For several years, the American Court of Auditors, the Government Accountability Office or GAO, has been very attentive to the actual performance and cost excesses of the F35 program. But it is above all the questions of operational availability and maintenance which are now the focus of its criticism, aided in this by the POGO, which carries out precise monitoring of the expenditure of the American federal government. Together, these two organizations conducted a study on the availability of the joint operational testing squadron, stationed at Edwards AFB in California, including the report was published in early August. And the results are, we can say, disastrous...
Thus, the 23 devices in the fleet only display full operational availability which has evolved between 11 and 5% in recent months. However, this squadron benefits from additional maintenance personnel and a privileged flow for access to spare parts vis-à-vis operational squadrons, and should, according to the Pentagon test director, achieve an availability of 80% for prefigure that expected in the operational units. These figures are also disclosed at a very bad time, barely a few months before the launch of mass production, which was to begin this fall, and which will therefore probably be called into question. It is difficult to see how the American military authorities could justify such a decision when the device presents such operational failures.
These very poor figures are the result, as is often the case, of several concomitant factors, each of which reduces the availability of devices: too high a breakdown rate, long and complex maintenance, difficulty in supplying spare parts, lack of maturity of certain technologies used, etc. If a complex program like a combat aircraft generally faces these problems in its development phase, the F35 seems not to be able to overcome them, despite the almost 500 aircraft already built and delivered. It is also notable to note that some of these problems, such as the number of breakdowns much higher than those observed on other devices, do not seem to find a solution, although they have been identified for several years, and that several versions of the F35 have passed through there.
We can therefore wonder if, like other recent programs, the F35 would not have exceeded a certain threshold of technological stability, beyond which it becomes impossible through corrective measures to restore the situation, without causing new dysfunctions. We can remember, on another scale, the Louvois software which was never able to reach a satisfactory operational level, to the point that it was decided purely and simply to replace it. This phenomenon occurs especially in software engineering, and in particular in the excessive implementation of ERPs, when the number of modules exceeds a threshold beyond which it becomes impossible to effectively model the logical architecture of the system. This threshold is obviously evolving, with time often bringing new logical approaches and new paradigms to order the logical structure of the program, in order to increase its processing and interaction capabilities. But with a given structure, it is immutable, even by artificially increasing the processing power of the system, the limit being logical, and not physical.
If this is the case for the F35, this would mean that the aircraft will never be able to effectively resolve its current problems, and that it will be condemned to offering only low operational availability, with high maintenance costs, and very limited operational resilience, contributing to a very massive weakening of the operational effectiveness of a large part of the Western combat air fleet. It does not matter, in these conditions, the stealth of the device, or its extraordinary data fusion capabilities, if it is incapable of following a sustained operational rhythm.
With more than $250 billion already invested, the F35 program is often presented as “too big to fail”, according to the established Anglo-Saxon expression. But in these times of renewed major tensions in many theaters, the return of a certain arms race, a logic of nuclear rhetoric which appears again, betting the future of the West on a device that we know present significant defects, does it not represent a major risk going well beyond the economic and political interests at stake here?