from Crikey .....

Joint Strike Fighter shambles continue

Ben Sandilands writes:

DEFENCE DEPARTMENT, JOINT STRIKE FIGHTER

Enormous problems with Australia's multibillion dollar commitment to the Joint Strike Fighter have emerged from an audit review just delivered to Congress by Mike Gilmore, the US Director of Operational Test & Evaluation concerning the JSF project in 2009.

Only 16 test flights of 168 planned in 2009 -- and the 5000 needed to complete System Design Designation (SDD) -- were made in the year and only 12 out of more than 3000 SDD success criteria were verified.

The report identified a range of problems that would cause the loss of pilot and aircraft, some of them caused by the removal of fire protection systems to speed up a program top heavy in reliance on modelling rather than testing.

It says "thermal management challenges" hamper the ability for the F-35 to operate in hot and high-density environments.

The defence analyst at Air Power Australia, Dr Carlo Kopp, says the language used in the audit review is without precedent, and is an ominous pointer to the alarm and dissatisfaction with the massive multinational project that is now being voiced on both sides of the Atlantic.

However, all remains subservient and obsequious in Canberra, despite the calamitous consequences that the failure of the JSF would have for national defence, and the clear failure of the defence materials office to either understand what was happening with the project in the past year, or tell the minister what they knew.

On November 25, Defence Minister John Faulkner praised it as a true fifth-generation multi-role fighter and announced a $3.2 billion purchase of 14 initial production F-35s for delivery from 2014 for the purpose of training and cost analysis.

The total commitment is to 100 of the jets, at a claimed total cost of only $16 billion, and no, the sums don't ring true no matter how they are dissected, with 72 of them deployed as fully operational between 2018 and 2021.

The Gilmore report says that at the earliest the demonstration phase of the project will not be achieved until the end of 2013, and that assumes 50% of the work involved is successfully achieved in the final 12 months, which it describes as a high-risk proposition.

It says of early examples of the JSF that "the process to accurately predict and verify the interim capabilities of each [batch] is not complete or coherent.

"Expectations of capabilities provided in the early lots of low rate initial production aircraft need to be adjusted to the realities of what can be developed and verified before delivery," meaning those Australia is spending $3.2 billion to get from 2014 if everything works perfectly from now on.

Kopp describes the F-35 as the most dangerous new combat aircraft ever contemplated or committed to by Australia.

It seems inconceivable that Australia's defence establishment would not have known the seriousness of the deficiencies in the JSF at a time when Faulkner, as a comparatively new defence minister, was being jollied into signing off on absurd statements about this project last November.

Which raises the question, what is the biggest threat to national security? Our defence materials procurement and strategic analysis processes, or the armed forces of populous resource poor nations to our north?

A more detailed report appears in Plane Talking.

from Crikey .....

Joint Strike Fighter project -- now firing ... at least in the US

Ben Sandilands writes:

BARACK OBAMA, DEFENCE, JOHN FAULKNER

The firing in the over-hyped and dismally under-performing Joint Strike Fighter F-35 project has started in Washington DC and needs to spread quickly to Canberra before more damage is done to Australia's defence interests.

Defence Minister John Faulkner was captured by his defence advisers last year when he committed late in November to the $3.2 billion purchase of 14 early production F-35s from 2014 for alleged evaluation purposes, which had the effect of handcuffing Australia to an ultimate purchase of 100 of the jets at a cost of at least $16 billion.

Last week President Obama's new appointee as US Director of Operational Test & Evaluation in defence matters, Mike Gilmore, tore into the project for a wide range of failures and was especially scathing of status of the low rate initial production jets Faulkner had so strongly endorsed.

This was followed yesterday by the firing of the head of the project by US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, and the withholding of $690 million in progress payments to the lead contractor Lockheed Martin for a blindly obvious lack of progress, as reported at length in Plane Talking.

Today, while Faulkner's predecessor, Joel Fitzgibbon, is fighting off allegations that he was being groomed as a "Chinese agent" with undisclosed cash gifts of $150,000, the minister has been made to look a complete fool by his advisers, who behaved like the agents of the project rather than the government.

The essential problem for defence, and the Rudd Government, is that the Howard Government encouraged the uncritical endorsement of whatever expensive "toy" the GWB administration wanted it to buy.

