You had reports from the Australian press...
You had reports from the Canadian press...
All singing the same tune. No one knows the actual costs for an F-35. Again. From outside appearances it seemed like a bad week.
It was manufactured and contrived bull shit. But Loren Thompson says it best (read the whole thing but some of the good bits are below).
Not the actual costs, that is -- those haven't risen much over the last decade. But the Pentagon's estimates have gone through the ceiling, mainly because it keeps expanding the range of items included in calculations. No kidding: 70-80 percent of all the increases in the cost to keep the F-35 flying are a consequence of changes in the way the Pentagon tracks and manages the program. This is one program where the customer has become the biggest threat to success. Let's take a look at how it has undercut support for the fighter.So just like all the other false debates that we've had, we have a false cost debate. I'd be amazed if I hadn't seen all this before.
First of all, estimators decided to increase many of the quantitative parameters on future operations. Instead of the 33 bases where the original 2002 sustainment estimate said the planes would operate, officials decided 49 was the right number. Instead of a 30-year lifespan, they decided it should be 50 years (without any increase in flight hours, making the whole program intrinsically less efficient). Instead of 253 major items of support equipment, they decided 525 would be needed. They also doubled the number of squadron logistics kits and quadrupled the number of initial training sites. Amazingly enough, estimated sustainment costs went up.
Another thing they decided to do was express long-term sustainment costs in "then-year" dollars, meaning dollars that include inflation. The only problem with that is no one has the foggiest idea what inflation rates are likely to be between now and 2065, the span of time covered by the estimates. So they made them up. Rather than reporting the cost of sustainment in today's dollars -- which would be about $500 billion over 50 years -- they quoted an utterly unprovable price-tag of $1.069 trillion. Needless to say, the latter number increased congressional concerns about affordability.
But the bean-counters didn't stop there. They neglected to mention to Congress in reporting F-35 sustainment costs that the existing fleet of tactical aircraft already costs about 20 percent more to sustain each year than they estimate the F-35 will ($12 billion versus $10.6 billion annually). They also failed to mention how the cost of sustaining the current tactical fleet will escalate using the same counting rules applied to F-35 as cold-war planes grow increasingly decrepit. If that information had been reported, it would have been apparent that the yearly cost of keeping all those ancient fighters flying will be nearly twice the estimated cost of F-35 sustainment by 2020. Follow that same trend-line out 50 years, and the legacy fleet costs four trillion dollars to keep flying, versus barely a quarter of that for F-35.
Now its just sad.
When the postmortem is done on the F-35 debate I predict that military reporters will be taken to task. Not because they falsified data. I don't believe that anyone would knowingly print lies. But I would bet body parts that I highly value that many of their sources would!
