Not a Surprise

When the Pentagon selected Lockeed Martin to make the JSF, Lockheed Martin got them to make sure that the program that would be the Hotel California for support and logistics. (You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.)

It's no surprise that the Pentagon is looking to pay $½ Billion to get out of the logistics roach motel:

The F-35 program office wants $500 million so that it can harness technical data that will make it easier for the military services to manage F-35 spare parts instead of having to rely on prime contractor Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon’s F-35 program executive said today.

In order for the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy to set up an organic supply chain, the services need “provisioning and cataloging data” associated with various parts, Lt. Gen. Eric Fick told lawmakers at a House Armed Services readiness subcommittee hearing.

“We have the rights to that data. It’s not a matter of data rights, it’s matter of data delivery — and being able to have that data delivered is going to cost money,” he said. “And that money is going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of about half a billion dollars, divided amongst the services.”

………

The debate on F-35 technical data rights have been a sticking point in negotiations between the Pentagon and Lockheed in recent years, as the department has shifted its focus to lowering the sustainment cost of the aircraft. When the F-35 program was conceptualized more than two decades ago, it was structured under a “Total System Performance Responsibility” approach that gave Lockheed an unprecedented amount of power to manage the sustainment of the aircraft.

It should be noted that Israel demanded, and got, better access to this data than did the US military, because the Pentagon, and L-M were concerned that if Israel was not in early on acquiring the platform, it would adversely sales worldwide.

“As a result, the government did not procure technical data that the government could eventually use, as needed and depending upon the circumstances, to promote vendor competition and increase government control over specific elements of sustainment,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in a report on F-35 sustainment released today.

 ………

When it became clear that the TSPR [Total System Performance Responsibility] model was inflating costs, the Pentagon began shifting to a hybrid approach where the Defense Department took additional responsibility for sustainment functions like storing or transporting parts.

It was always going to inflate costs.

This is a redux of the Lead System Integrator acquisition model that was so disastrous that Congress actually banned the the process.

Something important to note here, this is not incompetence, it is corruption.  This result, excessive cost and lack of operational capability, was foreseeable, but it was equally foreseeable that generals would get cushy and remunerative sinecures after they retired, so they did what Lockheed-Martin wanted.