Monthly Archives: February 2011

Another large carrier? CVN-79 #military

Posted on by Eric Palmer

The U.S. Federal budget is in grave debt. Other than platitudes, our politicians have no solid plan for getting us out of this mess; yet, steel was just cut for another large and overly expensive aircraft carrier.

“Three Hampton Roads congressmen, Navy officials and Newport News shipyard executives donned ceremonial safety glasses and hardhats Friday, but stood idly by while Wayne Kania, a shipyard machine hand specialist, punched a few orders into his computer.

Kania set in motion a hulking machine that fired a flaming mix of oxygen and propane onto a 2.5-inch slab of American steel, cutting two bevels that will allow the sheet to be welded to another, teaming to form a part of the understructure of a new aircraft carrier.

The event at Northrop Grumman Corp.’s Newport News shipyard marked an important milestone in the life of the yet-unnamed CVN-79 aircraft carrier: The official beginning of construction.

Although the CVN-79, the second aircraft carrier of the Gerald R. Ford class, isn’t due to be completed and handed over to the Navy until 2020, design and fabrication work is well underway.”

What will it cost? $15 billion? That price is not far-off. More? Less? Will there even be money to complete it? Will there be money to operate and sustain it?

Worse, the U.S. Navy has no carrier air wing that will be able to stand up to modern threats. The Super Hornet and F-35C will be obsolete. UCAS-N? We can look at that when it has success with carrier recovery and launch.

The American taxpayer is on the hook for a floating largess, that can be located and sunk; along with the rest of the battlegroup, because we possess no credible naval air domination assets.

The Navy, like the rest of the DOD, is going to have to join the real world and demonstrate that they can use the money we give them wisely. When will that be?

Does the USAF have the skill to manage the fighter roadmap? # military

Posted on by Eric Palmer

This recent U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) report (PDF) is about the USAF response on what it thinks about the fighter roadmap for the service.

In the report, the USAF makes claims that are simply false. For instance, the USAF claims that the best path to follow is to have an all “5th generation fighter” force. Well, if that is the case, the U.S. will have to continue building more F-22s because the F-35 doesn’t qualify as a “fifth generation fighter”. And, the purpose of the term “fifth generation fighter” is conveniently used by the USAF in this report. It is a sad attempt to mislead someone that has never been near the fast-jet community. Shouldn’t the top leaders of the USAF, General Schwartz and Secretary of the USAF, Mr. Donley make sure their service is being honest with our elected officials?

There are other interesting things in this GAO report. The USAF doesn’t want to have jets that can only do one or a few things. This kind of thinking is admirable. One example used is that if you have an F-35, you can use it for big war as well as chasing off the errant Cessna at home. Admirable, but given the weak budget, a disastrous management of the F-35 program, an equally disastrous management and sustainment of the fighters we have, along with the galactically stupid effort to stop F-22 production; unrealistic.

Are there any fixes at this late stage? The answer seems to be; no. The only thing left are efforts that are imperfect attempts to fix things and hope we don’t have to use these solutions against a real enemy that can shoot back. One possibility? Start buying new-build F-15s to my idea of 20 fighter groups and get better results than the USAF’s path to self-destruction with the F-35. “Big war” scenarios (which involve mostly fixed targets in the first few nights of a war) could involve the F-15 carrying JASSM*. That combined with the F-22 doing JDAM and SDB, might carry the night. A new-build F-15 is ready for home defence and can carry more weapons up to 50 percent further than an F-35. It is also superior for things like close air support. When the F-15 shows ups with a lot more weapons (and a second crew-member to help out) the aircraft is preferred by the ground forward air controller (JTAC) because it can stick around a while and drop bombs until the troops are happy. And in comparison, the F-35 that shows up that day could be a B or a C and may have left the deck without its gun pod. All that, and an F-15, like the F-35, is not a “fifth-generation fighter”.

The USAF’s response to Congress is lazy because they state that they don’t have the data to predict life issues with the legacy F-16 fleet. What have they been doing all these years with our money? Did they downsize their engineering skills or something? Oh wait, yeah they did. The USAF is awash in maintenance metrics that it collects on every flight and every maintenance activity. And let us be clear. Thinking that you can take the F-16 past 8000 hours in life is just foolish. The USAF has been negligent at keeping their force structure up. A continuous low-rate buy of F-15s and F-16s since the end of the Cold War would have kept train-wrecks that we are currently experiencing from happening. Based on that, every sitting USAF boss since the end of the Cold War can be accused of gross-negligence.

The short answer is; the USAF does not know how to properly manage expensive aircraft that the taxpayer gives them. When the USAF can stand in the mirror and see the real problems which are a lack of leadership, management and honesty, then maybe we can expect them to act like the USAF America deserves. This recent GAO report is nothing more than an admission of USAF incompetence. It hurts to say that–because there are a lot of talented people in the USAF–but there you are.

