F-35 ett fiasko? Läckta Rand rapporten och annat kul

-- Italy will reduce its planned order of Lockheed Martin Corp. F-35 fighter jets and trim the size of the military as part of defense-spending cuts, Defense Minister Giampaolo Di Paola said.

Italy will purchase 90 F-35s rather than the originally planned 131, Di Paola said in Rome in testimony before a joint defense committee of both houses of Parliament today.

(Reuters) - Delays in U.S. and international orders for Lockheed Martin Corp's (LMT.N) new F-35 fighter jet will increase its total cost, Lockheed and U.S. officials said on Tuesday, as Italy announced a cut in spending on the warplane.

On Monday, the Pentagon confirmed plans to put off orders for 179 F-35s over the next five years to save $15.1 billion and allow more time for testing, a third restructuring in recent years.

U.S. officials insist they have not changed their plans to develop and buy 2,443 jets at a cost of $382 billion over the next few decades.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Tuesday opened the door for a possible cut in the number of F-35 fighter jets Canada will buy, after reports that the United States was scaling back its purchase plans.

"There's a budget for that and the government has been clear, we will operate within that budget," Harper said in parliament about the project.

(Reuters) - The Pentagon on Monday confirmed plans to postpone production of 179 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters built by Lockheed Martin Corp over the next five years to save $15.1 billion, but it said the risk was "manageable."

The U.S. defense budget for fiscal 2013 funds 13 fewer airplanes than initially planned, saving $1.6 billion on the multinational, radar-evading fighter plane, the Pentagon's biggest weapons program.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in January, a year ahead of schedule, lifted a two-year "probation" on the Marine Corps B-model of the plane, which can land like a helicopter He said the jet's technical issues were on their way to being resolved.

Last week, Frank Kendall, the Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics who was recently nominated by President Obama to permanently take over the position, said in a speech (pdf) at the Center for Strategic & International Studies that the procurement strategy for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program was an example of "acquisition malpractice." Back in December, Vice Admiral David Venlet, the current F-35 program executive officer, characterized the strategy as merely a "miscalculation."

"Putting the F35 into production years before the first test flight was acquisition malpractice. It should not have been done... But we did it."

Referring to the F-35, Kendall said that there were "optimistic predictions" at the start of production. In other words, it had been assumed that there were "good enough design tools and good enough simulations and modeling that we wouldn't have to worry about finding problems in test," he said. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, this optimism—which the program's leadership held to despite warnings from the GAO (pdf) and others (pdf)—proved to be unfounded.

Kendall reports that the DoD is "finding problems with all three F-35 variants that are the types of things that [you're always going to find] in a state-of-the-art, next-generation, fighter aircraft ." In other words, issues such as design flaws in wings and the tail hook, improperly packed parachutes, and lower than expected combat acceleration, have cropped up.

An industry expert who is a graduate Flight Test Engineer (FTE) of the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School (USNTPS), Peter Goon, stated that, "Given the limited amount of suitable structure at the back end of the JSF variants, due primarily to the commonality that was being sought between the three variant designs and the fact that the STOVL F-35B JSF is the baseline design, there was always going to be high risk associated with meeting the carrier suitability requirements."

Feb 29 (Reuters) - Japan may cancel orders for Lockheed Martin Corp's F-35 fighter jets if the price rises or deliveries are delayed, Defense Minister Naoki Tanaka said on Wednesday, casting doubt on Tokyo's choice of next-generation combat aircraft.

Tokyo has warned Washington against increasing the price, but this was the first time Tanaka publicly raised the possibility of cancelling the order.