But it will come with strings attached — namely the handover of critical technical data that will make it easier for the department to do the maintenance itself if Lockheed fails to deliver on its promises.

“We’re using really the incentive of the PBL to help us get decent pricing on the tech data required [for the services to do more sustainment organically], so that at the end of that PBL, the services and the department have an option for moving forward,” Lt. Gen. Eric Fick, who leads the Pentagon’s F-35 joint program office, told reporters during a roundtable.

“If it comes to pass that Lockheed really kills it and we end up with great performance, then why would we not sign up for another PBL?” he said. “But if they’re not — if the services and the department and the partners are unsatisfied with the performance — now we have an option [to do sustainment work ourselves], because we have the data that allows us to do something different.”

Earlier this week, the Defense Department awarded Lockheed a contract for F-35 sustainment for FY21, with options for an additional two years that would bring the value of the deal to $6.6 billion.

That agreement will lay the groundwork for a more expansive, five-year performance-based logistics contract for “supply chain management and demand reduction,” Fick said. Put in basic terms, the agreement is meant to ensure F-35 parts can be repaired and made available to the flight line quickly.

For the aspects of sustainment not covered by the PBL, the Pentagon would continue to negotiate annual contracts with the company, he said.

Lockheed has been pursuing a performance-based logistics contract since 2019, when it proposed a fixed-price agreement that would keep the F-35 fleet at an 80 percent mission capable rate. Pentagon leaders were wary of the offer and rejected it, but undertook a study on whether a more limited PBL could provide value.

Ultimately, Fick said, the department opted to negotiate a normal annual sustainment contract for FY21 and signed a memorandum of agreement with Lockheed in spring 2020 that laid out the conditions necessary to enter a PBL.

“We knew as a department, that we did not want to be trapped into a bad deal, for the schedule to be weaponized and for us to have to sign a bad PBL,” Fick said.

Most importantly, the memorandum also included a mandate: Concurrent with the signing of a PBL, Lockheed must agree to a contract to deliver technical data that would allow the U.S. military to take on more supply chain management itself.

The department specifically wants to gain the “provisioning and cataloguing data” that would allow a manager at a depot to order the components and materiel needed for maintaining the F-35, not the design data that is more closely guarded by the company, Fick said.

Congress is wary of a PBL and has advocated for the Defense Department to introduce greater competition for F-35 sustainment, which is almost completely carried out by the prime contractors for the air vehicle and engine — Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney, respectively.

The House Armed Services Committee’s proposed version of the FY22 National Defense Authorization Act directs the Defense Department to provide a briefing on how it could create a “competitive sustainment environment” for the F-35, which the committee believes could “reduce lifecycle costs, increase efficiency, and drive innovation while strengthening the overall viability of the program.”

The bill also prohibits starting a performance-based logistics contact for the F-35 unless the defense secretary certifies that the program meets affordability targets and that sustainment costs would continue to decrease.

Fick said he is generally supportive of increasing competition in the F-35 program.

“[Competition] drives affordability, it drives responsiveness, it drives a focus that the sole-source environment doesn’t,” he said.

Pressed on whether the department would consider competing F-35 sustainment if Lockheed does not perform well on a PBL, Fick said that isn’t the intent, but acknowledged other companies could probably pick up portions of the work.

“Lockheed Martin, as our prime contractor, owns a lot of the intellectual property associated with the system,” he said. “We have access to pieces of it and will continue to use it, but our ability to take and pass that to another so that they might use it is in some ways limited.”

The agreement funds the sustainment of the F-35 air system for U.S. and international customers during FY21, with options for FY22 and FY23 that would bring the contract’s total value to $6.6 billion.

During that time, the average cost per flight hour for all F-35 variants will drop from $36,100 in 2020 to $33,400 in 2023, according to a Defense Department statement. For the F-35A conventional takeoff and landing model — the most prevalent variant of the aircraft, used by the U.S. Air Force and most international customers — the cost per flight hour will go from $33,600 in 2020 to $30,000 in 2023.

Lockheed’s share of the cost per flying hour would decrease by more than 30 percent from the 2020 contract, said Bridget Lauderdale, Lockheed’s vice president for the F-35 program.

The deal will also drive improvements in full mission capable rates and supply metrics, the department stated.

“Working together with our industry partner, the F-35 joint program office team negotiated aggressive cost savings and performance targets that will benefit the global F-35 sustainment enterprise, and all F-35 customers,” said Lt. Gen. Eric Fick, who leads the F-35 joint program office on behalf of the Pentagon. “This ‘21-’23 sustainment contract agreement is a positive step in securing affordable lifecycle costs for our customers.”