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*=The JASSM program is under some trouble on cost and technology issues. It is in no way perfect but after the USAF and industry fix the fuse issues on the thousands we have in stock and explores the extended range models, it is better than having nothing for going into stiff defenses. After some fail and some are shot down, the probability of kill of this weapon could be lower than 50 percent. Yet if you shoot enough, you can still get some success without risking a pilot. In the end, while these warshots will be gold plated, they have some worth. With that, JASSM is yet another example of faulty program management and a lesson of how not to do things.

The first production model F-35 has flown, but where is the program going? #military

Posted on by Eric Palmer

The first production example of the F-35 has flown.

AF-6 and another production example were scheduled to go to the F-35 training base at Eglin in Florida; near the end of the last fiscal year. Instead, they were delayed. Not only that, these first two production example aircraft will not go to Eglin. They will go out west to Edwards help with the development flight test program which is way behind.

What is left to deliver for the rest of the calendar year? About, 18 more aircraft if this recent story from Aviation Week is accurate.

“One goal to watch will be whether the program can make 20 deliveries this year against a revised schedule adopted in September (four SDD aircraft, one already delivered, and 16 LRIP jets). STOVL sea trials are still planned for this year, as are the first landbased ship suitability tests for the F-35C.”

The program has a mountain of challenges to get over. It has to deliver on all of the over-promise made by the big mouths in marketing. There is a tremendous amount of software that has to work on the aircraft, and people have to actually come forward with money to buy it at its no longer affordable price.

This is a big challenge for the program’s biggest potential buyer, the USAF, which for years, has had a free-ride in not having to throw money at a air-refueling tanker purchase. Now the USAF is committed to the tanker and has no space for anything other than the broken promise of the original low price quoted for the F-35. There is no practical way the USAF will ever see 1763 of this aircraft before they lose interest and can see better things to do with their money. That and the F-35 will not be able to stand up to advanced threats.

Expect to see a few hundred F-35s made before it is cancelled. In short, after all the years of broken promises, this program will never match the PowerPoint slide dreams.

The program may advance some. How it advances is yet to be seen. Anything is possible if you are willing to lower your expectations. For the DOD F-35 program office, that should be their new motto. There are no excess federal dollars sitting around to clean up this mess.

Today in Canada, Defence fear-mongering #cndpoli

Posted on by Eric Palmer

With the weight of tough analysis by the guys that are selling the aircraft to back him up, the Canadian defence minister tries to reknit the truth to his own liking.

“We’re buying the F-35 at the peak point in production when the cost of these aircraft is projected to be at its lowest,”

Take a minute and look at that sentence in detail like it is a modern art masterpiece and then post your art-speak response. I wonder how many companies participating in this scheme have financials that could end up like this?

By the way; on the topic of waste, throwing $1B into the trash (if it really is $1B as our esteemed math scholar claims), is a lot cheaper than throwing $20B in the trash.

Boeing KC-46A air-refueling tanker for the USAF. Now what? #military

Posted on by Eric Palmer

Boeing has been selected for the next USAF tanker. This is after the loser of this competition was selected to be the next USAF tanker a few years ago. All of this is after several delays, a criminal prosecution and some administrative goof ups.

So, now, the government is committed to a $30 billion plus purchase. If there is no show-stopper political fallout by the rent-seekers, let us see how they make ends meet with this new mouth to feed. For instance, the USAF is rapidly retiring legacy fighter aircraft to pay for the F-35 which will have cost climb and even more delays. What is the USAF willing to do to make sure the KC-46A stays on schedule? One would hope that Boeing and the DOD have all this figured out, yet there could be delays and cost over-runs on the tanker deal. What then? Even if there are no problems, will we see an accelerated schedule to retire existing tankers (and their associated base and personnel overhead) to help pay for fielding the KC-46A?

With the shrinking USAF, maybe we will find a shrinking overall number in tankers. I wouldn’t be surprised. And with that, there is still a mountain of uncertainty in future DOD budgets of a debtor nation.

A study of the Australian Defence Material Organisation as a failure

Posted on by Eric Palmer

Tiger ARH. “For a project that is said to be 27 months later than originally planned, with some major elements up to 62 months late, has been re-baselined, and is still facing considerable challenges, to be assessed as “still expected to deliver the required capability within the approved budget” stretches credibility.” (©2007 Carlo Kopp).

The project of concern list of Australian Defence weapons systems programs is only a tiny summary of management failure of the Defence Material Organisation (DMO).

In this monograph by Air Commodore E J Bushell AM RAAF (Retd), the poor management of the DMO is highlighed in great detail. It also looks at what efforts are needed to fix this leper colony of weapons system program management that eats up billions in taxpayer dollars for little returned value.

This monograph should be one of the cornerstones for anyone that wants to take on the task of trying to understand the moribund and dysfunctional management practices found in our senior defence “leadership”.

What can kids learn from the F-35 team? Maybe not what you would hope #military

Posted on by Eric Palmer

So what can the kids learn from this crew? Well kids, when your assignment is late or not looking so good, tell your teacher everything is “on-track”. Then, hand them a proposal for a revised schedule.

What is your answer then for bad grades? Easy, but the kids will need a Pentagon tour for that one. Try this; “We do not agree with that estimate, there is no basis for that estimate, and we do not support it.”