Congressman Rob Wittman (R-VA), vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, held a subcommittee hearing to emphasize the urgency of F-35 program development in deterring the Chinese Communist Party’s military buildup in the Indo-Pacific.
“The F-35 is a technological marvel, but the delays in fielding required capabilities are disturbing,” said Chairman Wittman. “As the Department of Defense’s largest acquisition program, I am committed to providing rigorous oversight to deliver required capability at a reasonable cost.”
(Watch the full hearing)
The hearing addressed challenges in the development and fielding of Technical Refresh-3 (TR-3), modernization and requirements of propulsion and thermal management systems, planning for sustainment strategy, and strategies concerning the development and testing of software and mission systems capabilities.
The subcommittee heard testimony from Dr. William LaPlante, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment at the U.S. Department of Defense; Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt, Program Executive Officer and Director for the F-35 Lightning II Program Department of the Air Force; and Jon Ludwigson, Director of Contracting and National Security Acquisitions at the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Wittman:
“Last Spring, you said the delivery date for a TR-3 upgrade would be between December and April, and now it looks like it’s April to June. I want to drill down and get from you, what are the specific areas that the contractors are having difficulty in delivering the TR-3 upgrade? What are they doing in trying to replicate the aircraft’s operational systems in the laboratory? It seems to me that this ought to be a fairly simple paradigm because contractors have done it for other platforms. They’ve done it for Arleigh Burke destroyers, with Aegis systems — they’ve done it for Virginia-class submarines, so it’s not like this is an unknown.
“Why is there a failure there to deliver this? Is there something there in the laboratories that is not connecting in how this TR-3 upgrade is being pursued?”
Lt. General Schmidt:
“Sir, you’re absolutely correct. Our labs are not properly representing the flight environment, and there’s way too much discovery happening in flight tests. Dr. LaPlante directed a tech-based flight review that started last summer that they’re just wrapping up, and we’ll get the results. We have seen way too much discovery in flight tests. Also, I would say in this program, concurrency has been an issue, but especially when we introduce concurrency in the form of hardware. In this program, we have a history of not being able to – in a timely manner – deliver hardware fully integrated from a software aspect into the program. We are better in the tactical application side, but when we introduce hardware into this program, and not have the full engineering rigor required to identify what the work scope is required to deliver in that specific lot, we run into problems in this program.”
Wittman:
“I’d like to know the course of action to correct this to get back on track because this doesn’t only affect TR-3, it also affects Block 4 as we have aircraft back up. And we are looking at the capability of these aircraft once they get the TR-3 upgrade, are they going to be as capable as TR-2 aircraft?”
Lt. General Schmidt:
“In the near-term — relative to the stability issues that we’ve seen — we are working through them. I wish I had all the solutions in place that proved to me that when I do something in the lab, it’s going to show up that way in the air. We have a number of fixes addressing the stability challenges. We will get to a stable, capable, maintainable airplane here. The data tells me it will be in the middle of the spring, but I would’ve had a more positive answer six months ago. ...
“I will tell you going forward — the competition in the labs and the limited capacity in the labs, between the latest TR-2 software that has great capabilities and will go out onto the field early next year — it’ll be good to get it out of the lab. We are competing right now between the first version of TR-3 hardware and software and the next version, which takes that combat capability in the field that we’re about to deliver early in the year and puts it into a TR-3 version. So we’re trying to create capacity in the labs to do that.
“I would say that for all Block 4 capabilities going forward, the team has done a very good job of taking the many contracts we had across all of the Block 4 capabilities and putting rigorous capability decision points with rigorous system engineering processes so that we don’t get ourselves into a situation where we commit hardware or software, but specifically hardware to a specific lot without all the rigors required to say I can put that into that lot and have that contractually binding with Lockheed or Pratt & Whitney.”
Wittman:
“I think this also begs the question about the enterprise on advanced systems – especially F-35 – now we’re at year 18 if you count from concept to where we are now, and then making sure this platform is operational. It really begs the question: if we’re going to do things quickly, at the speed of relevance, software needs to inform hardware. That’s the way things need to go. It’s a great hardware platform, but it can’t do the things we need it to do if it’s not software-enabled, so we want to make sure that’s the baseline.
“Let me go to performance-based logistics (PBL). Dr. LaPlante, wanted to get your mindset on this. We looked at performance-based logistics contracts to be able to reduce cost, to have more certainty in the supply of spare parts. Mission capability metrics, as you know, the non-mission capable due to lack of parts is currently at 42.5%, absolutely unacceptable. We looked at what you are proposing, and now you seem to be moving away from performance-based logistics because you say it’s going to be more expensive than doing one off, one aircraft mission capable maintenance and mission capability performance efforts.
“Can you explain where negotiations have led you to come to that point now and why a performance-based logistics contract is not the way to go forward?”
Dr. LaPlante:
“We’ve not made the decision to walk away from performance-based logistics overall at the system level. We had to pause, just because of the manpower we had that was doing negotiation, to extend the current contract. We have not walked away from the system level performance-based logistics. Where we were — to do the pauses I mentioned earlier — is in the proposals that we received from industry at that time, they were not sufficient cost savings, if any, and not performance savings, and so we knew we wanted to wrap up the negotiations by about February to be able to switch to the new contract and just didn’t have the time. So we put pause on the PBL to focus on extending the current contracting.
“But overall, this is the way we understand it: the key thing about performance-based logistics is: (1) picking the right metric to measure the contract with, and (2) you also want to do it over some period of time, five years or even longer. Sometimes at the systems level, performance-based logistics is very hard to do. I’ll explain an example why. If the contractor themselves or the program office doesn’t have control over the metric, I was talking to one of my colleagues in another country who had one system-level performance-based logistics that was actually not working for him because the metric in there was things like flying hours and he didn’t have control of it, nor did the contractor so sometimes you have to get the right metric.
“Where we’ve been in the metrics with this discussion is something called the gross issue effectiveness rate requirement, so it’s a percentage of total demands filled at the base with onsite inventory divided by total number of demands and supply response time. We think those are good metrics, but for us to get a good idea on whether we can meet the metrics, that data has to be something that is reliable. And that was part of the issue, but we haven’t given up on it.
“The other piece, and this may be the case, there is something in the sustainment community called the market basket approaches where you decide maybe for subsystems or what we might call systems, to do a PBL, but have one single PBL for the entire plane. So we’re looking at all of that and actually we’re looking at that as part of section 142. Because of section 142, that you all helped us with, really directed us to begin really standing the organic government management of sustainment. And to do that, the government has to know what it’s going to do itself organically and what it’s going to contract to do. And so the market basket approach may be there, we were not going to wrap up the negotiation on this one in the time we needed. I wouldn’t have been able to satisfy the requirement to have it certified for the price savings, but we’re not walking away from it overall.”
Wittman:
“I think you hit the nail on the head as far as metrics. I would encourage you to look at other organizations out there that do performance-based logistics. When you go to the airport, the airlines make sure they keep their aircraft in the air. They’re pretty aggressive about making sure that when that aircraft’s at the gate, now some of us had experiences where the aircraft gets rolled away from the gate, but their operational availability is pretty impressive, so they don’t make money if they’re not in the air so I would argue this: a lot of things can be learned from that, obviously tactical aircraft different than those passenger aircraft, but I think some of those concepts are probably the same.”
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