F-35 JSF 예언자들...

 

무려 사업비 총액이 약 3천억불 (한화 약 346조원 규모) 에 F-35 JSF 개발. 예언자라 할까요 아님 선지자라 해야할까요.

동 사업에 대해서 지난 수년간 문제점을 지적해온 사람들의 얘기를 모아 본 기사 입니다.

 

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Prescient commentary on F-35

Fort Worth Star Telegram    11/20/2009 Author: Bob Cox

Copyright 2009

F-35 test flight 11-13-08 002 In a column posted on Huffington Post, Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information, reprises a long ago commentary on the political finagling that led to the Joint Strike Fighter.

 

The August 2000 commentary (The JSF: one More Card In The House) by Chuck Spinney, former Air Force officer and civilian Pentagon weapons program cost analyst, makes some interesting points that in hindsight were eerily prescient of the situation that could be developing today.

 

The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), central to the Department of Defense's modernization agenda, looks more and more like a case of "Here we go again." Why? Because:

 

* Without timely deliveries of 2,853 JSFs, beginning in 2007, the plan to modernize Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps tactical aviation (TacAir) forces won't happen.

* Without the promises of acquisition reform-cost savings, shorter development times, increased production efficiencies, all without sacrificing capability-the economic assumptions gluing together the entire DoD modernization program unravel.

 

The TacAir house of cards is the inevitable product of short-sighted decisions made as the Cold War ended. In 1991 and 1992, the Air Force and Navy prematurely rushed the F-22 and F/A-18E/F, respectively, into engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) without determining how they would modernize the entire force over the long term. In both cases, the aim was the same: build political support networks quickly before the threat of a peace dividend became the skunk at the garden party - and hope that the future would take care of itself.

 

And this part of the story is, well, we've seen it before. Full speed ahead and worry about the costs and consequences later.

 

In March 1999, the Congressional Budget Office reported to the Senate Armed Services Committee that JSF costs might be underestimated by as much a 50%; in March 2000, the General Accounting Office told Congress the development program should be lengthened to reduce technical/cost risks: "To allow the JSF to proceed as planned - without maturing critical technologies - would perpetuate conditions that have led to cost growth and schedule delays in many prior DoD weapons system acquisition programs." The GAO claims DoD restructured the program so that the EMD decision will be made with even less information than originally planned, and the program has migrated toward the traditional practice of developing technologies and products concurrently.

 

Some interesting reading. Spinney, by the way, was a protege of the late Col. John Boyd, one of the fighter mafia leaders and a co-father of the F-16.