The contract covers “on-site support of day-to-day operations from LM field service representatives, engineers, and Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) administrators, along with global enterprise support for sustaining engineering, supply chain, repair and replenishment material, and training,” according to the program office.

However, it does not include the cost of sustaining the jet’s F135 engine, which is negotiated in a separate contract with manufacturer Pratt & Whitney.

Importantly, both the program office and Lockheed Martin stated that the deal “lays the groundwork” for a future performance-based logistics contract, which the company has sought over the past few years.

In 2019, Lockheed proposed a performance-based logistics contract it claimed would result in $1 billion in savings for the department, but the Pentagon rejected the offer. Fick in 2020 said the department was still working to “crisply articulate [its] desired role” in sustaining the jet and didn’t want to get locked into a deal that wouldn’t meet its requirements.

Lockheed presented a scaled-down version of the proposal to the Pentagon earlier this year. That offer centered around ensuring the availability of spare parts and accelerating repair times and would have run from 2022 to 2026.

However, some lawmakers are skeptical a performance-based logistics contract will produce the intended results.

The House Armed Services Committee’s version of the FY22 defense authorization bill includes language that would prohibit the Defense Department from entering into such a deal for the F-35 program unless the defense secretary certifies that the program meets cost reduction metrics and that sustainment costs would further decrease under the terms of the agreement.

Last week, the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee released its portion of the fiscal 2022 defense policy bill, which contained a provision requiring the Defense Department to investigate and implement corrective actions for the F-35′s pilot breathing system.

Although the FY21 version of the National Defense Authorization Act required the Pentagon to assess the root causes of physiological episodes occurring inside the Lockheed Martin-made aircraft, a report by NASA published in November 2020 has raised further concerns that the F-35′s breathing systems may not meet pilot needs, said a congressional aide who spoke with reporters July 28.

“They had some pretty concerning findings,” the aide said.

The NASA study — which used interviews with pilots and data from two F-35s during ground tests — found the Joint Strike Fighter does not continually supply the amount of oxygen needed by pilots, forcing operators to change their breathing rates to compensate.

“Pilots who have suffered [physiological episodes] in the F-35 … fault the breathing system for acute and chronic health conditions that have caused impairment for days, weeks, months, or longer,” the study stated.

By mandating a more comprehensive evaluation, the committee hopes to quickly correct technical problems before the services are locked into conducting expensive retrofits for a huge portion of their fighter inventory.

“Unfortunately it’s taken Congress to get the department to look at those issues and take action,” the aide said.

“We want to make sure that instead of the pilot having to adapt to the jet, the jet needs to make sure that it complies with the military specifications required for pilot breathing systems,” the aide added. “The pilot shouldn’t have to think about breathing in the airplane. It should just come naturally so that they can focus on the tactical employment.”

F-35 physiological episodes first came to the forefront in 2017, when the 56th Fighter Wing at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, grounded its F-35A conventional-takeoff-and-landing aircraft for several weeks. At the time, multiple pilots reported experiencing the symptoms of hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation.

After studying the issue, the F-35 Joint Program Office announced that it would make software changes to the onboard oxygen-generation system, which is produced by Honeywell. JPO officials believed that by amending the amount of oxygen delivered to pilots at altitude, it could lower the number of physiological episodes experienced by pilots.

More than 40 physiological episodes have been reported by F-35 pilots, the committee aide said.

Air Force Magazine reported that 27 of those incidents have occurred in U.S. Air Force F-35As, including one F-35A crash in May 2020 where the “work of breathing” may have adversely impacted the pilot’s cognitive functions, according to the accident investigation.

The number of physiological events in the F-35A has trickled downward since FY17, when there was a spike of nine incidents, according to Air Force Magazine. The Air Force logged four episodes in FY18, three in FY19 and five in FY20.

It’s unclear whether the subcommittee’s mandate for further study into F-35 physiological incidents will ultimately make it into the final version of the NDAA.

HASC is set to mark up its proposed legislation on Sept. 1. Once approved by the full committee, HASC members and their counterparts in the Senate will begin work on a compromise version of the bill.

The measure also for the first time would require women to register for the possibility of future military drafts and boosts parental leave to 12 weeks for all service members after the birth, adoption or foster care placement of a child.

“[This bill] provides for military families while strengthening America’s industrial base and the workers who contribute to our national security,” committee Chairman Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said in a statement.

“This year’s markup provides our troops and Defense Department civilians with a well-deserved pay raise, as well as new tools and reforms to protect the health and well-being of our servicemen and women and their families.”

