Incorporating more efficient management practices into the F-35 strike fighter and Navy’s F/A-18E/F and EA-18G fighter programs is already resulting in projected savings of more than $1 billion over the next five years—money that can be plowed back into the Pentagon’s modernization and personnel coffers, says Ash Carter, Defense Department acquisition executive. “As a result of that progress,” with the F-35, “the services have been able to reallocate” some $580 million that they thought they’d spend on the stealth fighters over that span to other projects, Carter told members of the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday in testimony on DOD’s efficiency initiative. In the case of the F/A-18s and EA-18s, the new, $5.3 billion multiyear deal announced Tuesday for the purchase of 124 aircraft will result in $600 million in savings compared to single-year contracts for those same airplanes, said Carter.
Raytheon, a division of defense giant RTX, recently announced a multiyear deal with the Pentagon to increase annual production of the Air Force’s primary dogfighting missile by more than 50 percent from two years ago.
