The U.S. Defense Department is considering ordering as many as 450 F-35 aircraft from Lockheed Martin Corp., sending warplane output to the fastest in three decades as it gains confidence in the advanced fighter’s performance.
The purchase would total 150 jets annually over three years and would include aircraft destined for international customers, Undersecretary Frank Kendall told reporters during a conference call Friday from Norway, where he was attending an annual meeting of F-35 customers and producers. The deal could potentially yield “double-digit” savings, Kendall said.
The Joint Strike Fighter is intended for use by the Air Force, Navy and Marines, along with sales to U.S. allies. Output has held steady at around 35 a year while the jet undergoes flight-tests and Lockheed and its suppliers debug software and boost engine reliability. As the production tempo increases, the cost of making each jet should fall from $108 million to about $80 million by decade’s end.
The hope is the order would be $36 billion instead of $48.6 billion.
Using block buy authority instead of the multi-year procurement process to buy three years’ worth of F-35s would allow defense officials to avoid Republican Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a frequent critic of cost overruns on the fighter program. McCain would probably not try to kill the F-35 but ask hard questions in an annual procurement process.
Signing the block buy would effectively “wall off the F-35 program from the rest of the DOD budget, and would increase budget pressure -- ‘uncertainty’ -- on other weapons systems and contractors,” he said.
The deal probably would include all the jets for fiscal year 2018 through fiscal 2020 in the Pentagon’s latest five-year plan
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