The defense policy bill is one of the most significant pieces of legislation passed by Congress each year, setting spending priorities and defense policies for the coming fiscal year. The version adopted by the committee Thursday will still have to pass the Senate and survive negotiations with the House before it can be signed into law.

Still, the 23-3 committee vote to advance the legislation signals bipartisan support for the plan, a rarity in the politically divided Congress and a change from just a few weeks ago, when numerous Republicans on the panel indicated they may not offer support for the measure.

More defense spending

The largest change which may have swayed many Republican votes was the addition of $25 billion in top line spending for the Defense Department next year.

President Joe Biden’s proposed fiscal 2022 budget for the department was about $716 billion, a slight boost over this year’s spending levels but less of an increase than the expected rate of inflation.

Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate have lobbied against that figure for weeks, saying it is insufficient to counter threats like a growing Chinese military and terrorist groups worldwide.

“This is a big win for our national security and sends a strong message to both our allies and adversaries that America is prepared to stand up for ourselves and our friends,” ranking member Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., said in response to the committee’s funding increase.

“The world we face today is more dangerous than I’ve seen in my lifetime, and our military must be ready to meet any and all challenges we face.”

But the decision likely sets up a showdown later this year over defense spending levels with the House Armed Services Committee, whose chairman — Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash. — has called the $716 billion mark adequate for military needs.

House progressive lawmakers also criticized the $716 billion level as too high in their chamber’s appropriations committee debate earlier this month. They have noted that defense funding has seen significant increases in recent years, while other domestic agencies have seen flat budgets or cuts.

More equipment purchases

The higher topline would help pay for an expansion in weapons procurement and development next fiscal year.

Lawmakers called for additional funding for the F-35 program, including $85 million to buy an additional F-35A for the Air Force and $535 million to purchase an additional five F-35C aircraft. While both the Navy and Marines buy that version of the jet, the summary does not specify which branch is making those purchases.

The committee also added $175 million for power modules to help ameliorate a shortage of the joint strike fighter’s F135 engine.

In the area of shipbuilding, the committee backed funding to restore a second Arleigh Burke-class destroyer at a cost of $1.7 billion, as well as including $125 million in long lead material for an additional Arleigh Burke-class destroyer to be procured in FY2023.

Lawmakers also added $130 million for Navy’s biggest acquisition priority, the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program. That sum would underwrite “industrial base development and expansion” that would benefit both the Columbia and the Virginia-class attack submarine programs.

And another $350 million was added to the plan to accelerate the construction of the ninth America-class amphibious assault ship and $270 million for expeditionary fast transport vessels. However, a proposed purchase of used sealift vessels received a $300 million cut, with the committee noting that “prior year funds have not been obligated.”

The bill also increases funding for a wide range of aircraft programs: $575 million for five more Boeing F-15EX fighter jets for the Air Force, $191 million for a Northrop Grumman E-2D aircraft for the Navy, $306 million for two Lockheed Martin C-130Js, $192 million for two KC-130J tanker aircraft and $250 million for two CH-53K helicopters for the Marine Corps.

Unmanned aviation also saw a boost, with SASC authorizing an additional $323 million for two MQ-4C Triton surveillance drones for the Navy.

For the Army, the committee authorized an increase of procurement funding for a range of combat vehicles, including a combined $746 million for the Abrams tank, Bradley fighting vehicle, Paladin self-propelled howitzer, and Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.

The committee also added $377 million for UH-60L Black Hawk and CH-47F Block-II Chinook helicopters.

Bolstering research and development of advanced technologies meant to counter the fast-paced China threat was also a goal of the bill. The Committee added $1 billion in additional science and technology funding to pay for research and prototyping activities in areas such as artificial intelligence, microelectronics, advanced materials, 5G and biotechnology.

It also authorized an additional $500 million for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which conducts some of the department’s most high-risk technology development efforts.

UCMJ overhaul

Along with the funding fight, the language requiring women to register with the Selective Service System could cause friction with House lawmakers later this year.

The language reflects recommendations from an independent commission created under a prior authorization bill that found the reasons for excluding women from registering are largely moot now, with all combat posts open to both women and men. However, the idea has faced strong opposition, especially from some conservative lawmakers.

Another major showdown with House lawmakers this fall will center on proposed changes to how military prosecutors handle felonies and other criminal offenses.

The Senate panel included all of the controversial Military Justice Improvement Act in its authorization bill draft, a move that will remove legal decisions on sexual assault and other serious crimes from the traditional military chain of command. Instead, decisions on whether to pursue or drop charges will be handled by a yet-to-be-established independent office of military prosecutors.

