Gates Shakes Up Leadership for F-35

Gates Shakes Up Leadership for F-35
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and THOM SHANKER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: February 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/us/politics/02pentagon.html?hpw


WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Monday that he was replacing the general in charge of the Pentagon’s largest weapons program — the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — and withholding $614 million in award fees from the contractor, Lockheed Martin.

The surprise announcement came from a Pentagon chief who has sought to impose accountability across the department’s senior leadership and who himself had promoted plans for the new plane last year in persuading Congress to kill the more expensive F-22 fighter jet. But a special Pentagon review team has since warned of possibly billions of dollars in cost overruns on the plane, and Mr. Gates announced that he was restructuring the program and requiring the company to cover some of the extra costs.

Mr. Gates disclosed the reshuffling on the F-35 program as he released the Pentagon’s proposed $708.3 billion spending package for the fiscal year 2011.

After a dramatic first year in which the Obama administration killed the F-22 and other expensive weapons programs, the Pentagon presented a new budget that includes a $14.8 billion increase over the current spending totals. Perhaps more important in the long term, the proposed spending plan represents a consolidation of Mr. Gates’s desire to add money to try to win today’s wars rather than spending as much on future weaponry.

The proposed increases reflect the rising cost of the war in Afghanistan and a push by military leaders to keep their basic budget growing faster than inflation.

Some of the extra money is intended to pay for helicopters needed to transport troops in rugged environments, for unmanned planes to provide surveillance on enemy movements and for more Special Operations forces needed in Afghanistan and a mix of other possible wars. Those spending priorities are explained in a new war-fighting strategy review that the Pentagon also released on Monday.

But the increases come at a time when President Obama has frozen spending on many domestic programs, and many Democrats in Congress could find them hard to take politically.

And while Mr. Gates said Lockheed Martin had agreed to absorb part of the cost overruns on the Joint Strike Fighter, industry consultants said other military companies were delighted that, once again, a long-expected turndown in military spending had not hit.

“The defense industry is pleased but bemused,” said Loren Thompson, the chief operating officer at the Lexington Institute, a policy group financed partly by military contractors. “It’s been telling itself for years that when the Democrats got control it would be bad news for weapons programs. But the spending keeps going on.”

All told, the administration said Monday that it wanted to increase the Pentagon’s regular spending by 3.4 percent, to $548.9 billion in the 2011 fiscal year from $530.8 billion this year. It also asked Congress to approve $159.3 billion for next year to cover the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The White House said it was also seeking an additional $33 billion now to pay for the 30,000 extra troops being sent to Afghanistan. That would bring the total war spending for this year to $162.6 billion.

Mr. Gates said the program manager on the F-35, Maj. Gen. David Heinz of the Marine Corps, would be replaced by a higher-ranking general whose name would be announced soon.

“A number of key goals and benchmarks were not met,” he said, adding that “the taxpayer should not have to bear the entire burden of getting the J.S.F. program back on track.”

In a statement issued late Monday, Lockheed Martin said it had been working with military officials “on a plan to get the program back on track” and was “committed to stabilizing F-35 cost, affordability and to fielding the aircraft on time.”

Mr. Gates said he planned to extend the development phase by a year. Pentagon officials said they would delay the purchase of 122 planes and expand the flight testing to try to avoid much of the $16 billion in cost overruns that the review team had projected.

The Air Force, the Navy and the Marines plan to buy 2,400 of the planes over the next 25 years, and eight allied nations have also invested in the project.

Mr. Gates also said he would try again to kill two programs — the C-17 cargo plane and an alternate engine for the F-35 — that Congress saved last year.

The new Defense Department spending proposal and the strategy reviews, Mr. Gates said, “are shaped by a bracing dose of realism — realism with regard to risk, realism with regard to resources.”

“We have, in a sober and clear-eyed way, assessed risk, set priorities, made tradeoffs and identified requirements based on plausible, real-world threats, scenarios and potential adversaries,” he said.

To calm critics who might argue that his emphasis on winning today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan put future American security at risk, Mr. Gates noted that his budget had shifted only 7 percent to 10 percent of spending to today’s missions and needs, and that 40 percent would pay for weapons that can fight all types of wars. That leaves half the budget still devoted to traditional threats.

Every four years, Congress requires the Pentagon to produce its Quadrennial Defense Review, an assessment of long-range strategy and the budgets to pay for them. In unveiling the review Monday, Michèle A. Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy, said the strategy document for the first time jettisoned a historic planning requirement that the American military prepare to fight two major conventional wars at the same time.

Instead, the Pentagon’s new strategy calls on the military to prepare for a much broader — and more complicated — set of national security requirements, that may include traditional combat against a state adversary, operations against foreign terrorists, counter-insurgency efforts, missions to mitigate natural or terrorist disasters at home and operations in cyberspace.

With a record number of veterans projected to use its health care system, the Department of Veterans Affairs has requested a $125 billion budget for 2011, a 10 percent increase. The department proposed creating more than 4,000 new permanent positions to help process a backlog of disability claims.

That backlog is expected to increase with new claims not only from Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, but also from Vietnam-era veterans with diseases related to exposure to Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant. The department is also requesting $13.7 billion in one-time spending for the current year to pay retroactive claims for three diseases it now presumes to be caused by Agent Orange: Parkinson’s disease, ischemic heart disease and hairy-cell leukemia.


James Dao contributed reporting.