(Luft) Lockheed Martin F-35 - Lightning II

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How Much Will JSF Cost?

When the Pentagon’s top buyer appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee, most observers expected Ash Carter to tell lawmakers just how much each F-35 costs and how much the plane is likely to cost over time. That didn’t happen. Winslow Wheeler, a bipartisan conagreassional defense budget expert now at the Center for Defense Information, penned a detailed analysis and commentary picking apart the Pentagon’s numbers and their underlying assumptions. One area sure to spark disagreement is his discussion of F-35 production. This plane is supposed to be the first advanced fighter built on the closest thing to an assembly line since World War 2. The Pentagon and Lockheed Martin say it will not be hand built, as was the F-22. But Wheeler argues that stealth materials will make it virtually impossible to build F-35s relatively quickly and efficiently. Winslow’s commentary follows. — Colin Clark

Ashton Carter, undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, and Christine Fox, director for Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, presented new unit cost estimates for the F-35 during two recent hearings in the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. Those estimates are extremely optimistic and very incomplete.

The F-35 unit cost estimate is incomplete because the $114 million to $135 million “Average Procurement Unit Cost” (APUC) Carter and Fox announced, in “then=year” dollars, to buy 2,443 aircraft does not include any research, development, test and evaluation money for the F-35. The best available estimate of those additional development costs is about $60 billion (to add to the estimate of $278 to $329 billion to produce the F –35s). Including those costs would add about $25 million to the cost of each aircraft, making the Carter-Fox total program unit cost somewhere between $139 million to $160 million.

It may be that Carter and Fox are unwilling to testify to a total program unit cost because they are unwilling to inflict further “sticker shock.” Presumably, the official, more complete numbers will be made available later in April when the Defense Department releases its new Selected Acquisition Report (SAR), now about 18 months late. What Carter and Fox thought they had to gain by delaying the more complete revelation does not merit speculation; their existing (incomplete) production unit cost estimates have little to do with reality.

The 2011 budget request for the F-35 plans to buy 43 aircraft for $8.654 billion in procurement funding. That makes for a production unit cost for the 2011 buy of $201 million per plane. In his March 24 testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, Carter stated that the unit cost “will decrease significantly” from this level as purchases increase and production processes “optimize.” This is consistent with conventional wisdom that there exists a “learning curve” for aircraft production that progressively shrinks unit cost steadily as production proceeds. Thus, Carter and Fox argue, F-35 unit production costs will come down from the currently unsettlingly high number of $201 million each down to the $114 to $135 million band.

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