F-35 Operational Evaluation Suspended Until Mid-2020 As Doubts Grow

(Source: Defense-Aerospace.com; posted Nov. 14, 2019)

PARIS --- Senior US lawmakers said Wednesday they’re unlikely to authorize the Pentagon to award a coveted multi-year contract to build F-35 Unless the program solves such problems as chronic shortages of spare parts that often wear out quicker than anticipated, USNI News reported yesterday.

Speaking during a joint hearing of two House Armed Services subcommittees, Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), chairman of the readiness subcommittee, said the F-35 program is still plagued by high operating costs, inadequate repair capacity, spare part shortages and poor reliability of replacement parts. In addition, the failure of the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) to function as planned is compounding the spare parts problems.

In parallel, the Pentagon’s head of operational test and evaluation yesterday revealed for the first time that the F-35’s Initial Operational Test and Evaluation (IOT&E) has been suspended, and will not resume before mid-2020 at the earliest.

The summer of 2020 is also the time when the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin expect to field a modernized, upgraded version of the F-35’s Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS), Defense Daily reported Nov. 13.

While Pentagon Undersecretary of Defense Ellen M. Lord told reporters last month that the end of the IOT&E would be delayed, she did not say that it had been suspended, which puts the failure on a different scale.

The reason for the suspension is that the Joint Simulation Environment (JSE), which is required to fully test the aircraft’s capabilities, is not ready, and will not be for another nine months or so.

Many previously unknown facts about the F-35’s shortcomings and the suspension of its IOT&E until mid-2020 were disclosed during Nov. 13 hearings by two subcommittees of the House Armed Services Committee, which posted this video.

The JSE will not be ready to start final phase of operational testing until July [2020], Robert Behler, the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation, said during a Nov. 13 joint hearing of two subcommittees of the House Armed Services Committee. he said. In turn, this means that a decision on moving the program into full-scale production will not be taken until early fiscal 2021. “There are enormous challenges and there are a lot of unknown unknowns still out there.”

“The Joint Simulation Environment is essential,” Behler explained. “The JSE is a man-in-the-loop synthetic environment that uses actual [F-35] aircraft software. It is designed to provide scalable, high-fidelity, operationally realistic simulation. I would like to emphasize that the JSE will be the only venue available other than actual combat against peer adversaries. To adequately evaluate the F-35, due to the inherent limitations of open-air testing, these limitations do not permit a full and adequate test of the aircraft against the required types and density of modern threat systems, including weapons, aircraft, and electronic warfare that are currently fielded by our near-peer adversaries. Integrating the F-35 into the JSE is a very complex challenge, but is required to complete IOT&E, which will lead to my final IOTE report.”

“So far, the JOTT [Joint Operational Test Team] has conducted 91% of the open air-test missions, actual weapons employment, cybersecurity testing, deployments and comparison testing with fourth-generation fighters, including the congressionally directed comparison test of the F-35A and the A-10C,” Behler added.

“Operational suitability of the F-35 fleet remains below service expectations,” Behler also said. “In particular, no F-35 variant meets the specified reliability or maintainability metrics. In short, [for] all variants, the aircraft are breaking more often and are taking longer to fix,” even though several suitability metrics are showing signs of improvement this year.

“There are two phases of IOT&E remaining,” Behler said. “The first is electronic warfare testing against robust surface-to-air threats at the Point Mugu [California] Sea Range. The other is testing against dense surface and air threats in the Joint Simulation Environment [JSE] at the Naval Air Station Patuxent River [Maryland]. I would approve the start of these tests when the necessary test infrastructure is ready.”

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