F-35 & the God's of the Copybook Headings

parts are parts

We haven’t discussed the F-35 too much in these spaces, but we have over on Midrats a few times. I think it was there many years ago when I explained why; we have put all our eggs in one basket. It cannot fail.

I can’t stand single points of failure. I really wish we build three different planes from three different primes to spread risk around and get better aircraft, but I’m not emperor.

So far I think it can be said that though there were perhaps other options we could have taken, the program as a whole is a success. I would hope that all the international buyers are a signal that, yes, it is worth it.

There is one thing that has always concerned me as it echoes a battle I’ve had since I got my MBA in the 1990s; the Cult of Efficiency being forcemoded on to things in the military where it shouldn’t be. What looks good on a spreadsheet in peace has a better than average chance of leaving you grounded at war. Exquisitely fragile supply chains and the chaos that is war will tear apart pleasant little assumptions.

The effectiveness school has a lot of trouble winning the peacetime bureaucratic wars against the efficiency school. So, when war comes, you have to leverage real-world conflicts to try to claw back some ground if you want to prepare for the war to come.

The only significant extended combat experience - and it is rather limited nonetheless - of the F-35A has occurred in the last few months following Hamas’ invasion of Israel on October 7th.

There are important lessons already that I hope we are using to our larger advantage. Not just the USA or Israel, but for all our allied nations who have purchased the F-35 and put their trust in us that we know what we are doing

First the challenge via Howard Altman at Tyler Rogoway at The Drive;

U.S. military's concerns over sustaining its F-35 Joint Strike Fighters through the so-called 'just-in-time' logistics model that underpins the program, especially during a time of war, have risen dramatically as we noted in April. Overall, U.S. F-35s still struggle in terms of readiness, with about 55 percent of F-35s operated by the Air Force, Marines and Navy able to perform at least one of their assigned missions as of March, a report that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) also released on Tuesday states.

How has the bird performed?

…performance in Israel is “absolutely outstanding,” Air Force Lt Gen. Michael Schmidt, Program Executive Officer and Director of the F-35 Lightning II Program, testified before a House Armed Services Committee subcommittee. ”Their mission-capable rates are high. Their full mission capable rates are high.”

Schmidt didn’t offer specific numbers, but added that the Israeli Air Force (IAF) is “very satisfied with what their performance from a sustainment enterprise is giving them. I think we could learn a lot from them in terms of the quickness with which they're turning airplanes.” The reference here to 'turning airplanes' is about recovering and resetting jets and then launching new sorties. Those lessons are in addition to “all of the things we're learning ourselves with moving parts around the world in support of a conflict,” he added.

Sounds like we are taking the right steps;

Both Schmidt and LaPlante said lessons learned by these high-tempo Israeli F-35 operations will be especially important in preparing for a fight in the Pacific, where the ability to sustain the notoriously support-intensive F-35s in a vast and contested theater will be a major challenge. The ‘just-in-time’ logistics strategy and the cloud computing hub that is the foundation for F-35 logistics are of especially high concern. While those systems may be adequate for peacetime operations — and even that is highly debatable — during a time of conflict, relying on them could leave F-35s stranded on the ground.

Those lessons are in addition to the Pentagon's own review of its long-distance F-35 logistics operations.

It isn’t easy.

"This program was set up to be very efficient... [a] just-in-time kind of supply chain. I'm not sure that that works always in a contested environment," Lt. Gen. Schmidt said. "And when you get a just-in-time mentality, which I think is it's kind of a business model in the commercial industry that works very well in terms of keeping costs down and those kinds of things, it introduces a lot of risk operationally."

"The biggest risk is that F-35 units have little in terms of spare parts on the shelf to keep their aircraft flying for any sustained amount of time."

Here is a snapshot of what we have to figure out as reported in October;

“I'm not sure how much better it got, but I can tell you the challenges that we faced back, logistically specifically, it was designed to be maintenance on demand, essentially. So the aircraft could relay a message to the supply warehouse and say, this part is getting ready to fail. And then Lockheed could send that part out to the base and it could be replaced, rather than having to have large warehouses full of supply parts, not knowing which was gonna fail and what you might need. You take that into the maritime service and the challenge, Tyler, is that you can't logistically operate that way because we could have a ship, in this case, off the coast of Taiwan that needs a part, and Lockheed Martin can guarantee its arrival into Okinawa. But now there is no FedEx, UPS, DHL that's gonna get it out to the aircraft carrier. So it stops and now you have a delay and it has to go get picked up and the aircraft might be down. I don't know if they have resolved that challenge…”

More work to do here to get battle ready … I sure hope there is follow through.

There I go again, the closet optimist.