense, because that slide was from before either of the X-planes were built or flew, and before the Operational Requirements Document was defined and published. See Slides 3, 4, and 5 from the ‘1997 document referenced:

See anything in there about those numbers standing for the proportion of total cost? Me neither. Next slide?

 

Wow. The two X-planes aren't even built yet, and the requirements document isn't even firmed up to determine how much capability for what cost will be pursued.

 

More talking about affordability opportunities to balance before deciding what to pursue. the whole briefing is this way.

I’d love to find the original with ‘notes pages’ view for clarification just to smack the stupidity down even more for my visitors, but I guess I will have to (for now) settle for just salting the wound by pointing out the 1997 ‘document’ wasn’t an authoritative source to begin with. With only a cursory search, I’ve found three copies on the web of various versions and unknown provenance, none on an official government website. So Bacon bases his argument on a 17-year old PowerPoint slide with a unexplained message and calls it a 'conspiracy'?  

Can’t you just feel the Dezinformatsia in Bacon’s ramblings now oozing out into the interwebs and being passed around by the illiterate and the innumerate?     

So who is this 'Don Bacon' writing this drivel for the Euro-Shill?

About the author: 
Don Bacon is a retired army officer with acquisition experience, who has seen how programs go wrong in spite of the evidence, largely because of the military 'can-do' attitude which leads to harmful, ineffective results. Now he is a private citizen who sees the necessity of challenging baseless claims in order to get to the truth, and so the truth will prevail.

That’s rather verbose for “completely clueless out-of-the-loop retiree with no knowledge relevant to the subject which he so ardently, yet so flaccidly opines about” Isn’t it? No wonder the children don’t respect their elders anymore.

Journalists Who [Apparently] Have no Critical Reading Skills Either

(Formerly Titled 'Oddest Thing')

I was invited (challenged?) to comment on Ares concerning my last posting where I covered Bill Sweetman's latest assault on 'all things F-35'. I commented,  leaving a link to the post.

I considered the possibility that it was a setup of sorts, but wasn't concerned as much as curious as to what he had in mind. Tonight I checked back at Ares, and Sweetman had responded.  I was somewhat disappointed in the response and can dismiss it rather easily. So I tried to post a response tonight (Can't sleep, been sleeping all day and all weekend trying to get over the bug).

Odd thing happened though. My attempt to post the first part of a two-part response just seemed to hang up in the process. I had broken my response in two to match format limits, but that won't be necessary if I post it here. I'll try and post at Ares in the AM to see if the 'glitch' has cleared up. If not, I'll add it below, and change the title to "Journalists Who [Apparently] Have no Critical Reading Skills Either" .

Stay tuned....

Well,  I woke up in a hacking fit, rebooted the computer, and tried again a couple of hours later, STILL "No Joy". I provide my correction of Mr. Sweetman's counter-comment at Ares (Sweetman in Italics) with a few non-Nyquil additions in [brackets]. I'll come back and add links and labels when I next come up for air or feel better. I may just fold this whole thing into the bottom of the original post. My response begins below the line

*********************************************************************************

(Sweetman) You appear to be trying to make two points.

I did make two points.


(Sweetman) Rather than my $60m current URFC, which I based on three consecutive years in the most recent SAR, you claim the figure should be $80 million.

NO. I did not 'claim' the figure 'should be' $80M. I demonstrated that, just as Thompson indicated “by perusing the Pentagon’s Selective Acquisition Reports”, such information could be found.
I identified information in the latest SAR that I saw as perhaps clues to the $80M figure that could be found in an earlier SAR. Those clues led me to information in an earlier SAR: the immediately preceding 2011 SAR. Whether estimating then-year unit cost off the base year cost or simply dividing then-year total cost by the units – both arrive at a value close enough to be ‘about’ $80M.


(Sweetman)You base that number on one estimated 13-aircraft "close-out" buy in an older report. This is more accurate... exactly how?

