/View.info/ The US Congress has criticized the F-35 program due to delays
The defense budget approved by Joe Biden in December was an all-time high of $886 billion. A significant part of the funds will be used to modernize existing weapons and create new ones, including strategic ones. But along the way unexpected obstacles arose – very dangerous for Washington.
Problematic new product
Among the issues that will hit the Pentagon budget hard is the F-35 fighter jet. Recently, Lockheed Martin released the 1000th model. In 2001, the manufacturer promised to fulfill an order for 2,852 units by 2010. For this, they asked for 233 billion dollars. 23 years have passed, the portfolio of orders, including foreign customers, has reached 3,481 aircraft, but the final price has increased more than seven times – to 1.7 trillion. It is the most expensive weapons program in American and possibly world history.
The F-35 is intended as a multirole fighter-bomber for the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy. Packed with electronics, the aircraft, built on stealth technology, was supposed to replace a whole range of combat vehicles.
However, the advertised product develops “children’s diseases”, the elimination of which requires additional money and time.
Fulfilling the mandatory requirement for a fifth generation fighter – flying at supersonic speed – proved to be no easy task. So if the deck versions are in such mode long enough, they lose their invisibility. The stealth coating bulges and cracks, and the antennae in the tail fail.
Engine defects were also found – and there have already been incidents, most notably in December 2022, an F-35B crashed near Fort Worth during a vertical landing. As a result, supplies were suspended for two months.
Several machines crashed due to software issues. And this problem, as noted by the American edition “Defense News”, has not yet been solved.
A technological solution
They want to remove the flaws as part of new updates. However, the company did not fit into the schedule and postponed them from April 2023 to summer 2024.
Because of this, according to F-35 program director Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt, production of new aircraft is also slowing. And manufactured fighters must fly with an incomplete version of the software.
Notably, Congressman Rob Whitman, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s Tactical Air and Ground Forces panel, doubts manufacturers’ ability to keep up until the summer. “I’d like to share your optimism, but consider me a skeptic,” he said.
John Ludwigson, director of national security contracts and acquisitions at the Government Accountability Office, also reported problems with the new update. It has been allocated 10.6 billion dollars, the completion date is 2026. Now the price has increased by almost a third – 16.5 billion, and everything will be completed no earlier than 2029.
In September, the Marine Corps lost another F-35B to an accident in South Carolina. But aircraft difficulties are not the whole story.
A rocket of half a century
The renewal of the US nuclear triad is not going according to plan. Thus, the B-21 Raider strategic bomber took off later than planned, only in November. And the successor of the “Ohio” submarine, the main carrier of atomic weapons – the “Columbia” submarine – has significantly increased in price. Although the situation is worst with intercontinental ballistic missiles.
LGM-30 “Minutemen-III” based in silos are currently on combat duty. They are quickly becoming obsolete – these intercontinental ballistic missiles were put into service as early as 1970. Maintaining 400 missiles costs a lot of money: for half a century, annual costs have increased by 17%, today the total amount is 482 million dollars. The new Sentinels were supposed to enter service in May 2029. But last year it became clear that they would succeed only by April-June 2030.
And now Bloomberg reports: the cost of the program has risen from $96 billion to $117. And therefore the government may shut it down completely, leaving Minuteman-III.
In a calmer climate, Washington would have turned a blind eye to all this. But now, in the context of the confrontation with Russia and China (and the clear lag in some areas, for example, in hypersonic weapons), this can lead to much more dangerous consequences than financial losses.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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