F-35: Death spiral is closing in

Great Debates
161

Government contracting is unlike business contracting. For one thing, only in rare occasions does the government issue contracts that bind the government to paying for something more than one year at a time.

For example, both production and R&D contracts for the F-35 are basically annual contracts with options for future years. If Trump didn’t want to buy any F-35s in his next budget, the government would most likely be liable for various shutdown costs (moving the tooling into storage, compensating Lockheed for some limited actions taken in good faith, etc.) The government is in no way, shape, or form obligated to buy any F-35s next year.

162

Sure, but Trump can’t cancel the program on his own. Congress has to agree not to allocate funding for the buy.

163

Right. Hell, recently submitted Presidental budgets are basically ignored completely, and I have no doubt that this trend will continue under Trump as well. In this case, that’s probably a really, REALLY good thing actually. :stuck_out_tongue:

164

Well, maybe. Considering how little reason they have to compromise it wouldn’t surprise me if the GOP submits a “no money for anything except the military and anti-abortion charities” budget.

165

This is a misunderstanding of what constitutes a budget proposal. Each presidential budget includes a few fiscal policy measures - reform the tax code, reform entitlements, etc - and these are rarely acted upon.

The budgets for individual agencies are generally accepted with some degree of modifications, ranging from mild tinkering to modest reforms. I’d say Congress approves 97% of the defense budget as proposed by the President each year.

166

Assuming enough political pressure came to bear and all the necessary parties (including numerous global partner customers and manufacturers) lined up for another F-22 style fiscal bloodbath, yes of course the program can be stopped. But the term “convenience” would not be remotely imaginable in the characterization of any such deal. In fact, it would be stupendously expensive and ill-advised for numerous reasons well beyond the scope of this discussion.

Anyone familiar with the F-22 program immediately preceding, knows exactly what I am talking about.

167

Wait - you said something earlier to the effect of, “Trump can’t cancel the contract because government contacting doesn’t work that way.” This implies that you have some understanding of government contracting.

However, you don’t seem to recognize the term of art for the government terminating a contact in cases where the performer did not default on its obligations. “Termination for the convience of the government” is the proper term for the government ending a contract prior to full performance.

Seriously, how can you say that this is “not remotely imaginable in the characterization” of ending a defense contract? It’s the damned proper term for what we are talking about.

Based on your apparent unfamiliarity with the term, I must question whether you know anything about government contracting. So once again, what point do you think you are making?

ETA: and I have quite a bit of knowledge of the F-22 cancellation, and I don’t have a clue as to what you’re obliquely referring to.

168

The point, though, is that it’s still Congress that has to approve it. Trump can’t just unilaterally decide ‘hey, let’s ax the F-35 program!’ and it gets done that way. He can submit a budget defunding the project…which would simply mean that money not previously spent on the project or already allocated would be cut back, not that whatever we have already committed to would be given back as some seem to be implying.

As for the first part I’ll bow to your knowledge of presidential budget procedures. I know presidents submit the things but I thought Congress basically went with its own compromise budget and didn’t really pay that much attention to what the President submits…at least not in the more recent administrations. If I’m wrong about that then learned something today. :slight_smile:

169

I however certainly do recognize the pedantic prattle of someone who has completely missed the point in their rush to be the smartest person in the room. As a former employee of The U.S. Defense Contract Management Command, Northern Europe, I’ll just smugly stop interacting with you now so the semantic wordplay games may continue unabated.

170

Well, fantastic. So you surely know that the government has very broad powers to cancel contracts for convenience, in which case I have not a damn clue what you’re disagreeing with me about. I especially have no idea why you vaguely allude to some sort of problematic outcome of the F-22 cancellation. If you were going to point out a horror story of cancellation, the most obvious case would be the A-12, which of course was a T for D.

Specifically, what are the “stupendously expensive” costs of curtailing the F-35? (I continue to maintain that such a cancellation would be foolish, but I cannot see how it would be stupendously expensive. The production and R&D contracts are such that the limit of the government’s liability should be the amounts appropriated in any year. I have a hard time seeing that there would be any liability on the government for things like dealing in bad faith or whatnot. So where do these outrageous termination costs come from?)

171

Agree with Ravenman’s larger point.

Yes, there would be significant costs for contract termination for government convenience. And that would mean substantially 100% of the money spent on F-35s to date would be wasted. In that sense it would be colossally expensive.

But when you factor in all the spending foregone in future years on not buying the other 1000+ F-35s, now you’re talking a yuuuge net savings. Not net cost.
The real OTOH is that just because the F-35 is cancelled doesn’t make the reason we started the project in the first place go away. Instead of doing without essentially forever, instead we’re going to have to start designing & building something else. And those costs may well swamp the costs of the planned F-35 program. Viewed at that level, cancelling the F-35 “bakes in” the cost of inventing and fielding the “F-40” or whatever. Which is almost certainly going to be even more expensive. Absent some miraculous step-change in tech.
As always, what looks like a good move in short-term tic-tac-toe can prove to be a bad move if we’re actually playing long-term chess. A hell of a lot of what goes wrong in society and in politics can be laid at the feet of different factions being utterly focused on one timeframe or the other, not on all of them as wisdom would dictate.

