According to Pentagon planners, the Joint Strike Fighter on today's drawing boards will dominate the skies of the next century. Radar-evading, laden with smart bombs and, above all, affordable, the fighter will be the Air Force's most numerous combat plane, the Navy's stealthiest and the Marine Corps' only. Starting in 2009, the services plan to buy almost three thousand of the planes-at least $165 billion dollars' worth. Competing teams from aviation giants Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. are already building demonstration models for preliminary tests. Add in expected foreign sales, and the new fighter will rule not just the heights, but the bottom line.
Assuming it can be built. Much as the White Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass believed six impossible things every day before breakfast, Joint Strike Fighter must bypass three imposing barriers before it can get off the ground: The three services have to agree on a common basic design; the cost per plane can't exceed $38 million; and the program must somehow fly clear of political meddling.
The program's hurdles start with the first word of its name: joint. Traditionally, the Air Force and the Navy have developed planes separately (the Marines by and large use Navy designs)-and for good reason. Navy warplanes have to be capable of operating from both dry land and aircraft carrier decks; the Air Force's don't. The last major warplane the services designed together, the F-111, proved too heavy to land on a carrier, so the Navy never purchased it.
With the F-111 debacle much in mind, recently retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Link recalled that initially, "I looked at [the Joint Strike Fighter] program with some skepticism. [But] things have changed." Bert Cooper, an analyst with the Congressional Research Service, agreed: The F-111 is "irrelevant," because it was "a forced marriage" imposed on the unwilling services by then-Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara. On the Joint Strike Fighter program, said Cooper, the services "people involved are seriously committed to 'jointness.'" Link added: "Were it not for the joint program office . . . this would be unmanageable."
The head of that office is Leslie F. Kenne-an Air Force major general whose predecessor was an admiral and whose deputy is a Marine general. Kenne, an engineer and a procurement expert, consults with an advisory group of professional "war fighters"-veteran officers, she explained, "on the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps staff that have come out of the field flying airplanes. . . . Their job is to write the requirements" that the contractors' designs must meet.
Skeptics counter that no amount of talk can reconcile the services' conflicting priorities.
"What you have here is a tri-service program that is more strongly advocated by the Marine Corps than by the Air Force, and more strongly advocated by the Air Force than [by] the Navy," said Loren B. Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., think tank. Only the Marine Corps has placed all its eggs in the Joint Strike Fighter basket: Both the Air Force and, especially, the Navy have other, higher-priority warplane projects-whose test planes are already flying.
The Air Force's is the F-22: a super-stealthy, super-lethal fighter whose price has already swelled to nearly $190 million per plane. Current plans call for 339 of the F-22s to strike the best-defended targets, while 1,763 of the cheaper Joint Strike Fighters swarm the rest. The Air Force insists it needs both aircraft. But "as far as Congress is concerned," warned Thompson, "the Air Force is developing two fighters, and all the details and nuances tend to get lost."
Meanwhile, "the No. 1 acquisition program for the Navy," to quote Rear Adm. Michael Joseph McCabe, is the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet, a larger, loaded version of the current F/A-18 C/D Hornet. With deployment starting in 2002, "we see the F/A-18 E/F as a today airplane," said McCabe. "The Joint Strike Fighter, in contrast . . . is a paper airplane right now." McCabe, the Navy's new director of aviation plans and requirements, denied rumors that his service is not equally committed to both aircraft. McCabe insisted: "We in the Navy see the two aircraft as complementary, not competitive."
But that complementarity envisions the Joint Strike Fighter hitting the best-defended targets, with the less stealthy Super Hornet in support-whereas the Air Force relegates the Joint Strike Fighter to the support role. Even though the Navy relies less on stealth than the Air Force does, modifying a common design to meet both roles is difficult. Add in the Navy variant's need to withstand bone-jarring carrier launches and landings, and the Marine Corps' insistence that its version be able to take off and land vertically, and the technical difficulties become tremendous.