However, the Obama Administration faces the reality of a broken US economy, a set of flawed big ticket projects such as the Constellation moon base project, which was cancelled in its budget package on Monday, and a JSF that the US Navy is already expressing serious doubts about, and which has abjectly failed to progress.

That new reality is a huge problem for Canberra, as well as other Western bloc nations who have signed up for the super-duper X-box with wings-hype that surrounds the JSF, and committed their future air superiority to its success.

Another victim of the scandal could be Defence Secretary Gates himself, who until the Gilmore audit review, was a fully credentialed believer in the JSF. The abrupt change of stance from Gates may prove too late, as the fallout in terms of future defence implications and relations with JSF partners among allies settles over Capitol Hill.

For Faulkner, the administrative problem is an incompetent defence procurement process and a set of senior defence appointees who preside over a situation where Australia struggles to keep a single Collins class submarine in a service ready state.

This is the same defence establishment that allowed the misuse of RAN ships by the disgraced Firepower miracle fuel additive company to launch the 2006 season of its Sydney Kings basketball team. It is, to put it kindly, populated by susceptible gormless fools who proved more than a match for Faulkner when it came to his enthusiastic and completely misinformed endorsement of early model JSFs.

The geopolitical element of the JSF situation is less funny.

The defence and foreign affairs establishments in Canberra often emphasise the success of Australian foreign policy with its potential enemies in Asia, and argue that there is no "immediate threat".

But the respect enjoyed by Australia is based on respect for its power. As the analysts at the Airpower Australia think tank have often pointed out, the basis of that respect has been trashed by the premature retirement of our F-111s and other errors, which will leave the country with seriously diminished air-power capabilities from 2015 onwards.

Indonesia doesn't have a air force that can out-fire Australia's today. But from 2015, even with a token force of say 10 Sukhoi SU-30 jets in Jakarta's arsenal, Australia faces an excessive loss rate in aerial encounters that would extinguish its capabilities very rapidly.

Last week the Russian long-range stealth platform, the T-50 made its first flight. Even assuming it takes 7-8 years to achieved operational capability, a timeframe largely dictated by a very ambitious plan using a very advanced engine design, the T-50 will, based on the Gilmore report, achieve deployment ahead of the JSF, and on current specifications, destroy it.

from Crikey .....

Sweetman's exit leaves sour note over Joint Strike Fighter reporting

Ben Sandilands writes:

BILL SWEETMAN, JOINT STRIKE FIGHTER

One of the foremost critics in the US of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) fiasco, Bill Sweetman, has been pulled off the case by his employer, Aviation Week, and a fire storm of anger is burning in the American media.

The issue is of critical relevance to Australia, who of all the allied partners in the project is the most generous in terms of brushing aside questions and pledging billions of dollars toward "low-rate initial production" JSFs that US government audits have condemned as being undefined, way beyond schedule, far above budget, and grievously mismanaged.

And with rare exceptions, the JSF issues are ignored in the general Australian media, or written up as puff pieces lifted from press releases by defence reporters taken on royal tours of lead contractor Lockheed Martin's facilities in the US.

This sellout in Australian defence reporting and showcase of inept defence acquisition is now centre stage in the US.

In the Flight International blog The DEW Line, Stephen Trimble, one of Sweetman's most prominent rivals, lays it on the line.

Of course, Lockheed Martin denies involvement. And Aviation Week regrets the matter has become "public", which is such nonsense. Sweetman's sudden non-coverage of the JSF, which he has lambasted as a failed project that will destroy the air superiority of the western world, is unlikely to have gone unnoticed.

Sweetman is a significant part of the brand value of Aviation Week, which together with a decades-won reputation for defence and aerospace reporting integrity, has just been trashed by its editor.

Last week the Minister for Defence Material and Science, Greg Combet, delivered a speech about the status, progress, and national defence industry benefits of the JSF which was troubling in its gullibility. It was the sort of set piece that Sweetman's reporting of the issues has already made impossible to deliver in Washington DC, or London, where answers to serious questions are now being pursued.

Combet's words were typical of those of a buyer already captured by a seller, but in this case for goods that have no realistic delivery date, no final price, no guaranteed capabilities, no refunds, and disastrous implications for the defence of the nation.

