Lockheed Martin's F-35 joint strike fighter has been called a quarterback in the sky
and the most capable tactical jet in history. But, for all its stealth super computing power the one
label the F-35 just can't seem to get away from in recent months is failure. Now projected to exceed
1.6 trillion dollars over the program's lifetime a single F-35 costs the United States about
$36,000 for every hour it's in the sky. That's about $14,000 more per hour than the F-16 it was
intended to replace. The joint strike fighter was meant to serve as a cost-effective solution
to a number of problems a single fighter that could meet the needs of three branches
of the U.S. military as well as foreign allies. Fielding one broadly capable fighter would mean
streamlining logistics, reducing training costs, slashing development time, and increasing the
interoperability between forces. Or, at least that was the pitch the reality that Lockheed Martin and
the Pentagon soon came to realize was that asking for the impossible is always cost effective,
it's delivering it that can be pretty pricey. In recent months a slew of bad press for the F-35 has
once again made calling it a failure culturally in vogue from largely fair criticisms of the
aircraft's financial woes to newly announced tech issues causing strategic pauses and development
and even an apparent lack of confidence in the aircraft's affordability coming out of the Air
Force's top brass the joint strike fighter program hasn't faced such an uphill battle since the
Pentagon first decided it wanted a single platform that could hover like a Harrier go super sonic
like an eagle sneak past defenses like a nighthawk and land on carriers like a super hornet the
first studies that would lead to the joint strike fighter or jsf program as we know it began in 1993
with America shopping for a short takeoff vertical landing fighter that could operate in the modern
era soon the Pentagon took notice of other fighter programs and development and posited
a theory if America could find one airplane that could replace a whole host of aging platforms
it would shrink acquisition costs streamline maintenance and operational training remove many
of the logistical headaches tied to operating a large number of different aircraft in theater
and make everyone's day just that much easier and a bit less expensive in hindsight those
goals weren't just naive they really may have been the program's first major problem
Lockheed Martin the same firm responsible for the world's first operational stealth
aircraft the F-117 and the world's first operational stealth fighter in the F-22 raptor
would ultimately beat out Boeing for the joint strike fighter contract thanks to their track
record in the field of stealth and impressive technology demonstrators today meeting the broad
requirements of three American military branches and at least two foreign partners has been one of
the F-35s biggest selling points for some time but back in the 90s it was akin to Kennedy's
announcement that America would put a man on the moon within the next decade it was a good idea on
paper but nobody really knew how to actually make it happen Tom Burbidge Lockheed's general manager
for the program between 2000 and 2013 said and I quote if you were to go back to the year 2000 and
somebody said I can build an airplane that is stealthy and has vertical takeoff and landing
capabilities and can go supersonic most people in the industry would have said that's impossible
the technology to bring all of that together into a single platform was beyond the reach
of the industry at that time but as we've seen time and time again with these sorts of programs
enough money has a way of making the impossible start to look improbable and then eventually
mundane the saturn v that kept Kennedy's promise about the moon was the most complex and powerful
machine ever devised by man and by Apollo 13 just NASA's third mission to the moon the
American people already thought the rocket's trip through space was too boring to watch
at least until everything went wrong likewise building a supersonic jet fighter that can
hover over amphibious assault ships sounded pretty crazy that is right until the F-35 made it mundane
and that's why it's important to reiterate here that making the impossible seem normal costs a ton
of money in order to design a single aircraft that could replace at least five planes across multiple
military forces Lockheed Martin chose to devise three iterations of their new fighter the F-35a
would be the closest to what might be considered a traditional multi-role fighter intended to take
off and land on well-manicured airstrips found on military installations the world over the second
dubbed the F-35b would incorporate a directional jet nozzle and hidden fan to provide the aircraft
with enough lift to hover and land vertically for use aboard Marine Corps amphibious assault ships
or on austere hastily cleared airstrips finally a carrier-capable variant dubbed the F-35c would
boast the greater wingspan necessary for lower speed carrier landings along with a reinforced
fuselage that could withstand the incredible forces tied to serving aboard America's flattops
the plan was to leave as much about all three iterations as identical as possible
so parts production training and maintenance could all be similar enough regardless of the operating
theater but the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry and the F-35 was no exception
Todd Harrison an aerospace expert with the center for strategic and international
studies said and I quote it turns out when you combine the requirements of the three services
