Straight Shooter

“If I start becoming a zealot or an advocate for this program then guess what? I lose my credibility. And no-one will listen to me. So what you’re going to hear today is the good, the bad, and the ugly. I will try and answer your questions as squarely as I can. And if there’s a reason why I can’t I’ll either get back to you or I’ll tell you that right up front. ” And up front he was, detailing how the JSF program has drawn detractors – the most recent of which is arguably ABC TV’s Four Corners program which aired a firmly anti-F-35 story just days before Bogdan’s Australian visit – due to its “tragic history”.

That tragic history includes an initial two-year delay and US$6 billion budget blowout to get the STOVL F-35B variant’s weight under control, and then the 2010 breach of the Nunn- McCurdy tripwire where if a program’s cost increases 50 per cent more than the baseline cost Congress can cancel a program unless the US Department of Defense can demonstrate why continuing with the program is in the national interest.

That saw the F-35 program, under Admiral Dave Venlet, “rebaselined” with new development timetable and cost schedules implemented, to the tune of an extra US$6. 5 billion in development costs and three years to the development timetable. In all, the F-35 development bill has increased by US$13 billion and the development program extended around five years in total.

“And so you can clearly see how and why the history of the program has led people to be both cynical, to criticise the program and to not, necessarily, want to believe anything positive coming out of the program. ” But, said Bodgan, since the rebaselining in 2010/2011: “This is a different program. It is a different program and it is getting better. ” Consequently, “Since that plan has been in place – since 2011 – we have fundamentally met every single milestone and this program is fundamentally stable and on track to that new plan. ” Certainly, that view has been largely borne out by the latest report on the F-35 by the US General Accountability Office (GAO).

“Overall, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is now moving in the right direction after a long, expensive and arduous learning process,” the GAO, which was ordered to provide annual updates on the program’s progress in 2010, found.

According to this year’s report, released in the US on March 11, the F-35 met seven of 10 ‘management objectives’ including key goals on cost efficiency and training.

Says Bogdan, a key reason why the program is now progressing more smoothly is that the US Department of Defense and the JPO has taken firmer control of the project.

“First and foremost, and my Lockheed Martin and my Pratt & Whitney buddies are going to cringe when I say this, but they’ve heard me say it before. . . I’m not so sure that up until 2010/2011 we – the Department – was really in charge of this program,” Bogdan remarked.

“I’m not going to armchair quarterback everything that happened back then but I can tell you today there is no doubt in my mind that I am in charge of this program and Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney know that.

“And that’s perfectly fine with me because the result of that is, when things go off the rails, and I don’t think they will, then I’m the one who needs to be held accountable for this now. ” One result of that regained control is management reserve funding: “. . . money that I hold back for when things go wrong. In the past Lockheed Martin had some of that money in their coffers and I had some of that money in my coffers. I can tell you, in general, when Lockheed Martin used the money from their coffers it was not necessarily with my approval, or our government’s approval or the program office’s approval. And they got to choose where they used it. That has changed. I control all the money on this program now and the JPO does. And with the senior leadership of the Department and our partners we decide where we want to apply the money to make this program better. ” From a technical perspective Bogdan cited more robust processes for systems engineering and software development yielding more robust results.

This is a different program and it’s getting better. BOGDAN

“The system’s engineering process moving forward from 2011 has been invigorated and is a whole lot more rigorous than it ever used to be. What do I mean by that? It used be that when we went through a design review – we call them critical design reviews/ preliminary design reviews – on the program, it would be Lockheed Martin or Pratt presenting information to the JPO.

“It’s not the way we run the program today. Today, when I get to a point where we have a design review – critical design review, preliminary design review, a technical review of some sort – I enlist the expertise of the US Navy and the US Air Force. I take senior executives from NAVAIR and Pax River and senior executives from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; senior civilians … with great technical expertise; their whole lives they’ve been doing this and they sit as the co-chairs of those design reviews. It’s those folks who have to give the thumbs-up and the thumbs-down now, not me. ” Continues Bogdan, a former B-2 test pilot and head of the USAF’s KC-46 tanker program: “What has that really meant for us? Well I can tell you one thing it’s meant. All the technical problems you hear about the program now … the helmet, the hook for the Navy’s version of the airplane, software development, fuel bump on the airplane, those kinds of issues, over the last two years we’ve put them through that rigorous systems engineering process and we have solutions in place.

“I do not lose sleep at night worrying about the technical issues on this program. Not all those fixes are going to be done right away… But for those known problems we have solutions. We think those solutions are viable and I think over time, as we integrate those solutions into the airplane, you will see an improvement and, basically, us starting to reap the promise of the capability of this airplane. ” As for software, Bogdan concedes F-35 software development is running five months late, “The five months behind on the software is five months of delay that we inherited before 2011 because Lockheed Martin and we were doing software development in what I would call not such a disciplined way. So that five months of delay going into what we call our Block 2 software was a result of the mess that we made on we got to Block 2.