The effort is the culmination of eight years of lobbying from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who has argued that military commanders should not have the ability to overlook and under-pursue serious crimes in the guise of sustaining military readiness.

“We have before us the opportunity to provide our service members with a military justice system worthy of their sacrifice,” Gillibrand said of the proposed changes on Thursday.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has backed plans to take sexual misconduct crimes out of the hands of military commanders, an acknowledgment that other efforts in recent years to prevent and punish such offenses have fallen short.

But he and others — including Reed — have resisted moving all serious crimes into a separate prosecutorial category. Gillibrand has countered that treating sexual misconduct differently from other crimes would only complicate the situation.

In the end, her arguments won over enough of the committee to be included in the final draft. House Armed Services Committee lawmakers are expected to have a similar contentious debate when they take up the matter in September.

The committee’s authorization bill also includes several other provisions related to sexual assault prevention and response, including plans to make sexual harassment a standalone offense punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Pay and benefits boosts

Along with the 2.7 percent pay raise, committee members approved plans for military end strength of more than 1.3 million active-duty troops.

The number of Army soldiers would drop by 900 (to 485,000) compared to this year’s levels, the Navy’s sailors total would drop by 1,600 (to 346,200), and the Marine Corps would cut its troop numbers by 2,700 (to178,500). All of those are in line with White House plans to draw down the total number of servicemembers.

The Air Force would see a decrease of about 4,200 personnel (to 329,220) under the Senate plan. That’s 1,000 more than what the administration requested.

Senators also included in their authorization plan language requiring that National Guard and Reserve members receive the same monthly incentive payouts as active-duty troops.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., has pushed for the pay equity in recent years, citing concerns that some part-time troops are receiving less money for identical training and work as their active-duty counterparts.

The legislation includes 12 weeks of parental leave for all service members, fixing a disparity between services in time off allowed for parents.

It would also establish a “Basic Needs Allowance” to ensure that lower-paid troops have enough money to avoid financial distress, an idea that has been proposed but ultimately rejected several times in recent years.

As it does every year, the authorization bill also includes language needed to renew dozens of military specialty pays and bonuses. If the legislation is not finalized by Jan. 1, military officials will have to delay awarding many of those payouts.

The full Senate is expected to vote on the authorization measure after their August recess. The House Armed Services Committee is expected to finalize its companion legislation at the start of September, with a potential chamber vote later in the month.

The new fiscal year begins on Oct. 1, but the final bill is not expected to be completed by then. The authorization bill has passed out of Congress for 60 consecutive years, but only once in the last 11 years has Congress finished their work on the bill before the start of the new fiscal calendar.

“We’ve got a portfolio of about 20 technology programs spanning different functional areas providing the tools needed to do this very rapid, just-in-time integration to meet mission needs,” Tim Grayson, who leads the DARPA Strategic Technology Office, said during a July 20 event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

“Our real big challenge now is how to transition those. We don’t have a nice, clean-cut program office where we can take our tools and put them directly in a classic, conventional program of record. They’re not designed to do those kinds of things. They’re enabling infrastructure.”

Typically, DARPA produces an advanced technology that could be turned into a program of record by the services, which then continue to mature that product before competing a contract.

But many technologies DARPA is developing for the Pentagon’s future war-fighting strategy of Joint All-Domain Command and Control don’t need further development, Grayson said. They need the people who will use the new technologies so that the services can implement the advances.

“What we’re really talking about doing is not buying technology, but buying bodies — buying human beings that will go out and use these tools to conduct mission planning,” he said. “If you put it in that context, it does not sound like RDT&E, but because it’s technology and because it’s coming from DARPA, because it smells like still needing to develop something … the current mindset is, it’s got to go to some program of record.”

One recent success story is the DARPA’s System-of-systems Technology Integration Tool Chain for Heterogeneous Electronic Systems program — also known as STITCHES.

The tool can autonomously write a software patch that translates messages between platforms using incompatible data types. The Air Force recently started to integrate STITCHES, though Grayson said its path has been a “rocky road.”

Although STITCHES has been validated in 19 experiments, the services have been slow to adopt it because they can’t figure out whether to pay for it with research and development funding or money set aside for sustainment, according to FedScoop.

The Air Force’s 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, which was established in June, is starting a “STITCHES Warfighter Application Team” that will teach units how to use the STITCHES software and act as a help desk to support to established users of the tool.