It is more accurate:

• because it was in the program of record at the time.
• because it reflected actual expected annual quantity buy and costs [which are the most current values for cancelled 2014 buy].
• most of all because it reflected a single-year procurement price, as the previous years that you chose to ‘average’ include the benefit of a multi-year buy [and FMS price support].
• because it also reflected the fact that there were no E-18Gs programmed at the time (for the first time in years) and were therefore not also providing price support 'off the F-18E/F books'.

As an aside, though the 13 E/Fs disappeared for 2014 in the 2012 SAR, [we find] 21 EA-18Gs have been added for 2014 in the 2012 SAR. They, of course, are more expensive as well.
[As another aside, whereas I can point to definite drivers for the increased cost, "close-out" buy is vague, undefined, and in this case unsupported: a  'throwaway' term.]

My first point is therefore made: Facts are in evidence that indicate substance behind Thompson’s $80M figure and [intelligent people may deduce that] therefore indignation and/or incredulousness were unwarranted.


(Sweetman)Then, you dispute my estimate for the 2001 cost by using a different inflation factor, called "economy cost".

NO. My second point was explicit: “Without the quantification of all “the necessary electronics included”, or estimation method used Thompson’s figures aren’t really debatable.” I then added that whatever your estimation was based upon, “it still does not invalidate Thompson’s claims if he uses another recognized inflation adjustment method, SUCH AS that for ‘Economy Cost’.”  

[ If Thompson's numbers bothered me, my first instinct would be to send an e-mail to him first asking him "Hey, what do you base those numbers on? I guess I'm too inquisitive to be a 'journalist']



(Sweetman)But the Pentagon doesn't use it - and neither does anyone else. A Google search for the term (in quotes) does not show it as a method of calculating inflation in its first four pages. If I add the words "inflation method" to the search I get two hits - the source that you link to, and your page.

Since my point, again, was that without more data ANY evaluation is futile, this is pretty much a ‘red herring’,  but I’ll play along. You would have had better luck with Elsevier instead of Google but not by much. First, because ‘Economy Cost’ is a pretty esoteric term. Second, “Economy Cost” is one of those word combinations that will yield multitudes of results far more popular and unrelated or at best peripheral: akin to looking for information on the web concerning incubating eggs by typing in ‘hot chicks’.
In any case, the ‘website’ is part of a project run by two economics professors, with about a dozen international members--apparently all of them also economics professors--on their project advisory board. Ergo: ‘somebody’ uses it.
BTW and not that it matters either: DoD uses OMB inflation figures, it may be authoritative for DoD estimating but not necessarily ‘accurate’ for a 'true' perspective . In DAU it is taught that DoD estimating methods are often disconnected (lower) from methods used by the rest of the world, because “OMB inflation rates reflect policy goals rather than a consensus of forecasters”(link: a dot mil site: ignore warning to view). That's an interesting pedigree isn't it?


(Sweetman) Thanks for playing.

Oh No. Thank You. [Its always appreciated when the big boys come down and inspire the hoi polloi.]

Debunking Close Air Support Myths, 2nd Edition: Part 7

Sourcing ‘AF Hates A-10’ Nonsense

We tackled the ‘big’ myths in a while back Parts 1-6. This post, at the root of things, is about the little myth that if the Air Force retires the A-10, that somehow means the Air Force doesn’t care about the mission, the Army, or both. I believe it is based upon other little myths that are sometimes based upon big lies and/or uniformed opinions more than anything else. The lies and opinions get planted as ‘fact’ in places where they line up neatly with already well-entrenched points of view. Then over time, if they get repeated often enough, they become ‘facts’… that aren’t.

The Current Sequester ‘Crisis’ and Close Air Support

At last week’s Air Force Association convention Air Force Leadership statements, acknowledging the reality of how Defense Sequestration was making the military a hollow force. As reported by Defense News:

With the F-35 coming online to take over the close-air support role, the venerable Thunderbolt II will be a likely target, Gen. Mike Hostage told reporters at the Air Force Association's Air and Space Conference.
“This is not something I want to do,” Hostage said, explaining that no decisions had been made.
Hostage said he had already talked to Army officials about losing the A-10 and using other jets to take over the close-air support role. The Army was “not happy” about the possibility, Hostage said.
“I will not lose what we have gained in how we learned to support the Army,” Hostage said. “I had to make sure the Army understood that I am not backing away from the mission.”
Hostage said the service can do the close-air support role with the F-35, but it would be more expensive and “not as impressive” without the famous GAU-8 Avenger 30 millimeter gun.
“In a perfect world, I would have 1,000 A-10s,” Hostage said. “I can’t afford it. I can’t afford the fleet I have now. If I cut the fleet in half, do I save enough to get through this problem?
“My view is, while I don’t want to do it, I would rather lose the entire fleet and save everything I do in the infrastructure.” 

