Just how much are those F-35s going to cost?

Ah that pesky auditor. Forever poking his little Sharpie into F-35 jet flaps and other dark corners.

To hear Defence Minister Peter MacKay tell it, with just a hint of bluster, the next thing Auditor General Michael Ferguson will demand is a detailed costing for the F-35 pilots’ “boot leather (and) shoelaces.”

Might not be a bad idea. Aviator boots don’t come cheap these days.

But at a guess, we think the auditor general would be content to know just how much the 65 F-35 stealth fighters the Conservatives intend to buy will end up costing us, beyond the $25 billion figure that has been the focus of so much partisan debate. That’s what Canadians really want to know, and can’t find out.

Originally, Canada’s F-35s were supposed to roll off the Lockheed Martin assembly line for about $5 billion, or $75 million a pop. The biggest part of the $25 billion involves the warplanes’ estimated “full life-cycle costs,” including upgrades to the jets, pilots’ salaries, weapons, maintenance, fuel, repairs and other costs, spread over 20 years. Boot leather and shoelace stuff.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper assures us that any F-35 buy will be brought in on budget, no more. But the Pentagon now admits the planes will cost about $95 million apiece, not $75 million as we were told. And that assumes that the current $120 million unit price will drop dramatically as production ramps up.

For Ottawa, that’s not good news. At $95 million each, Canada will have to shell out an extra upfront $1.3 billion to get all 65 jets, a 25 per cent cost overrun. At $120 million, the upfront extra cost would be about $3 billion, a 60 per cent overrun. And the military insists it needs every one of those planes.

As the opposition in Parliament has been howling, nothing about the F-35 is quite as it seems. That’s obvious now, despite the Conservative government’s best effort to keep Parliament and the public in the dark about this purchase, to wink at the military’s slippery cost estimates, and to discredit anyone who can count.

But is MacKay worried? No sir. Whatever the bottom line, he remains an F-35 true believer. “I’m just an optimistic guy,” he says.

Maybe he’s thinking Velcro boots. You know, to save on shoelaces.

Original Article
Source: Star
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