”Since 2011 – if you include that carry over of delay – we have not lost a month. We have not lost a week of delay to software development. We’ve made every milestone we intended to meet thus far over the last two years in software development.

“The latest was that on January 31 we delivered our first increment of 2B, which is our initial war-fighting capability software to the flight test community on time with all the capability you’d expect it to have. It’s the first time in this programme that’s ever happened.

“So there are small signs that the process we are using now to develop software and to test in the lab and to get to the testers, is starting to pay some dividends. I can’t do anything else but tell you wait and watch, and see if this plays out. I’m not going to convince anybody otherwise until you see the results, but I can simply tell you that I am cautiously optimistic that some of the changes, such as what we just talked about, are improving things. ” The F-35’s other great issue is concurrency – building an aircraft that is still in development. “While I’m designing the airplane I’m flight-testing it. And I’m only a third the way through the flight-test program, about 35-38 per cent done. While I’m flight-testing and designing, I’m producing airplanes at a rate of about 30 per year. While I’m producing airplanes at about 30 per year, I’m standing up operational units. In the next four years we’ll go from four operating sites to 17. And, at the same time that I’m fielding operational units, today at Yuma. . . we’re flying airplanes at Eglin and at Yuma in both the training and an operational environment … and I have to sustain those airplanes: supply, maintenance, repairables, those of kind of things. So when you look at the breadth of the program you see from the very beginning of design all the way to operational flying and operational training, we’re doing all that at once, right now. Boy, is that concurrency. ”

Since 2011 we have not lost a month. We have not lost a week to software development.

Consequently, concurrency is “part of the reason why progress on this program is so slow sometimes”. Says Bogdan: “It was decided a long time ago that we were going to live with this level of concurrency. It creates complexity. It drives cost into the program.

“So concurrency is a fact of life on the program and it costs us money. What have we been doing to fix that? Well, the first thing we did was we started accelerating the durability testing on this program knowing that the quicker I find problems, the quicker I can get them fixed and the less airplanes I’ll produce. And, today, if you take a look at the schedule we planned two years ago, we are ahead by months on our durability testing.

“And, by the way, the things we’ve found in durability testing are actually below our estimates for what we thought we were going to find and are right in line with the lower boundary of all the legacy airplanes that we test. So if you look at what we do with F-16, F-15, the F-22, the F-18, and you see how many things we found during durability testing there and you plot those, and you plot what we’ve found on the F-35 so far we’re at the low end. So we’re accelerating that testing and the results have been better than legacy airplanes. That helps drive concurrency cost down.

“The second thing that we’ve done; the time it takes when you find a problem to the time you get into production is really, really critical because if it takes a really long time, you’re cranking our airplanes that don’t have that fix. And retrofitting airplanes is a whole lot more expensive than putting that fix into the production line. So when we started looking at concurrency in 2011, we found that it was taking 18 months for Lockheed Martin to discover a problem on the airplane, whether it was flight-test or durability, and get it back into the production line. It’s way too long. In that 18 months we’re producing at 30 a year, we’re producing 45 airplanes that don’t have that fix in it.

“So here’s what we did. The first thing we did was all those costs I talked about, starting in 2012, we made Lockheed Martin responsible for half those costs on our contracts. So now they have skin in the game. Let me tell you what happens when a contractor gets skin the game. Stuff starts getting better because he’s losing money. And so that 18 months that I was telling about, in the time we starting putting skin in the game for them to today, that 18 months is down to 13 months and it’s on its way down below 12 months.

“And why is 12 months important for me? Because 12 months is my interval for production lots. And if I can get the changes down to within a production lot then I’m not producing lots of airplanes that are wrong, I’m producing only one lot of airplanes that’s wrong. So those are the kinds of things that we’ve done over the last two years that simply don’t get a lot of press. ” What does get a lot of press, and what Bogdan cites as his “number one concern” is affordability and aircraft cost. The unit price for each F-35 is coming down, the General noted. “From the first airplane we produced in LRIP (low rate initial production batch) 1 to the airplanes we’re producing today in LRIP 5 the unit cost of producing an airplane has gone down 50 per cent. So in five-and-a-half years we’ve reduced the cost 50 per cent. ” Under LRIP 5 the F-35’s unit cost is about US$119 million. The first two F-35As for the RAAF (AU-1 and AU-2) are being built under LRIP 6 and so are likely to cost in the order of US$115 million each, while the subsequent 12 F-35As for Australia are likely to cost in the order of US$90 million each in 2018 dollars.