Hostage’s comments follow similar statements from both acting Secretary of the Air Force Eric Fanning and Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh that single-mission aircraft would need to be cut if budgets continue to decrease.

“If we go into [fiscal year 2014] with sequestration still in effect, and we need to achieve those savings, you have to look at cuts,” Fanning said Monday…

What is facing the Air Force right now is same for all the services: they must plan on doing ‘less with less’ because of the current ‘budget reality’ [Though it is arguable that is really about a lack of defense-as-a-national-priority ‘reality’]. Within the framework of the ‘budget reality’, the services have to figure out how can they fulfill as many of their responsibilities, and to what extent, with the ‘less’ budget they will be left to work with going forward.

The Lesser of Evils?

It now appears that part of the best way (or least ‘worst way’) forward, involves the possibility of retiring the entire (such as it remains) A-10 fleet

Aside from the sentimentality of General Hostage’s statement, I have no problem with it, and there is one part that sums things up perfectly:

“My view is, while I don’t want to do it, I would rather lose the entire fleet and save everything I do in the infrastructure.”

Got that? Retire selected weapon systems and save all the capability (“everything I do”).

The A-10 is Going Away Anyway

This is certain to cause a groundswell of emotion and irrational fear in some quarters if the A-10 fleet is forcibly retired. I would say ‘retired early’ but that would be less correct than stating ‘earlier than planned’, as we have kept the A-10 past it’s freshness date. the A-10 was considered as rapidly obsolescing AND rapidly aging when the Air Force first proposed replacing it with A-7Fs and A-16's the first time in the late 1980's. All but the last A-10s built (~1983-84) were manufactured with known deficiency in structural strength to begin with.

A-10s in AMARG: The Largest Supply Source for Keeping Operational A-10s Flying.  

"...fourteen airplanes sitting on the ramp having battle damage repaired, and I lost two A-10s in one day..."

Desert Storm Air Boss Made the Call: Pulled A-10s Off the
Iraqi Republican Guard Due to High Attrition

Tales of  the A-10's effectiveness in Desert Storm overshadowed it's shortcomings, which no one wanted to talk about (see Gen Horner's observations in Part 6 of this Debunking CAS Myths Series ) . Between Desert Storm and Congressional dabbling in matters they did not understand, the A-10 got a reprieve. The reprieve has lasted this long because we have not had to fight a war like Desert Storm again (Yes, there were significant differences between then and Operations Allied Force, Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom).

Once again, there will be the ubiquitous ‘some’ who will complain that the AF is abandoning the needs of the Army by abandoning the Close Air Support (CAS) mission. In reality, the complaint will/would be over little more than a ‘hardware’ and ‘tactics’ change in the mission, NOT a retreat from the mission itself. Let us note here, that such complaints ignore the fact that the current plan already has the F-35 replacing the A-10 in the CAS role. If the A-10 fleet is retired due to sequestration, then sequestration is only causing a change in schedule for something that was going to happen anyway and NOT changing an inevitable end-state (not that changes themselves are good things, they usually cause chaos and added costs themselves).

Here We Go Again

With this emerging probability that the A-10s will finally be retired, we can expect a repeat of past experience: someone (or rather, many someones) will, in their ignorance, decry such a move as yet another example of the Air Force trying to get rid of the A-10 ‘they never wanted’ in the first place. Never mind that the reason for retiring the A-10 is clearly articulated in the present time: In the future the mythology will be that it was just another exhibit of ‘proof’ that the Air Force has ‘never wanted the A-10’ or never ‘took CAS seriously’. One in a laundry list of other examples. The problem is that laundry list, is a list of myths as well: a compendium of untruths, perversions of the truth, and biased opinions promoting a theme masquerading as the truth.