Some notes on that speed by defence analyst Eric Palmer will be published in Plane Talking shortly.

Air superiority crisis ... 14-minute warning hard to ignore

Ben Sandilands writes:

F-35, JOINT STRIKE FIGHTER

There is today, worldwide, on YouTube a 14-minute warning - about the air superiority crisis facing Australia as a US ally -- that new defence minister Stephen Smith and every member of the new parliament needs to review:

That video is a presentation by the recently retired commander of the USAF Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance agency, LtGen David Deptula, to an Air Force Association conference in Maryland last week.

It has taken a week to suddenly go viral, and we need to be clear about who is behind it.

America's Air Force Association had this presentation made by an extremely important commander days into retirement as an unimpeachable wake-up call to politicians and media, who are the captive of feel-good propaganda by the proponents of the JSF or Joint Strike Fighter F-35 project, which has bled the brains, and the dollars, out of defence thinking across the Western alliance.

For all of the "corny" presentation, the contents put in lay terms the diabolical loss of air power superiority facing the West that has been substantially caused by facile over-reliance on a JSF project that is terminally late, incredibly costly, and incapable of delivering on its promises.

It is like trying to tell the French about the futility of the Maginot Line before WW1 or warn Congress about the true nature of the Japanese threat before Pearl Harbour.

The video brutally summarises the failings of the JSF. It summarises the lock-out strategies of Russian and Chinese surface-to-air developments in terms of not just their territorial limits, but those of client states such as Venezuela, or Indonesia.

All of this new technology is for sale. Deptula says the Russian answer to the JSF, the PAK 50, will be deployed from 2015, and that China will fly its version, the XXJ, by 2012 and deploy it by 2018.

He could be wrong by four years and Australia still faces the loss of air superiority because of the inherent limitations of the JSF.

Stephen Smith is now defence minister surrounded by an establishment of advisers and bureaucrats who have behaved like the agents or sellers of the JSF rather than the servants of Australia. Our defence establishment has dismally failed to get on top of the officially documented shortcomings of the Lockheed Martin lead JSF project, and has not provided timely and impartial advice to his predecessors as to the true situation of a project that will leave this country without air superiority in the Asia-Pacific. Worse, leave the US, as our defence saviour, without air superiority.

It might seem easy for parliament to ignore the consistent warnings of Air Power Australia, an independent Defence think tank about such issues in recent years.

But will it ignore the US Air Force Association? This pillar of the US defence establishment has not resorted to social media at whim. It has done so out of frustration and a sense of fast-approaching calamity.

from Crikey .....

Joint Strike Fighter latest puts our defence planning under siege

Ben Sandilands, aviation reporter and Plane Talking blogger, writes:

DEFENCE DEPARTMENT, JOINT STRIKE FIGHTER PROGRAM, ROBERT GATES

The latest signal that the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program is in even more trouble came from soon-to-resign US Defence secretary Robert Gates, in an interview given on his way to his current talks in Beijing.

China, Gates said, has "the potential to put some of our capabilities at risk".

His comments were almost entirely directed at the sudden, unpredicted, early appearance of China's JU-20 answer to the JSF, less than a year after Russia flew its response, in the PAK-FA.

The evasive language of the Gates interview puts Canberra on further notice that the centerpiece of Australian defence planning is under siege.

And no doubt makes for a jolly time in the discussions now going on between himself and the China leadership cadre.

Over the holiday season Gates has announced that the US will put one model of the JSF, with short take-off and landing capabilities, on probation. It's not the model on which Australia hangs its future air superiority, but it erodes the battered finances of the entire program.

He also foreshadowed reductions in the US order for the other models, thus risking a huge increase in unit cost, and announced more orders for FA 18 Super Hornets to cover delivery short falls, as did Australia, last year.

In a strategic environment that is getting JU-20s and the PAK-FA faster than Australia will get "real" JSFs, the Super Hornets are as useful as more horses for the Polish Cavalry.

As are the JSFs, once they meet specifications, when confronted by aircraft that will fly higher and further and faster.

The JSF has a mission profile invented in the '90s that is designed to fail in the current decade.

Gates' reference to doubts about the stealth characteristics of the JU-20 are disingenuous. If it can kill our JSFs before they even know they are being hunted it hardly matters if they are less than invisible by the time they get to point where the could have been engaged.

