F-35 Controversy Rages On

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW)—a U.S. nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating the waste, fraud, mismanagement, and abuse with which the United States’ federal government is demonstrably rife—has released a new brief titled The F-35 Does Not Need an Alternate Engine. The work was co-authored by CAGW president Tom Schatz and Director of Research Sean Kennedy.

The brief presents compelling evidence contradicting the assertions of numerous Capitol Hill lawmakers maintaining collectively that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) is in need of an alternate engine. Messrs. Schatz and Kennedy contend such and undertaking occasions a waste of taxpayers’ money.

The notion of fitting the F-35 with a new powerplant isn’t new. An initial proposition to that effect was laid to rest in 2011. Now, as then, the retrofitting of America’s JSF fleet with a vulgarly-expensive new engine is opposed by the Department of Defense and taxpayer groups, but vehemently supported by members of Congress seeking to serve parochial interests at the expense of U.S. national security.

In a statement, Schatz and Kennedy set forth: “CAGW won a multi-year, multi-faceted battle to eliminate funding for a wasteful alternate engine for the F-35 that should stay dead and buried. Upgrading the existing engine would be far less costly, and the alternate engine is not compatible with all three versions of the JSF, making it illogical and particularly wasteful to fund its development. Questions have also been raised about pilot safety if the alternate engine is deployed, and any alleged harm to the industrial base from using a sole-source engine is overblown. The projected lifetime operations and maintenance costs of the JSF, the most expensive weapons system in history, are $1.727 trillion, so trimming costs in the program is vital. This issue brief is part of CAGW’s and CCAGW’s [Council for Citizens Against Government Waste] multi-faceted effort to stop members of Congress from unnecessarily wasting billions of dollars on the duplicative and unnecessary alternate engine.”

In 2021, the United States Air Force conducted the TacAir study, an investigative enterprise that examined the tactical requirements of U.S. combat aircraft in future conflicts. The study’s results compelled then Air Force chief of staff General Charles Q. Brown to concede the F-35 program had failed to achieve its goals. General Brown further set forth that little reason existed to believe the F-35 platform would ever deliver on its designer’s promises.

In 2023, the F-35 variant operated by the U.S. Air Force is flying less frequently than the service’s F-15E Strike Eagles—which were developed during the 1980s.

Over the seventeen-years since the F-35’s 2006 entry into U.S. service, the F-15E fleet has consistently demonstrated a dispatch availability twice that of its F-35 Lightning II counterpart. So states a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

The CBO report showed the mission capable rate for the Air Force’s F-35A fleet fell 11-percent between 2021 and 2022. The mission capable rate for the U.S. Marine Corps’ F-35B fleet dropped by seven-percent over the same time-period. The U.S. Navy’s F-35C fleet, however, saw a five-percent rise in dispatch availability—to a less-than-stellar 58-percent.

According to the CBO report, availability of all three F-35 variants, in 2022, ranged from a dismal 54% to an only-slightly-less-dismal 58%.

The $1.7-trillion F-35 program is the most expensive military undertaking in the history of humankind. The First and Second World Wars combined cost American taxpayers $320-billion, a mere 18-percent of the F-35’s total program costs. Notwithstanding its epic, eye-watering price-tag, the F-35’s lack of availability has occasioned supposition among Pentagon brass that the advanced, sixth-generation aircraft will never become the workhorse machine it was envisioned to be. Instead, the Lightning II—after the fashions of Vought’s F-7U Cutlass and Convair’s B-58 Hustler—may well wind up an overpriced, temperamental embarrassment relegated to nice roles at the periphery of U.S. national defense.

Parties interested in reading Citizens Against Government Waste’s The F-35 Does Not Need an Alternate Engine brief in its entirety may do so by visiting: www.cagw.org/reporting/f-35-alternate-engine .

FMI: www.cagw.org