Pentagon’s Favorite Jet Delayed as Costs Rise Yet Again
- By Spencer Ackerman
- November 1, 2010 |
- 5:50 pm |
- Categories: Paper Pushers, Beltway Bandits, Politicians
Add another several billion dollars and years in delays to the military’s most important new jet. Nearly a year after Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired the head of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program for failing to keep costs and performance under control, a new internal Pentagon review finds the $382 billion stealth plane might get pushed back as much as three years, with an added $5 billion price tag.
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The delay is due to a host of problems central to the aircraft, including “software, engineering and flight difficulties,” according to Bloomberg. Fixing them will require jacking program costs up an estimated $5 billion. Worse, Venlet’s review is supposed to find that the Joint Strike Fighter will be “as much as 1 1/2 times more expensive to maintain” as the F-16, the F/A-18, the A-10 and the AV-8B — the planes the Joint Strike Fighter is supposed to replace.
Phi Beta Iota: The literature on complexity & catastrophe is quite clear–one cannot micro-manage complexity, and the Pentagon keeps trying to do precisely that: build more and more complex systems that fail in unanticipated cummulative ways. The mind-set is broken, and no amount of money can fix that mind-set. It is going to take a kick-ass Secretary of Defense willing to actually do a clean-sheet redesign of Whole of Government and M4IS2 operations, using information and intelligence to reconnect PPBS to reality, and to harmonize other people's money. What we have now is flat out nuts, unaffordable, and ineffective.
See Also:
, Wu is known for the concept of “net neutrality.” He’s been thinking about this stuff for several years, and has as much clarity as anyone (which is still not much) about the future of the Internet.