The sleeper issue for the Pentagon, which America's US Air Force Association tried to awaken last year, is a Chinese investment in surface to air missile defences that denies its air space to intruding military aircraft.

It is reasonable to conclude from Gates' comments about the need to pay more attention to China that one of its immediate objectives has been achieved.

China owns enough US government debt to hurt, and it has a rapidly developing technology base to challenge both its trading and military interests. This includes a proven capability to destroy satellites in orbit, intercontinental nuclear missiles, ground based missile defences and now a large and potentially troubling fight and attack design.

Australia, in the JSF, has no answers. Just a painfully expensive toy that is years late in development, and already below the specifications of rivals that appear closer to entering operatons.

Officials in Britain's Defence Ministry are pushing to scrap their country's plans to buy a variant of the Joint Strike Fighter, reports from Britain say, potentially raising the cost for other customers such as Australia.

Media reports claim officials want the Royal Navy to buy older, less-capable F-18 jets, rather than pay higher prices for 138 JSF aircraft designed to be flown from aircraft carriers.

Australia has committed to buy 14 of the fighters so far and has indicated it will end up buying 100 of the planes for about $13 billion. But if nations such as Britain - which intends buying a lot of the planes - cut back, the cost for other countries could rise.

The reported scepticism within the Defence Ministry follows big spending cuts to Britain's defence budget forced by the global financial crisis.

Last year, the British Government scrapped plans to split its purchase between the vertical-take-off JSF model and the conventional model.

It concentrated instead on the latter, cheaper variant, a development the Australian Defence Department admitted at the time would have an effect - although minimal - on the cost of Australia's planes.

''Like Australia, the armed forces of [Britain] are likely to continue to push for the most sophisticated equipment they can get, which in this case would be the JSF,'' the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's Andrew Davies told the Herald yesterday.

JSF plane project in more flak

"First, it is too early to tell, second, it is too late to do anything about it." -Ernest Fitzgerald

There has been a flurry of articles in the defense press Tuesday about an internal Department of Defense (DoD) report on how the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Pentagon's newest attempt to buy a fighter jet, is skating toward potential mechanical and monetary disaster. The DoD top civilian weapons buyer put together a team to do a quick look at how the fighter was doing in its journey to become the next main fighter in the DoD arsenal. The report has the usual DoD hedge wording and qualifiers, but the answer is: not too good. There must be some panic and buzz in the Pentagon hallways since the last attempt of making a fighter, the F-22, was surprisingly canceled by the Obama administration and some brave members of Congress. Now, the newest fighter is falling under its own bloated procurement weight. Is the system, which has given us generation after generation of overpriced and technically dubious fighters, tanks, and other weapons finally succumbing to its own folly? This new report, which was leaked to the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) and some reporters, is now posted at POGO's web site. (Full disclosure: I founded POGO and still serve as treasurer and on the board of directors.)

Bill Sweetman, who writes the Ares blog for Aviation Week was not impressed with the F-35's progress:

When the Joint Strike Fighter team told Guy Norris about the jet's first run to its Mach 1.6 design speed, a couple of minor facts slipped their minds. Nobody remembered that the jet had landed (from either that sortie or another run to Mach 1.6) with "peeling and bubbling" of coatings on the horizontal tails and damage to engine thermal panels. Or that the entire test force was subsequently limited to Mach 1.0.

But selective amnesia is not even one of five "major consequence" problems that have already surfaced with the JSF and are disclosed by a top-level Pentagon review obtained by Ares. Those issues affect flight safety, the basic cockpit design, the carrier suitability of the F-35C and other aspects of the program have been identified and no fixes have been demonstrated yet. Three more "major consequence" problems are "likely" to emerge during tests, including high buffet loads and airframe fatigue.

To understand why this keeps happening to our weapons acquisitions and to try to change it, you have to know some history on how the system works and what has happened in the past. It is a sad tale of déjà vu all over again.

