Joint Strike Fighter program manager Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan acknowledged to reporters at AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference in September that F-35 Lot 9 and 10 production talks—the two lots were being negotiated together—were dragging on, but he expected a deal “before the end of the year.” Now that Lot 9 has been awarded separately, a JSF program spokesman said Bogdan remains optimistic about a Lot 10 deal by the end of 2016. Lot 10 is for 92 aircraft, but is still a long way from the “block buy” that the Pentagon and its JSF partners want to pursue. Similar to a US “multi-year” buy, the block buy would commit in advance to a set level of production, allowing Lockheed Martin to better manage materials supply and workforce, potentially producing a unit price reduction of several million dollars per airplane. The partners have agreed in principal to do a block buy from Fiscal 2017-2019, but the earliest the US could participate would be 2018. (See also: F-35 Block Buy Will Save $2 Billion in Three Years.)
A new report from the Government Accountability Office calls for the Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer to have budget certification authority over the military services’ research and development accounts—a move the services say would add a burdensome and unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.
