[Thanks to AirPowerAustralia]

At the end of November a devastating report entitled the “F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Concurrency Quick Look Review” was issued by the Pentagon. An up-t0-date assessment of the JSF’s current status, it identified 13 issues that required serious attention. The Penatagon being the Pentagon, these were split into three intricate groups:

1) Five involved this: ”major consequence issues have been identified, but root cause, corrective action or fix effectivity are still in development” (i.e. we don’t know what the problem really is);

2) Three involved this: “potentially major consequence discovery is likely pending outcomes of further discovery” (i.e. these small problems could turn out to be big problems);

3) Five involved this: “consequence or cost is moderate, but the number of moderate issues poses a cumulative concurrency risk” (i.e. see 2 above).

The report’s main conclusion was that the practice of ‘concurrency’ – procuring a weapons system before it has actually been developed and tested – has reached excessive proportions. While many Pentagon projects involve this business method, the sheer scale of the JSF – around $385bn for development and production alone, followed by a further $1tr to keep the thing in the air for a decade or two – has required an unusual amount of up-front government investment before the project is even proven to be fly-able. And the longer this goes on, the more the costs rise and the more costly it becomes to cut your losses and run. 

The extent of the Dutch commitment was once again exposed in the aftermath of the report going public, with Ben Knapen stating in parliament on 6 December that the purchase of two test aircraft will still go ahead in 2012-2013 as planned. He nonchalantly added: “It is logical, understandable, and advisable to follow the developments in the US closely, but there is nothing in particular to report.” Knapen defended the fact that the concurrency approach was known from the beginning and was necessary to allow all partners to contribute to the aircraft’s development. The final decision on yes or no for the JSF has, in classic Dutch style, been postponed for the next cabinet to decide. Meanwhile around 1.5bn Euro has already been pumped into the project despite no definitive decision. In January 2011 Hans Hillen announced that the price of each aircraft would be 59.7m Euro, instead of the 47.4m Euro that was pitched only in 2009 – and this is the basic price, with the necessary extras bringing it up to about 100m a piece. 

Naturally, the opposition is steadfastly opposed to this new version of transatlantic ‘burden-sharing’, with Groenlinks leading the leftist pack of PvdA, SP, and D66 in calling for the whole thing to be dropped. The PVV remains, inevitably, the wildcard, having abandoned the oppositional pack just over a year ago. The party went into the June 2010 elections rejecting any JSF test aircraft but abandoned that stance as part of the support agreement for the minority VVD-CDA cabinet. Whether the PVV will stick to this agreement is another matter. For the moment, with no electoral consequences attached to it, they do.

Meanwhile, positive news for the JSF’ers came in from a relatively unexpected quarter – Japan, which announced a week ago that it will probably join this elite club as part of its own defence upgrade. In May the message coming out of Japan was that the Lockheed Martin JSF could be dropped in favour of either the Eurofighter or Boeing’s F/A-18 Super Hornet.  The decision, committing between $6 to $8bn for around 40 aircraft to be delivered by 2016, is clearly a response to stay ahead of China’s ballooning defence budget and the introduction of its own stealth fighter, the Chengdu J-20. Even so, considering the recent misery from the Pentagon about project delays, the decision was something of a surprise.

But the Japanese decision also puts the Dutch position in stark contrast. Japan wants 40 aircraft in a region of the world facing a serious high-tech arms race escalation. The Dutch Ministry of Defence says it wants 85 for……..well, that is the question.