Interestingly, on the question of cost certainty, Lt Gen Bogdan expressed some sympathy with Defence Minister Stephen Smith’s position on evaluating the merits of an additional batch of Super Hornet for the RAAF versus early acquisitions of the F-35.

“He has a very difficult job. He has to weigh many, many factors when he makes decisions. And what he’d like to make his decisions easier are guarantees. He wants no risk when he makes a decision. Neither would I. Neither would anybody. And I can’t give him that. I can only give him my word that I’m going to do everything I can to drive the cost down. And from what I see today, I think that’s where the cost will be. So I have no problem with Minister Smith being sceptical. As we talked about it, he probably has earned the right to be sceptical. Everybody has on this program, quite frankly. So all I can do is show him what I negotiated LRIP 5 for. I will let him know immediately when I close the deal on six and seven. I will give him my best estimates as we move forward. But, if I were in his shoes. . . what I would do? I heard Lockheed Martin yesterday say the $65 million [price] thing. You know what I’d like to do as the program director? I’d like to have a contract right in my hand and say, okay Lockheed Martin, I’m ready to buy a 1,000 of them at that price right now. Give it to me at that price. They won’t do that now will they?” Certainly Bogdan’s comments point to a level of friction between the JPO and Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney. When asked about those relationships, he didn’t hold back.

“I said in the first six weeks I’d been on the program I thought the relationship between the government and Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney was the worst I’d seen. I stand by that statement. Are things getting better? A little bit. Are they getting better at a rate at which I want to see them get better? No, not yet.

“So I’ll make a few more statements about that that you guys will love because they’re great quotes for your papers. What I see Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney doing today is behaving as if they are getting ready to sell me the very last F-35 and the very last engine and are trying to squeeze every nickel out of that last engine and that last airplane. What’s the behaviour I want to see? The behaviour I want to see is that they want to, and intend on, and are knowledgeable that they’re going to send me 3,000 airplanes and 4,000 engines and start behaving that way and take the long view on this program. They’re not doing that yet. They are not there yet. ” Another headache looming large at the time of Bogdan’s Avalon press conference, that has since been realised, was the threat of cuts to the US defence budget under sequestration.

“The real question for me is what kind of sequestration is going to be applied? And then the question underneath that for me is will the Department and will the Congress give me the ability, and the Department the ability, to decide where to take money out of the program? If the answer to that is yes, I can tell you the Department will do a very good job of making sure this programme doesn’t break. Okay. If the Department is given the discretion to decide where to pay its bills – and we will pay some of that bill – they will not break this program. The real fear is if we’re not given that discretion. If we’re not given that. . . if the Department is not given that discretion and I’m not given that discretion and we do some kind of across-the-board cuts where there is money taken out of every element of the program it becomes problematic for me. ” But for all Lt Gen Bogdan’s frustrations on cost, he is, if not a cheerleader, at least an advocate for the F-35’s capabilities.

When asked if the F-35 would be as good as anticipated: “I would tell you that in about 95 per cent of the things that we promised on this airplane, the answer is absolutely yes. There are, without a doubt some things that we’ve had to compromise on. And the one that gets the most headlines for you guys is manoeuvrability. “Can the airplane turn as fast and for as long as your legacy fighters? So I’ll tell you, unequivocally, it can’t. But it can’t by only a very little bit. So if you took an F-35 and you took a clean wing F-18 or a clean wing F-16 and you turned them at their match performance capability, what you would find is the F-35 is probably less than about a half a G lower and maybe a half to a degree per second turn rate less. No doubt that in that little box those airplanes manoeuvrability-wise are better. You say to yourself, my god, why are we paying $100 million an airplane and it can’t even be as good as airplanes we designed 30 years ago and 20 years ago? I have an answer for you. You may not like the answer, but I have an answer for you. None of those airplanes can fly 1. 6 Mach. None of those airplanes can go anywhere near as far as the F-35 despite what people will tell you. I can tell you, compared to your F-18As a clean wing F-35 will go at least 40 per cent further, and further than a Super Hornet by a lot. So we traded-off – hear that word – we traded-off some of that manoeuvrability for speed, payload and range.

“But that’s not the whole story. What you really care about in a modern fighter is survivability. Can the airplane survive? And manoeuvrability is only one small part of that equation… When you take that manoeuvrability and you wrap it with very low observables; a radar that’s the best in the world, electronic attack, electronic warfare capability, and fusion of sensors, you now have an airplane that’s more survivable than any other airplane on the face of the earth. And it will be able to go places and do things that I absolutely guarantee you a fourth generation or a 4. 5 generation cannot do. ” In closing, Bogdan remarked: “Remember, judge us on how we’re moving forward. And, oh by the way, if this gets screwed up, I’m accountable and I’ll get fired. And if I get fired my family will have the biggest party. . . ”