And I can back up my claims with hard evidence.

Taking Down the Myths, One Myth at a Time

To me, one of the most annoying myths about the Air Force and the A-10 is the one that asserts that when the AH-56 Cheyenne program was cancelled, the Air Force “tried to back out of the A-10 commitment” but it was “made” to keep it by some greater outside force, See "Close Air Support: Why all the Fuss?"  (Garrett, P.10) .

 I’ve picked the ‘Garrett’ (Thomas W. Garrett) reference to use as a starting point for a few reasons. First, when he stays away from the politics involved and deals strictly with the whys and wherefores of the logical division of responsibilities and missions between the Army and the Air Force, the paper is quite admirable. (His snarky delivery however, which no doubt raises a chuckle or two in Army quarters, comes across as snide and mean-spirited in its essence when experienced by this Airman.) Second, He reprised his War College paper in the Army War College quarterly Parameters under a different title (Close Air Support: Which Way Do We Go) . Over a dozen papers written later directly cite these two Garrett papers, and even more papers spring from these.
Third, the paper was written shortly before Desert Storm when Garrett was a Lt. Colonel. Later in Desert Storm “he commanded, trained and led the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) Aviation Brigade, the largest Army Aviation rotary wing task force in conventional land warfare history”. Garrett also served in Vietnam, retired as a Major General, and has been inducted into the Army Aviation Hall of Fame, so he has sufficient ‘street cred’ to be a reliable reference on this topic.

Myth: The Air Force Tried to Kill the A-10 After the AH-56 Cheyenne Program was Cancelled.

When you go to the bibliography to find the source of the claim as quoted in Garrett above, you are taken to a reference:

Horton and David Halperin, "The Key West Key," Foreign Relations. Winter 1983-1981, pp. 117.

This source took me longer to find than I thought it would, because the citation is wrong (It should read “Foreign Policy” ). I initially thought it was some State Department trade publication, but instead find it was in a magazine we’ve all probably seen many time at Barnes & Noble. A magazine that describes itself thusly:

“Since its founding in 1922, Foreign Affairs has been the leading forum for serious discussion of American foreign policy and global affairs. It is now a multiplatform media organization with a print magazine, a website, a mobile site, various apps and social media feeds, an event business, and more. Foreign Affairs is published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a non-profit and nonpartisan membership organization dedicated to improving the understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international affairs through the free exchange of ideas.”

References to the web, mobile, apps and social media aside, I suspect their self-perception hasn’t changed much since the Halperin & Halperin ‘article’. Put succinctly: Foreign Policy is a magazine for self-identified ‘movers and shakers’. In the referenced article we find multiple complaints and examples of “interservice rivalry” causing ‘problems’. Close Air Support was but one example:

The Army next tried to build the Cheyenne, a large antitank helicopter priced at $8 million. This time the Air Force feared that the Army, with its new weapon, might be able to acquire officially the close-support function. While the Air Force still had no interest in providing close support, it wanted to protect its bureaucratic territory. Thus it developed the Fairchild A-10, which Easterbrook notes, "many aircraft observers believe is one of the best planes ever built." And priced at $3 million, the A-10 could do a far better job than the Cheyenne at less than one-half the cost. 

The Cheyenne was canceled. But having headed off the Army, the Air Force saw no further use for the A-10 and attempted to cut the plane from its budget. Congress has insisted that the A-10s be built. But Air Force reluctance has sent the Army back to the drawing board, once again in the no-win realm of the helicopter.

There’s A LOT wrong with the above besides the claim the Air Force tried to ‘back out’ of the A-10, such as tying what would become development of the AH-64 Apache to some sort of Air Force ‘reluctance’ ‘Halperin x 2’ were apparently unaware the Army began pursuing what would become the AH-64 the day after the Cheyenne was cancelled. The Air Force was fast in those days, but it wasn’t that fast. The Army simply went back to the drawing board trying to replace perhaps the longest-lived interim system ever: the AH-1 Huey Cobra. But we’ll let the niggling things slide and keep our focus on the task at hand.

