brainsnorkel.com

In a past life I worked on planes. Big sharp ones with fins, gills and pointy blowy-uppy stuff - as it’s known in the trade. I follow defense a little. This post is a summary of something that I think should be much more widely talked about.

In June 2002 the Australian government decided it wanted to repeat the experience of the tortuous budgetary and project slippage experience of the F-111 by signing up to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) development program and ordering 100 for an esitmated US$ 4.5 billion.

The JSF is to be developed to meet the needs of 8 nations. Sounds easy enough, right?

To quote DefenseTech blog:

…And a report last month, from the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded that the program was so complicated as to be “unexecutable.”

Is Australia worried? The new chief of the ADF should be:

A high profile invites greater scrutiny and Houston can expect plenty of parliamentary and media focus on the Joint Strike Fighter project. With a price tag of up to $15 billion, it is the biggest spending program in Australian history, at least twice as large as the Snowy Mountains scheme.

As chief of air force, he was the driving force to buy the Joint Strike Fighter and retire early the F-111 long-range strike jets, leaving the military operating for at least two years without either plane. It’s arguably the most important, and risky, strategic decision the military has taken in decades as air combat supremacy in the region remains a core objective.

There is the potential for this project to go horribly wrong on two flanks. The Joint Strike Fighter is still in its design phase and will almost certainly be hit by cost overruns and delays, widening the so-called “capability gap” between the retirement of the F-111s and the delivery of the 100 strike fighters beyond two years.

Yow - two years. They are working on contingency plans (cruise missiles launched from P3 Orions!?), but it sounds like two years is going to be a massive underestimate.

The Government? Peter Costello sounds on top of things:

Mr Costello conceded that Australia’s new generation fighter, the Joint Strike Fighter or JSF, would probably run over budget.

“All previous experience in defence purchases tells us that they very rarely come in at a lesser cost.”

It would be a good idea to stop laughing at New Zealand’s armed forces from now on. We’ll need all the composure we can muster.