The way JSF program office director Maj Gen Charles Davis puts it, the Joint Estimate Team (JET) which reviewed the program last year was his idea. "We had independent estimates between $5 billion and $37 billion" over the program office estimate, Davis said at a Brookings Institute forum yesterday, "so I sent a letter to [acquisition chief] John Young and said I need to get to one estimate I'm arguing with."
According to Davis, the JET based its projections - a two-year delay and $15 billion overrun - on two factors. One was the application of historical experience - the F-22 flight-test program's productivity and technical issues like the F/A-18E/F wing-drop problem - to JSF plans. Davis says that some of the F-22's problems were caused by funding cuts and that better modeling and simulation will avert test problems.
The JET also has a major disgreement with the program office about cost savings from the use of "cousin" parts across the three versions of the aircraft. The program office says that they will be 80 per cent cheaper than they would be if they were completely different; the JET says 25 per cent cheaper. Cousin parts are components that differ in shape, strength and thickness from one JSF variant to another, but which are made using the same processes and materials.
"The JET will be totally wrong and the program office will be totally wrong," Davis said. "The real answer will be somewhere in between."
So, by this definition the hull plates of a Liberty ship and the armor of a Sherman tank would be cousin parts . So would the door panels of a Chevy Malibu and a Dodge Ram pick-up. The real answer from a realistic perspective is that it is a different shape, different thickness and different strength it is not the same part in any meaningful sense and the savings should be zero.
YGBKM!
I hear ya, Rhino!....Slick's total indifference to what is real continues to entertain.
This is almost as good as some of the other attempts at generating alternate realities and other comfortable fiction attributed to the good general -
JSF is still at a point where it can be anything to anyone,
....and
Were going to make some mistakes. I just hope we make some new ones.
....and that all time favorite:
&..Davis challenged industry providers & as well as military concept-of-operations planners, to expend more effort in figuring out how to data-link the JSF with other weapons systems and how to use it in combat.
You could be forgiven for thinking these look a lot like something from the pen of the outgoing Commander-in-Chiefs script writer.
If not and if these are only half true, then the JSF Program is in a whole lot of hurt - far more than even those with countervailing views based on hard evidence derived from independent analyses had concluded.