In foreign policy, alliances of course make a country stronger. We are seeing it in the suddenly renewed relevancy and expansion of NATO. More alliances mean more weapons, more people available to deploy, and more resources to use if one nation is attacked, and so forth.
As they say, and as we are now seeing in Ukraine, teamwork makes the dream work.
There’s a similarity when it comes to defense contractors. Of course, each company develops proprietary platforms and programs, and deserves to be well compensated for its work. But no military could operate if its planes couldn’t land on its ships, incompatible because they had been made by a different contractor, or if its army equipment couldn’t coordinate smoothly with its navy equipment.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff was launched in 1942 to ensure that the services could work together smoothly for the good of the United States. Likewise, American defense companies need to work together to build military weapons that can mesh. One company may make the ship, another make the radar system, a third make the engines. After deployment, though, the entire platform needs to work together.
But when it comes to the next generation of fighter planes, one contractor, Lockheed Martin, is acting with a massive sense of entitlement and seems to write the rules. It is taking steps to loop out a longtime collaborator and is even icing out the Pentagon to do so.
The jet involved is Lockheed’s troubled F-35. The Air Force says it intends to keep using an existing engine instead of developing a next generation engine for the F-35. A smart move, because it would allow the military to move ahead with plans for a “next generation” plane to eventually replace the F-35. It is called the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program.
Lockheed doesn’t seem to be on board. In a recent interview with Breaking Defense a leading Lockheed executive “publicly backed the Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP) as an alternative engine for the F-35.”
That seems to have caught everyone off guard, including the company that builds the current engine for the F-35. “Pratt executives accused the world’s largest defense contractor of attempting to ‘delay or stop’ the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, arguing that the aerospace giant is seeking greater ‘longevity’ on the F-35 line that would distract from or defeat the purpose of a new, sixth-generation fighter,” the Breaking Defense story says.
That would, indeed, seem to be the plan; Lockheed is trying to slow down NGAD so it can keep selling F-35s, whether or not that is what the military wants (or whether or not they work as advertised).
This is odd on many levels. It isn’t as if the F-35 is, say, akin to LeBron James: a successful weapon that manages to dominate despite increasing age and the emergence of shiny new things. Instead, to stick with the sports analogy, it’s more like Robert Griffin III--a coveted top pick who never really panned out: a very public, very expensive disappointment. The F-35 is a program that everyone wants to and has tried desperately to make work, but nobody really has managed to. Not the military, not Lockheed Martin, no one.
Defense News has an entire page devoted to the problems of the F-35. It reminds us that “The F-35 program currently has 857 deficiencies, but only seven are considered ‘critical.” Only seven. What a relief.
Kidding aside, the F-35’s problems aren’t new. They go back to when the jet was on the drawing board. There is a reason the military has barely used this weapon, even as our country fought almost continuous wars from 2001-2021: it does not do the job. For that reason alone, moving on to NGAD is a better idea than attempting to keep trying to bandage the F-35.
Arrogance comes before a fall. Lockheed, ironically, has both the arrogance and has had the fall. The F-35 is already failing, yet the company persists in exhibiting incredible arrogance.
There is no reason Lockheed can’t be a huge and important part of the NGAD program. However, they could really do a better job of working with other contractors and cleaning up its own messes.
Christian Josi is a veteran of international center-right politics. He is the Founder and Managing Director of C. Josi & Company, based in Virginia Beach and Washington, DC.
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