With F-35 deliveries on maintain as a consequence of improve woes, Home authorizers need to trim this 12 months’s purchases of the jet and put the cash towards fixing a number of issues.
The Pentagon would lose 10 F-35s throughout all three companies underneath the Home Armed Providers chairman’s mark of the fiscal 2025 coverage invoice, decreasing the whole purchase to 58.
This transfer would save $1 billion to be plowed into this system. Lawmakers need a digital twin of the F-35, a brand new avionics flying testbed and extra software program integration lab, and to repair issues with the jet’s radars, in line with a congressional staffer.
The invoice would additionally stop the supply of 10 further jets till the Pentagon “submits to the congressional protection committees sure corrective motion plans and acquisition methods that may enhance analysis, growth, testing, analysis, and manufacturing points and deficiencies recognized throughout a number of areas inside the F-35 program enterprise,” in line with the laws.
The F-35 program has been struggling to discipline a computing improve that may allow the jet to make use of new weapons. This Know-how Refresh 3 has been delayed a number of instances and the Pentagon nonetheless doesn’t know when it is going to be totally prepared. The Pentagon has stopped accepting the deliveries of latest F-35s from Lockheed Martin and dozens of jets are at the moment sitting in storage.
However TR-3 is simply “one of many many points on the market we’re making an attempt to handle coming into the 2025 NDAA,” the staffer mentioned.
The Pentagon had already reduce its deliberate purchase of F-35s in its 2025 funds proposal as a consequence of spending caps set by Congress. Whereas worldwide demand for the F-35 stays excessive, it stays to be seen if worldwide prospects may alter their funding plans to fill these manufacturing slots.
However the staffer mentioned that the F-35 program workplace has advised them that six of the ten jets they’re slicing might be made up with international navy gross sales.
The draft coverage invoice is the beginning of a protracted funds course of. The Home Armed Providers committee is ready to mark up the invoice on Might 22, and can doubtless make quite a lot of adjustments to the laws.