“Someone from across the Air Force — or maybe, depending on policies, from across DoD as a joint activity — will call up SWAT and say I’ve got an integration problem,” Grayson said. “This can be anything from getting a new box on a platform to doing some large-scale JADC2 [combatant command] kind of exercise. The STITCHES team will go out [and] help them with that.”

However, Grayson acknowledged that most technologies under development by DARPA do not have a clear path to become part of the services’ JADC2 efforts: the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System, the Army’s Project Convergence and the Navy’s Project Overmatch.

There are “bits and pieces” that have been adopted by the services, he said. For example, the Air Force tested STITCHES and the agency decision-making tool Adapting Cross-domain Kill-webs, or ACK, during an ABMS experiment in September 2020.

Naval Air Systems Command has started to adopt DARPA’s Dynamic Network Adaptation for Mission Optimization (DyNAMO) — which helps route information across networks to the user who needs it — for the Marine Corps.

“The challenge we have now that we are working with things like ABMS and the other JADC2 elements is, how do we keep coherence?” Grayson said. “Maybe the answer is experimentation, maybe it’s program of record transition, but we’ve got to maintain some kind of coherence across this federated portfolio as these programs go off and have their own lives.”

As the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps’ F-35 operations reach their peak in 2036, it will be exponentially difficult for the services to afford sustaining the F-35 if the cost per tail remains at current estimates, the GAO said in a July 7 report. Cost per tail per year is the measurement the Pentagon uses to measure how much money it takes to sustain a single aircraft annually.

Specifically, the Defense Department will face a $6 billion gap in 2036 between the actual cost of sustaining the services’ F-35s and the cost the services can afford, the GAO said.

About $4.4 billion of that expense will be billed to the Air Force, which plans to buy 1,763 F-35A conventional takeoff and landing jets throughout the program of record.

“If the projected annual sustainment cost overruns — conservatively estimated at tens of billions of dollars when aggregated — are not reversed and brought into alignment with the affordability constraints, over time there will be increasing and significant pressure on DOD’s annual budget as the number of the aircraft in the F-35 fleet increases,” the GAO said.

“Decisions made and actions taken in the coming few years could have a significant effect on the affordability and effectiveness of the F-35 program in the longterm.”

Specifically, Air Force officials told the GAO that unless sustainment costs decrease, “the service’s only available remaining options to meet the affordability constraints are to reduce the total number of F-35A aircraft they plan to purchase, or to reduce the aircraft’s planned flying hours.”

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown has already signaled that the service may be willing to cut the F-35A program of record and buy a less expensive “fourth-gen plus” fighter to replace some of its oldest F-16s, which were originally slated to be replaced by the F-35.

The F-35 program is expected to cost taxpayers a total of $1.7 trillion across its lifecycle, according to the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office’s 2020 estimate.

Sustainment activities — which include maintaining the jet, the manpower needed to support the aircraft, fuel and training munitions costs, support equipment, certain costs associated with training, and other expenses — make up a whopping $1.3 trillion of F-35 lifecycle costs.

The $1.3 trillion sustainment estimate reflects an increase of more than $150 billion since the program was re-baselined in 2012, and there are signs sustainment expenses could continue to grow, the GAO said.

The sustainment cost problem overwhelmingly hurts the Air Force, the single largest F-35 customer.

“The Air Force needs to reduce estimated costs per tail per year by $3.7 million (or 47 percent) by 2036 or it will incur $4.4 billion in costs beyond what it currently projects it could afford in that year alone,” the GAO stated.

The Marine Corps — which operates both the F-35B short takeoff and landing variant and F-35C carrier variant — needs to push down F-35B cost per tail by 26 percent and F-35C cost per tail by 14 percent, or by 2036 will risk incurring about $900 million more than it can afford.

Meanwhile, the GAO calculated that the Navy will need to reduce sustainment costs by 24 percent to meet affordability targets, or it will pay an additional $655 million in 2036.

The stakeholders of the F-35 program—which include the F-35 joint program office, the services and prime contractor Lockheed Martin — have “unique and differing perspectives on affordability,” which ultimately make it difficult to develop a shared plan for cutting sustainment costs, the GAO said.

For example, Air Force officials have noted that, even if it could somehow obtain all spare parts for its F-35 fleet for free, F-35 sustainment costs would still exceed affordability targets by 14 percent. Further, officials told the GAO that there is “little room left for the program to make significant sustainment-related cost reductions” because its design and maintenance plan have already been set in stone.

For the other services, the situation is less dire.

Navy officials believe current cost-cutting initiatives will eventually bear fruit and resolve affordability problems, while the Marine Corps stated that while affordability issues could arise in the future, the service plans to address them further down the road, the GAO stated.

