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

Den norska roboten heter passande Joint Strike Missile (JSM).

Det flera år sedan som Norge bestämde sig för JSF, i konkurrens med bland andra svenska Gripen. Nu ska planen beställas men det har dröjt eftersom Norge inte ha varit nöjt med återkopplingen i form av beställningar i den norska försvarsindustrin.

Enligt försvarsminister Espen Barth Eide från Arbeiderpartiet så kom det amerikanska beskedet tidigare i veckan. Han betonar att det var en förutsättning för att Norge skulle gå vidare med beställningen./.../Affären kan vara värd 23-28 miljarder svenska kronor.

Unfortunately, neither the budget nor anyone in the Pentagon can answer a simple but vital question about this program: when will the F-35 be ready for our warfighters?
Normally, defense acquisition programs establish an initial operational capability (IOC) date.

This is the date when the program will deliver a usable new widget or tank or plane to our warfighters. To date, the only major defense acquisition program to not have an IOC date established this far into the program is the F-35.

During the House Armed Services Committee consideration of this year's National Defense Authorization Act, I offered an amendment that required the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish the IOC date of the F-35 or risk the loss of 50 percent of the program's procurement dollars until they did so. After twenty years in development, it is time the DoD and Lockheed Martin gave the American people some firm idea of when they could see a return on their $400 billion investment in the F-35 program.

WASHINGTON, June 8 (Reuters) - The rate of scrap, rework and repair on production of Lockheed Martin Corp's F-35 fighter jet is currently around 16 percent, higher than on other military aircraft programs at similar stages of production, the Pentagon said on Friday.

Both the Pentagon's F-35 program office and Lockheed Martin Corp "recognize this is an area that needs improvement, and are working together to achieve world-class levels of quality," said

Navy Commander Kyra Hawn, a spokeswoman for the program office.

Hawn said the other military programs had scrap, rework and repair rates in the mid to high single digits when they reached a production level of 100 aircraft. The F-35 is nearing production of its 100th jet.

The quality concerns are being raised as a strike by 3,300 union workers at the company's Fort Worth, Texas, plant over pension and healthcare benefits is moving into an eighth week.

Lockheed has hired about 200 temporary workers to keep production of its F-35 and F-16 fighters on track at the plant.

Lockheed says the new workers are being carefully trained, but union officials have questioned whether the quality of production - already an issue - would be maintained by workers with less experience on the complex weapons system.

The Senate committee noted in a report accompanying its fiscal 2013 budget bill that a potentially serious issue had been discovered with an aperture on the aircraft that was critical to its electronic warfare capability.

The committee said the full extent of the problem was not known, but it underscored the need for the Pentagon and Lockheed to "rigorously manage production quality," it said.

Sources familiar with the program said the issue centered on the placement of a sensor at the tip of the plane's wing and was a design matter and nothing to do with production quality.

They said the previous placement had reduced the sensitivity of a small part of the electronic warfare sensor, but affected only jets in the first three production batches and had already been resolved in jets now under production.

Retrofits would be done as needed, but only a small number of aircraft would be affected, the sources added.

Cartwright fears the Pentagon's most expensive program, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, might prove to be as vulnerable to enemy hackers as the old under-armored Humvees were to roadside Cartwright fears the Pentagon's most expensive program, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, might prove to be as vulnerable to enemy hackers as the old under-armored Humvees were to roadside bombs. "We built the F-35 with absolutely no protection for it from a cyber standpoint," he said. Just as historical aircraft used to have an "EMCON switch" -- short for "emissions control" -- that could turn off all electronic transmissions from the aircraft when it needed to avoid detection, Cartwright said, today's aircraft need a switch that shuts off all the electronic apertures through which they can potentially receive transmissions, lest electronically savvy enemies hack into them. "As a guy who spends his life on the offensive side of cyber, every aperture out there is a target," Cartwright said.

"There is a nexus coming between electronic warfare and cyber," between traditional electronic jamming and countermeasures and new-fangled hacking, Cartwright concluded. "One knocks the door down and the other goes in and does the dirty work." The current turf wars between the electronic warfare and cybersecurity communities miss the vital point, he said. In the cyber realm, "we've been thinking 90 percent defense, 10 percent offense. That's bass-ackwards for us," he said: We need to stand ready to seize the electromagnetic offensive.