Rewind

By Marcus Weisgerber / July 24, 2009 at 5:00 AM

There has been a lot of buzz around Washington, and abroad, about a July 23 Congressional Quarterly article that says the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program will need two years of additional work. Several blogs have written about the story and at one point it even appeared on the Drudge Report.

What the industry grunts, lobbyists and bloggers seem to have forgotten is that Inside the Air Force reported this news eight months ago. To quote our lede:

“Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England has directed the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps to all but disregard a recent assessment by a highly esteemed team of military cost estimators that concludes the Joint Strike Fighter program requires two additional years of testing and development -- and a staggering $15 billion more than is currently programmed over the next six years.”

This all stems back to a 2008 analysis by the Joint Estimate Team (JET), a group of “independent” military cost analysts. ITAF reviewed an internal Air Force document that listed the team's findings. The CQ story references the same report, but quotes “congressional aides familiar with the findings.”

At the time, our story received a bit of bounce, appearing in the Pentagon's Early Bird roundup of defense-related news, in addition to being referenced in a number of defense blogs and newspapers, including the Ft. Worth Star Telegram (the story on the newspaper's Web site has been archived, but it has been reposted here).

What's more, the CQ piece claims the JET prognosis was kept a secret at a time when the Senate just voted to end F-22A production. Not the case. Former Pentagon acquisition czar John Young discussed the numbers with ITAF in November 2008. He also discussed the report with Bloomberg News here.

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