F- 35 Jet Update

More Spending, Fewer F-35s

Published: May 23, 2011

Pentagon spending must come down to reduce the deficit. But some military contractors and their Congressional enablers on the House Armed Services Committee are pushing as hard as they can in the wrong direction.

In February, Congress bowed to the Pentagon’s pleas and terminated work on an unneeded alternative engine for the overbudget F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, at an estimated savings of $2 billion to $3 billion. Then the engine’s prime contractors, General Electric and Rolls-Royce, offered to pay next year’s development costs, hoping the Pentagon would then reconsider and buy their engine. By a huge bipartisan majority, the committee fell for it.

The committee’s chairman, Representative Howard McKeon, is an avowed foe of Pentagon cost-cutting. But Republicans who equate unaffordable spending with strong defense are only part of the problem. Robert Andrews, a Democrat, added language to next year’s military budget that would require the Pentagon to give the companies access to the information and equipment they need to keep testing the second engine. And making its goal clear, the committee voted to reopen the competition to the rejected engine in the likely event of rising costs for the Pratt & Whitney version the Pentagon prefers.

Competition can cut costs. But this competition has already been won by the Pratt & Whitney engine. Spending additional billions on continued development of the second version makes no sense. House members of both parties who favor a strong defense and lower deficits must strip out the alternate engine provisions when the authorization bill comes to the floor this week.

At the same time, we have to thank G.E. and Rolls-Royce for coming up with a great idea, which we hope Congress will embrace for future acquisitions: Contractors should pay a larger share of development costs. Too often companies win contracts with unrealistically low estimates, leading to huge cost overruns during development. And once the Pentagon has paid these development costs, it is reluctant to cancel systems it might never have bought had the real costs been known.

That has been the unhappy story of the F-35, whose initial selling point was its relatively cheap cost of $62 million per plane (in today’s dollars). Those costs have nearly doubled over the past decade. The nearly 2,500 F-35s the Pentagon plans to buy over the next two decades are now projected to cost around $382 billion.

Eliminating the alternate engine is part of the Pentagon’s strategy for containing the F-35’s soaring costs. G.E., Rolls-Royce and their Congressional allies should not be allowed to thwart that. The Pentagon needs to get this enormous program back under control