This column, a regular feature, was originally published on Reuters.com.
1. The book on America’s biggest boondoggle:
Last week, the Government Accountability Office issued the latest report on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, warning that “delays in testing of the jet’s software may hinder delivery of the warfighting capabilities the military services expect” for an additional 15 months. This means that the jets are unlikely to be ready until August 2016, at the earliest, instead of what had been a July 2015 deadline.
This GAO report was the latest of 15 issued by the government watchdog since 2001. They catalog a mind-boggling series of cost over-runs, delays and denials of reality that make the F-35 a parody of defense contractors (led in this case by the Keystone Cops at Lockheed Martin), Pentagon and Washington dysfunction.
The plane was supposed to begin being delivered in 2010, with the total cost projected at a record-shattering (and much attacked) $233 billion. By last year the official acquisition cost was estimated to be $390 billion — though that is likely to rise with this latest delay.
Meantime, reports persist, from the GAO and elsewhere, that the plane has bugs that still haven’t been fixed and that it will never deliver all the capabilities promised.
Because the Pentagon has now decided to purchase 14 percent fewer planes than first planned (down to 2,443 jets from 2,852), the cost per plane — not counting amounts to be added by these new delays — is now $159 million. That’s almost double the original $81 million per plane.
According to this construction data web site, seven or eight new high schools across the country could be built for the $151 million cost of one of Lockheed Martin’s F-35’s.
The latest GAO report also noted that in addition to these acquisition costs “the F-35 fleet is estimated to cost around $1 trillion to operate and support over its lifetime.”
The story of the F-35 should be a book. The over-promises, profligacy and mishaps are so ridiculous and so outsized that this could be a tale as hilarious as it is cautionary.
The writer could even organize the chapters around that waterfall of GAO reports. The first, written as the program was getting underway in 2001, could use this excerpt to open:
Although the [F-35] has made good progress in some technology areas, the program may not meet its affordability objective because critical technologies are not projected to be matured to levels GAO believes would indicate a low risk program at the planned start of engineering and manufacturing development in October 2001.
Four years later, in this March 2005 report, the GAO warned:
GAO found that the original business case for the JSF program has proven to be unexecutable. …. The first delivery of initial operational capabilities to the warfighter have been delayed 2 years so far. The program’s current acquisition strategy does not fully follow the intent of DOD’s evolutionary, knowledge-based acquisition policy that is based on best practices.
And by 2010, the GAO seemed pretty much disgusted with the whole project:
The JSF program continues to struggle with increased costs and slowed progress — negative outcomes that were foreseeable as events have unfolded over several years…. By December 2009, only 4 of 13 test aircraft had been delivered and labor hours to build the aircraft had increased more than 50 percent above earlier estimates. Late deliveries hamper the development flight test program and affect work on production aircraft…. Collectively, testing and technical challenges will likely add more costs and time to development, affecting delivery of warfighter requirements and hampering start-up of pilot and maintainer training and initial operational testing.
This could also be an instructive business and management saga. Not just because of all the screw-ups, but also because, in the last two years, the program appears to have come under better management. Thus, this latest GAO report has an intriguing graph charting new labor and manufacturing efficiencies, and notes steps Lockheed Martin has taken to improve coordination of the program’s “1,500 domestic suppliers and 80 international suppliers spread across 11 countries.”
Someone please write this story of the country that couldn’t fly or shoot straight. Bring to life the people behind this fiasco, the obstacles they faced and all the wrong turns they made.
Tell us what happened in the halls of the Pentagon, Lockheed Martin, Congress and the White House to produce this disaster. Tell us about the frustrated staffers at the Pentagon or Lockheed, if any, who wanted to do the right thing, or who wanted to blow the whistle. Tell us about the cover-ups and the efforts to keep the GAO auditors at bay. Tell us about the lobbyists who kept Congress at bay, despite all the GAO evidence.
Tell us who got rich off of this massive taxpayer loss.
Get hold of the proposal Lockheed used to win the deal and regale us with all the confident promises they made — price, delivery date, technical breakthroughs.
Tell us how, or whether, the jet will change combat and protect us.
And, in an elaboration of this latest GAO report — as well as this recent 60 Minutes segment — tell us about the people now working to fix things.
2. Dealing with voter ID laws:
This smart essay on Bloomberg View by Francis Barry persuasively argues that with the Democrats fast losing the battle to prevent states from enacting strict voter identification requirements, they need to change strategies.
They should instead, Barry suggests, push for the enforcement of a 2005 homeland security law requiring all states to issue “REAL ID” cards — either in the form of drivers licenses or as separate identification cards — that meet consistent, tamper-proof standards and prove that whomever has one is who he says he is and is a citizen or legal immigrant.
Forcing all states to comply and giving them the funds to provide REAL ID’s to those who cannot afford the fees, Barry argues, would overcome the barriers to voting among the poor, the elderly, minorities and others least likely to have drivers licenses and more likely to support Democrats.
Because of opposition to the law by civil liberties and libertarian groups, many states have resisted carrying out REAL ID. Only 21 states, according to Barry, have complied over the nine years since the law was passed, although 21 more are supposed to implement REAL ID by October.
I’d like to see a story explaining how states have been able to resist complying and how, if at all, the Obama administration has tried to complete implementation of REAL ID. What kind of effort, and how much money would it take, to trump the Republicans’ alleged voter-suppression strategy, while also providing the kind of identity verification necessary not only for security purposes but also to implement the employment provisions of whatever immigration reform ends up making it through Congress?
It would also be interesting to see if the politics of REAL ID have shifted, or could be shifted, by the prospect that a secure ID card distributed to all could trump the voter suppression efforts that the same civil liberties groups that have opposed REAL ID have been fighting in court to invalidate.
Steven Brill , the author of Class Warfare: Inside the Fight To Fix America’s Schools, has written for magazines including New York, The New Yorker, Time, Harper’s, and The New York Times Magazine. He founded and ran Court TV, The American Lawyer magazine, ten regional legal newspapers, and Brill’s Content magazine. He also teaches journalism at Yale, where he founded the Yale Journalism Initiative.