172

Just for everyone’s reference, I tried to find a dollar figure associated with the cancellation costs of the F-22. The figures I found were a low-end estimate of $80 million, a claim of actual costs of roughly $150 million, and a high-end estimate of $400 million.

Now, we never built more than 20 F-22s in any year, and we are now producing something more than 100 F-35s in a year (including international buys). Yes, the costs would be higher for terminating the F-35, but we are not talking billions of dollars. More likely, a few hundred million in termination costs as a very rough swag. We’re talking on the rough magnitude of what a few airplanes cost.

173

I’ve kind of lost the overall focus of the discussion at this point (sorry, seriously distracted lately). Just curious, are you suggesting we should cut the F-35 program, or just explaining that we could in fact cut it and what it would cost?

174

What I’m responding to is posts that assert something between “Trump can’t cancel the F-35 program” to “it would be horribly expensive to cancel the program.” Those are just factually untrue assertions.

I think cancelling the program would be silly, and there’s a decent chance that Congress might keep it afloat for a while if he did so, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.

175

Ah, gotcha. Sorry that I wasn’t following along very well there. I agree, it could be canceled…obviously, since other programs have been in the past. I guess ‘horribly expensive’ is going to be subjective…to ME, millions of dollars are ‘horribly expensive’, since I don’t have that sort of money, but to the US government it’s a drop in the bucket. While it’s true that Trump can’t unilaterally cancel the program he could recommend cancellation on his budget and if Congress agrees then it could be canceled as you noted.

I also agree it would be ‘silly’ to cancel it…I think it would be really stupid and a waste as I’ve said in other threads on this subject. This is an airframe and combat system that will probably be with us for decades, and based on the pilots assessments I’ve read it’s going to be a winner once the teething pains are overcome.

176

Once again the SD faithful demonstrate their peculiar lack of insight or understanding, especially with regard to the bigger picture. Some rather opt to post their ill-conceived rants considering only their own limited, inaccurate perspectives. Countries all over the world are depending on the F-35. The cost of modifying or cancelling the program cannot be measure in U.S. government money, and the costs are not just monetary.

177

Both things I said. Both factually true. And last but certainly not least, considering measuring intangibles including everything from foreign relations to war-fighting capability to numbers of dollars, pounds, yen and lots of things in between, cost impact from negatively funding the F-35 program on an F-22 scale (just as a reference point - it could be anything right? we are after all speculating here.) would be unprecedented by an order of magnitude.

Paying contractors for things not providing combat power would be the tip of the iceberg.

178

WTF? You think that Trump cannot cancel a defense program despite other ACAT 1D programs being terminated in recent years - VH-71, EFV, DWSS, F-22, and on and on.

You also cannot say why the F-35 program, if terminated, would lead to huge termination costs. Now you’re backtracking and throwing in “intangibles” as some measure of cost. This is patent nonsense. I’ve shown a rough order of magnitude of termination costs for a large defense program, and you’ve provided nothing in terms of verifiable facts.

When come back, bring something else than your unfounded opinions.

179

Definitely a WTF moment. Did you actually read what I wrote? Have you followed along with anything I wrote in this thread? Did you understand what I was responding to and what my response meant? Because based on this rather silly reply I’d have to say the answer to all of this is ‘no’.

180

The President has weighed in on the F-35 again. It makes me want to do this: :smack:

Anyone in this thread, or the others that have been like it, are surely familiar with my position: I’m generally a supporter of the program despite its warts, and I think most people don’t have a clue as to what is really going on, so they decide it is a disaster. Well, now the President weighs in with a few thoughts:

He claims that he cut the cost by $600 million. This is like the fly that rides on the chariot saying, “My, what a dust I do raise!” The costs of production are coming down, and barring any more specific evidence, I think these savings were already baked in the current negotiations which have been ongoing for many, many months.

He also said that “Boeing will be competing during the process.” Uh, no, there’s no F-18 vs F-35 competition. It doesn’t exist.

But then the President offers his view on the F-35: “A great plane, by the way… Lockheed is doing a fantastic job… There were great delays, tremendous cost overruns… We’ve ended all that. We’ve got that program now in really, really good shape.”

This is a really dumb thing to say. As much as the program has stabilized over the last few years, it will soon be entering operational test, and, ladies and gentlemen, this is where the remaining warts show up. I bet you anything that R&D costs are going to spike in the next few years, but nobody knows how much that will be. But it will take money to fix things, no doubt. Meanwhile, production costs will continue to come down, as everyone knew they would.

Again, as a supporter of the F-35 – I’d never say that delays and cost overruns have been ended. That’s a pretty dumb thing to say.