One concedes, off the top, that progress is difficult in everything from social programs to technological breakthroughs. That said, Canada should never have embraced the hyper-ambitious F-35 project. Neither should the Pentagon, which wisely dropped out of a supersonic passenger-aircraft race in 1971 (the stillborn SST). The Anglo-French Concorde was a commercial failure the entirety of its existence despite having the skies to itself.
After interminable delays and massive cost-overruns with the F-35, Ottawa finally indicated this month it will rethink its plan to purchase of 65 F-35s meant to replace our aging CF-18s. The Pentagon, it turns out, is having second thoughts about the F-35 as well, despite having its own crisis with aging F-15s and F-16s, the backbone of U.S. military air power.
It’s worth noting here the self-inflicted damage Ottawa’s years-long commitment to the F-35 has done to Canada.
• In waiting so long to acquire aircraft tailored to Canadian requirements of combat, search and rescue, and reconnaissance (on which our claim to sovereignty over the Far North lies), our air-power capabilities will have diminished longer than necessary.
• Had we selected wisely, we could have used the funds saved from purchasing more modest aircraft adequate to our needs to replace our antiquated helicopters, and acquire our first troop-transport capability. As matters stand, Canada’s armed forces are obliged to hitch a ride on U.S. transport planes to get to the likes of Afghanistan.
• Trust in the acumen and integrity of government obviously has taken a hit. From the time that Ottawa settled on the F-35 in July 2010, it misinformed Canadians through last year’s general election that the purchase price was $9-billion. Today the estimate, properly including decades of maintenance costs, is about $44 billion. Other likely national F-35 buyers have publicly disclosed the plane’s spiralling costs. “What distinguishes Canada has been the denials of the government,” Stephen Saideman of McGill University’s political science department wrote earlier this year.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, some will say. But the signs were there from the outset that the F-35 was ill-fated. The warnings have continued since 2001, when the Pentagon selected Lockheed Martin Corp.’s astonishingly ambitious F-35 as its new generation of fighter planes.
• Too much plane. The folly of the F-35 – an exercise in hubris for which Napoleon’s Russian excursions are roughly analogous – is that it was to be the first fighter plane that would accommodate the varied needs of all four branches of the U.S. Armed Forces. And to make affordable an aircraft program of unprecedented cost, Lockheed would have to peddle as many F-35s to as many countries as possible.
Eight countries signed tentative deals to buy. And their demands, specific to the needs of Australia, Italy, Britain, the Netherlands and so on, were loaded onto an already over-engineered aircraft. As any operator of machinery knows, the more features it boasts, the more things there are to break down.
A 2005 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative branch office of Congress, said the F-35 program was so complex as to be “unexecutable.” Yet in 2010, after the F-35’s woes had become even more pronounced, Canada signed a memo of understanding with Lockheed to buy 65 planes. The rationale, in part, was that this enabled scores of Canadian suppliers to bid on F-35 work.
• Wildly out of control costs. Between 2001 and today, the estimated cost of the F-35 program has doubled, from $200 billion to $400 billion. Because the F-35 is just entering its testing phase, where problems are revealed, neither Lockheed nor anyone else has any real idea how much the F-35 will ultimately cost.
While the Harper government clung to the F-35, other prospective buyers opted for different planes or slashed their orders. Even the U.S. began upgrading its F-15s and F-16s as a hedge against further F-35 delays. The shrinkage in orders has undermined the economies of scale boasted of in the original plan. It effectively raises the price per plane for remaining buyers like Canada.
• A dubious supplier. The checkered history of F-35 sponsor Lockheed Martin should have given pause to Canada’s Department of National Defence (DND). Soon after the Bethesda, Md. company was created in a controversial 1999 merger, the world’s largest defence contractor was mired in managerial chaos and culture clashes. New-product delays and cost overruns became routine with flagship projects including Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor, C-130J cargo plane, and its latest-generation satellites. In 2006, the year Ottawa formally committed to the F-35 purchase, the U.S. Army killed Lockheed’s troubled Aerial Common Sensors spy plane. And the repeated delivery delays with the F-35 have prompted the Pentagon’s chief procurement officer this year to label the F-35 “acquisition malpractice.”
• The wrong plane for Canada. For all the F-35’s costly cornucopia of features, including a vaunted stealth function Canada doesn’t need but would pay for, the plane’s designers managed to leave out “long-range without refuelling,” a must for vast regions like Canada. “I don’t understand why Canada selected this aircraft,” Winslow Wheeler, a U.S. defence spending watchdog and former GAO staffer, said last year. And, in Wheeler’s assessment, the F-35 has been a washout on basic air-to-air and air-to-ground combat missions. “The F-35 is so mediocre on those essential dimensions it would be a bad buy at even half the cost.”
All is not lost. Apart from the relatively modest funds it has sunk into F-35 development costs, Ottawa hasn’t yet spent a dime on purchasing F-35s. There’s no getting around the gullibility of the Harper government in being strung along by Lockheed’s necessarily frequent explanations for the F-35’s problems. Or Ottawa’s failure to conceive a back-up plan for replacing or upgrading the CF-18 to prolong its lifespan, even as the F-35’s unsuitability became more starkly evident – something defence experts have been pushing Ottawa to do since the fall of 2011.
But there’s still time to equip our Forces properly, by conducting the open competition Ottawa rejected in picking the F-35. And to then test planes that make the short list before settling on one. “And to make a decision,” said Wheeler, based “on real evidence rather than the paper studies.”
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: David Olive
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