By Ken Pole | February 16, 2012 Estimated reading time 4 minutes, seconds.
Canada has invited other countries on Lockheed Martin list of customers for the Joint Strike Fighter to a meeting at the Canadian embassy in Washington on March 1, amid growing concern that a major hitch in the United States’ own procurement will drive up unit prices.
It is necessary to have these face-to-face consultations, Defence Minister Peter Mackay told reporters in Ottawa. The entire program has not been without problems, in both terms of timeline and cost estimates, and so having these discussions is a normal course.
He said the discussions, only two weeks before a scheduled meeting in Australia of the JSF Executive Steering Board (JESB), which would be attended by senior Lockheed Martin and government representatives, will allow the JSF program partners to put direct questions to the company about timelines, costs and any other questions dealing with the development and delivery of the JSF.
This is a capability that is extremely important to the . . . air force and to our entire capability to protect North America and to participate internationally, he said.
However, when asked three times whether higher unit prices might mean the purchase of fewer aircraft the number most often used is 65 he would only say that the government was committed to giving the Royal Canadian Air Force the best aircraft available.
While concern about the viability of the JSF program has been growing for months, it surged when the U.S. Department of Defense confirmed that it was postponing elements of its own procurement and potentially driving up costs to export customers.
As part of an overall $487 billion reduction in U.S. defence spending announced in January, the Pentagon is putting off orders for 179 F-35s over the next five years in a bid to trim $15.1 billion from its short-term budget and to allow for more testing. Officials said, however, that the overall plan still calls for the acquisition of 2,443 aircraft in three variants for the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
Frank Kendall, the Acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics, said the Pentagon decision, coupled with any delays in export orders, would inevitably mean higher unit costs. This was echoed by Lockheed Martin Executive Vice-President Tom Burbage, who said it would raise the overall average cost of the total procurement of all the airplanes.
Italy, the third-largest investor in the JSF program since its inception in the early 1990s, almost immediately announced that it would reduce its requirement from 131 aircraft to 91, as General Claudio Debertolis, secretary general of the Defence Ministry, had signaled the previous day. There will be a revision of this . . . program to align it with disposable resources, he told reporters in Rome.
Italian Defence Minister Giampaolo Di Paola had warned for weeks that the original plan for 131 aircraft by 2018 was under review because his government, like those in many other prospective customer countries, was struggling to deal with budget deficits.
The Australian government has said it is reconsidering the delivery schedule for its planned initial purchase of 12 F-35s; Turkey has postponed the acquisition of at least two; and, Britain won’t make a firm commitment on the number it will buy until at least 2015.