Ernest Fitzgerald, the well-known Pentagon whistleblower who fought the bureaucracy in hand-to-hand combat for better weapons and realistically priced weapons from the 1960s to 2006, came up with a simple law of why this sordid history keeps repeating itself. Fitzgerald's first law of weapons procurement is: "First it is too early to tell, second, it is too late to do anything about it." I have found that this is the way that the DoD, the military services and the defense contractors squeeze every last dime out of the procurement budget and then even more, while making sure that their weapon doesn't get so obviously gross as to go on the rare weapons' chopping block.

Fitzgerald blew the whistle on the C-5A cargo plane in the late 1960s because of technical problems of the plane and that it had overrun its budget by $2 billion - a huge sum at the time. Lockheed, the manufacturer of the C-5A, had made the plane too heavy to meet its specifications. They, with the tacit blessing of the Air Force, took weight out of the wings of the plane to meet the requirements.

Everyone knew that this most likely would affect the service and life of the wings, but it was paramount that the C-5A got into the fleet before someone suggested that the C-5A production run could be lessened or cut. It was important for all sides who were interested in the money flow of this plane, including the Air Force, the DoD, Lockheed and the Congress, to keep it going for jobs, profits and future retirement jobs for the military and civilians who were overseeing this plane.

Besides, even though the laws of physics would tell you that taking weight and strength out of the wings of a big heavy cargo plane would lead to problems, wasn't it really "too early to tell"? Or, as the military called it, the unknown, unknowns or unk-unks. Many a career was made or saved by the mysterious unk-unks where bad things happened, but you couldn't get blamed because the unknowns were unknown.

I came into this picture in 1979, when the Air Force "discovered" that cracks were developing in the C-5A wings, threatening the safety and life of the planes. Everyone acted surprised even though there were plenty of internal oversight reports warning that this might happen if weight was taken out of the wings in the production process. So, the Air Force told the Congress that there had to be a "wing modification," a nice word for wing fix, and it was going to cost $1.5 billion to fix the wings of the current fleet. In the non-Pentagon normal world, logic would tell you that Lockheed had the liability to pay for this "mistake" because they took the weight out of the wings and the engineers at Lockheed and in the government said, at the time, that the wings would begin to crack. But when I began to investigate this fix and uncover all the evidence of why the taxpayer should not have to pay for this, especially since the plane had already had the largest overrun at that time, the Air Force said that they were responsible to fix the problem because of all the unk-unks at the time. People in the DoD, the Congress and Lockheed all bobbed their heads in unison and insisted that it needed to be done and the government should pay for this mysterious problem because the planes had been bought, the system was counting on them and "it was too late to do anything about it."

This law became even more perfected when the DoD began to use "concurrency" as a regular way of procuring a weapon. Logic would tell you that you build a prototype for a weapon; do developmental testing on it to fix the technical bugs; start an initial, low rate of production after the fixes; and test this small production run with operational testing, using real troops in wartime type situations. Once you identified and fixed problems that showed up when you used the weapon as planned in a war and you made sure that the weapon was truly effective for the troops and not just a box of new gee-whiz technology for technology's sake, you would decide to go to full production with a set blueprint for the weapon. Of course, logic would also tell you that, in these stages toward full production, you may find that some of the technology would never work and if the weapon was only good because of these technologies or that the technologies could not realistically work in a war, it was far better for the troops and the taxpayers to cut the losses and cancel the weapon before sinking any more costs into the project.

However, concurrency blows this logic out of the water. The DoD has increasingly, over decades, blurred the logical lines of production that is used by most of the world. Instead, the bureaucracy finds a way to continue to push the weapon into large production while trying to fix the technical bugs and see if the weapon would truly work on the battlefield. This concurrency of development and production helps to make sure there is never a moment, not even a nanosecond, between "too early to tell" and "too late to do anything about it." This makes sure one is never vulnerable to having the weapon cut back or canceled, threatening one's career in the DoD, the defense company's profit, Congress's access to defense jobs in each district and state and one is more likely to find a nice retirement job because the weapon got through.

As you can imagine, this concurrency has caused weapons failures in the battlefields, technical and expensive nightmares in trying to maintain these weapons and costly fixes for these so-called unknown unknowns leading to astronomical overruns. There have been dozens and dozens of reports and testimony by government oversight agencies on how this is a bad idea and doesn't work, but the beat of the military procurement culture goes on. And as I mentioned in a past column on weapon costs, these overruns and fixes become the historical costs on which all new weapons are priced, so that the waste and disaster of concurrency goes on as high procurement costs and high maintenance costs for each generation of weapons.