Officials from the Pentagon’s acquisition and sustainment office noted that the F-35 program could cut sustainment costs by transitioning additional contractor-performed maintenance to military maintenance personnel.

Meanwhile, other stakeholders — such as the F-35 joint program office — told the GAO that service requirements like number of aircraft, flight hours per year, and mission capable rate make it difficult to bring down the cost of sustaining the aircraft.

Lockheed Martin officials have also sought for the services to decrease manpower costs, which according to CAPE’s 2020 estimate make up about 53 percent of the total sustainment costs.

Both lawmakers and the Defense Department have a chance to mandate further cost reductions as part of the upcoming Milestone C full-rate production decision, which could occur sometime before 2023, the GAO said.

“Taking program-wide strategic actions to achieve the services’ affordability constraints prior to Milestone C declaration would better position DOD and the services to take the necessary steps to arrest the increasing sustainment costs of the F-35 and plot an affordable direction for sustaining the F-35 program,” the GAO said.

“Such an approach would entail assessing cost-savings initiatives, assessing the impact of potential changes in program requirements, developing and documenting a program-wide plan for achieving affordability constraints with detailed actions tied to milestones and resources, and developing and documenting a risk-management approach for addressing potential challenges or making adjustments to achieving affordability objectives.”

Sustainment costs have become an albatross for the F-35 program over the past several years, and several lawmakers have put pressure on program officials to decrease them.

“There’s no question that everyone involved ― certainly Lockheed Martin ― could be doing a better job on getting sustainment costs down,” said House Armed Services Committee chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash., during a roundtable with reporters last month. “The sustainment costs ― and it varies, I understand they’re as high as $38,000 an hour, and that is incredibly expensive ― it’ll make the plane so that you don’t really want to operate it any more than you absolutely have to.”

The service on July 1 awarded Raytheon a cost-plus-fixed-fee deal for the engineering and manufacturing development stage of the LRSO program, with contract options that max out at about $2 billion.

During the program’s EMD stage, Raytheon will continue maturing its LRSO design and prepare for full-rate production of the weapon in 2027, the contract announcement stated.

LRSO is slated to replace the AGM-86B air-launched cruise missile, which was designed in the 1970s. Air Force officials have argued that the legacy ALCM has become more difficult to maintain as its supply base becomes obsolete, and its effectiveness gets increasingly compromised as adversaries field more sophisticated air defense systems.

The Air Force could buy more than 1,000 LRSO missiles, which are projected to have a range in excess of 1,500 miles.

During a July 2 briefing, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the Defense Department aims to keep LRSO development on track, even as it executes a Nuclear Posture Review that could eventually call for the weapon’s cancellation.

The Pentagon’s fiscal 2022 budget requests full funding for the military’s nuclear modernization priorities, including $609 million for the LRSO program. That money ensures efforts like LRSO, the B-21 bomber and the Columbia-class submarine proceed, even as the department studies whether to make changes to the nuclear enterprise.

“As we continue with nuclear modernization we are going to continue to review ongoing programs to assess their performance, schedule risks and projected costs so you can define the right balance of maintaining the necessary nuclear capabilities with cost-effective solutions,” Kirby said.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in December 2020 that the Pentagon would save $12.5 billion from FY21 to FY30 by canceling the LRSO program and the W80-4 warhead it will carry.

In 2017, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin each received a contract worth about $900 million for the 54-month technology maturation and risk reduction phase of the LRSO program. At the time, the service planned to downselect to a single vendor in FY22 during the EMD period.

However, the Air Force announced last year that it would sole-source the LRSO design developed by Raytheon, effectively booting Lockheed from the competition two years early.

“Our competitive TMRR phase, which included both Lockheed Martin and Raytheon as the prime contractors, enabled us to select a high-confidence design at this point in the acquisition process,” Maj. Gen. Shaun Morris, who leads the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center, said at the time.

China has not yet caught up with the United States in most areas of advanced military technology, and the U.S. industrial base is well positioned to retain its edge, said Northrop CEO Kathy Warden, speaking during an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. But one sector that is “particularly problematic” is China’s growth in advanced computing, including in the development of artificial intelligence and applications used to process and interpret large amounts of data.

“If there were an area I would point to where that capability has shrunk to an alarming state, that would be the one that I would highlight,” Warden said. “It’s not an area that the U.S. has been investing significantly in in previous years.”

There are signs that might be changing under the Biden administration, she said.

The Pentagon boosted funding in its fiscal 2022 budget request for a variety of areas closely related to advanced computing. It aims to spent $2.3 billion on microelectronics, $398 million for 5G network capability and $874 million on artificial intelligence.