First, who were the authors of this ‘article’ and who was this ‘Easterbrook’ they were citing?

The Halperins

Around that time including before and after, Morton Halperin was the Director of the Center for National Security Studies, on the board of the ALCU, and a Brookings Institute ‘scholar’. He was nominated to be THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR DEMOCRACY AND PEACEKEEPING under Les Aspin (Spit!). When nominated in 1993, he was a very well known ‘quantity’. It did not go well.

The other ‘Halperin’ was his son David, then a senior at Yale, and he has not fallen very far from the tree. By the way, Nowadays ole’ Morton is running George Soros’ Open Society Institute. So one might file this data away for future consideration: Perhaps this Father-Son duo were/are not that keen on defense in the first place?

 

We Keep Pulling the Thread: What is The Halperins’ ‘Source’

The ‘Easterbrook’ above was one Gregg Easterbrook writing for the Washington Monthly. The current WM website describes the publication thusly:

The Washington Monthly was founded in 1969 on the notion that a handful of plucky young writers and editors, armed with an honest desire to make government work and a willingness to ask uncomfortable questions, could tell the story of what really matters in Washington better than a roomful of Beltway insiders at a Georgetown dinner party. In our cluttered little downtown DC office, we’re still doing what we have done for over forty years, and what fewer and fewer publications do today: telling fascinating, deeply reported stories about the ideas and characters that animate America’s government.

When you get right down to it, the Washington Monthly is a political ‘alternative’ news outlet. It has been largely run, and overrun, by people like James Fallows whose merits I briefly noted in a sidebar here. So file that away for future consideration as well.

Easterbrook’s ‘article’ was called “All Aboard Air Oblivion” in which he rambles through a no-holds-barred screed: 

• Decrying the wastefulness of hugely-vulnerable helicopters, 
• Asserting the Air Force with a penchant for technology was requiring an expensive unnecessary “smart bomb” called the AGM-65 be carried on top of the internal 30mm gun.
• Laughably describing the Maverick as having only a “15%” probability of kill per “pass” and being impossible to operate effectively in combat.
• Making baseless claims that the Air Force Chief of Staff only pursued the A-10 because of the Army's Cheyenne.
• Citing James Fallows’ writings criticizing the TOW missile, and mocking the idea that the next missile in the works, the Hellfire in combination with the “Son of Cheyenne” (AH-64 Apache) will be any better.

 Among many, many other transgressions against logic and truth. 

And buried inside Easterbrook’s nonsensical diatribe is this little gem of our real interest:

With the Army challenge deflected, anti-close-support generals once again ascended within the Air Force. They wanted to stop wasting money on an Army-oriented project and reserve all Air Force funds for superplanes like the F-15 and B-1. So each year, the Air Force tried to cut the A-10 from its budget. Fortunately, each year politicians put the funds back in. (This year, for, example, the Air Force cut 60 A-10s, but Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger reinstated them.) Next, the Air force shunted 72 of the first 400 A-10s straight to the National Guard, the only front-line aircraft ever assigned directly to the Air National Guard

ALL the above is patently, and demonstrably untrue. All of it.
Beside there being no evidence of ‘anti-close-support’ generals in the Air Force (names?), the ‘tried to cut the A-10 from its budget’ isn’t supported by the history either. I know from a personal friend that briefed the AF budget to Members of Congress (Circa 78-79) that there was constant pressure to increase the original objective of 600 planes to something greater. The numbers WERE increased, because they had to be: just to get the budget past a Committee Chairman or two. Three years after this article was published, at the end of production there were 715 A-10s. So yeah, after the Air Force got all they originally wanted, MAYBE then they stopped asking for more. So what?