In the late 1980s, I was investigating the technical problems of the radar systems on the B-1B bomber. The radar jamming system was jamming the B-1's own radar, rather than the radar on the enemy plane, along with several other problems. I came to a part in the DoD report where the author cheerfully predicted that, even though each radar built and put on production planes was different because of rolling modifications, the radar design would be finally set at the hundredth unit. It took me a minute to realize that we were only buying 100 B-1B bombers, thus, plaguing the fleet with planes where each one would have a unique radar to maintain. What would Henry Ford with his standardization of parts on the Model T think of us now? I wondered at the time.

The Air Force is now scrambling to make sure that it is too late to do anything about the F-35 production in this atmosphere of defense budget cuts. Top DoD officials have been arguing that maybe the costs and the effectiveness of the F-35 should lower the production rate of the plane, and senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee were trying to make sure that the next buy of the F-35 was not cost-plus as in the past, but fixed price where there would be a chance to try to control costs. Reuters reported:

Lawmakers inserted the fixed-price language into the bill after learning about Lot 5 contract [Pentagon had quickly approved it to be cost-plus], angered that the decision had been taken even as the Senate was debating whether or not to require the deal to be a fixed-cost contract. Senator Carl Levin, Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he and the panel's top Republican, Senator John McCain, were upset that the Pentagon had acted even though it knew lawmakers were looking at the contract language.

McCain and Levin have expressed discontent with previous "cost-plus" contracts that paid Lockheed's costs for producing the aircraft plus a profit margin on top of that.

They believe the contracts have enabled the cost of the F-35 program, the Pentagon's most expensive procurement program, to balloon over the years.

"We take umbrage at the idea that they would proceed on Lot 5 while we are negotiating whether or not there should be a prohibition on a cost-plus contract on Lot 5. So what we did is we said no cost-plus starting on Lot 6," Levin said.

Maybe the F-35 has finally come to that magical moment between "too early to tell" and "too late to do anything about it." With the threat of large budget cutting, there has been more scrambling going on than business as usual with all the parties involved. Defense contractors are beginning to squeal that they are getting cut to the bone and Secretary of Defense Panetta, who has only had the job for six months, has been a disappointment for becoming part of the Pentagon's usual hallelujah chorus despite his past cost-cutting career. This most recent report, even though they hate to say it, is committing a lot of truth about the failures on this plane that are just now starting to come out.

Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project, has been exposing this game longer than I have. He had some tough comments on the F-35 based on this newest report:

The new revelations are numerous and significant enough to call into question whether F-35 production should be suspended - if not terminated - even in the minds of today's senior managers in the Pentagon. The revelations include, but are not limited to "unsatisfactory progress and the likelihood of severe operational impacts for survivability, lethality, air vehicle performance and employment." Performance vis-à-vis so called "legacy" aircraft is seriously questioned and the individual deficiencies are sometimes so remarkable as to call into question the competence of the designers at Lockheed-Martin, to say nothing of the cost to repair the deficiencies. For example, the naval variant is now incapable of landing on carriers due to the inability of the arresting hook to capture an arresting cable on the carrier deck. And, there are more hard to conceive deficiencies, including airframe buffeting at different angles of attack. Moreover, as the report points out, these problems are appearing only after the easy phases of the test flights. The more exacting/demanding test flights are yet to even start. What unpleasant surprises do they hold?

The report frequently repeats the assertion that nothing so serious was found to "preclude further production." Read the report and decide for yourself if the report supports that conclusion, or actually the reverse. In fact, the oft repeated assurance that nothing too serious is uncovered was, in fact, added on by some in a rather pathetic attempt to convert this report into mush.

So, how can we retire Fitzgerald's law? It won't be easy, but the first place to start is to get rid of concurrency for everything other than the simplest of technologies. We have to go back to logic and not try to develop a weapon while also trying to use it at the same time. It would be crazy to do this in the automobile industry and it doubly more dangerous for our troops that rely on these weapons. Don't allow any full production until standards are set for manufacturing or we will be paying billions of dollars later to fix it. One of the best ways to retire Fitzgerald's law is to make the politically hard decision to cancel early weapons that can't realistically be fixed technically or won't work in real combat. There has to be a tolerance for failure and cancellation at the early stages of a weapon without fear of recrimination by the bureaucracy so that the weapons procurers and engineers can move on to a better and more realistic design instead of spending decades defending bad ideas at great cost to the taxpayer and the troops.

