Capabilities: Australia defers JSF in line with US | ADM June 2012

Defence Minister Stephen Smith’s announcement in May that the Government will delay the purchase of 12 Lockheed Martin Joint Strike Fighters by two years did not come as any great surprise.

Given the pressures it faces balancing the budget, the reported $1.6 billion savings from forward estimates is a significant portion of the $5.45 billion of Defence savings the Gillard Government flagged in the lead up to the budget. The budget also flags the subsequent deferral of the next batch of 58 aircraft, saving a further $700 million.

Minister Smith also indicated that the delay broadly aligns Australia’s Joint strike Fighter acquisition program with the US Air Force, which has deferred 179 of its own aircraft from earlier Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP) batches.

The deferral comes as the New Air Combat Capability (NACC) Project Office reviews the impact it will have on capability and whether there will be a need to mitigate any gap by either extending the Planned Withdrawal Date of the ‘Classic’ Hornet fleet or, as Smith has previously flagged, buying a further tranche of Super Hornets in the interim.

With the Government’s mind on extracting savings from the Defence budget, there are many who now think a revised withdrawal of the Classic Hornet is the more likely of the two scenarios. Australia indicated it would acquire an initial tranche of 14 F-35As in 2009, at a cost of $3.2 billion, and is committed to receiving the first two aircraft, from LRIP Batch 6, in 2014. The other 12 were to come from LRIP batches 8 & 9 from 2016, but the new production profile has yet to be worked out.

Under the schedule revised in 2010, the first two aircraft will cost Australia around $130 million (at 2012 prices and using an exchange rate of 1.03). The average cost over the initial 14 would have been around $110 million (Unit Recurring Flyaway cost), using the same metric, but this will now depend upon the new delivery profile.

Assuming no further cost increases, always a risky business where the JSF is concerned, the average unit cost of this first batch should now be less, as 12 aircraft will be built in later LRIP batches.

Speaking from the US, where he is attending the JSF Chief Executive Officer’s conference, Air Vice Marshal Kym Osley, head of the NACC program, said the planned review will determine the acquisition program and what further measures will be required to ensure a robust air combat capability is maintained in the transition to the F-35A.

“The Minister and Defence consider the deferral prudent, given the associated risk with schedule, and the Minister has clearly given us direction that we are to report back to Government later this year with a plan that covers a number of things,” he said. “The key thing will be the potential for any air combat capability gap.”

AVM Osley says the report will compare the capability required to match regional capabilities and outline options for the ramp-up of the JSF capability to meet a Government agreed Initial Operating Capability date. He says the Hornet fleet has only just finished the Hornet Upgrade program and the Planned Withdrawal Date (PWD) may be able to be rescheduled.

“At this point in time it’s a reasonably robust fleet, so we’ll look at what flexibility we have in the PWD,” he said. “But we’ll also consider other options, such as the Super Hornet.”

The US Government revised the JSF System Design and Development schedule in 2010, following Technical and Integrated Baseline Reviews, after identifying technical risk and concurrency issues – specifically the ramp up of production while flight test was still only in its early stages.

This restructure cost the US taxpayer US$7.4 billion, though no additional money was levied from any of the partner nations, and has delayed IOC for the USAF by two years to either late 2018 or early 2019. The concurrent deferral of 179 of its own aircraft has also contributed to US Government efforts to reign in the domestic budget deficit. The Australian deferral of two years puts the RAAF program broadly into line with the USAF. Originally due to be delivered by 2017, the next 12 aircraft, after the two in 2014, will now be delivered by 2019, though IOC and FOC dates are not yet clear.

“The ramp up that we need year-by-year is yet to be determined,” explained AVM Osley. “We will also have to determine how many pilots we will need to meet the IOC timeframe, so we end up with the right number to meet the IOC requirement.”

Pilots for all JSF operators will be trained at an Integrated Training Centre (ITC) in the US, but the system requires each nation to contribute aircraft to the process, in order to gain training credits.

Australia’s first two aircraft will come off the Fort Worth production line sometime in 2014, but will then have to undergo a substantial airworthiness and certification process, which will take several months. From there they will go to the ITC, most likely to be at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, to begin earning the required credits. The first RAAF pilots will arrive at the ITC in either late 2014 or early 2015.

“Some of the initial Australian pilots will train on the aircraft in preparation for our own Operational Test and Evaluation,” said AVM Osley. “Others will form our initial cadre of Qualified Flying Instructors within the ITC.”

Four aircraft will be delivered to Australia to begin OT&E, leaving the remaining 10 within the ITC to generate training credit for subsequent batches of pilots. After IOC, the training aircraft will be transferred to Australia, at which time the local training unit will begin the stand-up process. As for the future of the test and development program, AVM Osley says he sees software as being one of the major challenges.

“The F-35s capability advantage is in the way it synthesises information and fuses it together. No other platform has done this to the same level, not even the F-22A,” he asserts. “I do expect some delays, they will reach some stumbling blocks with software development and there will be some software they will have to delay to later builds.”

As a measure of confidence however, AVM Osley points to recent exercises where the various sensors have been employed, albeit on other platforms and not integrated into one aircraft, which have achieved outstanding results.

“Software development is a key metric that I monitor almost every day in the program office and it will be a key determinate of when the real capabilities are realised on the aircraft,” he concluded. “There is a degree of schedule flexibility, but we’ll want to see Lockheed Martin setting and meeting milestones, then demonstrating them in flight test.”