A great question: when to cancel a program?
Dan Ward has a great article up at Time's Battlelands Blog. Titled "Why to Cancel a Pentagon Procurement Program", it examines program termination, which the author argues should occur under three conditions:
We can’t afford it.
We don’t need it.
It doesn’t work.
More intriguing still is his look at two Air Force Acquisition programs I've blogged about here: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and C-27J Joint Cargo Aircraft.
On this note, Stars and Stripes just ran an ironically-placed pair of articles. The top of page 4 featured a piece from the Los Angeles Times about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s ballooning costs, showing how the estimated price tag jumped from $233B in 2001 to $395B in 2011. That’s an increase of $162B for an aircraft that is expected to deliver its first basic combat capability in 2015, assuming all the technical problems can be solved by then. The article quoted Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta as saying, “We absolutely need it for the future.”
Immediately below the JSF story was a piece about the USAF’s pending decision to cut the C-27J Spartan, which the U.S. has been using for combat supply missions in Afghanistan for the past eight months. The Air Force has spent approximately $1B on the Spartan so far and recently signed a contract worth $2B, but the article explained that Air Force leaders now see the small cargo hauler as “a luxury it cannot afford in this era of cost-cutting.”
If the Spartan is an unaffordable luxury at $2B, it does beg the question of the JSF’s affordability at $395B. We can afford the expensive one but not the cheap one? I think that’s a fair question to ask, since the C-27 is being called “unaffordable” while the JSF’s cost growth alone is 80 times larger than the new Spartan contract.As for necessity, if we don’t need the C-27J – which is flying in today’s war – one might perhaps be forgiven for wondering how much we need the still-being-developed JSF, whose most optimistic delivery date occurs after the projected 2014 departure from Afghanistan. Of course, the SECDEF’s commitment to the JSF couldn’t be clearer, so the necessity question for that particular aircraft is settled in the affirmative – at least for now.
A final question remains – does it work? Since the C-27J is flying missions this very minute, it clearly earns a yes. Based on the latest test results, I’m sorry to say the JSF doesn’t get a yes quite yet.
Since the author is an Air Force acquisition officer, his opinion provides some unique perspective, don't you think?