Here’s another little factor to consider. Since we don’t know the number from which Easterbrook is subtracting that 60 A-10 figure, perhaps at least some of the 60 aircraft that the Easterbrook alleges the Air Force tried to have taken out (in 1980-81) was related to the 1979 GAO report that ‘came down’ on the Air Force for buying too many total A-10s? From the GAO Report:

… We believe that our current work on reducing Defense aircraft time in maintenance further demonstrates the necessity to reevaluate aircraft needs for depot maintenance float. We focused on the potential procurement of 61 A-10 aircraft as substitutes for aircraft undergoing depot maintenance--currently called backup aircraft inventory for maintenance. Specifically, we found that: 

--Even though the A-10 is being procured under a concept designed to eliminate the need for depot overhaul, the Air Force is still using a 10-percent factor to justify the purchase of 61 A-10 aircraft for maintenance float purposes.
--While Air Force criteria also allows substitutes for aircraft undergoing modifications, the full extent of the modification program for the A-10 is not known.
--In developing the lo-percent maintenance float factor Defense has not systematically determined how quickly aircraft In the depot could be "buttoned up" and returned to their units under a wartime compressed work schedule and the influence of this rapid return on the requirements for maintenance float aircraft. 

The A-10, as well as other newer weapon systems, are being procured under a concept designed to eliminate the need for depot overhaul. New design features and reliability-centered maintenance concepts have improved maintainability and reliability so that work which used to be performed in depot facilities can now be performed in the field and at intermediate facilities. In spite of this change, we find that the planned procurement for the 61 A-10 maintenance float aircraft is still being justified using a 10-percent factor. Historical experience has been used in the past to justify the procurement of float aircraft as substitutes for those aircraft undergoing periodic overhaul. Since the A-10 is not scheduled to undergo periodic overhaul, the justification for 61 A-10s is questionable…


Funny how we never hear about this little development, eh? Congress' "watchdog" complains about too many A-10s one year, and a drive-by journalist hammers you the next. Such is life.

 

Finally, everyone and anyone who has ever played the 'budget game' knows that if someone up the chain is going to support buying system X, whether you want it or not, you can let that someone spend political capital getting more of system X, so you can spend it on system Y. Congress makes the rules, everyone else just plays the game. If the Air Force ever chose to reduce numbers of the A-10 to be bought in an annual budget, it was part of a larger strategy.

As to the characterization the Air Force “shunted” A-10’s to reserve units, and doing so was 'without precedent', the A-10 WAS the first ‘front-line’ system to go directly to reserve units, but hardly the ‘last’. The year after this article was printed, it was announced that the first F-16s would be going to reserve units beginning in 1984. I presume it would be Easterbrook’s argument that the F-16 was ‘shunted’ as well? My damning counterargument to any accusations that anybody in the Air Force was ‘shunting’ anything would be to point to a little thing we (the Air Force) had going on with a full head of steam at the time: Making Total Force a viable force.

So we’ve now pulled this thread, whereby it is claimed the Air Force “tried to back out of the A-10 commitment” all the way to it's frazzled, unattributed end. We've found NO substance to the claim at all, only B.S. 'hearsay'

 

Do I Have Suspicions? Feh. Its 'The Usual Suspects'

I don’t think you have to be much of a detective to read between the lines for Easterbrook’s sources. Aside from referencing Fallows, I see some of the same verbiage that’s been thrown around by Pierre Sprey and Winslow Wheeler for years. I also don’t find it much of a coincidence that this article found it’s way into a particular compendium of lunacy, a copy of which I own. A little book of perversions produced by the predecessor to Project on Government Oversight (POGO) in 1983; the much more verbose “Fund for Constitutional Government”, under their so-called “Project on Military Procurement”.

The title? “More Bucks: Less Bang: How the Pentagon Buys Ineffective Weapons” (If you buy a copy for goodness sake buy a used copy will you?). In this little (in more ways than one) book many weapon systems come under fire. I would say there were only 3 ‘reports’ (out of 30+) that I would call 'materially accurate'. One of those was written post facto: about the tribulations of the by-then long-fielded M-16 so it doesn't count as 'prophetic'.
The rest? Among all the other tall tales, written by a who's who of muckrakers, activists, and 'reformers', we learn that the Trident submarine and Aegis Cruisers won’t work, the Stealth Bomber is a ‘joke’, Low Probability of Intercept Radar is a ‘homing beacon’, the Abrams and Bradley are failures, and the Maverick, Pershing and Tomahawk missiles will be useless.