President Joe Biden’s proposed $2.3 trillion infrastructure package also includes $50 billion for domestic research and production of semiconductors. That investment would match spending on semiconductors made through the CHIPS Act, which became law as part of the 2021 defense authorization bill. (The bill’s entire name is “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America Act.”)

Warden said the bipartisan support for the act shows “strong progress being made” to incentivize semiconductor production in the United States. Currently, companies in China, Taiwan and South Korea lead in the manufacturing of advanced semiconductors and other microelectronics.

“Having the ability to control a supply chain in semiconductor and chip production could become a national imperative,” she said. “And we don’t want to wait until a conflict puts us into a position where it is a national imperative to realize that we don’t have the necessary capacity under U.S. control. That doesn’t mean it needs to all be onshore, but we do need to have clear access deep into the supply chain for semiconductors.”

While microelectronics are used in commercial products such as smartphones and personal computers, Warden argued that private industry is not incentivized to develop and manufacture the novel, advanced chips and semiconductors needed to ensure the U.S. military’s superiority.

Warden likened U.S. spending on microelectronics to investments made by the Pentagon during the 1950s and 1960s, which ultimately resulted in the invention of GPS and major advances in computers — both of which ultimately filtered to the commercial sector.

“I would submit that those [technologies] would not have matured at the rate they would have if we didn’t have strong government [research and development] spending,” she said. “And we certainly wouldn’t have found competitive differentiation from a national security perspective … if they’d have all originated in the commercial space because they would have been in the hands of all nations more simultaneously.”

In 2020, the F-35 program executive office announced plans to develop a replacement for the Lockheed Martin-made Autonomic Logistics Information System currently used by maintenance crews to perform functions such as ordering spare parts or logging repair work.

Known as the Operational Data Integrated Network, or ODIN, the new system would combine hardware produced by Lockheed with software coded by the government, allowing the Defense Department to retain more control over the system.

But because of a 42 percent cut to ODIN’s development and testing funding in fiscal year 2021, the program office has decided to take a “strategic pause” in ODIN’s software development effort, said Lt. Gen. Eric Fick, F-35 program executive officer.

“Despite all the positive activities, we underestimated the complexity of deprecating ALIS capabilities while migrating to ODIN and learned several important lessons,” Fick said in April 22 testimony before the House Armed Services Committee.

For years, ALIS has ranked as one of the F-35 enterprise’s biggest headaches. The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly documented problems, such as a bulky “deployable” version of ALIS that cannot connect to the internet or incorrectly signaling to maintainers that a plane is not mission capable due to incorrect data.

“We need to continue to improve the functionality of ALIS in the near term, as we ensure that the ODIN structure that we put into place, from a hardware perspective, from a data environment perspective, and from a software perspective, is what the users need,” Fick told lawmakers during the hearing.

In late 2020, the program office developed an ODIN user agreement and capability needs statement, which lays out what tasks ODIN needs to be able to accomplish and how the system should function, he said.

In addition, “The JPO and Lockheed Martin established a contract that captured data rights, frequent software deliveries, and proper data marking for modern software development,” Fick stated in testimony.

Fick’s testimony did not address when the program office intends to restart ODIN software development efforts, saying only that the JPO will update its plan based on available funding, inputs from the services and its finalized strategy for migrating from ALIS to ODIN.

However, ODIN hardware development is moving forward. Lockheed delivered the first hardware kit for testing at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma in September.

“The new kit is 75 percent smaller, weighs 90 percent less than the current hardware, and is projected to be 30 percent cheaper. In addition to the smaller footprint, we are seeing significant performance improvements in ALIS such as data processing and synchronization times 2-3 times faster than ever seen before,” Fick wrote in testimony.

The program office plans to roll out additional kits this summer, which will save money by being able to host multiple squadrons on a single unit, Fick said. The Defense Department plans to invest $471 million into both ALIS and ODIN over the next five years.

In 2018, the F-35 Joint Program Office announced a plan to begin releasing small increments of software code every six months — a model it called Continuous Capability Development and Delivery.

Under C2D2, each software drop should be comprised of four increments of code. This is meant to allow F-35 prime contractor Lockheed Martin to develop software during the first phase, and then test it for defects, fix them and test again before pushing the software it to operational jets.

However, the recent software releases have been comprised of more than four increments to allow the company to tackle bugs that were repeatedly discovered during the coding process, the GAO found.

