Blame-shifter

Lockheed Martin, the maker of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, is happy to use their bought and paid for whipping boy, Dr. Thompson of the Lexington Institute, to insult their top customer.

Again.

This time Thompson has an interesting collection of statements that show the desperation in trying to maintain a positive message about the troubled F-35 program.

For Thompson, it is all the fault government and not Lockheed Martin.

When examining a few points of historical interest, we find that just is not so.

Marketing and not sound engineering management process was allowed to drive the origins of the F-35 program and still does today. Fault: LM and DOD.

A faulty Joint Operational Requirement Document (JORD) was drawn up. The JORD is obsolete and assumed there would be several hundred operational F-22s to perform the heavy work. With that dream gone, the JORD has no relevance to the emerging threat picture over the alleged life of the F-35 program. The F-35 is obsolete by definition of the JORD. The JORD does not recognize the fact that the F-35 is unable to take on emerging threats. The F-35 is too expensive to use for non-anti-access threats that can be done by any other existing platform; better/cheaper. Fault: DOD

The main reason for the F-35 to exist is that it would be affordable. Due to many other influences, that possibility is long gone. Fault: DOD and LM.

The requirement for STOVL. STOVL fighters are not needed (at any price) to fight wars. This complex requirement put the major poison pill in the JSF concept and later the F-35. STOVL in the fashion of needing 7-tons of fuel for every sortie while trying to maintain a flying piano at a bare base is not realistic. The STOVL ship requirement ignores the fact that for any real wars (Libya being a side-show), there isn't any conceivable and/or sane scenario where big carrier groups will not be present. The STOVL requirement hijacked the whole program thanks to the United States Marketing Corps and a want to sell to an already decrepit and death-hospice UK MOD. Fault: DOD.

Incompetents made several poor assumptions on the ability of Lockheed Martin to pull this off on schedule. And, the schedule itself was full of poor assumptions. The first warning of the future was when LM had a big cost over-run in the concept demonstration phase while competing with Boeing to win the JSF contract. The government gave LM a pass. Fault: DOD and LM.

The X-35 was allowed to do its proof of concept with no existing weapons bays in the design. Holes are heavy. LM won. Fault: DOD.

Right after contract award to LM, incompetents could not come up with a useful weight management program. What I find interesting is how many observers of this program fail to grasp the importance of weight management. Fault: LM and DOD.

Lying to the customers. It is all there in existing public documents. Fault: LM and DOD.

Allowing the DOD to lie to Congress. Fault: DOD and Congress.

Failure to take the DOD to task for massive program management problems. Fault: Congress.

Failure to launch a Congressional investigation with the assistance of the DOD Inspector General and U.S. Justice Department. Fault: Congress.

The above is not all-inclusive. We can probably think of some more places to assign blame. One can be found everyday in the mirror; for those that vote.

Thompson is right. Blame needs to be assigned. Unfortunately his allegiance limits his opinions on the matter.

But, I suppose, we will continue to see some observers of the F-35 program quote him as a valuable source.

Some ask me,"how do you know?"

I don't "know". I notice.