Joint Strike Fighter targets rent

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From Crikey’s Bernard Keane comes a tale of Lockheed Martin entitlement in Australia’s quest to dominate SE Asian skies:

The problem is, the F-35 program is not under control, even according to the US government. In September, thePentagon Inspector-General issued yet another in a long line of scathing reports about the program, having found over 700 separate problems with the program’s administration that led to over 300 findings. “The F-35 Program did not sufficiently implement or flow down technical and quality management system requirements to prevent the fielding of nonconforming hardware and software,” the Inspector-General found. “This could adversely affect aircraft performance, reliability, maintainability, and ultimately program cost.”

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That apparently did not deter federal cabinet here from deciding to lock Australia into $12 billion on the planes. Nor had the fleet-wide grounding of the planes in the US last year after cracks were discovered in the plane’s turbine blades and elsewhere. Nor did another report, revealed in January this year by Reuters, by the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation, that described the performance of the plane’s highly complex software as “unacceptable” and noted that Lockheed Martin had delivered less than half of the software capabilities its contract specified.

Software was the also the target of yet another critical report just last month, this time by the US government Accountability Office:

“The Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) predicts delivery of warfighting capabilities could be delayed by as much as 13 months. Delays of this magnitude will likely limit the warfighting capabilities that are delivered to support the military services’ initial operational capabilities—the first of which is scheduled for July 2015—and at this time it is not clear what those specific capabilities will be because testing is still ongoing. In addition, delays could increase the already significant concurrency between testing and aircraft procurement and result in additional cost growth.”

So the plane will be further delayed, and costs could blow out further.

I am agnostic on the plane’s capabilities but our unfailing ability to support rent seeker is not doubt.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.