I marvel at the 'expertise' on display within.(/sarc)

I suspect Easterbrook was spoon-fed his article’s scary parts from the so called ‘reformer’ camp. His output then later gets rolled into the Reformer Noise Machine which then echoes down the years.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. That is how these myths are born.

I further suspect the next thread I pull will lead me right to the same noisemakers as I found this time.

The Next Myth? (Part 8)

'The Air Force only started/proceeded with the A-X/A-10 because they 'had to' due to external pressure.

Note: I'm having formatting (font and case mostly, with some copy/paste gaps) issues with Blogger on this post for some reasons. Please bear with me as I find problems and make adjustments.

    

F-35 Cost Estimates Drop; AvWeek Makes Motorboat Sounds

But...But...But...But...

Tonight, I was curious as to how Aviation Week's ARES Blog would cover the news that F-35 Sustainment cost estimates were being lowered dramatically, and how the CAPE estimates to-date apparently involved some wildly unrealistic Ground Rules and Assumptions (GR&As). I should have let that 'itch' pass.

I suspect AvWeek must have taken exception to getting scooped by 'Slow Tony' Capaccio on a big aviation story, the kind that perhaps they should have found first. I 'suspect' so because when I dropped in to see what they had written, all they had was Sean Meade's '8/22 Frago' link to someplace with the rather dismissive title:  Analysis: Lower F-35 Operating Costs Should Be Taken with A Pinch of Salt.

I clicked on the link and...gasp! It was the oh so cogent (/sarc) Giovanni de Briganti I've taken to task before. I (or anyone else for that matter) could go to his faux aero-news website almost any day to find some low-hanging fruit to debunk, so I'm usually not even tempted to bother....unless a presumably 'authoritative' website points to it, and even then I've resisted because of the whole "fish/barrel" thing. As usual, there's A LOT wrong with de Brigante's nonsense, but because it's late, and it's not worth too much of my time to beat down on this kind of stupidity, I'll just note the most egregious nonsense I found in de Brigante's so-called  'analysis' has the added benefit of also being the easiest one to explain to John Q. Public. I quote (bold emphasis mine):

The Marine Corps has also radically changed its F-35 operations to claim lower costs. Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle, deputy Marine Corps commandant for aviation, told Reuters that the Marines would fly their F-35Bs “in STOVL mode just 10 percent of the time, far less often than the 80 percent rate factored into the initial estimates.” ... 

...If STOVL is needed only 10% of the time, then it is, at best, a secondary capability, and is no longer enough to justify the F-35B variant’s exorbitant cost, both in terms of acquisition ($153 million, without engine, in LRIP Lot 5) and of operations ($41,000 per flight hour).   

Furthermore, if STOVL operations are limited to 10% of flight activities, it is hard to see how Marine pilots will ever gain enough experience to fly STOVL missions from small, unprepared landing zones on the beachhead – the main, if not only, reason the Marine Corps says the F-35B is indispensable.

Wow. Just. Wow. Let us note that Lt. Gen. Schmidle said they would be flying their F-35Bs (get ready to look for the key word here) “in STOVL MODE just 10 percent of the time".

STOVL "Modes" are for Doing 2 Things   

And you only want to be in a  "STOVL Mode" when you are doing those two things. Can you guess what they are Mr. de Brigante? No?



How about 'take off'.....


100th Short Takeoff
Source: LM Aero Code One Magazine

and 'land'?

BF-4's First Vertical Landing
Source: LM Aero Code One Magazine

Want to guess about what percentage of a normal sortie is spent taking off and landing? Way less than 10%. Which tells me the Marines will be practicing those STOVL takeoffs and landings quite a bit more than de Brigante's  so-called 'analysis' was able to identify. Pffft. Not much of an analysis.

de Brigante's 'logic' above is akin to telling you that your car doesn't need brakes 90% of the time, so that must mean you don't need brakes.

Seriously AvWeek?

You don't even cover the cost estimate reduction news, but you point to a juvenile attempt to diminish positive F-35 Program news.

I remember when Aviation Week was run by grownups for the aerospace community. Now?
Welcome to...

Frago Rock: Like another enterprise with a lot of silly nonsense, but with very little singing. 

   ~Sigh~