F-35 Fighter Latest In Long Line of Weapons Failures

The half-trillion-dollar defence cuts in the US announced by the President, Barack Obama, this week will drive the cost to Australia of the vaunted Joint Strike Fighter even higher, says the former defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon.

The increased cost of the $16 billion acquisition will be due to the third production delay to the next-generation jet in as many years and caused by the $487 billion ($473 billion) in cuts to US defence spending over 10 years.

Mr Fitzgibbon, who was minister for defence from 2007 to 2009, has been vocal about the cost of the next-generation Lockheed Martin jet, touted as the future of air warfare. ''F35 unit costs will rise due to US Defence cuts,'' he wrote on Twitter yesterday. ''Entirely predictable and one of a number of reasons I declined opposition pressure to sign.''

While minister he led a charge to recommend the government delay a final decision to sign up to the US-built plane so as to lobby for a lower price.

''I am determined not to sign on the dotted line of the JSF before I have got, as close as you can, a guarantee on cap, price and schedule,'' he said in 2008.

But yesterday the acting Minister for Defence, Warren Snowdon, said via email that a US production delay ''should not affect Australian JSF aircraft production''. ''While the US deficit reduction measures may result in a slower ramp up in JSF production over the next few years, at least some of this spare production capacity can be expected to be absorbed by new foreign customers, such as Japan,'' Mr Snowdon said.

Australia has set aside as much as $16 billion to buy 100 of the fighters but that purchase is under a cloud after the Minister for Defence, Stephen Smith, warned more cuts to the program could force Australia to re-evaluate its position.

Design faults with the JSF have meant the projected cost per aircraft has risen from $US50 million in 2002 to more than $US120 million last year. The latest news will place more pressure on the government to scale back the number of jets it buys.

The government has agreed to purchase at least 14 and as many as 100 of the next-generation fighters but remains concerned about the continuing production problems.

The first batch is due to be delivered by 2014, at a cost of $3.2 billion. Some speculate that Australia may finally buy fewer than 60 of the jets.

The US defence cuts come only weeks after the leaking of a report into the beleaguered jet by a Pentagon panel of experts calling for a production slowdown to fix a suite of design faults, which itself could see a cost blowout.

Thirteen issues were identified during the review, which was published in November and leaked to a US website four weeks later, including five described as being of ''major consequence''.

Those five include problems with the pilot's helmet display and a design flaw in the power package, which grounded the fleet for two weeks in August.

One of the five faults of concern was referred to in the report as ''classified'', and there has been speculation it may relate to the JSF's stealth skin.

Leaner US defence to swell jet cost - Fitzgibbon

the alarm has been sounding on this looming defence debacle for years (see comments thread above) .... the sooner Awstraylens realise that ridiculous multi-billion dollar defence contracts with the US have more to do with keeping US defence contractors in business than they do with protecting our strategic interests, the sooner we'll stop wasting our nation's wealth on useless weapons of mass destruction ....

Some of the most vehement critics of Australia's involvement in the Joint Strike Fighter program had their day in the sun on Tuesday afternoon when they testified before a high level parliamentary defence committee.

Representatives of anti-JSF think tank Air Power Australia and RepSim Pty Ltd were given an hour to make their case before the defence subcommittee of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade.

By the time the group was 30 minutes into its presentation at least five of the committee members had left the room.

Remaining committee members, including Opposition defence spokesman Senator David Johnston, were told the JSF program was a failure, the planes only had limited stealth capability and that they were compromised by the use of a core design to produce three different variants; a conventional land based plane, a short take-off and landing variant that will replace the US Marine Corps' Harrier jets and a carrier version.

Air Power Australia wants the Australian Government to abandon the JSF and, instead, exert pressure on the US Government to scrap the program in favour of having Lockheed Martin re-open its F-22 Raptor production line and make that plane, arguably the world's best air superiority fighter, available to the international partners.

''We're building the wrong aircraft,'' spokesman Peter Goon said.

