No Fighting Words

Lawmakers and senior Pentagon officials were tight-lipped this afternoon after a closed-door Senate Armed Services Committee meeting to discuss the fiscal health of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) was the only one to say anything to reporters after emerging from the committee hearing room in the Russell Senate Office Building, although even he declined comment on the content of the hearing itself.

“They've got real issues and they're working through them,” he said of program officials. “I don't know what they knew,” he said of the current cost and schedule issues, “but . . . they should've known.”

Chambliss added that the committee has “major, major issues” to deal with in the coming months.

“The committee is going to have to face this, because here we are getting close to budget time again, and the ((Joint Estimate Team)) report ((has not been)) made public and won't be until probably sometime as we get into the budget process,” he said.

The panel of cost estimators also found the F-35 program would need an additional $16 billion over the next five years, as InsideDefense.com first reported. The Pentagon is likely to adopt the JET recommendation to slow JSF development by one year when in finalizes its FY-11 budget proposal, as we wrote last week.

Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Ashton Carter and Maj. Gen. David Heinz, the JSF program executive officer, were among the witnesses at today's meeting.