The Official F-35 Price Tags Are Bogus: Pentagon statements do not reflect
real costs or original estimates
(Source: originally posted on War Is Boring blog on Dec 22, 2016)
By Winslow Wheeler
http://www.defense-aerospace.com/articles-view/feature/5/179781/the-latest-official-f_35-prices-are-bogus.html

On Dec. 12, 2016, president-elect Donald Trump asserted that F-35 unit cost
was “out of control” through his preferred medium, Twitter. On Dec. 19,
2016, U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan, in charge of the Joint Strike
Fighter project, gave the press his version of things.

Multiple media outlets passed along the officer’s comments, but with no
analysis of the completeness and accuracy of Bogdan’s assertions. The
reports offered no context or alternative views on the stealth fighter’s
actual cost per plane.

The general said each one of the Air Force’s F-35A would cost $102.1
million, while both the U.S. Marine Corps’ F-35Bs and U.S. Navy’s F-35Cs
would set the taxpayer back 132 million each. Those costs average to
approximately $122 million for a “generic” F-35.

Bogdan got these numbers from the funds Congress set aside in the 2015
defense budget for what the Pentagon called “Lot 9,” just one of a number of
planned F-35 purchases. In November 2016, the U.S. military was still
negotiating the final deal with plane-maker Lockheed Martin.

Needless to say, the unit costs Bogdan gave the media were incomplete. They
involve only the Pentagon’s existing contracts with Lockheed and
engine-maker Pratt & Whitney to build the airframes and jet motors.

The numbers do not, for example, include the cost to buy maintenance
equipment and other necessary support elements. They do not include money
the Pentagon will spend to fix design errors discovered in testing now and
in the future.

These figures are not the “sticker price.”

One could calculate a far more complete price from the appropriations that
Bogdan told Congress he needed to buy functioning airplanes. The difference
between what he is telling the press now and what he told Congress in 2015
is significant — it is also the difference between a factory simply putting
together an airplane and delivering an airplane that can actually fly and
operate.

For the 2015 fiscal year, the F-35 project chief petitioned Congress for
$6.4 billion to produce 34 F-35s for the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy.
This amount did not include separate funds for research and development and
other costs that the Pentagon asked for in its budget request.

With the production data, we can calculate that a F-35A has a price tag of
$157 million, not $102 million. It’s $265 million for a F-35B and $355
million for a F-35C, not $132 million for either variant.

On average, these F-35s cost $188 million apiece, not $122 million.

More basically, Bogdan says the F-35’s price has been coming down, and
indeed it has. The $188 million generic price in 2015 was less than the $250
million the Pentagon quoted in 2001.

For the 2017 fiscal year, Congressional appropriations showed us that the
total costs came down again to $128 million for a generic F-35. That’s $113
million for an F-35A, $142 million for an F-35B and $241 million for a
F-35C.

However, an old Congressional Research Service report on the F-35 tells us
that in 1994 the Pentagon was promising F-35As for $31 million, F-35Bs for
$31 to $38 million and F-35Cs for between $30 and 35 million. In 2017
dollars, those costs would be $53 million per F-35A, $53 million to $65
million for each F-35B and $51 million to $60 million for a single F-35C.

Put another way, in 2017, an F-35A costs about twice what the Pentagon
promised Congress more than two decades earlier. Compared to this initial
estimate, the F-35B costs more than twice as much now, while an F-35C is
about four times more expensive.

I suspect Trump can recognize when he is being scammed. In this case, the
Pentagon is telling him American taxpayers can get F-35s for only two to
four times what they originally advertised.
====================
In 2014, Winslow Wheeler retired as the Director of the Straus Military
Reform Project at the Project On Government Oversight. He worked on national
security issues for 31 years in the U.S. Senate for members of both
political parties and at the Government Accountability Office.

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