Kenne's assertion: All three versions can be built--and on a single production line. The variants will share not only their engine and electronics, but also most of their structure, with "jump jets" added for the Marine Corps edition and stronger supports for the Navy.
"That's pretty easy to do these days, with advanced manufacturing that you couldn't do back in the days of the F-111," Kenne said. She argues that old-fashioned mass production is already giving way to the flexibility of computer design and robotic assembly lines: "We're going to be the beneficiaries of some dramatic changes in the way the U.S. industry operates."
Many of the new techniques are in fact only "a couple of years" old, said Kurt Nohavec, a Joint Strike Fighter manager at Boeing.
Still, "no matter how much efficient manufacturing . . . you do," Kenne said, "you've got to start out with a reasonably affordable set of requirements." That, added the Air Force's Link, "is difficult, because no one wants to be responsible for making the decision that saved a dollar and cost a life-or a battle, or a war." As a result, Pentagon projects consistently run over budget because the writers of requirements push for ever-better performance at exponentially increasing cost.
Kenne's solution: "For the first time, the war fighters have a cost in their requirements document." What's more, each time they rewrite the requirements, the contractors assess the resulting change in cost and report back to the military-which can then change the requirements again to make the plane cheaper. The Joint Strike Fighter requirements, which won't be finalized for another year, have gone through three such cycles since 1995-the year traditional procedures would have set the requirements, and their costs, in stone.
Such flexibility is the goal of the Pentagon's five-year-old acquisition reform program, which has already achieved significant incremental savings: The Joint Strike Fighter is the first major weapons program to incorporate all the new ideas from the start.
The most important change-besides the close feedback on costs between the military and the contractors-is a dramatic reduction in detailed military specifications. Instead, the contractors are free to achieve the required performance however they see fit. When the requirements documents are finalized, said Boeing's Nohavec, "we may have approximately 300 requirements [on the Joint Strike Fighter] in comparison to about 6,000 on the F-22. [So] we do not have to validate each of those 6,000 requirements, which obviously takes time and money."
"I don't think it's a particularly new way of doing things," countered the Pentagon's in-house iconoclast, analyst Franklin "Chuck" Spinney: It's "earlier things that have been repackaged," not a revolution. But revolutionary the new system had better be, because if the Joint Strike Fighter does not escape historical precedent, the program is doomed to catastrophic cost overruns. Extrapolating from past programs, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that the plane will come in at a third more than its planned cost. And even the official figures for the Joint Strike Fighter, added to the overlapping F-22 and Super Hornet purchases, may overwhelm the static Defense Department budget.
Even though acquisition reforms may cut costs, the Pentagon has long relied on future increases in efficiency to dodge tough fiscal decisions-only to discover that actual savings don't even approach the original projections. In this context, said the Lexington Institute's Thompson, the Joint Strike Fighter "feels more like a pretext than a program."
"Given the nature of the political process," added Harlan K. Ullman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, "it is very unlikely and exceedingly difficult for new ways of doing business to make much of a dent. . . . In addition, the consolidation of defense industries . . . gives the surviving companies-such as Boeing and Lockheed-enormous political clout."
Executives of both companies describe the Joint Strike Fighter as "a must-win program."
Industry analysts suggest that the losing company will have to idle its military aircraft facilities altogether. So, even though Kenne insists this is a "bet-your-fighter-business competition," the Pentagon cannot squelch speculation that it will eventually bow to political pressure and to fears of a future aircraft monopoly, by splitting its Joint Strike Fighter purchases between Boeing and Lockheed-a guarantee of higher costs. "It's heretical to suggest that there won't be a shoot-out [that] only one will survive," said Congressional Research Service analyst Cooper, "but [the shoot-out], I think, simply, it's a useful myth."
Kenne insists that, with new technology, new methods, and a new ethos of cooperation, the fighter will fly free of the pitfalls that have trapped past programs. The years to come will prove whether she is on a hero's journey, or a fool's errand.
NEXT STORY: Campaign '98: Does Monica matter?