Australia Frets Over Fighter Gap

The good news, for the JSF program, about Australian defense minister Stephen Smith's visit to Washington is that he expressed faith in the final outcome, in the course of an interview with Australia's ABC.

I'm absolutely confident that in the end the project will get up, and that's because the full weight of the United States defense industry and administration is behind it.

However, Smith sounded what - for Australia - was a note of unprecedented caution.

We also made sure that in our own planning there was plenty of pre-planning for slippage on schedule and slippage on cost. But, we're now starting to rub up against both of those issues, and I've made that clear publicly and privately.

In terms of schedule, there'll be an exhaustive review done before the end of this year, so I think by the first quarter of next year, we'll be in a much better position to know whether we need to start really seriously planning for a gap in capability, and cost will also be impacted upon by future decisions in terms generally of United States defense budget cuts.

It's quite clear that there will be further cuts and these may have an impact on the number of Joint Strike Fighters that the United States itself orders. So that will have an impact on cost, but, again, we won't know that variable for a bit more time yet.

In terms of the actual number of Joint Strike Fighters, we've made it clear that our initial order is 14. We're part of the program. But any future numbers will be subject to further consideration. 14 effectively gives us one squadron. You would want to have more than one squadron of Joint Strike Fighters, but we'll take that step by step.

The Defense capability plan talks in terms of around 100, but that is very indicative. It's not a firm number and not something that either Defense or the government is attached to or will necessarily adhere to.

Smith, notably, did not demur when the interviewer stated that he had meetings in Washington with Boeing leaders.

This all suggests that the issue raised here in March 2010 is still alive: so far, nobody has produced an official assessment of where the cycle of rising unit costs and delayed, slower deliveries (both to the Pentagon and for export) will stabilize. And meanwhile, the U.S. fiscal crisis has turned the screw tighter.

The challenge for the Pentagon's leadership is this: Guess low, and it will probably be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Guess high, and you risk driving the price up (by investing and tooling for unrealistically high rates) and triggering a second round of the spiral.

Tags: ar99, tacair, jsf, super hornet