what you end up with is the F-35 which is an aircraft that is in many ways sub-optimal for what
each of the services really want Lockheed Martin's team of designers began with the simplest version
the landing strip friendly F-35a once they were happy with the design they moved on to the F-35b
which needed to house its internal fan right in the middle of the aircraft's fuselage
as soon as they began work on the b it became clear that just copying and pasting the F-35a's
design wasn't gonna cut it in fact they were so far off the mark that it would take an
additional 18 months and 6.2 billion dollars just to figure out how to make the F-35b work
now this was the first but certainly not the last time a problem like this would derail progress
on the F-35 to some extent these failures can largely be attributed to poor planning but it's
also important to remember that the F-35 program was aiming to do things no other fighter program
had ever done before discovery and efficiency rarely walk hand in hand and to make matters
worse Lockheed Martin had no real incentive to make the joint strike fighter work on a budget
and that brings us to the two dirtiest words in modern military aviation concurrent development
you see the u.s knew that what they were asking Lockheed Martin to deliver wouldn't be easy
stealth aircraft programs from the F-117 to today's B-21 raider have all faced a struggled
balance between price tag and capability and with so many eggs in the F-35 basket the stakes quickly
ballooned with highly capable 4th generation fighters like Russia's SU-35 and china's J-10
already flying and both nations developing their own stealth fighters by the 2000's
America was in a tough spot the dogfighting dynamo F-22 was cancelled in 2011 after just
186 jets were built making the F-35 the nation's only fighter program on the books
this new jet would need to be able to out-compete everything in the sky today and for decades to
come and it had to start doing it right away to make this possible the Pentagon believed the best
approach would be concurrent development or just concurrency depending on the book you're reading
the premise behind concurrency is simple you begin production of this new aircraft once the design is
settled and then you go back and make changes as testing highlights any issues that may need to be
addressed on paper it looked like a way to begin fielding this new highly capable fighter training
pilots and maintainers developing tactics and settling it into service as it matured in reality
however it meant building F-35s before they'd been fully tested and then spending billions to go back
and fix them after testing revealed problems and before long issue after issue started bubbling
to the surface and they were serious enough that the Air Force began to consider just abandoning
the first 108 F-35as they'd received along with the 21.4 billion dollars they'd spent on them
just because fixing them was prohibitively expensive by the end of 2020 Lockheed Martin again
postponed full rate production with a long list of issues that were still yet to be resolved
and amid all of this spending rose yet another financial hurdle the immense cost of operating
the F-35 while the Air Force's new non-stealth F-15ex might cost around $28,000 an hour to fly
the F-35 has cost at least $44,000 per hour for much of its life thus far and each F-35
airframe is only rated to fly for less than a third of the total hours of an F-15EX
in other words the F-35 has been egregiously expensive to develop and promises to stay
egregiously expensive to operate not that long ago general cq brown the secretary of the air force
even said that they would consider adding another cheaper fighter into the mix despite planning to
order more than 2,000 F-35s over its lifetime the fact of the matter is the F-35 is just too
expensive to use for some jobs and that's exactly what General Brown said I'll quote them here
I want to moderate how much we're using those aircraft you don't drive your Ferrari to work
every day you only drive it on Sundays this is our high end fighter we want to make sure we don't use
it all for the low end fight we don't want to burn up capability now and wish we had it later
but here's the twist you see it's easy to spiral down the acquisition rabbit hole until you start
shaking your fist at the sky and any F-35s that may be in it and if you view the world
through the lens of dollars and cents it makes sense to lump the F-35 in with flying aircraft
carriers and pigeon-guided missiles as yet another mistake on uncle sam's bar tab but these vantage
points are missing one incredibly important bit of context the opinion of the warfighters who
actually fly these things in terms of responsible spending you'll really only see the f-35 program
defended by the air force and Lockheed Martin's marketing team but in terms of what matters in the
fight namely combat capability you don't have to look far to find people singing the F-35s praises
but don't take my word for it i've never flown one of these things so we'll close with a quote
from my buddy F-35 pilot Hazard Lee quote if you separate the noise and talk to current fighter
pilots who've flown with or against the F-35 in the last few years they'll tell you the impact
and value the jet has on the battlefield this isn't theoretical or something that may happen
in a few years the transition has already occurred the F-35 along with the F-22 is now the premier
fighter aircraft in the world and with that bit of trademark fighter pilot confidence ends yet
another edition of Sandboxx News I'm Alex Hollings make sure you swing by Sandboxx News today and
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