US
Most Expensive Weapon System Ever Needs An Extra Half Billion
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The F-35 program may need as much as $500 million extra to complete the current phase of development, Bloomberg News reports.
The F-35 program office requested additional money on top of the $55 billion already spent on the jet during a closed-door meeting of the Defense Acquisition Board, unnamed officials told Bloomberg.
Frank Kendall, undersecretary for defense acquisition at the Department of Defense, said he “disappointed to hear that additional funds would be needed,” and told Bloomberg that “we are working to minimize the size of the shortfall and to deliver options to address it.”
The Pentagon’s weapons tester Michael Gilmore recommended “very strongly that the [F-35] program be restructured now and provided the additional resources it clearly requires to deliver its long-planned and sorely needed full” capability in an Oct. 14 memo. (RELATED: Pentagon Tester Says F-35 ‘Not On A Path Toward Success’)
The program needs more funding, Gilmore said, to “complete all the testing” required “to rectify a substantial number of existing critical deficiencies as well as the new deficiencies that will inevitably be discovered.”
The military plans to order 2,443 of Lockheed Martin Corp’s F-35s for the U.S. military, which will cost around $379 billion total. The program has been delayed several times over the course of development.
The F-35 achieved Initial Operational Capability, a critical step in the development process, Aug. 2. The fighter “reached the point of initial combat capability, so that’s what we said we were going to have by now and we’ve got it,” Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James told reporters at a Singapore news conference. “But ‘initial ’means initial and over the next several years it’s going to continue to develop, and the word ‘develop’ is an important word too.”
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