This is the Joint Strike Fighter or
F-35 Lightning II.
It's planned to be America's new advanced fighter jet.
The $100 million plane is stealth, can fly
at supersonic speeds and one version can
even take off and land vertically.
It's one plane designed to replace the aging
fleets of the Air Force, Navy, and Marines.
It's the jet fighter of the future.
But in December, Donald Trump put the entire
project in doubt with a single tweet.
saying it's too expensive.
And Trump's not wrong
the 16 year, $1 trillion project is
seven years late and seventy percent
over budget.
But the F-35 is much more than a government purchase and canceling it
is nearly impossible.
That's because it's deeply woven into
the US government, military, and economy.
President Trump meet the
Military-Industrial complex.
So US defense companies make a lot of
money. Their best client is the largest
military in human history and they sell
their products to other countries too,
making the US the largest arms exporter
in the world.
As a result, they are some of the biggest companies in the world.
This all requires a unique relationship
with the US government.
Not only defense companies bid on contracts from the
Pentagon, but all of their domestic and
foreign sales must also be approved
by Congress.
As a result, these companies try and get as much support in
Congress as they can and they've adopted
a pretty smart strategy to do so.
One thing every member of Congress can
support is jobs in their home state.
So major US defense companies spread their
operations across as many states as
possible. By doing so they can maximize
the number of legislators inclined to
support their projects
regardless of political party.
I did a quick search and found just a small
portion of Boeing and Raytheon
locations across the US, along with
legislators who voiced support for these
companies in Congress. Now if you include
subcontractors like the 3,000 hired by
Boeing in California, you can imagine
how many jobs are at stake across the
country.
This strategy is called political
engineering and defense companies have
gotten pretty good at it.
In August 2015, Lockheed Martin purchased Sikorsky
aircraft known for making the iconic
Marine One helicopter used by American
presidents. That brought the company into
the lucrative defense helicopter market.
It was a smart business move but a
smarter political one. See, Sikorsky aircraft
is based in Connecticut and the
northeast is one area where Lockheed had
little political influence.
Rivals, General Dynamics
United Technologies and Raytheon were the
area's major defensive employers and
therefore wielded the most important in Congress.
But Sikorsky has 8,000 employees
and Lockheed instantly became the third
largest contractor in Connecticut and
gain the political influence that comes
with it .
The Northeast is home to some of the defense industries most vocal
supporters in Congress like Rosa DeLauro
of Connecticut who wants Sikorsky
to build the next Marine One in her own
district.
There's no doubt political engineering
the smart strategy; Defense companies get
more business and more jobs are created
in America. But with so much political
support and widespread economic impact
some of these defense companies have
been deemed "too big to fail" .
Even when they appear to be failing.
Now, back to that F-35 project Trump threatened to
cancel.
Despite deep design flaws and constant
problems, there have been no serious efforts
to cancel or scale back the project.
In, fact through more than three years of cuts to
defense spending funding for the f-35
entirely been touched.
That's because the project was
politically engineered to
near-perfection.
The Pentagon starting bidding for the F-35 in the mid-nineties
It would be the largest defense
contract in history, and Boeing and
Lockheed Martin quickly emerged as the
two contenders.
Both had loyal supporters in Congress who were very
eager to create jobs in their state.
It was an intense competition and when
Lockheed won the contract Boeing
supporters quickly mobilized in Congress.
Immediately they drafted legislation
proposing to split the work between the
two companies. When that failed they
pushed award Boeing contracts for
KC-767 tankers, C-17 cargo planes and
radar-jamming Growler planes. Ensuring
the Boeing factories in their states
remained open.
Today, the Lockheed Martin F-35 project supports a hundred and
forty-six thousand jobs across 46 states.
In fact, this interactive map is straight
from the Lockheed Martin website.
Parts for the plane are produced all
over the country maximizing the number
of stakeholders and ensuring broad
bipartisan support in Congress.
Lockheed Martin has also hired subcontractors in
eight other countries to build
components for the plane. And several
allied countries have placed orders for
their own militaries. Anything done to hurt
the F-35 project could hurt those
relationships.
A procedure called concurrency also complicated things
Concurrency is when a product goes into
production before all the tests are
complete. This is intended to speed up
job creation because the sooner
production starts the sooner jobs are
created. So both defense companies and
Congress are inclined to strike a deal
quickly. But it's a flawed practice
that's delayed the F-35 project by seven
years. When testing reveals a problem,
planes that have already been built need
to be sent back and retrofited.
The radar, still a problem. The helmet is too heavy.
Inadequate fusion of sensor information,
shortfalls in the performance
distributed aperture system.
That is not good.
The autonomic logistics
information system and other issues that
are classified. And each military
branch is also asking for its own
distinct modifications, complicating the
entire process.
And its still inconclusive when the plane will be ready.
The F-35 has been delayed so long it's
now unclear whether the US military even
needs it anymore. America's current enemies in
Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan don't even
have air forces, and the F-35 is far more
advanced than anything Russia or China
have planned.
Despite all of this the F-35 project keeps moving forward with
enthusiastic support in the US
government. In 2010 the Department of
Defense allowed Lockheed more time to
fix design flaws. And in 2015 Congress
actually added more money to the project
without the military even asking for it.
That's because canceling the project
would be an economic and political
disaster. Thousands of jobs across the
country would be lost, international
relationships will be tested, and billions
spent in taxpayer dollars would amount
to nothing.
But that's exactly why Trump's tweet was
so surprising. See traditionally,
defense companies negotiate projects
privately with Congress and the Pentagon
without any input from the president.
But Trump seems to want to take a more
hands-on role in contract negotiations
which has completely rattled defense companies.
And rightly so because while
Trump can't cancel the entire program he
can refuse to purchase future F-35s.
And that's put a surprising degree of
uncertainty in the defense industry and
the US companies are scrambling to
figure it out.
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