“For example, software delivered in June 2020 included 10 increments — six more than originally planned,” the GAO stated in its report. “Lockheed Martin representatives said that two of these increments were added to increase functionality and mature capabilities to avoid delays in the next software drop. However, according to contractor representatives, four of the added increments were to address software defects.”

Another software drop, which was originally scheduled for October 2020, included eight increments in total, with four modules added to address bugs, Lockheed representatives told the GAO. That release has been delayed until April 2021.

There are several reasons why software releases are falling behind schedule. For one, Lockheed does not always develop code for all required capabilities during the first increment, as originally planned. The company said this is because of “late contract awards preventing them from conducting new work, supply chain issues, and recent workforce capacity issues stemming from COVID-19 restrictions,” the report stated.

Lockheed also had trouble identifying software deficiencies before new code was released to operational F-35s, with one analysis by a third party finding that 23 percent of all defects (656 bugs total) were discovered after delivery from December 2017 to September 2020.

The program risks further disruption to its schedule as the F-35 moves through the Block 4 modernization effort, which began in 2018 to add new hardware and software to the aircraft. According to a review by the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, future software drops planned for 2023 through 2025 “are more complex” than current releases, while the overall schedule is “high risk,” the report stated.

“Program officials stated that the program is currently reviewing the feasibility of its schedule and DOT&E officials told us that the program office is considering establishing longer time frames for each software drop, such as extending them to 1 year. Simply adding time to the development cycle, however, may not fully address the program’s challenges,” the GAO said, using an acronym for the office of the director of operational test and evaluation.

“Without a software development schedule that reflects how much work can be accomplished in each increment based on historical performance, the program office will continue to experience Block 4 development delays, and capabilities will continue to be postponed into later software drops,” the watchdog added.

In the end, those delays could lead to cost increases and capabilities becoming outdated before they ever reach the flight line.

The GAO ultimately recommended that the F-35 program office implement tools to automate the collection of data related to the software development process, making it easier for the program to identify whether Lockheed is meeting performance targets.

Lt. Gen. Eric Fick, who leads the government’s F-35 Joint Program Office, said that the Pentagon concurs with the GAO’s recommendations and is working to improve the aircraft’s software factory.

“The ability to stay ahead of our adversaries in the high-end fight is inextricably linked to our ability to deliver high-quality software to the F-35 air system at speed. Today, software quality is missing the mark which is driving increased cost and delays,” he said in a statement.

Lockheed has also taken steps to review F-35 software development, launching an independent review team in fall 2020 to lead a programwide assessment of the aircraft’s software capabilities. “This team, comprised of representatives from the JPO, Lockheed Martin, U.S. Government and industry, has made significant progress in identifying and addressing opportunities that provide quality products on time and on budget for the F-35 customer,” the company stated.

The GAO’s report echoed earlier concerns by the Pentagon’s independent weapons tester, who in 2020 questioned whether the program office would be able to put out new software releases on schedule.

“The current Continuous Capability Development and Delivery (C2D2) process has not been able to keep pace with adding new increments of capability as planned,” Robert Behler, the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation, wrote then. “Software changes, intended to introduce new capabilities or fix deficiencies, often introduced stability problems and adversely affected other functionality.”

Simulation difficulties

As the F-35 grapples with software development challenges, it is also facing continued difficulties integrating the F-35 with the Joint Simulation Environment, or JSE — a key simulation technology that allows F-35 pilots to face off against complex and highly advanced threats that would be impossible to replicate in live training events.

The F-35 must complete 64 scenarios in the JSE in order to wrap up operational testing and move forward to a full-rate production decision. While the Pentagon had hoped to finish JSE development and run those tests by August 2020, “testing officials identified technical problems with the simulator,” according to the GAO.

In a response to questions from Defense News about those issues, JPO spokeswoman Laura Seal said the challenges include “the integration of high-fidelity models from multiple external organizations to create a comprehensive, realistic threat environment. … Complex interactions between the F-35 and this synthetic battlespace are also challenging, warranting significant development, test, and verification activities.”

As a result, the Pentagon has pushed off a full-rate production decision — originally scheduled for December 2019 and then delayed to early 2021 — to a still yet-to-be determined date.

The program office does not plan to provide a new date for full-rate production until it finishes a revised acquisition program baseline, which will lay out a modified schedule for the program, which the Pentagon’s lead acquisition official must then approve, Seal said.

The program office is also sponsoring an independent assessment of the JSE technical baseline, which will inform the F-35′s overall schedule and provide a target date for the completion of operational testing, Seal said.

“DOT&E officials stated they are not considering deferring any additional testing or granting a waiver to any test requirements needed for their final report,” the GAO stated.