USAF looks at F-35 Block capability short-fall

A few points to this Reuters piece.

Note the capability missing from the stated 2018 BLOCK 3F is "classified".

How convenient.

The bit about getting maintenance people for the F-35 should not be a problem.

Why?

On the original plan when the program started, by now the USAF would have hundreds of F-35s. With 120 or so on order every year. This was down-checked in 2006 to 80 per year for the USAF at full rate production, and extending production out to 2035-37. Reason; predicted cost rise.

So, with hundreds of jets on hand by now, the USAF can't claim foul that a shortage of maintenance personal is anyone's fault. It is the fault of USAF star-level leadership.

Not Congress.

Bill Sweetman reported some years later that in 2008, USAF plans and programs people--those that tell the boss what can be paid for and not fantasy--stated that when full-rate F-35 production kicks in, USAF could only afford 48 F-35s per year.

That also assumed full-rate production kicking in at 2014.

Unless more money was added to the DOD budget. How is that all going today?

Grand assumptions of the Joint Strike Fighter program--as sold to congress--claimed much less maintenance personnel required to run a squadron.

So, this idea that USAF is somehow going to run short of maintenance personnel is nothing more than poor planning at the star-rank level.

Yet, we may in fact see USAF spending less on tac-air over the long-haul. Because after the A-10, they will come after not only more F-16s and F-15C/Ds, but ... F-15Es.

F-22s and several hundred F-35s.

Less money spent for operations and sustainment. But not very effective.

It is a plan of where no one will call upon USAF tac-air for real ops.

A flying club and not much else.

So how does the program address missing Block capability?

Either it is fixed, pencil-whipped, or the definition of Block 3F...

...will be changed.


.