Lifetime Cost To Run F-35 Fighter: About $1 Trillion

[Purveyor]

By Reuters
Monday, February 27, 2012 4:35 EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon estimates that it will still cost about $1 trillion to operate a fleet of 2,443 F-35 fighter jets over the next 50 years, but is continuing to analyze how to drive that staggering sum down, a top U.S. Marine Corps official told Reuters.

Lieutenant General Terry Robling, deputy Marine Corps commandant for aviation, said top defense officials agreed last week to continue low-rate production of the new radar-evading warplane built by Lockheed Martin Corp, while keeping a close eye on the cost of maintaining and operating the new jets.

“Everybody was on board with … the program,” Robling told Reuters aboard a military aircraft on Saturday after a ceremony involving three F-35B jets at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. “We understand the costs are high. We understand that we need to do something, we need to make decisions down the road.”

Robling said the cost estimate would likely decline in coming years as more jets were built and flown, reducing the reliance on comparison data from other aircraft programs.

MORE...

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/27/lifetime-cost-to-run-f-35-fighter-about-1-trillion/

[Scuba]

1. I'd feel a lot safer with Medicare for All.

[Fearless]

10. +1

[indepat]

27. For sure. A $trillion here, a $trillion there, pretty soon you are talking

big bucks.

[bluedigger]

2. I'm interested.

Do they have a payment plan?

[Fearless]

11. Clearly they should have to pay it outright for 75 years like the Postal Service!

[sofa king]

3. And they'll never be useful.

Paint the hovering F-35 with a UV targeting gun, release about $3000 worth of tiny semi-autonomous Frisbees, each with a small titanium rod in it, and let 'em be sucked into the intakes.

In a future war zone where everyone else spent their money on cheap RPVs, an F-35 will never get fifty feet off the ground. My 20g toys will catch and kill your 9g attack fighters every time.

[leveymg]

4. Another way of saying: F-35 is already obsolete, and was born an outclassed compromise.

Cancel the program. Just keep the old mix of airframes flying and upgraded, and put the money saved to better use.

[sofa king]

6. Yep.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that a pilotless vehicle is already capable of carrying weapons, and the progress of miniaturization, autonomous programming, and secure communications means that war in the air is now inevitably trending toward the smaller, the cheaper, and the faster.

The robots are going to win, because they don't have to carry a life-support system and without a pilot they can accelerate and maneuver under stresses that would turn a human being into jelly. That makes them cheaper and faster, which collectively outweighs "better" every single time.

Worse still, we've cornered the market on piloted fighting, and nobody can or ever will be able to challenge us at the game we perfected long ago. That practically guarantees that everyone else will go the other way.

It's the exact same logical path that guerrillas take when their country is occupied by a superior on-the-ground military. Rather than challenge the enemy on the battlefield, they aim instead for what they can hit.

To me, that means the F-35 is worse than a Valkyrie-style political football, it's a national security policy position that is untenable and which needs to be reversed.

Edit: Perhaps the simplest way of defining the problem: a piloted aircraft is a platform for carrying weapons; when the weapons fly all by themselves, the pilot becomes a liability.

[MACARD]

12. the military needs to stop replacing our tried and true Aircraft

the F-15 is still a more than competent fighter for this day and age and it is pointless to replace it with the F-22.

the F-35 is replacing the F-16 and Harrier attack jets both of which are still perfectly competent.

the Stealth Fighter would replaced the A-10 had the Stealth fighter been anywhere near as good as the A-10, but all the stealth fighters have been retired.

all these stealth aircraft the only things they have over their predecessors is their stealth and nothing more.

[kysrsoze]

16. Very good points - We already have everything we need, along with incremental upgrades.

[primavera]

31. Actually, we have a lot more than we need

The US spends more on military than the next 10 largest military budgets on earth combined and, of those 10, all but one are our own allies. There's absolutely no reason why we need to be spending anywhere near as much as we do on military.

[Sherman A1]

25. Agreed

The airframes need to be replaced as they age, but the designs still work very well and having been long payed off should be much less expensive to simply continue the production line. Certainly new avionics & electronics can be added, but the aircraft work well. That said in many of the current situations a P-51 or A4D Skyraider would probably work just as well.

Bring back the B-36!

[PavePusher]

29. Not entirely accurate.

We do still need to replace planes, they wear out, get old, overused, and overstressed. But many/most could be replaced with upgraded versions of the same airframe at a much lower cost than the new models.

The Stealth fighter and A-10 had very different missions.

[zipplewrath]

13. Sunk costs

The problem with the F-35 is that the development costs are already spent. Short of deciding that you don't need ANY plane in that category, you're probably better off just going with it, that trying to develop a low cost alternative. As they suggest, the target costs are probably over stated, especially if they put any effort at all into reducing the specific cost drivers going forward.

There was discussion when the original F-35 contracts were being written that it was probably going to be the last manned fighter contract ever. That day is probably coming faster than we thought, and using 2050 as the "lifetime" of the F-35 might be a tad long. They could be out of any substantial service within 20 years. The direction China goes over that time frame could dictate our decisions.

[sofa king]

15. Good points.

It occurs to me that since the F-35 is already semi-autonomous itself, with fly-by-wire inputs and onboard systems already overseeing most of the tricky details of takeoff, landing, and maneuver, it may yet have utility by ripping out the cockpit and using it as a mothership for the semi-autonomous weapons that it will inevitably carry.

But that's a job that a Predator already does for a fraction of the cost.