Independent analysts say this is unlikely to ever happen - and that the F-22 was never released for foreign sales in any case.

Senior Defence officials, who have been aware of the Air Power Australia claims for some time and give them little credence, are not expected to take Tuesday's presentation lying down. It is understood a formal response could be made to the committee around the middle of next month.

Mr Goon said the STOVL F-35B variant imposed weight and performance limits on the other two aircraft. ''It is the aerial equivalent of Herpes; it just keeps on giving.''

He was equally disparaging about the Boeing Super Hornet, the plane favoured by Defence Minister, Stephen Smith, to stand in for the JSF if there are further delays in the stealth fighter program. ''It is a technological lemon''.

Judging from the number of questions, the remaining committee members found the segment of the presentation detailing computer simulations of a hypothetical 2018 air battle between either 240 F-35s, 240 F-22 Raptors or 240 Super Hornets and an equivalent number of Sukhoi SU35s off the coast of Taiwan the most interesting.

It was claimed only 30 F-35s would survive as against no survivors for the Super Hornet force and 139 survivors for the F-22 force.

Senator Johnston said the claims were interesting but stressed it was important the committee be provided with the assumptions on which the simulation was based so it could be assessed with some degree of accuracy.

Joint Strike Fighter Program A 'Failure': Think Tank

A US joint strike fighter. The UK is deciding whether to buy the cheaper 'cats and flaps' version or revert to the vertical-landing model. Photograph: Joely Santiago/AP.

Britain's troubled and increasingly expensive plan to equip the navy with new aircraft carriers has been plunged into fresh turmoil as ministers consider reversing their earlier decision to change the type of plane that should fly from them, it has emerged.

The government announced in last autumn's strategic defence review that it had decided to buy the "cats and flaps" (catapults and arrester gear) version of the US joint strike fighter. This would have a "longer range and greater payload ... the critical requirement for precision-strike operations in the future", the government stated.

Moreover, the government added, it will be cheaper. It would also enable French planes to land on British carriers, and vice versa, inkeeping with the new UK-French defence spirit of co-operation.

Now, in an extraordinary volte-face, the Ministry of Defence says the "cats and flaps" planes may well be cheaper but it would be too expensive to redesign a carrier - more than £1bn - to accommodate them. The ministry is thus faced with the prospect of renegotiating a deal with the US, reverting to its original plan - namely buying the short take-off and vertical landing version of the aircraft, even though it is acknowledged to be less effective and more expensive .

The latest chapter in the troubled saga of Britain's future aircraft carriers - whose own estimated costs have soared - was raised on Thursday in a letter to the defence secretary, Philip Hammond, from Jim Murphy, his Labour opposite number.

Murphy referred to "worrying suggestions" that the government was about to change its mind about the kind of aircraft to buy from the US. "It is vital that there is now clarity on the government's plans for this vital area of the defence equipment programme," he wrote.

Murphy said the decision in the defence review to scrap the Harrier fleet meant the UK would have no carrier aircraft capability until 2020 - and then only one carrier would be operational.

Defence officials said that the government was "re-assessing" its earlier decision because, they indicated, of pressures on the defence budget.

HMS Queen Elizabeth, the first carrier, will be mothballed immediately it is launched in 2016, according to existing plans. The second, HMS Prince of Wales, will be able to put to sea by 2020, but it is not known how many planes will be able to fly from it - nor what kind.

The two carriers, originally priced at £3.5bn, are now estimated to cost £6.2bn. According to the Commons public accounts committee, the cost is likely to icrease to as much as £12bn.

The government, which originally said it wanted more than 100 joint strike fighters, says that it will have just six operational ones by 2020. The unit cost of the joint strike fighter, made by Lockheed Martin, has soared because of production problems and delays caused by US defence budget cuts. Britain's BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce have big stakes in a future deal adapting the joint strike fighter for British forces.

A spokesperson for the MoD said: "We are currently finalising the 2012-13 budget and balancing the equipment plan. As part of this process, we are reviewing all programmes, including elements of the carrier strike programme, to validate costs and ensure risks are properly managed. The defence secretary expects to announce the outcome of this process to parliament before Easter."

UK Aircraft Carrier Plans In Confusion As Ministers Revisit Square One