Australia: dump F-35s or carry on sinking AU$?

I’m going to sell you a plane which can do things you can’t even fully describe. In fact, no one can, because it’s just an untested idea on paper. 14 years later, and you still don’t have a plane, but the price tag has more than doubled. And in fact the cost could keep rising. At the end of the day, you’ll pay whatever I ask.

Finally, this unfinished plane overheats on the tarmac. To cool it down, you have to open some of its doors every ten minutes, even when you’re flying. It’s not faster than other planes, and it doesn’t handle well. Chinese hackers could hack your plane out of the sky. And if you weigh less than 75 kilos and you need to eject, its helmet could actually kill you.

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Now the man who had to sign off on the testing and evaluation for the Joint Strike Fighter for Australia, Dr Keith Joiner, has spoken exclusively to Background Briefing. He wants the whole JSF project brought to a screeching halt. …

Sarah Dingle: A senior US air force strategist Colonel Michael Pietrucha has spoken out to Background Briefing, saying the US itself should pull the pin on the Joint Strike Fighter.

Colonel Pietrucha is a serving officer but is speaking here in a personal capacity.

Michael Pietrucha: I’d drop it like a hot rock. …

Australia’s jets were originally estimated at US$40 million each, which the government says has now escalated to US$90 million. But at this stage Australia is spending a total of almost AU$18 billion on its Joint Strike Fighter program, that’s more than $200 million per plane. Despite it being the most expensive military item we’ve bought so far, it never went to tender. …

Documents released under Freedom of Information show that in March 2002, Australia’s Defence Capability and Investment Committee considered the pros and cons. The cons included not enough information to know whether this paper plane could actually replace our existing fighters, and that buying a stake would effectively end the competition process we’d just begun, ‘possibly to Australia’s disadvantage’.

The pros included ‘a more favourable view of Australia may be generated in the US Defence community’. The Committee concluded that buying a stake ‘is not recommended at this time’. But three months later, in June 2002, we were in. …

The US Government Accountability Office is the States’ supreme auditing agency, which investigates and reports to Congress on how taxpayers’ dollars are being spent. Michael Sullivan is the head of the GAO’s Defence Weapons System Acquisition program.
… Mike Sullivan says the planes are so late, and have sucked up so much money from the Defence Budget, that the US Air Force—the biggest air force in the world and the cornerstone of Western air power—is now being held hostage by Lockheed Martin.

Mike Sullivan: We’re beholden to a single source. We are held hostage to one contractor. …

The next year the Joint Strike Fighter program had a budget over-run so big the US actually has a name for it. It’s called a ‘critical Nunn-McCurdy breach’, which means your defence project is more than 50% more expensive than originally estimated. By law such projects have to be terminated, unless you can demonstrate a good reason why they shouldn’t be. …

Sarah Dingle: If it had been 4 degrees warmer at Williamtown base, any JSF would have run into problems. When the JSF is on the ground, if it’s 32 degrees or more and internal stores are loaded, crews have to constantly open and shut the weapons bay doors. To prevent overheating, the doors can’t be left shut for more than 10 minutes on the tarmac and even sometimes when it’s in the air. …

Chris Mills: It was conferred, I have heard, from the fighter weapons school and these are the top guns of the United States air force, and they call it the ‘little turd’. …

Chris Mills: Well, this is what I say about the Joint Strike Fighter; you pay for it five times. You pay the capital costs, you pay the operating costs, you then pay the opportunity costs of what you could have bought with the money. You pay for it diplomatically because having a good capable military changes the calculus in international relationships. And finally, if push comes to shove, when your air force is defeated, you can lose sovereignty. And that is the ultimate price to pay.