Unfortunately, I cannot foresee any way in which a human being will be able to survive the crushing maneuvers such a vehicle will have to use just to stay in the game, except by removing the pilot from the vehicle entirely.

I really hope we don't have to learn that the hard way. That's how you lose a war in a day.

[zipplewrath]

18. Ground support

The F-16 maintained a long life as a ground support aircraft. You may also be able to classify the F-35 as "aerial artillery" some day. There are "games" in which the aircraft will still be able to "play". But yes, there will also be theaters where they will be sittin' ducks.

[BadtotheboneBob]

5. Ike said...

“Every gun that's made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms...is spending the genius of its scientists, the sweat of its laborers”

I'll add... One trillion = one million million... Hmmm... So, we'll need to talk about entitlement reform now, won't we?

[Major Nikon]

8. He also warned us against the military industrial complex

Apparently nobody listened.

[BadtotheboneBob]

24. Ironic that it took a soldier to say it...

He also said, “When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing.” (attention: Neocons)

... and “I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

...and “I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so” (attention: Neocons)

...and “The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own”

...and finally, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

Ike had his flaws (e.g. he started our Vietnam 'advisers'. I knew a Sgt Major when I served in '72 that was there in '58), but in my book overall he was a decent man and the last decent GOPer.

[Liberal Veteran]

7. A bargain at twice the price....

...for the shareholders of the company making them and the MIC.

[phantom power]

9. That is $8 million per plane, per year.

How does that compare to running costs of other fighter jets? I assume that maintaining and operating any advanced fighter jet is not cheap.

[stevebreeze]

21. my understanding, I don't have a source handy, is it caost 30-40% more to fly the F35 then the F 22

[olddad56]

14. tax the corporate churches to pay for it.

if the corporate churches and Mr. Santorum don't think there should be any seperation of church and state, tax the chruches and let the churches pay for the weapons. No doubt, the weapons will be used against non christian countries anyaway.

[msongs]

17. F 35 purpose = attack US Treasury...Mission Accomplished nt

[toddwv]

19. We'll have to cut more taxes to pay for it.

It's the only way...

[Lasher]

20. Does that include the cost of the USS Saint Ronnie and the USS Poppy Bush?

Some of them will be riding around on these monster carriers, to hazard the seven seas. How about the cost of maintaining the US air bases in Oman, Kyrgyzstan, et. al ad nauseam?

[KurtNYC]

22. Condi Rice said that 9/11 was the result of a lack of "silver bullets"

Perhaps we should save the trillion and buy some silver bullets?

In fact many politicians have been asking for more silver bullets:

"There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 11 September attacks." - C. Rice

Gas prices have "built up over many years - decades, in fact. It's not going to be solved in the short run by some silver bullet." - Bush aide Josh Bolten.

"We know there’s no silver bullet that will bring down gas prices or reduce our dependence" - Obama

Rebecca MacKinnon to Congress: "There Is No Silver Bullet for Achieving Internet Freedom"

Obviously we need bullets made of silver ASAP! They are very versatile. F35s not so much.

[GreenTea]

23. The Pentagon doesn't care how much it cost they aren't paying for it-Corporation hope it goes higher

Our taxes are are paying for it and the UNION-BUSTING corporations are profiting OFF OUR TAX DOLLARS- NO ONE ELSE BUT THEM!

The same republicans who run and own these corporations and use our tax paid military for world imperialism & soaking up our hard working tax dollars and then these same greedy rich via their corporations and their republicans shills scream when we want just a tiny fraction for health care for ALL Americans. - The republican & the rich are getting their health care through the profits from our tax dollars....

Shameful & disgusting are republicans and their rich contributors who own these same corporations.

[DeSwiss]

26. The Pentagon doesn't know how to handle money.

- When they find the other lost trillions we gave them, then we'll see......

K&R

[Former_DU_Member]

28. We are going to need a good adversary to turn these things loose

on. I'm shocked that we feel the need to have such toys while social programs wither on the vine.

[Strelnikov_]

30. “Everybody was on board with … the program,” Robling told Reuters

"all the pigs were on board . . . with the trough," Robling told Reuters

[lovuian]

32. this is just done right bankrupting us

1 trillion dollars OMG!

[Locrian]

33. sounds like an "entitlement" program to me.... nt

[cbrer]

34. Our current fighter fleet

Combined with superior training and weapons, still dominate the worlds airspace. This consists primarily of the F-15 Eagle, and F-16 Falcon Air Force fighters, the F-18 Hornet Navy fighter, and the Armys close air support fighter, the A-10 Warthog. Obviously, there are various other communications, transport, jamming, and C3 (command, communications, control) aircraft such as our AWACS. Plus our high altitude surveillance aircraft that in some cases are being flown by pilots younger than the airframes themselves.

The F-117 Stealth, F-22 Raptor, and F-35 Lightning JSF programs are designed to combat a threat that doesn't yet, and may never exist. Along with the current capability to defeat most ground based sensors, and defensive weapons tracking systems. These programs align with our imperialist foreign policy goals, and help ensure America will be able to impose military might on any non-nuclear power it wishes.

I would love to think that we could shelve further fighter development all together, along with any new carrier battle groups. Our next steps should be to space. But given our military policies, as well as political policies and budget expenditures, it might not be such a good idea to move weapons platforms to space.

The costs of these, along with DOD spending across the board, is well known in these forums, and despite slated cutbacks, shows no sign of abatement to any significant level. Any talk of costs decreasing, is disingenuous at best. Fighter development programs aren't exactly known for cost containment.